The new rector, Samuel Provoost, had been a patriot, alone among Episcopal clergymen in the northern colonies. As such, the patriot vestry knew he had the proper credentials to take Trinity’s helm in 1784: political convictions that would silence radical opposition. But Provoost’s credentials were more than intellectual, and appealed to the vestry for other reasons: he was related by marriage to the Livingstons, the wealthiest of the great landed families of the Hudson River Valley. This connection made him kin with John Jay, James Duane, and William Duer, the men who presided over the 1784 transfer of power to patriot interests in the church. The political shift from loyalist leaders in the 1770s to Whigs in the 1780s did not change the fact that a wealthy elite managed the church, and represented its public face.30
While the Episcopalians stressed their patriot bona fides and downplayed the church’s earlier emphasis on hierarchy, the Methodists simply asserted that they were no longer Anglican. In 1784, at the “Christmas Conference,” Methodist leaders voted for an official break with the Church of England. Methodists became a separate church, with their own self-sustaining ministry and administration of the sacraments. In 1789, the denomination sent greetings of congratulation to new President George Washington before any other denomination did so.31 Methodism was no longer an English transplant, but an American original. Methodists’ end goal remained the same, to preach the gospel message to all.
Trinity Church’s vestry acted as if the holistic organic vision would revive despite disestablishment. Trinity cooperated with other religious bodies in the city but expected to lead them. As the city’s most prominent church, Trinity’s vestry felt a duty to aid their lesser brothers, just as they had supported the building of the Methodist church. But they modified the organic vision—no longer would all churches eventually join the Church of England, but rather the church might be a first among equals and lead by example. Anglican wealth helped its position.32
Trinity judiciously parceled out portions of its extensive lands to influence others. When British officers confiscated Garrit Lydekker’s Dutch Reformed Church for a hospital, Trinity’s vestry allowed Lydekker’s group to use St. George’s Chapel for worship. More striking were overtures of friendship to New York City’s Presbyterians, who had been the Anglican Church establishment’s most vocal critics. Trinity’s vestry granted Brick Presbyterian Church the use of its chapels from 1783 to 1784, during a building restoration. Trinity further granted plots to Presbyterian congregations to build parsonages for the church’s ministers. After the Revolution, Trinity vestry implicitly supported the state’s legalization of the Roman Catholic Church, by leasing, then selling, Barclay Street land to trustees of St. Peter’s Catholic Church.33
Painting the Churches White: Marginalizing Black Presence after the Revolution
The association of blacks with Anglicanism and Methodism hurt the churches’ public images in post-Revolutionary America. Neither group, however, removed blacks from their communities. Trinity’s ministers continued to marry and baptize black members, and restarted the African Free School in 1787 after a four-year hiatus. Methodists allowed blacks to speak at some meetings and organized class meetings where blacks could worship. Even so, both Methodists and Episcopalians more nearly entered the mainstream of American attitudes toward race by marginalizing their black members.34
In dealing with slavery and race, white Episcopalians expressed a condescending benevolence that promised gradual reform. This remained consistent with the humanitarianism the SPG had preached in catechizing blacks the previous century. In 1785, Trinity vestrymen James Duane, John Jay, Robert Troup, and Matthew Clarkson joined with Episcopalian Alexander Hamilton and other leading New Yorkers (including their political rival George Clinton) in founding the New York Manumission Society (NYMS), an institution dedicated to promoting gradual and voluntary manumission among the city’s slaveholders. Trinity’s Anglicans comprised a majority of its non-Quaker founders. Historians have noted the strong Quaker presence in the formation of the NYMS. However, the Anglican presence comprised a significant minority. Indeed, in its first years the society appears to be a nearly exclusive Anglican and Quaker undertaking, an alliance of the old order’s elite politicians and churchmen with a prophetic, energetic, yet commercially connected majority.35
The New York Manumission Society attempted to undermine the worst effects of slavery in New York. It supported bans on out-of-state slave sales in an attempt to choke off the ready market for slaves and push owners toward manumission. NYMS lawyers legally represented free blacks accused as runaways, and filed suits for slaves who had been promised freedom that unscrupulous masters had later repudiated. The society also pushed the state to free slaves of loyalist masters, whom the state had seized and expected to sell.36 As the institution’s title suggested, members advocated for the direct end of slavery, albeit in a gradual and voluntary way. Shortly after the New York Manumission Society formed, the state legislature considered, but defeated, a law to implement gradual manumission. Over the next fifteen years, NYMS leadership would support efforts to push gradual manumission through the legislature, culminating in the successful law passed in 1799.37
Issues of black citizenship were embedded in questions of abolition. To make manumission more palatable to whites, NYMS members also attempted to exhort, and aid, the black community toward moral improvement. In 1787, the NYMS established a school for free blacks. Board members limited pupils to families who were “regular and orderly in their deportment.” In limiting black “vice,” white prejudice might decrease.38 Thus, as patrons and teachers of blacks, society members placed themselves at the top of a social pyramid, in which grateful blacks at the bottom might reciprocate with hard work and clean living.
Joining the New York Manumission Society satisfied multiple parts of conservative Anglican elites’ identities. The attack on slavery mirrored the Revolutionary rhetoric that asserted that all men are created equal, and that none should be held as slaves. Educating and exhorting blacks in efforts to humanize or civilize them placed members in line with the eighteenth-century Anglican mission to touch all members of the empire. Yet NYMS members did so in a way that respected the social order, including the right to property. The NYMS thus affirmed the Anglican conception of an organic society, in which everyone had a place, but tradition and hierarchy made it clear that even in liberty, not all places were equal.39
Less publicly minded Anglicans did resume the connections to blacks that had made the church suspect in the eyes of many colonists during British occupation. Trinity’s ministers resumed the catechization of its black members on Sunday afternoons in the 1780s, an act they continued through the 1790s. A gap exists in the records between the colonial missions and the formation of the black-run parish of St. Philip’s. Nonetheless, church historians surmise that the colonial-era efforts to catechize blacks led to the formation of the black-run parish of St. Philip’s established in 1819.40
Early Methodist opposition to slavery did not completely disappear, but the church toned down its early insistence on the unity of all believers in Christ. By the 1780s, racial divisions began to show. Black Methodists approached white ministers with petitions to worship separately, but the white leadership repeatedly denied these efforts. At a 1780 conference, white Methodists resolved that church leaders should meet regularly with blacks, or appoint “proper white persons” in their stead, so that blacks not “stay late and meet alone.”41
While denying blacks their own space and time for worship, white Methodists nonetheless marginalized blacks within the main body of Methodism. They did so primarily through the organization of the class meeting. Methodist classes were intense prayer meetings in which individual believers could work spiritual disciplines toward greater piety, removing individual tendencies toward sin from their lives. New York Methodist class records that survive from the 1780s reveal that while whites refused blacks the ability to lead themselves religiously, white Methodists nonetheless did not fully accept blacks into the main body of Methodists for worship.
Before the Revolution, no class records for John
