To bigotry no sanction, Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport

The President of the United States stepped off a boat in a small Rhode Island port in the summer of 1790, and a few hundred words later the whole meaning of American religious liberty had been set down in a letter to a congregation of Jews.

Think about what that moment was. The federal courts were brand new. The Bill of Rights had not been ratified. Rhode Island had only just agreed, after a long holdout, to join the Union. In most of the world at that time, a religious minority lived by the permission of a ruler, and the ruler's permission could be withdrawn on a bad day. And the first President of a new republic took the trouble to say, in writing, that here the arrangement would be different.

I want to read that letter the way it should be read, which is slowly, with the text open, and with the Constitution beside it. It is one of the founding documents of American liberty, even though it is not in the Constitution, and I believe every citizen ought to know it as well as he knows the Gettysburg Address.

The setting: Newport, August 1790

Rhode Island was the last of the thirteen original states to ratify the Constitution. It did so on May 29, 1790, by the narrowest of margins in its convention. President Washington, who had been in office a little over a year, had not yet visited the state, and the delay had been noticed. In August he went to Newport, traveling with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Governor George Clinton of New York, and on August 17 he was received by the town with speeches and a procession.

Among the people who addressed him was the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, which worshiped at the synagogue that had been dedicated in 1763 and which still stands, the Touro Synagogue, the oldest synagogue building in the United States. The congregation's address was written by Moses Seixas, who served as its warden. It greeted the new President with thanks and with a prayer for his health and for the country.

Seixas's address contained a passage that is as important as Washington's answer, because Washington used its words. Seixas wrote, in paraphrase, that the Jews of Newport rejoiced to live under a government that gave to bigotry no sanction and to persecution no assistance, and that offered to all people liberty of conscience and the immunities of citizenship. A small Jewish congregation in a port town, whose members came from a people that had been expelled, taxed, confined and slaughtered across Europe for a thousand years, was telling the new nation what it hoped the nation would be.

The letter, passage by passage

Washington answered in writing within days. Founders Online dates the letter August 18, 1790, though some printings give August 21. I will give the key passages exactly, and then say what each one meant.

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.

The first thing to see is the praise, and the target of the praise. Washington is not flattering Rhode Island. He is saying that the American citizens collectively have done something new. The word "examples" matters. He is aware that the world is watching. The experiment in self-government was less than two decades old, and he is saying that its handling of religion is one of the lessons it offers to others.

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.

Here is the principle in ten words. "All possess alike." It does not say all who agree, all who belong to the majority faith, or all whom the majority approves of. It says all. And it joins two things that are often separated: liberty of conscience, which is the freedom to believe and worship, and the immunities of citizenship, which are the ordinary protections of law that every member of the political community enjoys. A Jew in Newport is not a guest in the republic. He is a member of it.

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.

This is the sentence that makes the letter great. Notice the distinction. Toleration is what a ruler or a majority grants. It is a gift, and what is given can be taken away. A natural right is what a person has by being a person, and no majority can grant it, because no majority possessed it first. In the old Europe, the best a Jew could hope for was toleration, and sometimes not even that. Washington is saying that in America the language of toleration is already out of date. The question is not whether the majority will put up with you. The question is what you are owed.

That is the Declaration's logic applied to conscience. If men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, then a right to worship according to conscience is not a franchise handed out by the legislature. It is prior to the legislature.

For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

Here is the borrowed phrase, the one that came from Seixas's address and that Washington carried into the letter, and here, too, is the bargain. The government gives no sanction to bigotry. It lends no assistance to persecution. In return it asks one thing of the citizen: to be a good citizen, to obey the law, to support the common order. Not a creed. Not a baptism. Not a confession. Good citizenship is the whole price of admission.

Think about how modest that is, and how large. Every government in history had asked for more. Some demanded that you share the ruler's faith. Others demanded that you pay a special tax. Washington asks you to behave yourself and to be loyal. That is the entire list.

May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

The vine and fig tree is from the prophet Micah, and the same image appears in the books of Kings and Zechariah. It is the Hebrew Bible's picture of peace: each man at home on his own land, secure, unafraid. Washington reached for it here because it was exactly the right gift to give a Jewish congregation. He was speaking to them in the language of their own Scripture, and the point was not lost. The words that the Hebrew prophets used to describe the perfect peace were the words the first President used to describe the safety America would give them.

May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

The closing is a prayer, and that matters for the argument I will make in a moment. The man who has just announced that the government gives no sanction to bigotry then ends by invoking God, in language that is plainly biblical and plainly sincere. He sees no conflict. The letter does not say that religion is private, or that the public square must be scrubbed of reference to the Almighty. It says that the government does not rank citizens by their faith.

What the letter does not say

A close reader has to notice what is missing.

It does not say that the government is hostile to religion. It does not say that religion is a private matter that should not appear in public. It does not use the phrase "separation of church and state," which Jefferson would write in 1802 in a letter to the Danbury Baptists. It does not say that Jews must keep quiet in public. It says they are citizens, with the same rights as anyone else.

That is a useful corrective to the modern habit of reading the Founding as a project to evict faith from public life. The man who wrote this letter issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789, and in his Farewell Address of 1796 called religion and morality "indispensable supports" of political prosperity. In the Newport letter itself, he prays. What he excludes is bigotry and persecution as instruments of the state.

The constitutional frame

The way to read a Founding document is to put it next to the text of the Constitution, and here the match is exact.

Article VI, clause 3, says that "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." That sentence was in the original Constitution, ratified in 1788, before there was a First Amendment. A Jew, a Catholic, a Quaker, a nonbeliever could hold federal office, at a time when many European states and several American ones barred them. Washington's letter is the plain-English version of Article VI.

The First Amendment, ratified in December 1791, a year and a half after the letter, says that Congress "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The letter's "no sanction" corresponds to the Establishment Clause, and "liberty of conscience" corresponds to the Free Exercise Clause. When Washington wrote, the amendment was still a proposal moving through the states, and he plainly regarded its principle as settled.

And Madison, in Federalist No. 51, had set out the deeper logic: "It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part." A religious minority is the clearest example of a part of society that needs guarding from the majority. The Newport letter is the executive branch's promise to do exactly that.

The strongest objection

There are three objections to making much of this letter, and each deserves an answer.

One: it is only a letter, not a law. True. It is not a statute or a holding. It carries no legal force. But it is the first President's statement of how the new government understood its own principles, written in the first year of the republic, by the man who had presided over the Convention that wrote the Constitution. It is evidence of original understanding of the highest quality, the way a framer's contemporaneous explanation is evidence. And its content was later enacted in the First Amendment.

Two: the Founders were not perfect, and Washington owned slaves. Also true, and honest history has to say it. Washington held enslaved people throughout his life, and his will provided for freeing those he owned. The letter's promise was not kept for everyone, and nobody should pretend it was. But the principle it states, that rights are inherent and not granted, is exactly the one the abolitionists, and later Lincoln and the civil-rights movement, used against the institution of slavery. A principle is not refuted by the failures of those who first stated it. It is vindicated by the people who hold the country to it.

Three: the letter proves the government should be secular in the strict modern sense. Here the text answers back. A government that gives no sanction to bigotry is not thereby a government with no relation to religion. The letter prays, quotes the prophets and assumes that its readers share a biblical frame. What it excludes is a legal hierarchy of faiths. That is neither the strict separationist reading nor the reading that says the state may favor a church. It is the American middle path, and it is the one the law followed for a long time.

What it promises today

What does the letter promise to Jews, and to every religious minority? Four things, as I read it.

1. Equal citizenship. A person's faith does not reduce his standing in the political community.
2. Rights that are inherent. The government does not grant liberty of conscience. It recognizes and protects it.
3. A government that withholds its power from bigotry. It will not lend its force to persecution, and a country that mistreats a minority on the basis of religion is breaking the promise.
4. A duty in return. The citizen supports the common order, obeys the law and acts as a good neighbor.

That last point is often forgotten. The promise runs both ways. A free people expects the minority to be loyal and gives the minority full membership. The bargain only works if both sides keep their part.

It is worth saying something here about antisemitism, because the letter's central promise has been tested by the ugliest of hatreds, and it has been tested in our own time. A republic that has pledged "to bigotry no sanction" cannot be indifferent when Jewish citizens are menaced for their faith. Conservatives who cite the letter should be the first to defend the people to whom it was written, and the first to say that hatred of Jews is a moral evil and a betrayal of the American creed. That is not a political position. It is the promise Washington made in writing.

Where to go from here

The relationship between faith and public life runs through many of the posts on this blog. The letter's own constitutional framework is read in Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase. Washington's later view, in his Farewell Address, is the subject of Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable. The Founders' attempt to protect conscience in the Bill of Rights is told in The conscience clause Madison wrote for the Bill of Rights and lost. For a Founding-era example of a state church and how the Constitution tolerated it, see Massachusetts kept a state church until 1833, and the Constitution let it. And for the long argument about what it means for a free government to treat believers equally, see 'Religious liberty is a license to discriminate,' answered with the law. The full set of founding texts is at the site's Constitution page and founders page.

The case in brief

1. In August 1790, Washington visited Newport and received an address from Moses Seixas on behalf of the Hebrew Congregation, which worshiped at the Touro Synagogue; Washington answered it in a letter within days.
2. The letter's central claim is that toleration is the wrong word: religious liberty is an inherent natural right, not an indulgence from the majority.
3. The government, he wrote, "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance," and asks only that citizens be good citizens in return.
4. The letter matches Article VI's ban on religious tests and anticipates the First Amendment, and its prayer and biblical imagery show that it opposes persecution, not faith.
5. Its promise of equal citizenship was not fully kept in Washington's time, but its principle is the one the country has been held to ever since.

What you can do: read the letter in full from the Founders Online archive or the Touro Synagogue's own materials, and read Article VI, clause 3, aloud to your family.