The New York Manumission Society attempted to undermine the worst effects of slavery in New York. It supported bans on out-of-state slave sales in an attempt to choke off the ready market for slaves and push owners toward manumission. NYMS lawyers legally represented free blacks accused as runaways, and filed suits for slaves who had been promised freedom that unscrupulous masters had later repudiated. The society also pushed the state to free slaves of loyalist masters, whom the state had seized and expected to sell.36 As the institution’s title suggested, members advocated for the direct end of slavery, albeit in a gradual and voluntary way. Shortly after the New York Manumission Society formed, the state legislature considered, but defeated, a law to implement gradual manumission. Over the next fifteen years, NYMS leadership would support efforts to push gradual manumission through the legislature, culminating in the successful law passed in 1799.37
Issues of black citizenship were embedded in questions of abolition. To make manumission more palatable to whites, NYMS members also attempted to exhort, and aid, the black community toward moral improvement. In 1787, the NYMS established a school for free blacks. Board members limited pupils to families who were “regular and orderly in their deportment.” In limiting black “vice,” white prejudice might decrease.38 Thus, as patrons and teachers of blacks, society members placed themselves at the top of a social pyramid, in which grateful blacks at the bottom might reciprocate with hard work and clean living.
Joining the New York Manumission Society satisfied multiple parts of conservative Anglican elites’ identities. The attack on slavery mirrored the Revolutionary rhetoric that asserted that all men are created equal, and that none should be held as slaves. Educating and exhorting blacks in efforts to humanize or civilize them placed members in line with the eighteenth-century Anglican mission to touch all members of the empire. Yet NYMS members did so in a way that respected the social order, including the right to property. The NYMS thus affirmed the Anglican conception of an organic society, in which everyone had a place, but tradition and hierarchy made it clear that even in liberty, not all places were equal.39
Less publicly minded Anglicans did resume the connections to blacks that had made the church suspect in the eyes of many colonists during British occupation. Trinity’s ministers resumed the catechization of its black members on Sunday afternoons in the 1780s, an act they continued through the 1790s. A gap exists in the records between the colonial missions and the formation of the black-run parish of St. Philip’s. Nonetheless, church historians surmise that the colonial-era efforts to catechize blacks led to the formation of the black-run parish of St. Philip’s established in 1819.40
Early Methodist opposition to slavery did not completely disappear, but the church toned down its early insistence on the unity of all believers in Christ. By the 1780s, racial divisions began to show. Black Methodists approached white ministers with petitions to worship separately, but the white leadership repeatedly denied these efforts. At a 1780 conference, white Methodists resolved that church leaders should meet regularly with blacks, or appoint “proper white persons” in their stead, so that blacks not “stay late and meet alone.”41
While denying blacks their own space and time for worship, white Methodists nonetheless marginalized blacks within the main body of Methodism. They did so primarily through the organization of the class meeting. Methodist classes were intense prayer meetings in which individual believers could work spiritual disciplines toward greater piety, removing individual tendencies toward sin from their lives. New York Methodist class records that survive from the 1780s reveal that while whites refused blacks the ability to lead themselves religiously, white Methodists nonetheless did not fully accept blacks into the main body of Methodists for worship.
Before the Revolution, no class records for John Street survive; missionary reports suggest that blacks and whites stayed in close contact. After the Revolution, black members were increasingly recorded and regulated in separate classes. In 1785, an unnumbered list of seventeen “Negroes” followed the class lists enumerating all white Methodists in New York, an afterthought to the main body of Methodists. In 1786, the Methodist society records formally placed blacks in their own class of twenty-five, with an addendum to the class lists adding nine more names. In 1787, Methodist leaders standardized their organization of black members, placing them in three clearly defined classes.42 Without allowing blacks full self-governance, whites nonetheless shielded blacks from full Methodist fellowship, treating them as second-class citizens in separate classes. These actions made Methodists appear less unusual regarding racial issues, however.
Methodist cultural memories also stressed their patriotic impulses. While most blacks in New York had chosen loyalty to Britain during the war, the most famous Revolutionary-era black Methodist in New York was a patriot. Peter Williams was born a slave in New York City to African-born parents. He converted to Methodism at John Street Chapel in the 1760s, along with his wife, Mary (or Molly). Williams’s master taught him the tobacconist trade. Although his master was a loyalist, Williams reportedly cherished the ideal of liberty that the patriot cause championed, as one oral history later recounted. While in New Jersey during the war, Williams helped a Methodist patriot minister hide from British authorities. The commanding officer pointed his sword at Williams, threatening to kill the slave if he did not reveal the preacher’s position. Williams refused. The officer changed his tack, then offering Williams a purse of money, also rejected. The story, repeated in Methodist circles, had the dual aim of promoting a Methodist minister who was not a Tory or English subject, and championing a black Methodist who similarly refused to join the British.43
Figure 2.2. Old John Street Chapel. This image, often reproduced in different forms and styles in Methodist histories, displays the sexton Peter Williams, patriot, in the doorway. (Reproduced with permission from the Methodist Collections at Drew University.)
Williams’s fleeing Tory owner sold his slave to John Street Chapel. Despite the general Methodist opposition to slavery, Methodist trustees bought Peter and put him to work as a sexton and gravedigger. The chapel apparently allowed Williams to purchase his freedom with his labor, combining a bartered watch and time served to gain his manumission papers in 1796. Thus in the 1780s, as Methodists attempted to integrate into American society, the New York chapel employed a black man in a position most New Yorkers would have recognized: as a slave. Williams’s story entered the lore of New York history generally, and his image often appears in famous historic prints of John Street Chapel, suitably absent the context of widespread black loyalism during the war, or of his own status as a slave for more than a decade.44
Not only did New York Methodists downplay their unusual status on race, but they also minimized the presence of loyalism in the church. Another Methodist oral history surviving from the Revolutionary era (again, via Peter Williams) condemned the irreverence and immorality of British soldiers in New York. Williams recounted two instances of British soldiers’ irreligion. In one tale, British soldiers dug a pit outside John Street Chapel for churchgoers to fall into when leaving religious services. In another striking passage, a British officer wore a devil’s outfit to frighten Methodist chapel attendees on Christmas Eve. Both cases ended with virtue rewarded and vice punished, but such stories served a larger role to emphasize Methodist patriotism. The tales obscured the facts that the Methodist church remained open in occupied New York when most other churches were forcibly shut, and that British soldiers attended Methodist meetings.45
While Peter Williams’s stories were useful to white Methodists, they highlighted a problem for blacks who remained. Most black New Yorkers had not shared Williams’s support for the patriot cause. Instead, they cautiously, and sometimes incautiously, supported British efforts to gain freedom and to benefit themselves. When British troops left, thousands of blacks