“The Constitution still fails to protect the freedom of the individual. Unless an amendment is made, our republic will finish up just as tyrannical as the old monarchies like England.” This was a gross exaggeration, his father had responded, but James had been insistent. Freedom of religion was not sufficiently guaranteed, he insisted, nor was freedom of the press. On the latter subject, he’d even started to give his father a lecture about the Zenger trial until Master had been forced to remind him: “I know about the Zenger trial, James. I was here at the time.”

“Well then, Father, you surely were not against Zenger, were you?” Wryly remembering his unfortunate boyhood performance during the visit of his Boston cousins, John Master had contented himself with replying: “I listened to my cousin Eliot from Boston speaking for Zenger strongly—and a damn sight more elegantly than you,” he had added, just to keep James in his place.

“Back in ’77,” James had continued, “Jefferson proposed a bill to guarantee religious freedom in Virginia. What we need is an amendment along those lines. New York won’t ratify the Constitution without one, nor will Virginia.” And when the First Amendment had appeared, James had treated the matter as though it were a personal victory for Jefferson.

No doubt it was his innate conservatism, but for all his respect for the new republic, Master could not feel entirely comfortable with what he now sensed was a profound, secular tolerance at its very heart.

Even Washington was guilty. Of course, the president always observed the proprieties. While Trinity was being rebuilt after the fire, the Masters had attended the handsome chapel of St. Paul’s nearby, and it always gave John Master pleasure to see the president and his wife in their pew there—even if Washington did leave before communion. But there was not the least doubt, for Washington made it clear, that the president couldn’t care less what religion his fellow citizens followed. Protestant or Catholic, Jew or atheist, or even a follower of the prophet Mohamet—so long as they observed the new Constitution, Washington declared, it was all one to him.

Others, it seemed to Master, were more devious. Before he died that spring, old Ben Franklin had claimed to be a member of every Church, and prayed with each congregation in turn. The cunning old fox.

But Jefferson, this handsome, Southern patrician with his fine education and his fancy Parisian friends, who had returned to America to run the nation’s foreign affairs—what was he? A deist, probably. One of those fellows who said that there must be a supreme being of some kind, but who didn’t seem to think they needed to do a damn thing about it. A fine belief for a coxcomb.