the 1790s, New York’s Methodists had built two more chapels.3
The city’s growth posed new challenges to the churches. The Episcopal Church confronted an increasingly complex and divided community, one that defied the inclusive yet homogeneous vision that Anglicans had championed before the Revolution. The massive influx in immigrants strained conceptions of an organic society. The decline of deference by common people to their betters also challenged political elitism. After the Revolution, Anglicans ceased to automatically dominate political office. Church officials could not expect society’s wealthiest and most prominent members, who sat in the front pews, to govern the city.
For the Methodists, the challenges of growth led to greater internal divisions within the church. Now several hundred members, and growing, Methodists were no longer the close-knit body of believers of the 1760s. The familial, communal nature of late-colonial Methodism necessarily strained as the church incorporated large numbers of rich and poor. During revivals, the poorer wards to the north generated more new members. Methodist leaders built a new chapel to accommodate them in 1789; these new converts thus had decreasing contact with the older, wealthier members downtown. In the 1790s, social stratification began to appear among the Methodists.
Episcopalians and Methodists also dealt with the challenges of being multiracial communities in a society that increasingly feared such as threats to the social order. Free blacks occupied an undefined space in a republican society, and often faced white hostility. Before the 1790s, both churches accepted blacks but relegated them to marginal positions. As the number of free blacks increased, the presence of blacks in both churches grew less welcome. In the first years of prosperity following independence, both groups encouraged racial separation in worship. Leaders in both groups, however, contended that blacks remained under their institutional oversight, a separate but unequal body of believers.
Black worshipers made steps to assert themselves in their respective congregations. Tensions over race at Trinity seemed less pressing in the decade, as many loyalist blacks had left the city. Black Anglicans who remained affirmed their denominational identity, accepting messages of obedience and promises of future liberation. They did so under the title of the African Society, which offered hints of a larger heritage and resistance, but as yet had little public presence, and firmly identified with white benefactors. Among Methodists, a group of skilled black males sought independent worship, taking steps to be not just Methodists, but African Methodists. Even so, these black Methodists remained connected to white church leaders. Further, black churchmen remained silent in the public sphere, whether due to the widespread presence of slavery in New York, or the lack of significant literate leadership to initiate debate. In 1790s New York, blacks were not able to disrupt the white churches’ self-images as reflecting the religious norm.
In facing these social and racial challenges, both Trinity and John Street fashioned themselves as merchant congregations. They exemplified a preference for hierarchy, and organic connection, among their members. All had a place in the church—laborer or professional, black or white—but elites offered both bodies most of their stability and leadership. As such, the congregations exemplified connections to Federalism prominent in the era, albeit less in a political way than in a cultural and social preference. Therefore, in this decade the city’s growth challenged, but did not disrupt, church leadership.
Federalists at Prayer: Trinity’s Social Hierarchy
The wounds that the Revolution inflicted upon Trinity parish healed by the 1790s, as the parish’s patriots genially embraced their former opponents. The radical bent of the city council demanded that in 1784, the parish’s Whigs depose the Tory vestry and its hand-picked rector, Benjamin Moore. But the victors did not lord their triumph over the vanquished. This shakeup was temporary, and had few lasting effects on the church’s governance. Shortly after this action, loyalists trickled back into positions of church leadership.4 More important, the church retained its wealthy members, and its insistence that hierarchy, privilege, and wealth should persist.
Most of Trinity’s Whigs became Federalists. During the later 1780s and 1790s, Federalists dominated political events. Having successfully framed and ratified the Constitution, Federalist officeholders occupied the majority position in state and federal legislatures. Federalism promoted hierarchy, the rule of society’s betters, and a conception of an organic society. Culturally Anglophile, Federalists advocated improved relations with Britain, and welcomed back former loyalists; indeed, loyalists often joined conservative Whigs as party leaders.5
Figure 3.1. Federalist-era Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street, with Federal Hall on the right displaying the connections between social, political, and religious prominence. (Collection of The New-York Historical Society.)
Although New York’s Revolutionary state constitution abolished the Anglican religious establishment, Federalists strengthened the symbolic ties between church and state, between divine rule and temporal order. During the two years the federal government remained in New York City, Federalists emphasized the mutual ties of Episcopalianism and republican government. Trinity rector and bishop of New York Samuel Provoost served as chaplain to the United States Senate. Trinity’s chapel, St. Paul’s, became the destination of several governmental processions. Trinity’s vestry affixed a presidential seal over the pew where George Washington sat at St. Paul’s Chapel, and a seal of New York State on the pew reserved for the governor, at the opposite side from Washington.6
The Federalist emphasis on the benefits of hierarchy and order energized opponents suspicious of monarchy. Pennsylvania senator William Maclay sharply criticized any monarchical trappings. His censorious diary reveals a deep suspicion of pro-Anglican politicians who linked Episcopacy and government. He scorned the Episcopal “churchmen” who moved that Congress accompany the newly sworn-in President Washington to “attend divine service” at St. Paul’s Chapel. Maclay failed to block the measure. Two weeks later, Washington addressed Congress, and then led another procession to St. Paul’s, where Provoost prayed.7
Figure 3.2. Samuel Provoost, patriot rector of Trinity Church, first bishop of New York. (From Morgan Dix, History of Trinity Church, vol. 2 [1901].)
During the 1790s, Trinity’s parishioners bolstered this Anglican vision, which united the larger society behind a moderate and genial Christianity. Samuel Provoost offered a rational and orthodox theology that persuaded few but likewise offended few. He exemplified familial ties and kinship alliances at the top. As Senate chaplain, and as minister of and relative to leading government officials, he embodied a tangible connection between church and government. Filled with pews arranged according to prominence and wealth, the church’s building illustrated this organic vision of all society united in a coherent whole, with the wealthiest at the front.
From Trinity’s 1790 pew rent lists and New York City directories, I developed an occupational sketch of Trinity Church’s members. Both sources display upward bias. City directories tended to record established individuals with their own businesses and residences.8 Unskilled and poorer laborers would be more transient or more likely to board or share rooms, decreasing the possibility of their being listed in any given year. Likewise, pew lists record the congregation’s wealthier members. Although every church provided a few pews without charge for those who could not afford a minimal rent, such individuals did not appear in the lists. Even given these caveats, Trinity parish’s 1790s pew lists clearly portray a largely upper-class church. But because many occupations included both wealthier and poorer individuals, and because even poorer occupations appeared in the pews, an individual might scan the church building each Sunday morning and assume that Trinity represented New York as a whole.9
Politicians and professionals constituted a significant
