Now vines and fig trees were all very nice, especially if you lived oceanside in Rhode Island, but did this mean that Jews could, after all, be eligible to be magistrates, have the vote? It can hardly have escaped the Jews of Newport that this was emphatically not the case elsewhere. And there was the rub. Until the passage of the 14th Amendment at the end of the Civil War, the Constitution gave states the right to determine qualifications for state and local elections. The Jews of Baltimore, for example, had to wait until 1826 for the Maryland “Jew Bill” to clear matters up and allow them to participate in politics.

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There was someone else on hand in Newport on August 18, for whom this little exchange was of more than casual interest: Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew better than to steal the president’s thunder and diligently played second fiddle to Washington’s stentorian brass. But this particular turn in the proceedings had a special significance for him. The fight to keep matters religious and matters of state apart, to institute toleration and equal rights for those of all beliefs or none, was not, for Jefferson, nor for his friend James Madison, a revolutionary afterthought. It was the revolution just as much as the institution of democracy itself.

Jefferson realized that not everyone in America felt the same way, especially his personal bugbear: John Adams. The constitution of Massachusetts, drafted by Adams, ratified in 1780, and generally remembered as a mild and equitable treatment of religion, was, in fact, nothing of the sort. In Article III, Adams decreed that “the happiness of a people and the good order and preservation of civil government, essentially depend upon piety, religion and morality.” Since “these cannot be generally diffused through a community but by the institution of the public worship of God and of public instructions in piety, religion and morality…to promote…and secure the good order and preservation of government, the people of this commonwealth have a right to invest their legislature with the power to authorize and require the several towns, parishes, precincts and other bodies politic or religious societies, to make suitable provision at their own expense, for the institution of the public worship of God and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality, in all such cases where such provision shall not be made voluntarily.” Notice the Protestant. Catholic worshippers and schoolteachers expecting public funding, much less Jews or “Mahometans,” could not expect to be provided for. Notice also the element of compulsion Adams has smuggled in. The good people of the commonwealth could volunteer to finance churches and religious schools, but should they wish to opt out, they would be taxed for that purpose anyway.

Such compulsion is exactly what Jefferson sought to avoid when he authored the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, arguably the greatest and bravest thing he ever wrote. “Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free,” he proclaimed, “all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion who, being Lord of both body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either.” Thus, Jefferson continues, it is only the presumptuous impiety of weak men and rulers to usurp the Almighty’s sovereign power and presume to do what he refrained from. “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions in which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular passions he feels most persuasive to righteousness.”

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