The issue of religious toleration in early America is enormously complex. The essays in this volume highlight that complexity by revealing the range of ideas, social practices, and legal norms that determined the extent of toleration in early American society, both before and after the American Revolution. Yet even while considering this range, as well as the intolerance that preceded and survived the Revolution, one thing is clear: The idea of religious toleration was increasingly discussed in the burgeoning public sphere of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North Atlantic world of early America relative to earlier periods. The sheer volume of...

The definitive nineteenth-century biography of the nation’s seventh president concluded with its author observing: “It does not appear that he ever repented of anything, ever thought that he had been in the wrong in anything, or ever forgave an enemy as a specific individual.”¹ But as William Graham Sumner and a throng of other biographers since have noted, the General gave signs of embracing the good book, especially late in life, when he doled out morsels of its wisdom, wrapped in words of tender affection, to his family and friends during his final June, in 1845. In assessing his life...

The exceedingly long controversy over the project of bringing an Anglican bishop to colonial British America has never been an easy matter for American historians to explain. Originating in intermittent plans introduced during the seventeenth century, the Anglican effort to obtain a bishop recurred enough times a century later to form an almost continual point of contention. The most puzzling aspect of that effort is probably its persistence, in the face of general indifference if not outright hostility from much of the Anglican populace in North America, vocal opposition from rival churches, and a consistent lack of support from the...

For centuries, the Dutch Republic has been hailed for leading the march toward religious toleration in seventeenth-century Europe. Among the many achievements of this geographically compact but economically mighty nation, its role as sanctuary for people fleeing religious persecution from across Europe has ranked high. Yet the intricate maneuvering that underlay this roseate picture went largely unnoticed until scholars began to probe the ambiguous relations between church and state in the seventeenth-century United Provinces. This recent scholarship has revealed that the vaunted religious toleration of the Netherlands rested neither on ideology nor policy, but instead on a series of ad-hoc...

Charles Arabella could not help himself. Having accidentally spilled “some scalding pitch upon one of his feet,” he swore “by God.” Though his “blasphemous words” were clearly “spoken in a great passion,” Arabella nonetheless found himself convicted of the crime of blasphemy, a capital offense in most British colonies. The court mercifully ordered him to be “bored through his tongue and fined £20 sterling” instead of sentencing him to death; one report claims his tongue was bored “three times.” Unable to come up with the fine, Arabella remained in prison for six months before successfully petitioning the Council of Trade...

Pennsylvania has long been considered a singular success story in the history of Anglo-American religious liberty. In the standard narrative, William Penn’s colony illustrates how adherents of diverse religious views can peacefully coexist, creating a vibrant public life bound together by civil interest and a commitment to the common good. As one historian explains, the “highly mobile society of laymen” who comprised Pennsylvania society was “drawn from all social classes and from many parts of the Old and New Worlds.” Following Penn’s long career of advocacy on behalf of his persecuted Quaker brethren across Europe, and his constant efforts to...

“You, above all the Inhabitants of the Earth, ought to be zealous in establishing the generous Principles of religious Freedom.” Otherwise your actions “may possibly be attended with Consequences that are fatal.” Without religious liberty, “the temporal Interests of the Colonies” will be “obstructed,” the “out-lying Parts of the British Settlements” will be “doomed to live in Ignorance and Error,” and the “native Indians” will either “continue in their present deplorable State of Idolatry, Cruelty and Vice; or . . . become your most dangerous Enemies, by the Adoption of the Principles of Popery.”¹

With the fiery zeal of his...

In summer 1774, as the American revolutionary movement intensified, the sun scalded the Virginia countryside. The ground withered and the corn was “roll’d up with the heat & Drouth.” On a hot Sunday morning at the end of July, the man who wrote those words, Philip Vickers Fithian, a tutor on the plantation of Robert Carter in northern Virginia, emerged from his house. He saw one of Carter’s 600 slaves, Thomas, more commonly known as Daddy Gumby, who was reputed to be ninety-four years old. A few days earlier, Fithian had helped Daddy Gumby draw up a list of his children...

In 1774 the Continental Congress reached out to the inhabitants of Quebec. American colonists were engaged in a bitter struggle with Parliament over the rights of colonial subjects within an imperial system and they needed to present a united front against British tyranny. In particular, the Congress urged French Canadians to reject the Quebec Act, a recent act of Parliament that, among other things, provided for the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church and French-style civil law in Canada. This was a blueprint for tyranny, the Congress argued, challenging French Canadians to “take a noble chance for emerging from a...

The status of the small number of Jews in early America from their first arrival in New Amsterdam in the early 1650s until the beginnings of a significant, largely German migration in the 1820s may be best expressed through three interacting concepts: anti-Semitism, toleration, and appreciation. These concepts overlapped in that early American Jews often experienced more than one at once and there was not necessarily a clear chronological progression from prejudice to appreciation. For example, in the colonial era, Jews were tolerated but experienced significant anti-Semitism, particularly from non-elites. They were allowed to live and practice their religion in...

A revolution in religious culture and politics began in Britain’s North American mainland colonies during the 1770s.¹ This movement toward religious liberty, nonsectarianism, and public civility was never undone. There would be no retreat, no Thermidorian Reaction. New laws almost always expanded, and almost never contracted, the range of religious liberties granted to religious groups.² While it is true that a handful of states took several decades to grant full political rights to non-Protestants, the progressive character of religious liberty during this period is incontrovertible. Unlike earlier periods of reform in America and Europe, when radical policy shifts and confessional...

In 1798, a pamphlet by a member of a Newburgh, New York, deistical club responded to an attack printed in a local paper. The newspaper essayist’s denunciation of deism had begged two questions, the pamphleteer wrote: first, “is the gospel or any principle of religion incorporated in our federal or state constitutions,” and, second, “are deism and patriotism irreconcilable?” These questions, debated through the first half century of American independence, probed the boundaries of legal toleration and social tolerance. The Newburgh deist answered no to both. Citizens, he argued, were “doubly shielded” in the United States by laws guaranteeing religious...