The struggle for religious liberty in colonial America. In Virginia, the established church was the Church of England. "Beginning in 1768, Virginia county magistrates jailed Baptist preachers under laws governing public order for preaching without a license. On June 4 of that year, the sheriff of Spotsylvania seized John Waller, Lewis Craig, and James Childs. The magistrates offered to free them if they promised not to preach in the county for a year and a day. They refused. As guards marched them through the streets of Fredericksburg to jail, the three men sang an Isaac Watts hymn: “Broad is the road that leads to death”. Jail did not silence them. One Anglican churchman complained that the Baptists simply preached through the prison windows. At one jail, authorities built a high plank fence in front of the windows to prevent prisoners from preaching to people outside. Their followers raised a handkerchief on a pole above the fence as a signal that a congregation had gathered, and a prisoner preached through the boards to a crowd he could not even see. The Culpeper jail, a short ride from Hebron, held Baptist preachers James Ireland, Elijah Craig, and others at different times. Near Culpeper Courthouse, attackers caught a Baptist layman named Thomas Waford at a spring and beat him for helping arrange the preachers’ meetings. He carried the scars past his eightieth year. Much of this history survives because Charles F. James, a Baptist minister who had himself pastored in Culpeper, went back to the Virginia Assembly journals, original petitions, and the letters of Madison and Jefferson. In his 1900 Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia, he printed the documents chronologically so readers could examine the evidence themselves (James 1900, 7, 8). --Dr. Robery Malone Preaching from prison: