It was in view of this evident determination to make of Illinois Territory a slave state, that James Lemen, with Jefferson's approval, took the radical step of organizing a {p.17} distinctively anti-slavery church as a means of promoting the free-state cause.[21] From the first, indeed, he had sought to promote the cause of temperance and of anti-slavery in and through the church. He tells us in his diary, in fact, that he "hoped to employ the churches as a means of opposition to the institution of slavery."[21] He was reared in the Presbyterian faith, his stepfather being a minister of that persuasion; but at twenty years of age he embraced Baptist principles, apparently under the influence of a Baptist minister in Virginia, whose practice it was to bar from membership all who upheld the institution of slavery. He thus identified himself with the struggles for civil, religious, and industrial liberty, all of which were then actively going on in his own state. The name of "New Design," which became attached to the settlement which he established on the upland prairies beyond the bluffs of the "American Bottom," is said to have originated from a quaint remark of his that he "had a 'new design' to locate a settlement south of Bellefontaine" near the present town of Waterloo.[22] The name "New Design," however, became significant of his anti-slavery mission; and when, after ten years of pioneer struggles, he organized The Baptist Church of Christ at New Design, in 1796, he soon afterwards induced that body--the first Protestant church in the bounds of the present State--to adopt what were known as "Tarrant's Rules Against Slavery." The author of these rules, the Rev. James Tarrant, of Virginia, later of Kentucky, one of the "emancipating preachers," eventually organized the fraternity of anti-slavery Baptist churches in Kentucky, who called themselves "Friends to Humanity."