FROM THE FORTHCOMING BOOK THE AMERICAN FUTURE: A HISTORY. COPYRIGHT 2009 BY SIMON SCHAMA. TO BE PUBLISHED MAY 19, 2009, BY ECCO, AN IMPRINT OF HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS.

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In the dog days of August 1790, President George Washington paid a courtesy visit to Newport, Rhode Island. 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 retake the city failed, and when the British finally evacuated in 1781, Newport 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 Newport’s 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 10 amendments to the Constitution. Though minute in territory, Rhode Island, as Washington knew, had mixed feelings about the Union. Its citizens were notoriously protective of their idiosyncrasies, and were joked about as “Rogue Islanders” elsewhere on the Eastern seaboard, especially in neighboring Massachusetts. Though its 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 13 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.

Of particular interest to Rhode Islanders, most notably the Jews of Newport, was the declaration in the First Amendment of the Constitution that “Congress should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” With that declaration, the framers of the Constitution sought to ensure that while religious visionaries are free to shout their dreams from the mountaintops, they are not at liberty to impose them on their fellow citizens. At the outset, since the amendment referred only to Congress, individual states could choose to support religious bodies and even interfere with the practice of religion. Nonetheless, the First Amendment embodied a bet with posterity that by keeping the church from directing government, or government from compromising theology, religion might actually flourish rather than wither.

Much of American history has been the vindication of that gamble. In the post-9/11 era, the implications of the First Amendment have, inadvertently or not, backed America into the great question on which the peace of the whole world, not just the United States, will turn: Can those claiming a monopoly on religious wisdom be prevented from imposing it on others? The fact that the Founders’ daring bet paid off makes America uniquely qualified to fight the most important battle of the 21st century: the war of toleration against conformity; the war of a faith that commands obedience against a faith that promises liberty.

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