February 5 · This Day in America
After fifty-six days at sea, the ship Lyon reaches the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the dead of winter, and a young minister named Roger Williams walks down the gangplank into America. He carries with him a conviction the Puritans cannot abide: that the state has no business commanding a person's soul, that church and government must be kept wholly apart, that conscience is answerable to God alone. Within five years they will banish him for it. He flees south through a brutal winter, is sheltered by the Narragansett, buys land, and founds Providence as a place where a person could believe anything, or nothing, and still be free. The idea he carried off that ship in the cold would, a century and a half later, become the First Amendment.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1937
Fresh off a landslide, President Franklin Roosevelt announces a plan to add up to six new justices to a Supreme Court that keeps striking down the New Deal. It is legal. It is also, the country quickly decides, a step too far, and even his own party turns against him. The plan dies in the Senate. The episode is remembered as proof that in America the line at the Court is one a popular president still cannot cross.
Source: www.fjc.gov