and whites stayed in close contact. After the Revolution, black members were increasingly recorded and regulated in separate classes. In 1785, an unnumbered list of seventeen “Negroes” followed the class lists enumerating all white Methodists in New York, an afterthought to the main body of Methodists. In 1786, the Methodist society records formally placed blacks in their own class of twenty-five, with an addendum to the class lists adding nine more names. In 1787, Methodist leaders standardized their organization of black members, placing them in three clearly defined classes.42 Without allowing blacks full self-governance, whites nonetheless shielded blacks from full Methodist fellowship, treating them as second-class citizens in separate classes. These actions made Methodists appear less unusual regarding racial issues, however.
Methodist cultural memories also stressed their patriotic impulses. While most blacks in New York had chosen loyalty to Britain during the war, the most famous Revolutionary-era black Methodist in New York was a patriot. Peter Williams was born a slave in New York City to African-born parents. He converted to Methodism at John Street Chapel in the 1760s, along with his wife, Mary (or Molly). Williams’s master taught him the tobacconist trade. Although his master was a loyalist, Williams reportedly cherished the ideal of liberty that the patriot cause championed, as one oral history later recounted. While in New Jersey during the war, Williams helped a Methodist patriot minister hide from British authorities. The commanding officer pointed his sword at Williams, threatening to kill the slave if he did not reveal the preacher’s position. Williams refused. The officer changed his tack, then offering Williams a purse of money, also rejected. The story, repeated in Methodist circles, had the dual aim of promoting a Methodist minister who was not a Tory or English subject, and championing a black Methodist who similarly refused to join the British.43
Figure 2.2. Old John Street Chapel. This image, often reproduced in different forms and styles in Methodist histories, displays the sexton Peter Williams, patriot, in the doorway. (Reproduced with permission from the Methodist Collections at Drew University.)
Williams’s fleeing Tory owner sold his slave to John Street Chapel. Despite the general Methodist opposition to slavery, Methodist trustees bought Peter and put him to work as a sexton and gravedigger. The chapel apparently allowed Williams to purchase his freedom with his labor, combining a bartered watch and time served to gain his manumission papers in 1796. Thus in the 1780s, as Methodists attempted to integrate into American society, the New York chapel employed a black man in a position most New Yorkers would have recognized: as a slave. Williams’s story entered the lore of New York history generally, and his image often appears in famous historic prints of John Street Chapel, suitably absent the context of widespread black loyalism during the war, or of his own status as a slave for more than a decade.44
Not only did New York Methodists downplay their unusual status on race, but they also minimized the presence of loyalism in the church. Another Methodist oral history surviving from the Revolutionary era (again, via Peter Williams) condemned the irreverence and immorality of British soldiers in New York. Williams recounted two instances of British soldiers’ irreligion. In one tale, British soldiers dug a pit outside John Street Chapel for churchgoers to fall into when leaving religious services. In another striking passage, a British officer wore a devil’s outfit to frighten Methodist chapel attendees on Christmas Eve. Both cases ended with virtue rewarded and vice punished, but such stories served a larger role to emphasize Methodist patriotism. The tales obscured the facts that the Methodist church remained open in occupied New York when most other churches were forcibly shut, and that British soldiers attended Methodist meetings.45
While Peter Williams’s stories were useful to white Methodists, they highlighted a problem for blacks who remained. Most black New Yorkers had not shared Williams’s support for the patriot cause. Instead, they cautiously, and sometimes incautiously, supported British efforts to gain freedom and to benefit themselves. When British troops left, thousands of blacks left with them. Until then, such actions of revolt had been a regular possibility for blacks in the colonial era. In 1712 and 1741, and from 1776 to 1783, unhappy slaves could forge alliances with poor whites, Anglicans or Methodists, or British or Spanish states to overturn their bondage when their conditions grew too oppressive. But in the new Republic, blacks were under a clearly defined majoritarian regime, one that in fact (and eventually in most states, in law) recognized white superiority.46
New York blacks in the early Republic therefore traded revolution for hopes of reform. After 1788, blacks who remained in New York (and in all northern states) gambled that slavery was increasingly in decline, and that such decline would create the possibility of greater rights. They hoped that the language of liberty that patriots invoked in the Revolutionary struggle would truly include a universal promise that would accrue to them. Blacks first pushed for greater reform in the one arena open to them: the church, especially the Anglican and Methodist churches that previously accepted black participants. For churchgoing blacks, this also meant accepting white local church leadership, whether or not such leaders recognized black rights. Eventually, many blacks would form their own, separate, church, representing a possibility of a new revolutionary act. But in the Revolution’s immediate aftermath, black religion would appear less confrontational or dangerous than before.47
Anglican and Methodist church leaders probably assumed that their congregations could continue as they had before the Revolution. Trinity Church continued to house society’s most important members, who would dispense the gospel and gradual humanitarian reform as they saw fit.48 Cooperation in poor relief and among missionary efforts would be more informal and unofficial than before. The Methodists faced greater possibilities for change, as they now existed institutionally separate from their Anglican mother, but clung to their goals of reaching lost souls with the gospel, and encouraging saved souls to progress toward moral perfection.
New York City’s Methodists and Anglicans could not foresee the greater changes that were in store with the dramatic growth of the city. These changes would strain the conceptions of Episcopalian social prominence and Methodist mission, and ultimately would cause deep fissures between white and black coreligionists. Such problems were not immediately apparent, for after the Revolution most churchmen were simply happy that they had averted complete disaster, that Trinity had not been divested of its property, and that the churches could continue with their missions.
3. Creating Merchant Churches: The 1790s
During the 1790s, America’s economic recession lifted, as the new federal government offered a secure platform from which commerce boomed. When war between Britain and France revived in 1793, the neutral United States benefited by assuming the carrying trade around the globe. With its fine harbor and expansive hinterland, New York capitalized on the opportunity. Between 1790 and 1800, the city’s population doubled, growing from thirty thousand to sixty thousand inhabitants.1
By 1790, both Methodist and Episcopal churches could celebrate tangible signs of postwar recovery. In 1790, Rector Samuel Provoost consecrated a new Trinity Church, rising from the ashes of the old site to proclaim a new grandeur. Following Trinity’s example, Episcopalians erected new churches throughout the state, and the denomination’s numbers grew. The American Episcopal Church’s prestige renewed with the election of Samuel Provoost as bishop of New York, emphasizing that hierarchy still had a place, even if it no longer emanated from the Crown of England.2
The Methodists also prospered. By 1784, the Methodist Episcopal Church was no longer an ambiguous branch of the Anglican Communion but a denomination in its own right. Shortly after the war, Methodist records first referred to John Street as a “church” instead of a “meeting house,” suggesting a greater stability and permanency. In the expanding city, New York’s Methodists added to their numbers. In 1789, they built a second chapel on Second Street (now Forsyth), near Division—also known as the Bowery church—to accommodate their growing membership. The Bowery church was the site of several revivals,
