This paper examines the question of scale by focussing on a neglected historical source, public petitions.  In the period of the early Republic, secularists sent more than 200 hundred petitions to Congress.  Their immediate goal was to ensure that the delivery and transportation of mail on the Sunday Sabbath continued. But their broader argument was that religion and government be kept apart, and that the United States was not, in political or constitutional terms, a Christian nation.

These petitions are a rich source for several reasons. They reveal that political secularism was a far more vibrant and popular cause than historians of nineteenth-century America have recognised. In terms of scale, public petitions further allow historians to bridge the local and the national. Petitioners were engaged in a national political controversy. But their petitions reveal fascinating glimpses of ideological battles taking place in small towns and local meeting halls a long way from the centres of power. The story of secularism tends to be told from the perspective of the lettered elite. Through a close examination of these documents, a rich insight into the grassroots dimension of secularism begins to emerge.