in the American colonies. Fewer American Anglicans supported the matter; most southern churchmen were dedicated to local lay control over parishes, and northern ones found the SPG’s high Tory principles to be embarrassing, and certainly politically inexpedient after colonists unified to oppose the Stamp Act in 1765. Even ardent High Churchmen who supported a bishop suggested that such an office could be confined to spiritual authority, with no power to coerce colonial subjects. The debate over bishops had few real ecclesiastical results, then, even as it allowed antichurch opposition to coalesce.10
The Loyalist Taint on Anglicans and Methodists during the Revolution
The pre-Revolutionary debates over High Church establishment, in which patriots attacked church hierarchy and privilege, spilled over into the Revolution. The Revolutionary War undermined the Anglican vision of a unified colonial society. During the war, Episcopalians divided internally over politics and church governance, rejecting the supposed unity that Anglican clergy and SPG missionaries promoted. The Methodist institutional attachment to Anglicanism caused similar strains, and Methodists struggled to define themselves in relationship to their parent church. Both churches’ connections to the British government created a special problem in New York City, where the military occupied the town for most of the war. Patriots (an increasing number of citizens identifying as such as the Continental Army’s position improved) could paint Anglicans and Methodists as not only Tories, but also biracial disgraces, given their support for black evangelization.
New York’s Anglican clergy stressed loyalty to the Crown; in fact, the northern colonies’ Anglican churchmen were the strongest American voices for loyalism during the Revolution, and among the few to offer a coherent ideology. Priests such as New York’s Samuel Seabury had publicly promoted an Anglican King’s College and bishops in America; it was a short trip for him to denounce the emerging patriot cause. In 1774, Seabury wrote several tracts denouncing the delusional and fanatical tendencies of rebellion. He engaged in battle not with a Presbyterian, however, but an Episcopal layman, as then-teenaged Alexander Hamilton penned a series in reply.11
Priestly loyalism meant that, in the run-up to Revolution, Anglican churches suffered where patriots held sway. Trinity’s rector Charles Inglis asserted that north of the Chesapeake, all Anglican clergy (save one lone exception) remained true to Britain. Inglis minimized his loyalism, noting only that his religious duty meant he could not advocate liberty from the pulpit, and had to adhere to the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer, which included prayers for the king. Trinity, along with all other Anglican churches, also displayed the king’s coat of arms. Consequently, Inglis complained that patriot committees of correspondence closed Anglican churches and harassed loyalist priests. As the British army occupied New York in 1776, Inglis insinuated that fleeing patriot forces burned down the church.12
Complicating matters, Anglican suffering under patriot rule disappeared under British oversight. During the British occupation of New York, Anglican churches fared better than other religious groups. Both of Trinity’s chapels and John Street Methodist meetinghouse remained open during the conflict. Believing the Anglican charge that other denominations were havens for dissenting patriots, British officers forcibly closed most other churches. Some Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed congregations suffered the added indignity of serving as hospitals or barracks for British soldiers. But by remaining open, the Anglican Church garnered the same resentments applied to the occupying British army. Condemning British soldiers as licentious and immoral, patriot moralists attributed the same vices to the Anglican churches that soldiers attended.13
Further, Trinity Church, rare among New York City’s congregations, included a multiracial vision. Anglican priests baptized and married blacks, and served them communion. During the war Anglicans opened a school for black children. Methodist preachers, too, willingly ministered to blacks, and publicly rejoiced in their participation in revivals and prayer meetings. Such actions may have played a greater role in creating suspicion than the Anglican clergy’s ideological loyalty to the Crown, for blacks occupied a conspicuous place at the bottom of the social hierarchy. When the Revolution offered opportunity for greater freedom, many blacks took advantage: historian Graham Russell Hodges has deemed black actions in Revolutionary New York an eight-year revolt against white New Yorkers.14
The most obvious threats to white colonists were blacks who joined British military actions. Eight hundred black soldiers trained on Staten Island, their Black Brigade serving as a segregated group within the British regular regiment known as the Queen’s Rangers. Black soldiers’ activities focused on the greater metropolitan area of Westchester County and east New Jersey. Colonel Tye, a runaway slave from a prominent Jersey Quaker, led an interracial group of irregular soldiers in terrorist attacks on patriot farms throughout New Jersey. Tye’s men seized valuable provisions and freed slaves. While some elite loyalists such as Oliver DeLancey grumbled about blacks’ military presence, British officers typically ignored such complaints.15
More visceral and immediate than military action was the large influx of blacks, mostly runaway slaves, who swelled the population of British-occupied New York City. An outside observer entering the city in the late 1770s might first notice the prominent scarlet-coated uniforms of the British army, for the city remained the army’s headquarters throughout the war, an increasingly beleaguered center as the generals lost ground on the greater continent. But a close second to catch the eye would be the sheer numbers of blacks. Twelve thousand runaway slaves filled the city in 1779 (perhaps as much as half of the wartime population); at the time of British withdrawal in 1783, four thousand remained, despite thousands who fled with the army. The sea of black faces would appear striking in most American colonies north of the Chesapeake.16
Most of these blacks did not serve as soldiers. Paid less than white laborers, shunted to tent cities in Staten Island or the burned-out West Ward, blacks nonetheless moved freely about the city and earned wages for their labor. They gained employment in rebuilding the charred West Ward in lower Manhattan, where more than one thousand buildings burned alongside Trinity. Others improved the military fortifications in the city and surrounding countryside. Teamsters carted arms from ports to magazines in the town. Black foragers ventured outside city limits to gather scarce foodstuffs to feed the teeming city. Black pilots navigated rivers for these foraging parties, and for British expeditions.17
Patriots had ample opportunity to complain about the mongrel nature of the British occupation. Patriot sympathizer Henry M. Muhlenberg suggested that the British regiment of blacks was “inclined towards barbarities . . . [and] lacking in human feeling.” Blacks associated freely with British soldiers. Most scandalous to some were the “Ethiopian balls” in which white British officers mingled indiscriminately with African Americans.18Such criticisms of impropriety could be leveled directly at Anglicans, for their combined support of the British cause and black humanity.
Property and Patriotism: Trinity Rebuilds its Reputation
The traditional interpretation of the Revolution’s effect on the Church of England is that the Anglican clergy’s wartime loyalty to Britain nearly destroyed that denomination at war’s end. In 1782, the SPG withdrew its aid to the American colonies, ending its longtime support for Trinity’s catechists. Many SPG missionaries fled the country, among them Charles Inglis, who finally realized the High Church dream of a bishop in the Americas—in his case, in Nova Scotia. In 1784, the New York state legislature disestablished the Anglican Church, granted all denominations the right to incorporate, and legalized Catholic worship in the state. Further, state-appointed regents took control of King’s College, removing it from Anglican hands and renaming it Columbia. At war’s end, many Anglican loyalists fled the city, removing to havens in Britain or Canada. Lower attendance and smaller offering collections hurt the cash-strapped church. Resentment between patriot laity and loyalist clergy wracked the church in the 1780s. Relations also became strained between the colonial churches and the Anglican headquarters in England. Such conflicts and flagging numbers led some observers to conclude that the Church of England, in America, would not last beyond
