Providence

Roger Williams National Memorial — The most eye-opening conversation of the whole trip. People fled here because Boston and Philadelphia still enforced strict religious conformity, and Rhode Island became the place for the "hated people." Roger Williams named the town Providence because he believed a person's relationship with God was private — never something a church or state should force. He called it "soul liberty," decades before the same idea reached Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment, and even named two of his kids Freeborn and Providence.

The ranger's other thread was money. Back in Europe and in the stricter colonies, your work was boxed in by your station and the church — if your father made chairs, you made chairs, and you might be permitted only a set few, however many you could actually build. Rhode Island loosened that grip: here you could earn by your own effort. He pointed to the beaver trade as the example — trappers turning pelts into real money, shipped back to Europe to become the felt hats that were all the rage — the kind of self-made enterprise that was hard to imagine under the old rules.

The ranger drew a sharp line between "allowed" and "actively supported": Touro Synagogue in Newport wasn't built until nearly 80 years after Williams died, by a Jewish congregation working with a non-Jewish architect who designed it from their descriptions. Tolerance took generations to become infrastructure.