Many people know Thomas Jefferson's phrase about a "wall of separation between church and state." In that letter, Jefferson wrote that the First Amendment had built "a wall of separation between church and state." Yet Waite elevated them into constitutional law, where they would play an outsized role for more than a century. Indeed, Jefferson's metaphor of the "wall of separation" dominated the Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence in the twentieth century. Offhand remarks in private correspondence—about constitutional law, but mostly about Bordeaux—became touchstones for constitutional doctrine.