These local actions paralleled Anglican actions on the national level. In 1785, the Anglican Church in America became the Protestant Episcopal Church, independent of its mother, the Church of England. Liturgical reform proceeded, with American Anglicans editing the Book of Common Prayer to fit its new republican setting. Authority in the new body resided with the laity, who attended and voted in diocesan conferences alongside priestly delegates. The issue of bishops rose again, briefly: when Samuel Seabury emerged as a candidate to be the first United States bishop, in Connecticut, Whig Episcopalians like John Jay and Rufus King (both at Trinity) fumed about Seabury’s Tory views, and complained that the office of the bishop emphasized an unwelcome hierarchy in the church. But after Seabury’s consecration in 1784, patriots gained access to the office: in 1787, Trinity’s Samuel Provoost was elected as bishop of New York, and William White (chaplain of the wartime Continental Congress) was elected bishop in Pennsylvania. After the inclusion of lay checks on clergy, and of patriot clergy on loyalist ones, the old political resentments simply faded away.24
The wounds that the Revolution inflicted upon Trinity parish had healed by the 1790s, since the parish’s patriots genially embraced their former political opponents. The 1784 shakeup that deposed the Tory vestry and rector Benjamin Moore was temporary and had few lasting effects on the church’s governance. Evidence suggests that the men who joined the vestry in 1784 did so from expediency to preserve the church’s property and image, and willingly stepped down when Trinity no longer faced danger. Vestry members who took office in 1784 served, on average, only four years—this was less than half of the eight years of service of the men they replaced. Further, those four years represented less than one-third of the twelve-and-a-half years of average service of the vestrymen who were elected after 1785. Men of unquestionable patriot pedigree such as Richard Morris, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Isaac Sears, and Joshua Sands entered the vestry, served a few years, then stepped down. Their formerly loyalist neighbors and associates then returned to lead the church.25 More important than political affiliation, Trinity offered continuity in the social composition of its leadership; in retaining its elite members, Trinity Church implied that hierarchy, privilege, and wealth would provide stability for the parish, in good times and bad.
The Whigs who shook up Trinity’s leadership were reluctant revolutionaries, displaying a moderate and cautious stance in politics. The leader of the group that ousted the wartime vestry, James Duane, had been a careful conservative prior to the war. Duane acted as a liaison for, and sympathetic ally of, arch-loyalist Joseph Galloway. But unlike Galloway, Duane accepted the Declaration of Independence, figuring that “[i]t was more sensible to . . . become a careful neutral and look forward to the ‘rich Encrease of our Estates,’ which would assuredly follow in the wake of free trade with the world.”26 He was joined by men such as John Alsop, who had asserted a modest loyalism by resigning his position in the Provincial Congress after the passage of the Declaration of Independence. Alsop clearly adapted to his situation, marrying his daughter to Rufus King, a Massachusetts patriot and signer of the Constitution, who after marriage relocated to New York.27
Interested in the security of property rights, during the 1780s and 1790s Duane and his political allies welcomed loyalists back into the city, deeming their economic contributions to the city’s prosperity more important than any past political irregularity.28 This welcome extended to the ousted vestry of 1784. Miles Sherbrooke returned from abroad by 1787 to reestablish his merchant business on Little Dock Street. Similarly deposed, William Laight remained in the city, and worked as a merchant on Queen Street. He returned to the vestry in 1788, and served until 1802. His shop stood but a few houses down from the residence of William Bedlow, a Whig who had replaced him. Robert C. Livingston’s Tory sympathies compelled him to remain in London for much of the war, although he occasionally visited British-occupied New York. He returned to the city at war’s end, and in 1785, Livingston began a ten-year term of service as vestryman.29
Elites controlled Trinity Church and its property after the Revolution, as well as before. The new rector, Samuel Provoost, had been a patriot, alone among Episcopal clergymen in the northern colonies. As such, the patriot vestry knew he had the proper credentials to take Trinity’s helm in 1784: political convictions that would silence radical opposition. But Provoost’s credentials were more than intellectual, and appealed to the vestry for other reasons: he was related by marriage to the Livingstons, the wealthiest of the great landed families of the Hudson River Valley. This connection made him kin with John Jay, James Duane, and William Duer, the men who presided over the 1784 transfer of power to patriot interests in the church. The political shift from loyalist leaders in the 1770s to Whigs in the 1780s did not change the fact that a wealthy elite managed the church, and represented its public face.30
While the Episcopalians stressed their patriot bona fides and downplayed the church’s earlier emphasis on hierarchy, the Methodists simply asserted that they were no longer Anglican. In 1784, at the “Christmas Conference,” Methodist leaders voted for an official break with the Church of England. Methodists became a separate church, with their own self-sustaining ministry and administration of the sacraments. In 1789, the denomination sent greetings of congratulation to new President George Washington before any other denomination did so.31 Methodism was no longer an English transplant, but an American original. Methodists’ end goal remained the same, to preach the gospel message to all.
Trinity Church’s vestry acted as if the holistic organic vision would revive despite disestablishment. Trinity cooperated with other religious bodies in the city but expected to lead them. As the city’s most prominent church, Trinity’s vestry felt a duty to aid their lesser brothers, just as they had supported the building of the Methodist church. But they modified the organic vision—no longer would all churches eventually join the Church of England, but rather the church might be a first among equals and lead by example. Anglican wealth helped its position.32
Trinity judiciously parceled out portions of its extensive lands to influence others. When British officers confiscated Garrit Lydekker’s Dutch Reformed Church for a hospital, Trinity’s vestry allowed Lydekker’s group to use St. George’s Chapel for worship. More striking were overtures of friendship to New York City’s Presbyterians, who had been the Anglican Church establishment’s most vocal critics. Trinity’s vestry granted Brick Presbyterian Church the use of its chapels from 1783 to 1784, during a building restoration. Trinity further granted plots to Presbyterian congregations to build parsonages for the church’s ministers. After the Revolution, Trinity vestry implicitly supported the state’s legalization of the Roman Catholic Church, by leasing, then selling, Barclay Street land to trustees of St. Peter’s Catholic Church.33
Painting the Churches White: Marginalizing Black Presence after the Revolution
The association of blacks with Anglicanism and Methodism hurt the churches’ public images in post-Revolutionary America. Neither group, however, removed blacks from their communities. Trinity’s ministers continued to marry and baptize black members, and restarted the African Free School in 1787 after a four-year hiatus. Methodists allowed blacks to speak at some meetings and organized class meetings where blacks could worship. Even so, both Methodists and Episcopalians more nearly entered the mainstream of American attitudes toward race by marginalizing their black members.34
In dealing with slavery and race, white Episcopalians expressed a condescending benevolence that promised gradual reform. This remained consistent with the humanitarianism the SPG had preached in catechizing blacks the previous century. In 1785, Trinity vestrymen James Duane, John Jay, Robert Troup, and Matthew Clarkson joined with Episcopalian Alexander Hamilton and other leading New Yorkers (including their political rival George Clinton) in founding the New York Manumission Society (NYMS), an institution dedicated to