At Mother Zion, gentility entailed male leadership and preaching bourgeois standards of education, respectability, and rationality. In the white churches, a suburban mentality encouraged some members to flee from the city. Trinity’s chapels gained new prominence. Seeing its members less like one large family and more like a grouping of private families, John Street focused on a domesticity that limited the prior aims of Methodism. Education and cultural refinement joined spiritual fervor as paths to leadership.
The eighth chapter examines the full consequences of this domestication of church life in the 1830s and 1840s. Racial fissures grew absolute, and swept the last remains of hope for racial unity from the churches. Yet black churchmen continued to articulate loyalties to denominational traditions that recognized the local relationships fostered in each church. Many white Methodists and Episcopalians embraced nativist politics as a way to re-create the lost world promoted in the colonial era, a truncated version that continued racial separation while promising to soften class conflict among whites. But neither racial separation nor nativist dreams of unity could wind back the clock on the city’s economic and demographic growth. Economic slowdowns and the flight of downtown residents caused the churches’ once prominent position to decline.
A conclusion extends the narrative to the Civil War. In the 1840s and 1850s, a number of larger developments in American religious and intellectual history suggested that a new unity could be created in New York, whether it lay in evangelical revivalism, Broad Church Episcopalianism, or generalized Romanticism. But the reality of how church members lived highlighted major differences with the colonial era’s promotion of organic unity. Social difference, and private religious experience, was the norm for the members of these churches.
In 1860, New York City was the United States’ largest city, and a center of finance, fashion, and culture. Regular gridded streets and fine new houses uptown dwarfed the colonial era’s small crooked alleys huddled at the south end of the island. The four congregations remained, or became, bastions of respectability. Church leaders could not offer a united vision similar to what their forebears had in the Revolutionary era. Rather, they reached out to individuals on a case-by-case basis, offering not social transformation but personal salvation and public respectability. While some historians note the importance of evangelicalism to nineteenth-century American cultural and political life, the experience of New York’s churches suggests that social factors limited whatever influence that the churches and the churches’ leaders could claim.
American religious scholars have posited that religion has functioned in a variety of important roles in different settings throughout American history. Paul Johnson, for example, asserted that evangelical religion helped newly bourgeois businessmen to control their laborers, and Nathan Hatch contended that the popularization of revival Christian movements liberated lowly upstarts and outsiders to attack the authority of learned clergymen and church hierarchies. For Johnson, religion was a tool of elite control; for Hatch, a force for popular liberation. In a similar vein, Graham Russell Hodges argued that religion invigorated the New York black community’s resistance to white racism.22
As striking as the works of these scholars are, I found that the churches had a shorter reach in early Republic New York’s urban setting. The expansion of the city, and the expansion and contraction of the city economy, battered and buffeted these downtown churches. Congregants paired their religious lives with identities borne of their living and working spaces. Religious groups rarely influenced events as dramatically as their leaders and prominent members initially hoped. Even when individual church members had important roles in their respective communities, their churches often hesitated in matters of social or political importance. Often, social, economic, and racial concerns eclipsed religious motivations. As time passed, religion became a more private, individual affair. While religion was certainly rich in meaning for the individual believer, the city’s growth and commercialization meant in practical terms that, over time, the churches grew less relevant to the community as a whole.23
Even so, the parishioners at Trinity and St. Philip’s and the congregants at John Street and Mother Zion chose to identify themselves religiously as well as socially or racially. Religion was significant because the participants deemed it such, not because it provided a functional or measurable tool for them. In an environment that was ultimately uncontrollable even for most elites, these city congregations offered havens where adherents might recapture some control, if only in claiming the option to worship and fellowship with the men and women around them.
1. The Foundations of Religious Establishment: The Colonial Era
During the 1760s, the New-York Mercury was a modest four-page newspaper in a midsize colonial port town. Its rear section of advertisements typically dwarfed the few columns devoted to news, and most news relayed events occurring outside the city, in Philadelphia, London, and Paris. Nonetheless, on November 3, 1766, the Mercury gave much attention to a procession that had taken place in New York City’s streets the previous Thursday, when Trinity Episcopal Church consecrated St. Paul’s Chapel, its second daughter chapel in the city. New York’s three Anglican worship houses equaled the Dutch Reformed in number for the first time and made the Anglican Church second to none in terms of prestige. The paper’s printer, Episcopal layman Hugh Gaine, deemed the chapel’s ornate Georgian architecture “one of the most elegant Edifices on the Continent.”1
The proceedings began at 10:00 a.m. at Fort George, at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. A procession of religious and civic officials marched the half mile to St. Paul’s in precise order. Children who received charity from the church walked in front. City and colonial officials followed, along with Trinity’s clergy and prominent laity. At the chapel, Trinity’s rector, the Reverend Doctor Samuel Auchmuty, led a worship service. In his sermon, Auchmuty preached on the text “the place whereon thy standest is holy ground.” The service concluded with the “judicious execution” of several pieces of choral and instrumental music.2
Figure 1.1. Samuel Auchmuty, Trinity’s catechist of blacks and rector, champion of Anglican unity. (From Morgan Dix, History of Trinity Church, Vol. 1 [1898].)
When Samuel Auchmuty presided over St. Paul’s consecration, he must have felt some satisfaction. During the 1750s and 1760s, Anglican opponents led a series of attacks on Anglicanism’s prominence in New York. In his letters to his superiors in London, Auchmuty reported Presbyterian conspiracies against the Church of England around every corner. But at this ceremony only Anglican eminence showed. Gaine reported that thousands of individuals of “all Ranks and Denominations” observed the procession from the streets. Inside the chapel, several thousand more listened to the service with “fixed attention” and “devotion.”3 On this day Trinity Episcopal Church and its two chapels, St. George’s and St. Paul’s, presented an Anglican establishment that, in the colony of New York, had never been stronger. Some Anglicans believed it augured a united, dominant Church of England throughout North America.
This chapter begins the study of four congregations by examining the origins of Trinity and John Street churches. The story opened with the consecration of St. Paul’s because the Anglican concept of church establishment framed the Episcopalian and Methodist churches in colonial-era New York. Although religious pluralism weakened New York’s establishment, Trinity Episcopal parish enjoyed a privileged place in Manhattan. The Methodists who began worship at John Street Chapel also associated with Episcopacy and borrowed from its cultural authority. Establishment provided a springboard for missions. Both groups aspired to a universal evangelism that would reach all members of society.
This chapter also examines the churches’ attitudes toward black congregants, and black responses, in turn. Both Methodists and Anglicans ventured ministries toward blacks, whom other church groups had generally neglected during the colonial era. Before the Revolution, blacks’ inclusion symbolized the universal, authoritative reach of these churches. For
