Chapter One: Proof of Concept
Since the first Jews stepped foot on this soil, they knew they were home. They had from the beginning been treated as founding partners in the American project in one of history's great untold stories
On Sunday morning, August 15, 1790, George Washington, then the president of the fledgling democracy called the United States, set off with an entourage in a packet—a small ship used for regularly scheduled local transportation on America’s canals and rivers. He had decided the Friday before to execute a plan that had been on his mind for a while: a trip to Rhode Island to celebrate its finally joining the union, the last of all the states. Washington had taken a tour of New England the previous autumn in 1789, but he had purposely skirted Rhode Island, which had refused to ratify the Constitution until May 19, 1790. “Now that Rhode Island had reknit the old ties, he would go there, meet the leaders, see the people and make it plain that he no longer kept in his heart the resentments the petty spokesman of the little State had aroused,” writes Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman. Three months later, Washington invited William Loughton Smith, a South Carolina Congressman, to join him, his “lady and suite” on a quick journey upstream to Rhode Island. Smith had been planning to make his own little tour into the backwaters of New York and Massachusetts, a plan he quickly abandoned for the honor of joining the president. “I could not decline so acceptable an invitation,” Smith writes in his diary, and set off with Washington and company on the Hancock, helmed by a Captain Brown. It was a small but important group, which included a number of Washington’s trusted military personnel, the governor of New York, and the secretary of state, one Thomas Jefferson.
The men had a lot to discuss on the journey to Newport, which carried them from New York to Rhode Island via the Long Island Sound over the next two days. The leading item in the Saturday edition of the New York Gazette, right before a story about a young man who apparently died, only to have signs of life reappear three days later (“This instance of the return of life should awaken caution, and prevent inconsistent hurry in laying out the dead, and precipitating the funeral ceremonies,” the paper reasonably concluded), was a letter on the Revolution in France that claimed that “the Christian religion is to all intents and purposes abolished in France—and that the National Assembly have covertly and insidiously introduced a system of atheism in its stead.” At the behest of “Heathens, Jews, and Christians,” the letter reported that the Senate in France had abolished tithes. No doubt the role of religious freedom in a democratic society came up over the meals our Founding Fathers shared upon that little skiff or later aboard deck on those warm summer evenings as they sailed up the Long Island Sound.
As the packet entered the Newport harbor, a salute was fired to greet them, and the group disembarked to the applause of Newport’s principal inhabitants, which included the town’s clergy, who escorted the President and his retinue through the town to their lodgings. Among the clergy was Moses Seixas, a leading merchant who would later become the cashier of the Bank of Rhode Island and was the president of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport.
