in his journal. He expressed ambivalence regarding urban growth, welcoming its opportunities, yet fearing its effects.
Although Methodist leaders avoided taking sides in political issues, many of their laity could not resist the temptation. During the Revolution, Asbury lamented that some Methodists “had dipped deep in politics.”20After hostilities ended, electoral strife seduced many Methodists. In 1792, Asbury fretted, “This city has been agitated about the choice of Governor: it would be better for them all to be on the Lord’s side.”21 In 1795, Asbury viewed Independence Day celebrations in New York with regret. Bells ringing, drums beating, and rifles firing: all proclaimed the nation’s love of liberty, but Asbury lamented that, although the preachers shared a communal spirit, the city’s Methodists “are far from being as spiritual as we ought to be.”22
While politics led to obvious snares, more subtle and dangerous were the lures of moneymaking and wealth. After the Revolution, Asbury worried that, as peace brought prosperity, “our preachers will be far more likely to settle in the world; and our people, by getting into trade, and acquiring wealth, may drink into its spirit.”23 Suspicious of wealth, Asbury preferred that the poor fill his churches. During a 1787 visit to a Long Island church, just outside the city but miles away socially, he noted bluntly that “[t]he people on this island, who hear the gospel, are generally poor, and these are the kind I want, and expect to get.”24
Late-eighteenth-century cities were notoriously unhealthy. New York’s crowded, dirty conditions sorely aggravated Asbury’s health. Seasonal epidemics made matters worse, with “fluxes, fevers, and influenzas” marking his congregational visits to all the eastern seaboard cities.25 During those trips, Asbury regularly complained of sickness. In the late summer of 1791, he observed:
The weather is extremely warm and dry: people are sickly and dying, especially children; I find my body very weak: preaching at night, added to the moschetoes [sic], causes me to sleep very little. . . . We rode to New-York; a very warm day. I found myself much injured, but was well nursed at the north side of the city. They have a touch of fever here in George-Street. Sabbath, Oct. 1 We had much rain. Live or die, I preached at the old and new church. . . . I had some disagreeable things and was but ill-fitted in body to bear them.26
Asbury rode thousands of miles on horseback, but despite these physical exertions, his worst health complaints came in tight urban quarters.
For circuit-riding Methodist ministers, the crowded city also meant much work in a short time, with an intensity unmatched in rural locations. On July 5, 1795, for example, Asbury preached in Brooklyn in the morning. He then crossed the river to administer the Lord’s Supper at the Bowery church and met with the black classes. In the evening, Asbury preached at John Street and afterward met with two men’s classes. The next day, Asbury met with nine more classes, “so that I have now spoken to most of the members here, one by one.”27
For Asbury and other Methodist ministers, ungodliness flourished in the city. New York was an especially worldly place of bustle and business. Great wealth and noisy poverty crowded out thoughts of God. Urban anonymity allowed sins to pass unnoticed, far more than in the socially confining small towns and villages of rural America. On one trip into New York, Asbury feared during the ferry crossing that the boarding party had uttered so many curses that God would sink the boat! He then asked another passenger for a piece of chalk, that he might keep track of the number of curses for the duration of the trip. At John Street, after preaching on self-denial, Asbury noted, with great exasperation, “a more gay and indevout congregation I have seldom seen; they were talking, laughing, bowing, and trifling both with God and their minister, as well as their own unawakened souls.” After preaching to another unresponsive congregation in 1804, Asbury concluded, “[New] York, in all the congregations, is the valley of dry bones. Oh Lord, I will lament the deplorable state of religion in all our towns and cities!”28
Despite these lamentations, Asbury valued the stability that prominent members gave to the city’s Methodist congregations. Although Asbury railed against the wealthy in the abstract, his personal friendship with long-standing members anchored him during trying visits to the city. Asbury regularly lodged with such “Old Friends,” strong in the faith, who provided him a deep sense of calm. In 1796, he noted simply “I lodged with Elijah Crawford: this house is for God.”29
To foster holiness, Methodists scorned ostentatious living and public displays of wealth and social status. This stance attracted many poor people into their churches. Methodists welcomed women, blacks, and the poor, groups that republican politics explicitly excluded from the public sphere. As historian Dee Andrews noted in her pathbreaking study of American Methodism, the Methodist societies were socially and racially heterogeneous. They included the poorest and the richest: unskilled laborers and hardscrabble journeymen on one hand, and great planters and emerging capitalists on the other.30 But in the bustle of city life, merchants and entrepreneurial “new artisans” remained when laborers came and went, and they funded the struggling churches in ways that the poor could not.
Divisions over occupation or wealth within Methodism therefore imbedded in the movement from its start; they did not merely represent a later declension, but rather the realities of a movement that appealed to groups across the social spectrum.31 A study of churches on the congregational level reveals this clearly. When John Street Chapel was the only Methodist building in New York City, believers could hail the spiritual unity of its members. As John Street Church in the 1790s, the building represented a congregation, one of two (and by 1800, four) Methodist bodies. Occupational and wealth divisions very quickly strained the unity of early Methodism and highlighted the difficulties of preserving a heterogeneous movement.32 But at the congregational level, the wealthiest members, merchant-professionals, attended John Street alongside workingmen. Such elites befriended ministers and could view the church as a unity of believers. While Methodists in New York did not typically share outright their Episcopalian brothers’ tendency toward political Federalism, John Street’s Methodists specifically embraced an organic unity in Christ that functioned very similarly on a social and cultural level.
New York City’s 1796 Methodist classes reveal a church largely drawn from laboring occupations. One-third of all white males in the lists did not appear in the city directories, which suggests that their position was too poor or transient to enter the record. In the occupation categories of government, professional, retail, service, and marine workers, the Methodist society members were, compared to city averages, underrepresented in all categories. Within the service sector, cartmen accounted for two-thirds to three-quarters of the category. Cartmen might be considered closer to artisans in spirit than to other service workers, given their group solidarity, and their ability to regulate entry to their occupation through licensure. The largest job category in the Methodist classes, well above city averages, belonged to artisans.33
Artisans in the early Republic were hardworking, but not necessarily working-class. Artisans typically placed themselves in a middling category between the parasites at the top of society—ranging from bankers to lawyers to landlords—and the under classes at the bottom, with few skills or prospects. Some Methodist artisans had transcended the daily grind of production to manage and oversee shops. The New York Methodist society’s large artisan population thus reveals not a church of the poor, but rather one dominated by a large middling section, many of whom were anxious of their eroding status and increasingly militant in defending it.
During the 1790s, class meetings lay at the center of Methodist spiritual life. Through 1820, New York’s Methodist ministers recorded membership by class lists, not congregation. They listed each class one after the other, numbered consecutively, with no mention of what church each group may have attended. Assuming that geographic proximity to a church made attendance more likely, I identified individual white male Methodists as either John Street or Bowery attendees depending upon their places of residence as listed in city directories. If a class had a preponderance
