Further, Trinity Church, rare among New York City’s congregations, included a multiracial vision. Anglican priests baptized and married blacks, and served them communion. During the war Anglicans opened a school for black children. Methodist preachers, too, willingly ministered to blacks, and publicly rejoiced in their participation in revivals and prayer meetings. Such actions may have played a greater role in creating suspicion than the Anglican clergy’s ideological loyalty to the Crown, for blacks occupied a conspicuous place at the bottom of the social hierarchy. When the Revolution offered opportunity for greater freedom, many blacks took advantage: historian Graham Russell Hodges has deemed black actions in Revolutionary New York an eight-year revolt against white New Yorkers.14
The most obvious threats to white colonists were blacks who joined British military actions. Eight hundred black soldiers trained on Staten Island, their Black Brigade serving as a segregated group within the British regular regiment known as the Queen’s Rangers. Black soldiers’ activities focused on the greater metropolitan area of Westchester County and east New Jersey. Colonel Tye, a runaway slave from a prominent Jersey Quaker, led an interracial group of irregular soldiers in terrorist attacks on patriot farms throughout New Jersey. Tye’s men seized valuable provisions and freed slaves. While some elite loyalists such as Oliver DeLancey grumbled about blacks’ military presence, British officers typically ignored such complaints.15
More visceral and immediate than military action was the large influx of blacks, mostly runaway slaves, who swelled the population of British-occupied New York City. An outside observer entering the city in the late 1770s might first notice the prominent scarlet-coated uniforms of the British army, for the city remained the army’s headquarters throughout the war, an increasingly beleaguered center as the generals lost ground on the greater continent. But a close second to catch the eye would be the sheer numbers of blacks. Twelve thousand runaway slaves filled the city in 1779 (perhaps as much as half of the wartime population); at the time of British withdrawal in 1783, four thousand remained, despite thousands who fled with the army. The sea of black faces would appear striking in most American colonies north of the Chesapeake.16
Most of these blacks did not serve as soldiers. Paid less than white laborers, shunted to tent cities in Staten Island or the burned-out West Ward, blacks nonetheless moved freely about the city and earned wages for their labor. They gained employment in rebuilding the charred West Ward in lower Manhattan, where more than one thousand buildings burned alongside Trinity. Others improved the military fortifications in the city and surrounding countryside. Teamsters carted arms from ports to magazines in the town. Black foragers ventured outside city limits to gather scarce foodstuffs to feed the teeming city. Black pilots navigated rivers for these foraging parties, and for British expeditions.17
Patriots had ample opportunity to complain about the mongrel nature of the British occupation. Patriot sympathizer Henry M. Muhlenberg suggested that the British regiment of blacks was “inclined towards barbarities . . . [and] lacking in human feeling.” Blacks associated freely with British soldiers. Most scandalous to some were the “Ethiopian balls” in which white British officers mingled indiscriminately with African Americans.18Such criticisms of impropriety could be leveled directly at Anglicans, for their combined support of the British cause and black humanity.
Property and Patriotism: Trinity Rebuilds its Reputation
The traditional interpretation of the Revolution’s effect on the Church of England is that the Anglican clergy’s wartime loyalty to Britain nearly destroyed that denomination at war’s end. In 1782, the SPG withdrew its aid to the American colonies, ending its longtime support for Trinity’s catechists. Many SPG missionaries fled the country, among them Charles Inglis, who finally realized the High Church dream of a bishop in the Americas—in his case, in Nova Scotia. In 1784, the New York state legislature disestablished the Anglican Church, granted all denominations the right to incorporate, and legalized Catholic worship in the state. Further, state-appointed regents took control of King’s College, removing it from Anglican hands and renaming it Columbia. At war’s end, many Anglican loyalists fled the city, removing to havens in Britain or Canada. Lower attendance and smaller offering collections hurt the cash-strapped church. Resentment between patriot laity and loyalist clergy wracked the church in the 1780s. Relations also became strained between the colonial churches and the Anglican headquarters in England. Such conflicts and flagging numbers led some observers to conclude that the Church of England, in America, would not last beyond the Revolutionary generation.19
Figure 2.1. Charles Inglis, Trinity’s ill-fated Revolutionary-era rector, later bishop of Nova Scotia. (From Morgan Dix, History of Trinity Church, vol. 1 [1898].)
As a branch of the Anglican Church, Methodists risked clear guilt by association. Like the High Church ideologues who promoted Tory principles, Methodist founder John Wesley was an arch-Tory in politics. During the Revolution, Wesley published loyalist tracts suggesting that all Christians should submit to their God-ordained governments. Certainly Methodism’s status as a missionary wing of the church did not help matters, for the mission-focused SPG had been one of the most consistent voices for loyalism before and during the war. In fact, whereas most SPG missionaries had been American-born converts, most Methodist missionaries were British-born, culturally even more removed from the settings where they preached.20
Methodist preachers emphasized that building the kingdom of God was their primary aim, suggesting a commitment to political neutrality. But it might appear that Methodists tended, like their founder, to support the mother country. During British occupation, John Street Methodist Chapel remained open, when army officers forcibly closed all other churches (save the Anglican). Blacks and British soldiers (and black British soldiers) attended John Street, again reinforcing the strangeness and foreignness of the religion in many American eyes. After the war, most British Methodist missionaries left, if they had not been deported already. Such was the case for Thomas Webb, whose military background caused immediate suspicion. Patriot leaders captured Webb, held him as a prisoner of war, and deported him to England in 1778. Webb would never return to the church he helped found. Francis Asbury avoided the same fate by going into hiding. Asbury was virtually the only English minister, and licensed Methodist preacher, to remain at war’s end. He would emerge as the symbolic and real leader of Methodism in America.21
As the Revolution ended, many patriot observers labeled New York’s Methodist and Anglican Churches as loyalist and interracial. Both affiliated with a Church of England establishment that Whigs found hierarchical and tyrannical. But while both groups suffered damage to their reputations, neither faced extinction, or irrelevance. Both Methodists and Episcopalians resolved to continue their mission to society. While they deemphasized the colonial imperatives of hierarchy and patronage, they adapted older religious forms to new social realities. Independence muted their message, but did not destroy it.
While Anglican loyalists drew intense opposition, they had been small in number, and concentrated almost exclusively on high government officials and the clergy. Thus when church disestablishment forced most government officials and many priests to flee, few tangible signs of loyalism remained. Instead, an Anglican patriot laity forged a new elitism based upon the protection of property, and welcomed the return of any loyalist (especially those of means) willing to submit to the new government.
The transition from loyalist to Whig to an apolitical unity of wealth occurred quickly. In 1783, Trinity’s loyalist vestry voted to replace the departed priest Charles Inglis with another loyalist, the moderate Tory Benjamin Moore. Fearing a political backlash against their parish, Trinity’s Whigs protested. Using authority granted by the city council, in 1784 these Whigs took control of the vestry, deposed Moore, and replaced him with Samuel Provoost, whose patriot politics made him acceptable to more New Yorkers.22
The change in church governance accompanied a rearguard action to keep Trinity’s property