Michael Haddam

speaker

274 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 22 Jan

Michael Haddam’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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American History Hit · Origins of the First Amendment · 22 Jan 2026 podcast

Constitution's provision that allowed for free toleration to all religions meant that there was supposed to be a separation between church and state in New York.

And that is not an argument that had been made before.

The prosecutor, on the other hand, argued that blasphemy was perfectly legal or was perfectly fine as a restricting law because

The New York Constitution also inherited the English common law in 1776.

And of course, blasphemy was a longtime offense in England.

And eventually they agreed with the prosecutor and upheld his conviction.

So he tried to make an argument for separation of church and state.

To enable his freedom of speech, which shows us why those two rights are both in the same amendment.

Right.

Yeah.

So the House had a rule that the first 30 days of each congressional session was to be devoted to reading all the petitions that had been sent in by constituents over the previous months.

And each petition had to be read aloud, had to be printed in the record, and then typically was assigned to a committee which could choose to address it or ignore it.

But that

That procedure became totally unworkable in 1835 after the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society because they organized a petition campaign to writing these petitions against slavery for Congress.

And they started to get...

All these petitions, way more than they'd ever seen before.

I think they got over a thousand petitions in this one period right after the society was created.

And so Southerners, Henry Pinckney specifically from South Carolina, proposed a resolution saying that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery.

And that any petitions having to do with slavery would not be read in the Congress and that they would be laid on the table, basically ignored, right?

So that is, you know, the slavery gag rule.

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