From My Palace In Culpeper
The Jailed Preachers Who Sparked the First Amendment
He signed his letters from a cell infested with mice and spiders, a place where men had tried to blow him up with gunpowder, suffocate him with burning brimstone, and poison him outright — and he called it, without a trace of self-pity, "My Palace in Culpepper." Before this evening is over, you'll know exactly who wrote those words, exactly what he survived to write them, and exactly why a man being tortured for his faith could still find something to joke about.
That's where this story starts. It's not where it ends.
A Crime Called Preaching
In colonial Virginia, the Church of England was the only fully legal church in the colony. Every Virginian — Baptist, Presbyterian, or otherwise — paid taxes to support Anglican clergy whether they ever set foot in an Anglican church or not. Preaching without a state license was against the law, and the license itself was built to be nearly impossible to use: granted only in Williamsburg, restricted to approved theology, and valid at exactly one specified location — which made the traveling revival meetings sweeping through Virginia during the Great Awakening illegal by definition.
More than thirty Baptist preachers were jailed across Virginia for exactly this in the 1760s and '70s. In Culpeper, the cell held a young Scottish-born preacher named James Ireland — seized mid-sermon, dragged from his own pulpit table to a jail infested with vermin, where the jailer encouraged drunks from his own tavern to beat the prisoner for sport. It also held a man named John Delaney, who wasn't even a Baptist. His crime was letting a prayer meeting happen inside his own house.
Jail didn't stop Ireland. He preached through the bars of his cell window to the crowds that gathered outside — so his enemies escalated: horsemen sent to trample the listeners, gunpowder, brimstone smoke meant to suffocate him, a poison plot, men who urinated on him mid-sermon. None of it broke him. He kept preaching, kept signing his letters from his "palace," and never fully recovered his health for the rest of his life.
Details
DATE COST LOCATION TIME FOOD and DRINK
February
2027
$30 per Adult
$15 Youth Ages 12-18
$10 Children (Under 12)
Senior Citizen $25
Culpeper, VA
7:00 pm
Soft Drinks
Spiced Cider
Light Refreshments
provided
The Neighbor Who Was Watching
Twenty-two years old, fresh home from Princeton, a young man from the county next door wrote to a friend in fury: "That diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages among some... There are at this time in the adjacent County not less than 5 or 6 well meaning men in close Gaol for publishing their religious Sentiments."
That young man was James Madison. The adjacent county was Culpeper. He didn't read about this persecution in a book — it was happening within earshot of his own front door, and he never forgot it. A few years later, drafting Virginia's Declaration of Rights, Madison would quietly change one word in George Mason's language on religion — from "toleration" to "free exercise" — and that single word swap, made by a twenty-five-year-old who'd grown up hearing about the Culpeper jail, is the seed of the First Amendment itself.
From One County Jail to the Constitution
By 1788, Virginia's Baptists were numerous and organized enough to swing a national election — and deeply wary of a proposed Constitution with no explicit protection for religious liberty. A Culpeper-connected preacher named John Leland struck a bargain with Madison directly: Baptist support, in exchange for a promise. Madison won his seat. He kept his word. The amendment he introduced — the one that became the First — answers this exact story, clause by clause: no establishment, because a state church had taxed and licensed men into jail cells; free exercise, because a county jail should never again be where faith goes to be silenced.
The Baptist congregation Culpeper's jailed preachers helped build still stands there today — on the literal ground where the jail once stood. The lock and key from that cell are preserved in Richmond, at the Virginia Baptist History Museum, quiet physical proof that this isn't legend. It happened, on a specific street corner, to specific named men, and it reached all the way to the document that still protects your own freedom of conscience today.
Why This Session Stays With You
This isn't a lecture about the First Amendment as an abstract legal idea. It's an introduction to the actual people who paid for it before it existed — a preacher tortured for refusing to stop, a man jailed for the crime of hospitality, a twenty-two-year-old radicalized by what he watched happen to his neighbors, and a bargain kept at exactly the moment it mattered. You'll leave with something sturdier than a history lesson: a real, human sense of what "freedom of conscience" actually cost the people who first insisted on it — and a harder question sitting in your chest about who's watching what we tolerate, or defend, today.
Reserve Your Spot
The First Amendment didn't begin in a debate hall. It began through the barred window of a Culpeper jail cell, in the voice of a man who wouldn't stop preaching. Come hear the whole story — including the surprising, very human footnote about what one of these preachers went on to invent in Kentucky. Will you join us?
