The Virginia Assembly in 1776 relieved dissenters of paying taxes for the maintenance of the Anglican church and suspended the payment of public sal- aries to parish ministers as of 1 January 1777.6 For some time parish taxes for parsons salaries James Madison s real monster of oppression had been the central focus of dissenter petitions, although, as Rhys Isaac notes, the establishment was so entrenched before the Revolution that the Baptists never dared even hint at aspirations to be relieved from taxes for the support of the Church. 7 Nonetheless, mandatory taxes were the feature of the parish system that made the church and particularly the clergy most vulnerable to attack.8 Opposition to taxes united diverse elements including religious dissenters of all stripes, persons who had little or no empathy with institutional religion, and those congenitally ill disposed to taxes of any sort. Resistance to British taxing measures from the Stamp Act onward further empowered this opposi- tion and afforded it an appealing principled rights-based rationale.9 The as- sembly continued the suspension of parsons salaries until1779 when, once and for all, it put an end to the linchpin of the establishment.10 The successful attack on clerical salaries, however, did not put an end to the Anglican establishment. During the war the Virginia Assembly, for example, continued to form new parishes: Kentucky, Washington, and Montgomery in 1776; Fluvanna, Rockingham, Hampshire, Greenbrier, and Rockbridge in1777; Patrick and Lexington in 1778; St. Asaph in 1779, and, most astonishing of all, yet one more in 1790, Hardy Parish.11 In dividing Drysdale Parish in 1779 and Albemarle Parish in1780, the assembly continued to order the dissolving of the incumbent vestry and the election of new vestries. For Albemarle, the assembly mandated that new vestrymen take oaths to be conformable to the doctrine and discipline of the church of England. 12 Election of new vestries follow- ing dissolution of the old was ordered for Antrim, Westover, and St. Anne s (Essex) Parishes in1782, Lynnhaven Parish in1783, and South Farnum Parish in 1784.13 As late as1778, a grand jury in Lancaster County was presenting persons for failure to attend the parish church.14 The question of public support of religion came again to the fore in 1784 85. In October 1784 the General Assembly granted a charter of incorpora- tion to the Protestant Episcopal Church whereby the pre-1777 properties of the parishes churches, chapels, churchyards and burial grounds, glebes, and furnishings were transferred to the Protestant Episcopal denomination. The measure repealed all previous establishment legislation and dissolved the parish vestries. It reconstituted vestries as local ruling bodies of the Epis- copal church through election by those subscribing themselves as Episcopa- . 296 epilogue