Ten of the Revolutionary War patriots buried in Alexandria’s historic cemeteries share a distinction that has nothing to do with a battlefield. In 1785, each signed his name to the Memorial and Remonstrance — James Madison’s petition against a tax to fund the Christian church, and one of the founding documents of American religious liberty.
They were not framers or statesmen. They were Alexandria merchants and sea captains, a brewer and a ropemaker — ordinary citizens who put their names to an extraordinary idea. Their graves lie within a mile of one another in Old Town and the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex, and the principle they signed for is written into the First Amendment of the Constitution.
A tax for the church, and the petition that stopped it
In 1784, Patrick Henry introduced into the Virginia General Assembly a measure called “A Bill Establishing a Provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion.” It proposed a general tax to support Christian ministers; each taxpayer could direct his assessment to the church of his choice, or to a common fund distributed by the legislature. To many it seemed a reasonable way to shore up religion in the unsettled years after independence. To James Madison it was a dangerous first step.
Madison answered with the Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments, written in 1785 and circulated across Virginia as a petition to be signed and returned to the Assembly. Its argument was patient and devastating. Religion, Madison held, is a matter of conscience that cannot be coerced; it is “an unalienable right” precisely because belief follows evidence, not command. State support does not strengthen faith but corrupts it, and a government that can tax a citizen three pence for one church can compel him to any church — or any creed — it pleases. Far better, he argued, for government to protect every citizen’s religion “with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property.”
“The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.” — Memorial and Remonstrance, 1785
The petitions worked. Henry’s assessment bill died, and in January 1786 the Assembly enacted in its place Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom — the law that disestablished religion in Virginia and became a model for the nation. When Madison drafted the Bill of Rights a few years later, the establishment clause of the First Amendment carried this Virginia fight into the Constitution itself. The Memorial and Remonstrance is, in a real sense, where the American wall between church and state was first surveyed.
Ten signers, buried in Alexandria
What makes the document remarkable is not only that Madison wrote it, but who put their names beneath it. The Memorial circulated as petitions through the counties, and thousands of Virginians signed. Among them were these ten Alexandrians — the same men whose names appear on militia rolls, church committees, and the city’s first town council. In a town with a living memory of an established church, adding your name was a public act with consequences. They are buried today across three of Alexandria’s historic grounds.
Christ Church Burial Ground · Old Town
- Colin McIver — King Street merchant and Alexandria militiaman; partner in trade with Robert Adam and Peter Dow.
- Peter Wise — merchant and tanner; a member of the Common Council at the creation of Alexandria’s city government in 1780.
Old Presbyterian Meeting House · Old Town
- Andrew Wales — Alexandria’s first commercial brewer, who sold barley to George Washington.
- George Hunter — merchant and charter member of the Alexandria Library Company.
- Washington Blunt — ship owner and block-and-pump maker; a documented supplier to the Continental cause from 1777.
- William Hunter — sea captain, mayor of Alexandria, and founder of the St. Andrew’s Society.
Presbyterian Cemetery · Wilkes Street Complex
- Colonel Dennis Ramsay — Washington’s honorary pallbearer and the first man in history to address him as “Mr. President.”
- Dennis McCarty Johnston — sea captain and planter; son of George and Sarah McCarty Johnston.
- James Irwin — ropemaker and Fourteenth Master of Alexandria-Washington Lodge No. 22.
- John Dundas — merchant and twice mayor of Alexandria.
Standing where they signed
It is one thing to read that the separation of church and state has Virginia roots. It is another to stand at the grave of a brewer or a ship captain who signed for it by name. Two of these men rest in the Christ Church yard in Old Town; four lie in the Old Presbyterian Meeting House churchyard, a mile east; and four are buried in the Presbyterian Cemetery within the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex. As Alexandria marks the 250th anniversary of American independence, they are a reminder that the founding was not only a war but an argument — about conscience, coercion, and the proper limits of government — carried forward by citizens whose names most histories never record.
Each of these signers appears in our registry of Revolutionary War patriots buried in Alexandria, with a full biography. Their cemeteries can be located on the interactive cemetery map, and the Wilkes Street grounds are explored in depth on our guided cemetery tours.
Sources: Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (James Madison, 1785), full text in the public domain; the Bill of Rights Institute’s primary-source materials on the Memorial and Remonstrance; the Roster of Historic Congregation Members of the Old Presbyterian Meeting House, compiled by Donald C. Dahmann; and the Gravestone Stories registry of Revolutionary War patriots buried in Alexandria.