Trinity’s or John Street’s missionizing efforts for their own ends; the Revolution would create an environment where black church members would attempt greater separation and independence from their white coreligionists. Black Anglicans and Methodists who first attended Trinity and John Street would provide the basis for St. Philip’s Episcopal and Mother Zion African Methodist churches.
This background of religious establishment provided a cultural and social model that these churches’ members would retain after the Revolution. Even though the political upheavals of the 1770s and 1780s formally ended official establishment, Anglicans and Methodists in New York promoted the idea of an organic, connected church body as normative. Growth of the city, not the Revolution, would alter the religious commitments of these congregants in the coming decades.
Anglican Religious Establishment, and Its Methodist Offshoots, in New York City
The concept of religious establishment seems strange now, but four hundred years ago it was the norm in European kingdoms and their American colonies. In the early modern period, most European elites believed that a stable and harmonious society required a linkage of church and state, with religious and secular authorities each supervising their subjects. In England, the Church of England was the church of the monarch, and the church of the realm. The monarch appointed its bishops, and these bishops in turn consecrated new monarchs. Public taxes went to church support, and in return, the church administered poor relief. Although England’s colonies had no bishops, Anglican churchmen expected the model of establishment to expand across the Atlantic.4
The turbulent seventeenth century altered this ideal. A Civil War in England disestablished the church, but was followed by an intensely prochurch Restoration. At century’s end, the Glorious Revolution resulted in a modified establishment that recognized the permanence, and significance, of dissenters. In the eighteenth century, pro- and anti-establishment camps periodically coalesced around politicized issues of church and state. In the English colonies, the reality of church establishment often varied considerably from the ideal model. Nine of thirteen colonies contained some form of religious establishment. From the Chesapeake region southward, the Anglican establishment mirrored the hierarchical conception of royal government, although wealthy tobacco planters in Virginia, not priests, dominated the parishes. In New England colonies, a thorn in the royal side, renegade Puritans established a Congregational Church, forcing loyal Anglicans to play the role of dissenters. In Pennsylvania, William Penn established a proprietary colony dominated (albeit unofficially) by the Society of Friends. In New York, Anglican interests were stronger than in New England, but weaker than in the South. As a result, pluralism limited formal religious establishments, requiring a shaky compromise with dissenters that lasted, in fits and starts, until the American Revolution.5
The English colony of New York had begun as the Dutch colony of New Netherland, and New York City had been New Amsterdam. Because the Dutch burghers who oversaw the colony sought profits more than religious orthodoxy, they allowed a degree of religious toleration remarkable for the seventeenth century.6 When the English conquered the sparsely populated colony in 1664, the new elites did not wish to disturb old practices, and risk new rebellion, by imposing a heavy-handed religious conformity. In addition to de facto toleration of other Protestants, the new English leadership placated the Dutch landed elites by allowing Dutch Reformed churches to form corporations and own property, a grant denied to other denominations (the Anglican excepted). But accommodations soon extended beyond the former Dutch masters.7
Ethnic and religious pluralism hampered the royal governors at every turn, especially in New York City. By the late seventeenth century, the modest seaport of four thousand people displayed a remarkable variety of religions, and irreligion, to the consternation of Governor Thomas Dongan, who reported in 1687:
New York has first a chaplain belonging to the Fort of the Church of England; secondly a Dutch Calvinist; thirdly a French Calvinist; fourthly a Dutch Lutheran—there be not many of the Church of England; few Roman Catholics; abundance of Quaker preachers men and women especially: singing Quakers, ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-Sabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some Independents, some Jews: in short of all sort of opinion there are some, and the most part none at all.8
British governors struggled to nurture an Anglican conformity as existed in the mother country. The Anglican establishment that took hold in New York, however, was a veneer of respectability, barely masking both the continued pluralism and the tenuous hold of Anglican authority.
There were simply too few Anglicans in the colony to justify a full establishment. In the 1690s in New York, dissenters outnumbered Anglicans forty to one. In 1693, Governor Benjamin Fletcher strong-armed through the legislature a modified Anglican establishment in the four southernmost counties—New York, Westchester, Richmond, and Queens—where Anglicans were most numerous, although still a minority. This law, called the 1693 Ministry Act, called for the election of ten vestrymen and two wardens for each county. This vestry held the power to tax the citizenry for the local poor relief and the support of a minister. In New York, then, religious establishment encountered several limits from the start: it was not colony-wide, the local populace controlled it, and local interests could theoretically favor some other, non-Anglican church.9
In the three counties outside the city, the Anglican Church’s control over the vestry was weak, nominal, and contested. The vestry tax often supported a non-Anglican minister. In New York City, Anglican interests fared better. In 1696, Anglicans captured a bare seven-to-five majority in the city vestry and elected William Vesey to serve as minister. Vesey had been raised in a non-Anglican family. Moderate in his theological views, Vesey willingly compromised on matters of faith. He proceeded to serve as Anglican rector in New York for more than forty years. His parish was Trinity Episcopal Church, incorporated in 1697, the year after his appointment, located at the foot of Wall Street on Broadway. Vesey’s easygoing tenure calmed suspicious dissenters and allowed Trinity parish the precedent of having its senior minister’s salary supported by public tax. It also granted Trinity a measure of privilege and esteem otherwise lacking among skeptical antichurch colonists.10
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, two other sources of funding gave the Church of England in New York increased vitality, especially at Trinity parish. First, in 1705, New York’s Governor Cornbury granted Trinity a land grant, or glebe, of the Queen’s Farm on the west side of Manhattan Island, which secured a comfortable income to pay assistant ministers’ salaries. Second, mission-minded Anglican priests founded the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (or SPG) in 1701 in London. The SPG aimed to evangelize every subject in Her (soon thereafter, His) Majesty’s realm. The SPG paid the salaries of missionary priests to staff the wide-flung parishes throughout the North American continent, and supported evangelization efforts among Native American tribes and African slaves. By the time of the Revolution, seventy-seven SPG-funded missionaries worked in North America, most serving north of the Chesapeake. They included a regular catechist at Trinity Church, who taught both poor white students and African slaves the fundamentals of Christianity, and non-English speakers the basics of the language.11
Such projects led to an increased optimism among Anglicans in the colonies over the eighteenth century, especially in the northern colonies where the church had lagged behind the southern colonies’ full establishment. Trinity’s steeple was the first in New York City with a bell to call congregants to worship. Trinity’s rise initiated a flurry of church construction in New York, with parishes raised in Staten Island, Westchester, Eastchester, New Rochelle, and Queens. Between 1690 and 1750, the number of Anglican parishes in the British American colonies increased fourfold; the number north of the Chesapeake line of establishment increased one-hundredfold. By the time of the Revolution, Anglicans sustained more than 450 parishes, an increase of six times the number existing in 1690.12
Such growth was accompanied by theological compromise. Although most rectors at Trinity adopted a High Church position that stressed the significance of bishops, church hierarchy, and
