by Simon Schama
Four years before, in May 1647, a meeting of delegates from several towns in what would become Rhode Island formally declared that “it is agreed that the forme of Government established [there] is DEMOCRATICALL, that is to say a Government held by ye free and voluntary consent of the greater part of the inhabitants.” Providence Plantation would be governed by an appointed president but would be accountable to an elected assembly of representatives from the townships. Thus, as Roger Williams wished, political and religious liberty were coupled and an American future made before there was a United States of America.
When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Williams must have feared that his little republic of free conscience would also be terminated. Sir Henry Vane had come to a bad end, imprisoned first by Cromwell, then by the Restoration government. Although Vane had disapproved of the execution of Charles I, he was tarred with the brush of the Parliament that had judged the king. In June Vane was tried in Parliament, where he defended to the end its sovereign authority, and was beheaded on Tower Hill nine days later after delivering on the scaffold a characteristically long speech. But in the following year, on 15 July 1663, Charles II signed a renewed charter giving the blessing of the Crown to the “livelie experiment” at Providence Plantation. This act and the document that proclaimed it are so astonishing, in that they follow almost to the letter what Williams would have himself sought, that they are almost unaccountable for a government then very much in the business of reestablishing tests of conformity. But since the charter begins by addressing “our trustie and well-beloved subject John Clarke,” it may be that Williams’s old friend, who had stayed in England, had something to do with what then followed. The document bears quotation at length for it unmistakably makes the very unpuritanical figure of King Charles II rather than, say, William Penn or Thomas Jefferson, the establisher of free conscience in America!
John Clarke and the rest of those who had petitioned on behalf of Providence Plantation, the document proclaims, “professing with peaceable and loyall minds their sober, serious and religious intention of…edifyeing themselves in the holie Christian ffaith and worshipp as they were persuaded, together with the gaineing and conversion of the poore ignorant Indian natives…have not only byn preserved to admiration but have increased and prospered…whereas in their humble address they have ffreely declared that it is their hearts (if they may bee permitted) to hold forth a livelie experiment that a most flourishing civill state may stand and best bee maintained and that among our English subjects with a full libertie in religious concernments and that true pietye and religion grounded upon gospell principles will give the best and greatest security to sovereignty and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest obligations to true loyaltie…Now know that wee beinge willinge to encourage the hopefull undertaking off the sayd loyall and loveinge subjects, to preserve unto them that libertye in the true Christian ffaith…and worshipp of God which they have sought with so much travaill and with peaceable myndes have…thought fit and doe hereby publish, graunt, ordeyne and declare, that our royal will and pleasure is that noe person in the said colonye at any tyme and hereafter shall bee any wyse molested, punished, disquieted or called into question for any differences in matters of religion and doe not actually disturb the civill peace…but that all and every persons may from tyme to tyme and at all herafter freelye and fully have and enjoy his and their own judgment and conscience in matters of religious concernment…they behaving themselves peaceablie and quietlie and not using this libertie to lycentiousness and profaneness nor to the civil injurye and outward disturbeance of others.”
That last reservation, which Clarke and Williams certainly shared, is important for the future history of what they began in Rhode Island. To breach the separation of church and state in the interest of keeping the civil peace, the wall-breachers have had to make the case that the particular transgressions they seek to have the state outlaw—alcohol or abortion, say—are indeed matters that threaten social peace. Were he around today, would Williams concur that the former was the handmaid of mayhem, or the latter a form of murder, a crime against “person?” Maybe, although drink and dead babies were in plentiful supply in his world. But there can be no doubt that he would have regarded any suggestion that taxes ought to be used for the support of either ministers, schools, or any “faith-based” institutions unacceptable, given that there would be taxpayers not sharing the beliefs of those whom their money maintained. Or would he have thought that, for instance, gay marriage was a manifest threat to the social order, or would he have reserved that judgment for the Almighty?
Did Charles II, Defender of the Faith according to the Church of England, actually read the revolutionary charter issued in his name, a document more radical than anything Cromwell had ever endorsed? At precisely the time he signed it, his bishops were busy hounding from their livings any minister who showed the slightest dissent. But if Charles hadn’t taken seriously the implications of what was now established in Rhode Island, others who needed freedom of conscience certainly had. In 1658, a ship carrying fifteen families of Sephardi Jews had sailed into Newport Harbor looking for better days. In all likelihood they were a remnant of the communities of Recife who had thrived in Brazil before its recapture by the Portuguese in 1654. Their own origins were in Spain and Portugal, and their continued covert existence there after the expulsions of the 1490s as pseudo-Christian Marranos and “conversos” had given them a network of language and culture that in both the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds was a priceless asset for the Dutch. Pragmatic toleration had been extended to them, communities had settled; synagogues had been built; printing presses had turned out literature in Hebrew and the vernacular language of the Sephardim, Ladino. The fall of Brazil had made them wanderers again. That same year, 1654, a group of twenty-four families had arrived in New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan, looking for some semblance of the existence they already enjoyed in the other Amsterdam. But the governor, Pieter Stuyvesant, thought their religion an “abomination” before God and felt that if he granted rights of private worship, the next thing would be a demand to build synagogues. A direct application to the Heeren of the West India Company back in Holland produced permission to meet for prayer in their own homes, but it was short of the rights they had expected.
Some of them, at least, wanted more. Was England and its American empire an answer? After a meeting with the Amsterdam sage Menasseh ben Israel, Oliver Cromwell’s hope that the conversion of the Jews might usher in the Last Days and the reign of Christ, as well as his canny sense of opportunity to steal an asset from the Dutch, led him to permit the de facto residence of the community in the country that had expelled them in the thirteenth century. Evidently, though, Rhode Island promised more, perhaps even the full enjoyment of civil rights alongside Christians. Hence their optimistic voyage to Newport.
The promise was only partially fulfilled. As in New York, worship was in private houses; there was no thought that Jews might hold public office or vote, and it was not until 1677 that a plot of land on the edge of town was acquired for a cemetery. But by the mid-eighteenth century, exactly a century after the first Jews had arrived, the community was strong and wealthy enough to call for a rabbi—the novice, Isaac Touro—to come to Newport from Amsterdam. A year later, in 1759, the foundation stone was laid for the synagogue that miraculously still survives on Spring Street. Commissioned from Peter Harrison, the most distinguished architect in New England, it’s the most elegant as well as the oldest synagogue in the United States: two stories, arched leaded windows, a balustraded gallery for the women congregants. Inside the ark of Jeshuat Israel, the Salvation of Israel, is a deerskin sefer Torah, thought to have been carried from Spain in the year of the expulsion, to have sojourned in Amsterdam and then been brought to the Atlantic world by the first immigrants, who came seeking Roger Williams’s “soul liberty.” The Torah is a work of great beauty, startling in the clarity of its Hebrew calligraphy, the hide enriched by time t
o a deep tawny hue.
When not in use, the scroll is kept open to the chapter of Exodus describing the crossing of the Red Sea; the passage from bondage to freedom, the birth of a nation. But for the Jews of Jeshuat Israel true redemption would come only with the revolution.
17. “Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free…”
In the dog days of August 1790, President George Washington paid a courtesy visit to Newport. The purpose of his journey was partly emblematic. The first Congress of the United States, following the adoption of the Constitution, had adjourned for the summer recess, and Washington was minded to show the People the face of their president. The morning walkabout (with Washington apparently setting a clip that fatigued those trying to keep up with him “fortified by wine and punch” at four different houses) was especially meaningful to Newport, which had suffered heavy losses of material, building fabric, and population during the Revolutionary War. In the autumn of 1776 the British had occupied the port to preempt it becoming an American base from which an attack on New York, their strategic jewel and hostage, could be mounted. Repeated attempts by American forces to dislodge them failed, with the town and port in 1778 turning into a battle site assaulted by sea and land. When the British finally evacuated Newport in 1781 and Washington arrived for a meeting with the French admiral Rochambeau, the place was a shell of its wealthy mercantile former self. Half of its prewar population of 9,000 had gone, dispersed elsewhere in New England and the mid-Atlantic states, never to return. The least he could do, the new president figured, was to offer in his person some encouragement for its restoration.
But there was another reason for Washington to go to Rhode Island and that was to gin up the state’s ratification of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the constitution. Though minute in territory, or perhaps because of it, Rhode Island, as Washington knew, had mixed feelings about the Union. Its citizens were notoriously protective of their idiosyncrasies and quick to suspect any attempt by the rest of America to compromise them. Excluded from the New England Confederation of states during the colonial centuries for their excessive generosity in matters of conscience, not to mention the unaccountable attentiveness to Indian land titles, the citizens of Providence and Newport knew they were joked about as “Rogue Islanders” elsewhere on the eastern seaboard, especially in neighboring Massachusetts. Though their merchants and seamen had been the first to take violent resistance to the British, firing on their ships as early as 1772 and again in 1774, and had also been the first to make a formal break from allegiance to the Crown, Rhode Island was the last of the thirteen states to ratify the Constitution, refusing to send delegates to the Convention in Philadelphia. Only the threat of being treated as a foreign nation, and made subject to customs duties, overcame their pesky reluctance at being integrated into the new Union.
So the president was paying a call on the dog-in-the-manger of the United States, and he was not taking anything for granted. Rather, he was doing what all successful presidents have done ever since: making his presence felt in American cities that had gone through hardship, glad-handing the people, drinking with them (very important), promising a better future, and diplomatically giving the prickly Rhode Islanders a sense that they were being personally consulted on the amendments to the Constitution; that though they might be the most modest state in the Union, in his own balance they were as weighty as any New York or Virginia. Washington was a huge success: his peculiar combination of rugged simplicity and noble bearing working magic as it almost always did. But there was one section of the Newport community especially eager to pay homage: the Jews of the Kahal Jeshuat Israel. Many of them had departed with their fellow citizens at the time of the British occupation, leaving only a few like the parnas (warden) and banker Moses Seixas to protect the deerskin Torah and the fabric of the Touro Synagogue from harm, notwithstanding the latter’s appropriation for storage of arms and ammunition, making it a prime target for enemy guns.
The Seixases were a little Jewish empire all to themselves. Originally from Lisbon, they had dispersed during the revolution to Connecticut, New York, and Philadelphia, where Moses’s pious brother Gershon was haham (rabbi), hazzan (cantor), mohel (circumciser) and shochet (ritual slaughterer), a full-service minister to the community. Benjamin, another brother, had been an officer in the New York militia. You didn’t get any more Judeo-patriotic than the Seixases. So it was natural for Moses, who, while never swerving in his loyalty to the American cause, had stayed behind in Newport during the occupation, to seize the moment of Washington’s visit to clear up one or two matters concerning the First Amendment which promised that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” On the face of it this sounded like unequivocal good news, the redemption, at last, of Roger Williams’s promise of “soul liberty.” No church would be the national church of the United States, and evidently the Jews would be free to “exercise” their right to free worship. But they had had that allowance already for more than a century. What they wanted to know was whether under the Constitution they would finally secure what had been long denied: equal rights as citizens, including the right to hold public office and, most precious of all, the right to vote. Seixas forbore from quoting Williams in support of his case, but he might have for the Seeker’s view, explicitly expressed in The Bloudy Tenet Yet More Bloudy, was that since religious profession could be no criterion for the exercise of public office, but rather “a [more general] morall vertue” such as “morall fidelitie, abilitie and honestie,” this could as well be found in “other men (beside Church-members) [who] are by good nature and education, by good Lawes and good examples nourished and trained up.” All that Williams really wanted was for principled men to do what was right by their own lights. “I commend that man, whether Jew or Turk or Papist or whoever steers no otherwise than his conscience does.” But the notion that any of the above might actually exercise positions of public trust in the United States was, for the vast majority of Americans, still an abhorrent notion.
Seixas hoped that, since the implication of the First Amendment was to separate entirely religion and government, it might go otherwise in Rhode Island. So the letter he penned on 17 August for presentation to the president the following day was a nosegay of praise to the Father of the Nation (and not before time, since the Jews of the several American congregations had been tardy in offering congratulations on Washington’s inauguration earlier that year—but then getting a handful of kehillot, community leaders, to sign on the same page of anything counts as a miracle). Between the lines Seixas was also seeking clarification. Had the great day finally arrived when Jews would be treated as all other citizens? Could they now be magistrates, councillors, constables? Above all could they now vote?
Being “the stock of Abraham,” Seixas took an ornamentally Hebraic tone with the general, reflecting on “those days of difficulty and danger when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword shielded Your head in the day of battle…and we rejoice to think that the same Spirit who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and will ever rest upon you.” That must have softened the old boy up—visions of David at Yorktown, President Daniel. Then the nub of the matter: “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government erected by the Majesty of the People, a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience and immunities of Citizenship—deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine—This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual Confidence and Public Virtue [nice touch that, putting tzedakah, righteous charity, first in the Masonic trio], we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God
who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven.” Cleverly Seixas wasn’t asking. He was in this manner merely describing what he took to be self-evident, leaving Washington to demur if he must. “For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days.” (God, not the president.) May he like Joshua when gathered to his Fathers be admitted into “Paradise to partake of the water of life and the tree of immortality.”
Washington loved this kind of thing. The next day, after an all-out dinner in the Old State House, he responded to Moses Seixas in a way designed to make Jeshuat Israel happy. “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.” And then came Washington’s endorsement of the presumption that active citizenship for all Americans was indeed what was understood in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. America was the republic in which toleration was not bestowed as an “indulgence of one class of people” to another but the “exercise of their inherent national gifts.” Then, in what one hopes Seixas took as a compliment to his prose, Washington simply lifted the Jew’s lovely characterization of a nation “which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and then rather grandly failed to acknowledge (or perhaps notice) that he had taken it from Moses Seixas’s letter. Not until the poet Emma Lazarus came along would a Jew manage to supply so perfectly felicitous phrasing for what the United States was supposed to stand for. Rest assured, the president concluded, in this benign state of affairs, every one of the “Stock of Abraham” “shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” A neat touch this, straight from the prayer book of the psalmist. Well, Washington had just been compared to David.
