"Among the Choicest of Their Blessings, but Also of Their Rights": George Washington and Religious Liberty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the first year of his presidency, George Washington received hundreds of congratulatory letters from individuals, municipalities, and organizations all over the new country. Most complimented him and emphasized the United States' good fortune at having him at the helm. Some of the most interesting, and important, of these missives came from formerly persecuted religious groups, who had concerns about how Washington—and the new government—intended to deal with them. By the start of the American Revolution, nine of the thirteen colonies that became the United States recognized a state church (six were Anglican, three Congregational). Dissenters, or those outside the official church, found only varying degrees of acceptance and several of these groups, including Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, Catholics, and Jews, had faced discrimination, imprisonment, and even death in Europe and the Americas. Furthermore, persecution directed at Baptists in Virginia shortly before the Revolution was still on the minds of many of these individuals. Appalled at the actions taken against good people, who only wanted the freedom to worship in the manner they believed was correct, a number of leading Virginians came to support the cause of religious liberty. One of them, George Washington, as head of the Continental Army during the war, chastised his soldiers for prejudices against Roman Catholics in Canada, and permitted military units to choose their own chaplains, even when the chosen person held controversial beliefs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".