destroyed the legal privilege of these churches, but all their other characteristics—their cultural cachet, desire to reach all subjects (now citizens), and biracial missions—would remain.
2. Religious Establishment Challenged, Destroyed, and Re-formed: The Revolutionary Era
Samuel Auchmuty did not live to see his vision of a unified Anglican Church establishment in New York fulfilled. His successor, Charles Inglis, had a front-row seat to its destruction. Inglis complained that the Church of England’s loyalty to Crown in the 1770s only drew “peculiar envy” from “disaffected” patriots. He reported that in the run-up to Revolution, patriot laymen threatened, verbally abused, and jailed recalcitrant priests. Inglis had personally penned a response to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but patriots had seized the essay directly from the press and destroyed it. Even though the British army occupied New York from 1776 until war’s end, Inglis’s anxiety remained. Fleeing American patriots plundered Inglis’s house. And Inglis suspected that rebels under orders from George Washington set fires in the city. “It really seems the conflagration was directed against the interest of the Church,” wrote Inglis, for the flames consumed Trinity’s building. St. Paul’s Chapel and King’s College, directly in the fire’s path, nearly met the same fate, but alert observers doused their roofs with water, sparing those two prominent Anglican symbols from destruction. For the rest of the war, as the king’s troops marched through the streets of New York, His Majesty’s largest church in the colonies would remain a burned-out husk. After the war, Inglis would leave New York alongside the British troops.1
This chapter traces the effects of the American Revolution on New York’s Anglican and Methodist churches. Before the Revolution, proto-patriots attacked the Anglican clergy’s vision as hostile to true liberty. During the Revolution, many patriots associated both groups, including their black coreligionists, with loyalism, and after the Revolution patriot lawmakers disestablished New York’s Anglican Church. Such actions fatally destroyed the clergy’s highest aspirations for political influence. Methodists similarly suffered in the shadow of the larger Anglican conflicts, harmed by their ambiguous relationship with the mother body. Yet most churchmen, especially Anglican lay elites who accepted independence, viewed these setbacks as temporary, and continued to embrace a cultural vision for the church that did not rely upon full political establishment. Both groups kept connections to blacks, a group tainted by all-out loyalism, but Americanized themselves by creating greater distance between white and black congregants. By 1790, many Episcopalians and Methodists expected that their institutions would shake off the setback of disestablishment and continue to provide a socially cohesive vision for the city.
Political Battles over Religious Establishment
During the eighteenth century, the political ramifications of religious establishment ebbed and flowed with the changing times. After heated debates in the 1710s, moderate Anglicanism dominated both sides of the Atlantic for an entire generation. But in the 1750s, old battles took on new forms. In the early 1750s, many New York elites championed the creation of a King’s College to match their aspirations in a growing, prospering city. Anglican priests particularly welcomed the college as a necessary Anglican response to Congregationalist strongholds at Harvard and Yale. Many SPG missionaries had been American-born and American-trained, in hostile anti-Anglican environments: Trinity’s rector Henry Barclay had attended Yale; Trinity’s catechist Samuel Auchmuty had gone to Harvard. Such men hoped the college could train the Church of England’s ministers in North America, ending the need for costly trips to England for education. Their influence, and the preponderance of Anglicanism in the governor’s circle, led Anglicans to dominate the original board of trustees. When Trinity’s vestry offered in 1752 to provide thirty-two acres for the college, provided it be Anglican-led, the matter appeared settled.2
Elites initially crossed denominational lines to support the effort, as a college would grant New York new cultural capital. But the attempt to link the school with religious establishment roused religious dissenters. Presbyterian William Livingston, a minority non-Anglican on the board of trustees, led the assault through a series of essays in the Independent Reflector. Livingston strenuously opposed the church-state connection an Anglican college would imply. He particularly attacked the docility and deference that accompanied religious establishment.3
Livingston’s opponents fired back, using the voice of the New-York Mercury, printed by the Anglican layman Hugh Gaine. Like Livingston, these High Churchmen dipped into the well of an earlier era, adopting the polemic of High Church debaters from the 1710s. Such men invoked a sacramental theology that stressed that God’s invisible grace worked through visible signs, as it did in the Lord’s Supper. No less did the visible and invisible intertwine in the working of civil and church laws, and in social and political institutions. In response to the Independent Reflector’s invocation of a state of nature, which they deemed an ahistorical never-land, the Mercury’s High Church champions suggested respect for God-given social and historical precedents. In the proper forms of deference, religion could steer a clear path between the twin dangers of emotional enthusiasm, on one hand, and infidelity, on the other.4
Livingston and allies responded in kind, extending the pamphlet war through 1756. The resulting political battles pitted the Anglican governor and council against a largely dissenting assembly. Like the original 1693 church establishment, the resulting compromise granted the college a limited form of Anglican influence. The board of directors would include both Anglicans and dissenters, and the college president would be Anglican. The college would provide a general instruction in Christian morality, without promoting the dogma of any individual sect. While this was technically an Anglican victory, it mostly suggested that support for full political-religious establishment was neither broad nor deep.5
The battles over King’s College suggest that the High Church polemic attracted passionate support among the few clergy in the colony, but little beyond. Livingston’s opponents were generally not laity, but clergy. Samuel Johnson was the eldest and most influential of these. Johnson’s protégés wrote the Mercury essays, including New York priests Henry Barclay, Samuel Seabury Jr., Samuel Auchmuty, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler.6
For Anglican laity, however, such pure High Church principles were an embarrassment. The Tory principles that clerics championed in their responses to Livingston turned former Anglican allies, including a number of key Dutch Reformed clergy and laity, against the establishment. Opposition to such establishment made strange bedfellows, linking pietist revivalists with rationalist skeptics, radical with moderate Whigs, and opposition politicians with disaffected lower orders. Such unity would repeat in the Revolution. Anglican laymen who sought influence in their communities would rather channel such unity than beat against it.7
The King’s College controversy would recur, in a larger register, in the bishop controversy. From the English colonies’ inception, Anglican leadership had periodically tested the idea of establishing bishops in America. But none had seriously promoted the matter after 1720, as British politicians and colonial merchants alike turned their attention to the increase of commerce; none, that is, until the late 1760s. Historian Patricia Bonomi has suggested that the debate over establishing a bishop in the Americas consumed even more paper in the presses than the Stamp Act, and likely swung local elections in New York, where the debate ran hottest.8
The debate centered in New York because it was the center of Anglican missionary efforts. Anglican clergy had the ear of the colony’s presses, as the city’s two principal newspapers, the Mercury and Gazette, were both printed by Anglican laymen eager for church business. And clergymen started the debate when an English bishop, in a sermon delivered in support of the SPG, attacked colonial religion for its extremism and disorder, and suggested the planting of bishops as a remedy. As previously, William Livingston debated SPG affiliates or allies, most notably Anglican churchmen Charles Inglis and Thomas Bradbury Chandler.9
A minority of British
