Figure 2.1. Charles Inglis, Trinity’s ill-fated Revolutionary-era rector, later bishop of Nova Scotia. (From Morgan Dix, History of Trinity Church, vol. 1 [1898].)
As a branch of the Anglican Church, Methodists risked clear guilt by association. Like the High Church ideologues who promoted Tory principles, Methodist founder John Wesley was an arch-Tory in politics. During the Revolution, Wesley published loyalist tracts suggesting that all Christians should submit to their God-ordained governments. Certainly Methodism’s status as a missionary wing of the church did not help matters, for the mission-focused SPG had been one of the most consistent voices for loyalism before and during the war. In fact, whereas most SPG missionaries had been American-born converts, most Methodist missionaries were British-born, culturally even more removed from the settings where they preached.20
Methodist preachers emphasized that building the kingdom of God was their primary aim, suggesting a commitment to political neutrality. But it might appear that Methodists tended, like their founder, to support the mother country. During British occupation, John Street Methodist Chapel remained open, when army officers forcibly closed all other churches (save the Anglican). Blacks and British soldiers (and black British soldiers) attended John Street, again reinforcing the strangeness and foreignness of the religion in many American eyes. After the war, most British Methodist missionaries left, if they had not been deported already. Such was the case for Thomas Webb, whose military background caused immediate suspicion. Patriot leaders captured Webb, held him as a prisoner of war, and deported him to England in 1778. Webb would never return to the church he helped found. Francis Asbury avoided the same fate by going into hiding. Asbury was virtually the only English minister, and licensed Methodist preacher, to remain at war’s end. He would emerge as the symbolic and real leader of Methodism in America.21
As the Revolution ended, many patriot observers labeled New York’s Methodist and Anglican Churches as loyalist and interracial. Both affiliated with a Church of England establishment that Whigs found hierarchical and tyrannical. But while both groups suffered damage to their reputations, neither faced extinction, or irrelevance. Both Methodists and Episcopalians resolved to continue their mission to society. While they deemphasized the colonial imperatives of hierarchy and patronage, they adapted older religious forms to new social realities. Independence muted their message, but did not destroy it.
While Anglican loyalists drew intense opposition, they had been small in number, and concentrated almost exclusively on high government officials and the clergy. Thus when church disestablishment forced most government officials and many priests to flee, few tangible signs of loyalism remained. Instead, an Anglican patriot laity forged a new elitism based upon the protection of property, and welcomed the return of any loyalist (especially those of means) willing to submit to the new government.
The transition from loyalist to Whig to an apolitical unity of wealth occurred quickly. In 1783, Trinity’s loyalist vestry voted to replace the departed priest Charles Inglis with another loyalist, the moderate Tory Benjamin Moore. Fearing a political backlash against their parish, Trinity’s Whigs protested. Using authority granted by the city council, in 1784 these Whigs took control of the vestry, deposed Moore, and replaced him with Samuel Provoost, whose patriot politics made him acceptable to more New Yorkers.22
The change in church governance accompanied a rearguard action to keep Trinity’s property rights secure. Radical political groups in the city, the Sons of Liberty and Mechanics Committee, promoted the seizure of loyalist properties for the common good. When heirs of the original owner of Trinity’s lands petitioned the New York state assembly to recover their lost property, assemblymen suggested that the lands, initially granted to Trinity by Queen Anne, properly belonged to the state. Trinity attendee Alexander Hamilton led the defense of Trinity’s property, uncovering a deed that kept Trinity’s lands from seizure. Hamilton’s overtures to conservative Whigs also called for lenience toward former loyalists.23
These local actions paralleled Anglican actions on the national level. In 1785, the Anglican Church in America became the Protestant Episcopal Church, independent of its mother, the Church of England. Liturgical reform proceeded, with American Anglicans editing the Book of Common Prayer to fit its new republican setting. Authority in the new body resided with the laity, who attended and voted in diocesan conferences alongside priestly delegates. The issue of bishops rose again, briefly: when Samuel Seabury emerged as a candidate to be the first United States bishop, in Connecticut, Whig Episcopalians like John Jay and Rufus King (both at Trinity) fumed about Seabury’s Tory views, and complained that the office of the bishop emphasized an unwelcome hierarchy in the church. But after Seabury’s consecration in 1784, patriots gained access to the office: in 1787, Trinity’s Samuel Provoost was elected as bishop of New York, and William White (chaplain of the wartime Continental Congress) was elected bishop in Pennsylvania. After the inclusion of lay checks on clergy, and of patriot clergy on loyalist ones, the old political resentments simply faded away.24
The wounds that the Revolution inflicted upon Trinity parish had healed by the 1790s, since the parish’s patriots genially embraced their former political opponents. The 1784 shakeup that deposed the Tory vestry and rector Benjamin Moore was temporary and had few lasting effects on the church’s governance. Evidence suggests that the men who joined the vestry in 1784 did so from expediency to preserve the church’s property and image, and willingly stepped down when Trinity no longer faced danger. Vestry members who took office in 1784 served, on average, only four years—this was less than half of the eight years of service of the men they replaced. Further, those four years represented less than one-third of the twelve-and-a-half years of average service of the vestrymen who were elected after 1785. Men of unquestionable patriot pedigree such as Richard Morris, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Isaac Sears, and Joshua Sands entered the vestry, served a few years, then stepped down. Their formerly loyalist neighbors and associates then returned to lead the church.25 More important than political affiliation, Trinity offered continuity in the social composition of its leadership; in retaining its elite members, Trinity Church implied that hierarchy, privilege, and wealth would provide stability for the parish, in good times and bad.
The Whigs who shook up Trinity’s leadership were reluctant revolutionaries, displaying a moderate and cautious stance in politics. The leader of the group that ousted the wartime vestry, James Duane, had been a careful conservative prior to the war. Duane acted as a liaison for, and sympathetic ally of, arch-loyalist Joseph Galloway. But unlike Galloway, Duane accepted the Declaration of Independence, figuring that “[i]t was more sensible to . . . become a careful neutral and look forward to the ‘rich Encrease of our Estates,’ which would assuredly follow in the wake of free trade with the world.”26 He was joined by men such as John Alsop, who had asserted a modest loyalism by resigning his position in the Provincial Congress after the passage of the Declaration of Independence. Alsop clearly adapted to his situation, marrying his daughter to Rufus King, a Massachusetts patriot and signer of the Constitution, who after marriage relocated to New York.27
Interested in the security of property rights, during the 1780s and 1790s Duane and his political allies welcomed loyalists back into the city, deeming their economic contributions to the city’s prosperity more important than any past political irregularity.28 This welcome extended to the ousted vestry of 1784. Miles Sherbrooke returned from abroad by 1787 to reestablish his merchant business on Little Dock Street. Similarly deposed, William Laight remained in the city, and worked as a merchant on Queen Street. He returned to the vestry in 1788, and served until 1802. His shop stood but a few houses down from the residence of William Bedlow, a Whig who had replaced him. Robert C. Livingston’s Tory sympathies compelled him to remain in London for much of the war, although he occasionally visited British-occupied New York. He returned to the city at war’s end, and in 1785, Livingston began a ten-year term of service as vestryman.29
Elites
