debate in the church and have noted the lack of agreement on such basic issues as rights of female and black Episcopalians. Fifth, I have, in addition, continued the narrative to 1990.
I thank all of those who have helped me with this work, particularly, Marcia, Daniel, and Joseph, my patient wife and sons; Guy F. Lytle, Samuel Garrett, Bruce Mullin, Roland Foster, and Charles Henery, fellow historians who have given me advice and counsel at various points; the members of the Women’s History Project, who have taught me to look at historical evidence in new ways; and a decade of students at the Virginia Theological Seminary, who have taken my class in the history of the Episcopal Church.
Robert W. Prichard
Alexandria, Virginia
January 1991
NOTES
1. “A the preceding a name [of institutions, groups, and companies] is lowercased in running text.” See Chicago Manual of Style on Line, sixteenth edition, 8.67, http://0-www.chicagomanualofstyle.org.librarycatalog.vts.edu/16/ch08/ch08_sec067.html (accessed February 17, 2014).
2. In the decade following the American Revolution, American Anglicans chose the name “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America.” This remains the official name of the denomination. The General Convention did, however, authorize the shorter title Episcopal Church as an alternative in 1967. In 1976, the Convention amended the declaration of conformity required of clergy (article viii of the constitution) to employ this shorter title.
Raymond W. Albright’s A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church (New York: Macmillan, 1964) was the most recent history of the denomination.
3. See, for example, Kit and Frederica Konolige, The Power of Their Glory, America’s Ruling Class: The Episcopalians (U.S.A.: Wyden Books, 1978); E. Brooks Holifield, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1978); David L. Simpson, Jr., “A Data Base for Measuring the Participation Levels of Episcopalians in Elected Office and Including a List of Lay Delegates to the General Convention of the Church from 1789 to 1895,” (M.T.S. thesis, Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1987); and W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
4. See, for example, John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1984); R. Bruce Mullin, Episcopal Vision/ American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and David Sumner, The Episcopal Church’s History, 1945–1985 (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1987).
5. See, for example, Mary Donovan, A Different Call: Women’s Ministries in the Episcopal Church, 1850–1920 (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1986), Joan Gundersen, “Before the World Confessed”:All Saints Parish, Northfield, and the Community (Northfield, Minn.: Northfield Historical Society, 1987), and Joanna Bowen Gillespie, ‘The Clear Leadings of Providence’: Pious Memoirs and the Problems of Self-Realization for Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the Early Republic 5 (Summer 1985) on the roles of women; Carleton Hayden, “Black Ministry of the Episcopal Church: An Historical Overview,” in Black Clergy in the Episcopal Church: Recruitment, Training and Deployment, ed. Franklin Turner and Adair Lummis (New York: Seabury Professional Services for the Episcopal Office of Black Ministries, n.d.), J. Kenneth Morris, Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, 1872–1906, Founder of Voorhees College (Sewanee: University of the South, 1983), and OdeII Greenleaf Harris, It Can be Done: The Autobiography of a Black Priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church Who Started under the Bottom and Moved up to the Top, ed. Robert W. Prichard (Alexandria, Va.: Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1985) on the roles of black Episcopalians; Owanah Anderson, Jamestown Commitment (Cincinnati: Forward Movement, 1988) on Native Americans; and Otto Berg, A Missionary Chronicle (Hollywood, Md.: St. Mary’s Press, 1984) on the role of the deaf.
6. For a more detailed discussion of the covenant argument, see Robert W. Prichard, The Nature of Salvation: Theological Consensus in the Episcopal Church, 1801–73 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 71–91.
7. William Wilson Manross, A History of the American Episcopal Church, (New York: Morehouse-Gorham, 1935); and E. Clowes Chorley, Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951).
Founding the Church in anAge of Fragmentation(1585–1688)
Following a series of exploratory visits (Florida, 1565; California, 1579; Newfoundland, 1583; etc.), the English made their first attempt at American colonization at Roanoke Island (1585–87). They named the colony Virginia after Elizabeth the Virgin Queen (1558–1603), though the island is in what is now the state of North Carolina. The Roanoke effort was unsuccessful, in part because of the attempt of Queen Mary’s widower, Philip II of Spain, to take control of England by sending the Spanish Armada (1588). In anticipation of that attack the English government directed all ships to remain in port. No supply ships made the trip to Roanoke until 1590, by which time no surviving colonists of what has come to be called “the Lost Colony” could be found.1 In 1607, however, an English mercantile company (the London Company) did plant a permanent colony further north, which it named Jamestown after James I (James VI of Scotland), who had followed Elizabeth to the English throne.
During James’s reign (1603–25), this Virginia colony was the primary focus of English colonial efforts. It was not, however, the only English settlement. Navigation was still an inexact science in the seventeenth century, and not all the ships headed for the new colony reached their intended destination. In 1612, the wreck of a ship bound for Virginia led to the establishment of an English colony in Bermuda, a collection of islands 580 miles to the east of the coast of North Carolina. In 1620, the Pilgrims, also bound for Virginia, landed at Plymouth, considerably to the north. In 1624 the English first visited the island of Barbados in the Caribbean, establishing a colony there three years later.
Fig. 1 The brick church at Jamestown, Virginia begun 1639
English Christianity and the Reformation
The colonists came from England to America at a time when the faith of the English people was in transition. As was the case with many of the people of Europe, the English of the seventeenth century were attempting to come to terms with a major transformation of the Christian
