Elites initially crossed denominational lines to support the effort, as a college would grant New York new cultural capital. But the attempt to link the school with religious establishment roused religious dissenters. Presbyterian William Livingston, a minority non-Anglican on the board of trustees, led the assault through a series of essays in the Independent Reflector. Livingston strenuously opposed the church-state connection an Anglican college would imply. He particularly attacked the docility and deference that accompanied religious establishment.3
Livingston’s opponents fired back, using the voice of the New-York Mercury, printed by the Anglican layman Hugh Gaine. Like Livingston, these High Churchmen dipped into the well of an earlier era, adopting the polemic of High Church debaters from the 1710s. Such men invoked a sacramental theology that stressed that God’s invisible grace worked through visible signs, as it did in the Lord’s Supper. No less did the visible and invisible intertwine in the working of civil and church laws, and in social and political institutions. In response to the Independent Reflector’s invocation of a state of nature, which they deemed an ahistorical never-land, the Mercury’s High Church champions suggested respect for God-given social and historical precedents. In the proper forms of deference, religion could steer a clear path between the twin dangers of emotional enthusiasm, on one hand, and infidelity, on the other.4
Livingston and allies responded in kind, extending the pamphlet war through 1756. The resulting political battles pitted the Anglican governor and council against a largely dissenting assembly. Like the original 1693 church establishment, the resulting compromise granted the college a limited form of Anglican influence. The board of directors would include both Anglicans and dissenters, and the college president would be Anglican. The college would provide a general instruction in Christian morality, without promoting the dogma of any individual sect. While this was technically an Anglican victory, it mostly suggested that support for full political-religious establishment was neither broad nor deep.5
The battles over King’s College suggest that the High Church polemic attracted passionate support among the few clergy in the colony, but little beyond. Livingston’s opponents were generally not laity, but clergy. Samuel Johnson was the eldest and most influential of these. Johnson’s protégés wrote the Mercury essays, including New York priests Henry Barclay, Samuel Seabury Jr., Samuel Auchmuty, and Thomas Bradbury Chandler.6
For Anglican laity, however, such pure High Church principles were an embarrassment. The Tory principles that clerics championed in their responses to Livingston turned former Anglican allies, including a number of key Dutch Reformed clergy and laity, against the establishment. Opposition to such establishment made strange bedfellows, linking pietist revivalists with rationalist skeptics, radical with moderate Whigs, and opposition politicians with disaffected lower orders. Such unity would repeat in the Revolution. Anglican laymen who sought influence in their communities would rather channel such unity than beat against it.7
The King’s College controversy would recur, in a larger register, in the bishop controversy. From the English colonies’ inception, Anglican leadership had periodically tested the idea of establishing bishops in America. But none had seriously promoted the matter after 1720, as British politicians and colonial merchants alike turned their attention to the increase of commerce; none, that is, until the late 1760s. Historian Patricia Bonomi has suggested that the debate over establishing a bishop in the Americas consumed even more paper in the presses than the Stamp Act, and likely swung local elections in New York, where the debate ran hottest.8
The debate centered in New York because it was the center of Anglican missionary efforts. Anglican clergy had the ear of the colony’s presses, as the city’s two principal newspapers, the Mercury and Gazette, were both printed by Anglican laymen eager for church business. And clergymen started the debate when an English bishop, in a sermon delivered in support of the SPG, attacked colonial religion for its extremism and disorder, and suggested the planting of bishops as a remedy. As previously, William Livingston debated SPG affiliates or allies, most notably Anglican churchmen Charles Inglis and Thomas Bradbury Chandler.9
A minority of British Anglican churchmen considered it wise to plant bishops in the American colonies. Fewer American Anglicans supported the matter; most southern churchmen were dedicated to local lay control over parishes, and northern ones found the SPG’s high Tory principles to be embarrassing, and certainly politically inexpedient after colonists unified to oppose the Stamp Act in 1765. Even ardent High Churchmen who supported a bishop suggested that such an office could be confined to spiritual authority, with no power to coerce colonial subjects. The debate over bishops had few real ecclesiastical results, then, even as it allowed antichurch opposition to coalesce.10
The Loyalist Taint on Anglicans and Methodists during the Revolution
The pre-Revolutionary debates over High Church establishment, in which patriots attacked church hierarchy and privilege, spilled over into the Revolution. The Revolutionary War undermined the Anglican vision of a unified colonial society. During the war, Episcopalians divided internally over politics and church governance, rejecting the supposed unity that Anglican clergy and SPG missionaries promoted. The Methodist institutional attachment to Anglicanism caused similar strains, and Methodists struggled to define themselves in relationship to their parent church. Both churches’ connections to the British government created a special problem in New York City, where the military occupied the town for most of the war. Patriots (an increasing number of citizens identifying as such as the Continental Army’s position improved) could paint Anglicans and Methodists as not only Tories, but also biracial disgraces, given their support for black evangelization.
New York’s Anglican clergy stressed loyalty to the Crown; in fact, the northern colonies’ Anglican churchmen were the strongest American voices for loyalism during the Revolution, and among the few to offer a coherent ideology. Priests such as New York’s Samuel Seabury had publicly promoted an Anglican King’s College and bishops in America; it was a short trip for him to denounce the emerging patriot cause. In 1774, Seabury wrote several tracts denouncing the delusional and fanatical tendencies of rebellion. He engaged in battle not with a Presbyterian, however, but an Episcopal layman, as then-teenaged Alexander Hamilton penned a series in reply.11
Priestly loyalism meant that, in the run-up to Revolution, Anglican churches suffered where patriots held sway. Trinity’s rector Charles Inglis asserted that north of the Chesapeake, all Anglican clergy (save one lone exception) remained true to Britain. Inglis minimized his loyalism, noting only that his religious duty meant he could not advocate liberty from the pulpit, and had to adhere to the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer, which included prayers for the king. Trinity, along with all other Anglican churches, also displayed the king’s coat of arms. Consequently, Inglis complained that patriot committees of correspondence closed Anglican churches and harassed loyalist priests. As the British army occupied New York in 1776, Inglis insinuated that fleeing patriot forces burned down the church.12
Complicating matters, Anglican suffering under patriot rule disappeared under British oversight. During the British occupation of New York, Anglican churches fared better than other religious groups. Both of Trinity’s chapels and John Street Methodist meetinghouse remained open during the conflict. Believing the Anglican charge that other denominations were havens for dissenting patriots, British officers forcibly closed most other churches. Some Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed congregations suffered the added indignity of serving as hospitals