Answer:
1773, it came to the notice of a weedy, bookish, young Virginian that some Baptists were languishing in a nearby jail. For many years before, as he well knew, magistrates had meted out fines and prison sentences to religious dissenters from the colony’s Anglican establishment. But this episode struck a nerve, prompting the young gentleman to condemn what he called the “diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution.” Thomas JeffersonPerhaps that was because it occurred close to his family’s members.