Philip Embury, one of the original five New York worshipers, preached the inaugural sermon at John Street in October 1768. Unlike the grand procession accompanying the consecration of St. Paul’s, John Street Methodist’s opening received no attention from the New York press. Almost immediately, however, John Street attracted large crowds: former closet Methodists, perhaps, or other evangelically inclined Protestants. Methodist itinerant minister Richard Boardman reported to John Wesley that 1,700 souls regularly attended Methodist services, only one-third of whom fit in the building.23
Trinity’s Anglicans kept close ties with the city’s Methodists. Methodists erected their first chapel on land bought from Mary Barclay, whose husband, Henry, had served as Trinity parish’s second rector. She charged a nominal fee of five shillings in advance, and ground rent of just over fourteen pounds per year. Approximately 250 individuals pledged contributions to raise money for the erection of the chapel. Trinity’s ministers Samuel Auchmuty, John Ogilvie, and Charles Inglis all donated. So did Trinity’s vestry, including such prominent citizens as James Duane, Elias Desbrosses, Andrew Hamersley, Edward Laight, David Clarkson, Gabriel Ludlow, and Nicholas Stuyvesant. At least 10 percent of the individuals on the subscription list affiliated with Trinity.24
Colonial-era Methodists remained Anglicans, for John Wesley did not grant his followers the authority to conduct all the church’s ordinances and rituals. Methodists attended Anglican worship services to receive the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion. On one visit to the city, future Methodist bishop Francis Asbury partook of the Lord’s Supper at St. Paul’s Chapel with several Methodist church leaders, including Thomas Webb. Prominent Methodists Samuel Stilwell, Stephen Sands, William Valleau, and Andrew Mercein, all of whom were trustees, class leaders, or ministers at John Street, had their children baptized at Trinity parish in the late 1770s.25
Some of the Anglican cooperation with the Methodists contained an element of social control. Many of society’s elites believed religious practice set a good example of moral character for the lower orders. Methodism deserved support because it encouraged unruly laborers and slaves to attend church. For this reason, Presbyterian Philip Livingston also contributed to John Street’s building fund. But perhaps some at Trinity hoped that the Methodist chapel would draw the more enthusiastic members from their midst, thereby reinforcing the majesty and decorum of the church’s most visible branch. Historian Richard Pointer notes that during the 1760s, Trinity, the “archetype of European traditionalism,” had “developed an evangelical wing.” As such, a Methodist preacher’s fiery exhortations might upset the propriety of genteel latitudinarian morality, and be better placed outside the mother church.26
Trinity’s attempt to create a broad church establishment confused many about the church’s identity. Samuel Provoost stepped down as an assistant minister at Trinity in 1771. His biographer blamed Methodists for the resignation, for Provoost refused to deliver the enthusiastic, emotional sermons that many congregants desired. But another historian claims that a pro-establishment party forced Provoost’s dismissal, for the theologically liberal Provoost sympathized with New York’s dissenting religious groups, including the Methodists.27 The opposing conclusions suggest that forms of worship divided the church.
Anglicans and Methodists remained officially linked during the colonial era, but the alliance fell short of true union. Trinity rector Samuel Auchmuty viewed the Methodists with less concern than he did the Presbyterians, whom he believed conspired constantly against the established church. But he also considered Methodism an unwelcome nuisance. In one letter to London church officials, Auchmuty described the preacher-soldier Thomas Webb as “turn’d mad and do[ing] a good deal of mischief about the country.” Auchmuty feared that Webb, who had already abandoned a military career, might attempt to gain clerical office from the Church of England, “which would be another affliction to the Clergy here.”28 Thus Auchmuty’s greatest concern about the Methodists was not that they would attempt to destroy the church, but instead wanted to lead it! Even so, such concern did not compel him to bar Webb from taking communion at Trinity’s chapel.
Although strains developed in the Anglican-Methodist alliance, both churches shared a common cultural and religious background that made movement between Episcopal and Methodist churches more likely than between other denominations. Well into the nineteenth century, after the churches had institutionally separated, Methodist ministers who wished to settle down and acquire a regular salary often joined the Episcopal Church. Upon surveying an area for evangelism, Francis Asbury confidently proclaimed that the local Methodists would achieve lasting success, “because the inhabitants are generally Episcopalians.”29 In addition to these affinities, both churches shared a willingness to evangelize black slaves.
Blacks under New York’s Religious Establishment
The colony of New York contained more slaves, at a larger percentage of the population, than any other British colony north of the Chesapeake. In 1750, one in seven of the colony’s population was enslaved blacks, with New York City’s proportion closer to one in six. The Greater New York metropolitan region, including Long Island and east New Jersey, contained an especially dense slave population. Most slaves in the colony lived in rural regions adjoining New York City on Long Island, especially in King’s County (later Brooklyn). By the early 1770s, an estimated 18,000 blacks lived in Greater New York City. In the city, slaveholding was widespread, with even poorer whites owning slaves.30
Historians have observed that racism toward blacks increased dramatically in the late-seventeenth-century British colonies. Antiblack racism became prominent, and more obvious, as the numbers of Africans imported through the Atlantic slave trade grew dramatically and after colonies stipulated clear slave codes in law. Under early Dutch rule, the city’s blacks owned and accumulated property, drilled with the militia, and initiated lawsuits in courts of law. Blacks’ status eroded in later New Netherland, as slavery grew more important, and under English rule slipped further. In the early eighteenth century, waves of new slaves from Africa bolstered general cultural assumptions about Africans’ inability to assimilate, and their basic inequality with whites.31
On this issue, Anglican churchmen held a position contrary to that of most colonists. English imperialists looked to religious establishment to consolidate their control of English possessions. The aim of the Church of England in New York was not merely religious conversion, but also the cultural Anglicization of the population. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel stood at the forefront of these efforts, seeking the education and conversion of not only Dutch subjects, but also African slaves. The SPG funded a missionary, Elias Neau, to catechize New York blacks at Trinity Church for the first two decades of the eighteenth century.32
Many Dutch and English alike remained suspicious of blacks’ involvement in the church. A long-standing debate in Christendom involved whether Christians could enslave fellow baptized individuals. As such, many whites hoped to avoid the question by barring blacks from religious participation. Neau took another tack. A French Huguenot, Neau had been imprisoned in a French galley and sympathized with his charges as slaves. But Neau held a more personal and pietistic vision of faith than did the typical Anglican. He did not challenge the institution of slavery, but rather emphasized the heartfelt conversion of his charges. This gained him the grudging support of New York’s more prominent Anglicans, who valued the cultural supremacy that the church promoted.33
Neau reported thirty regular communicants in his first years on the job, but such good fortune would not last. Neau’s efforts nearly derailed in 1712, when almost three dozen enslaved blacks joined in a blood oath to throw off the shackles of slavery. Setting fire to buildings, they hacked apart fleeing whites with swords and hatchets before authorities subdued them. Six rebels killed themselves before capture. Officials tried twenty-five survivors, and executed seventeen. As one participant was a Neau convert, many white New Yorkers called for an end to the mission.34
The rebels of 1712 rejected most of the surrounding
