Voltaire reached them early and reached them as a historian and a dramatist more than as a philosopher. His histories were in colonial libraries; his plays were performed; Candide circulated. The part that bears on this article is the toleration argument, which also circulated, and which arrived in a colonial world already working out its own settlements between churches and civil authority.³⁰ None of that makes a French book the source of any American measure, and the surviv