That a law was passed at all is testament, however, to the determination of NYMS members. In a burgeoning economy, successful shopkeepers became merchants, small merchants became large merchants, the numbers of professionals increased, and successful individuals at all levels bought slaves when they could afford them. In the 1790s, the percentage of men holding slaves rose from one-quarter to one-third of the population. It took a long, determined effort to convince a majority of New Yorkers that slavery should end.16
The New York Manumission Society’s bylaws did not demand immediate manumission from its participants, and actually placed guidelines on its members more lenient than the 1799 law. Trinity’s parishioners, who were also the most prominent politicians within the society, men such as John Jay, James Duane, Alexander Hamilton, and Rufus King, all held slaves. Historians have debated the significance of this connection. An older generation of scholars, now reinforced by new scholarship, has highlighted the real abolitionist intentions of the NYMS. David Gellman characteristically argued that “pragmatic incrementalism and moral idealism” marked the society’s efforts, and that, no matter the compromises, society members always pushed the status quo toward, rather than away from, abolitionism. On the other side, scholars studying the black community have noted the heavy-handed paternalism of NYMS members, and critiqued the fact that those members widely held slaves even as a statewide manumission law passed. Shane White noted that the percentage of known slaveholders in the NYMS was significantly higher—perhaps double—than in the city as a whole, and further that slaveholding members owned nearly 50 percent more slaves than the average city slaveholder.17
Whereas Gellman finds idealism, and White hypocrisy, Trinity’s Anglican abolitionists occupied a place where slavery was simply secondary to their larger concerns. Alexander Hamilton, for example, was consumed by ambition and a desire to remain within the social elite. Despite antislavery convictions on national or international issues, Hamilton kept his slaves because New York’s elites kept slaves, as ultimate status symbols. John Jay, a more devout Episcopalian and more ardent abolitionist than Hamilton, nonetheless kept his slaves until he judged they had worked off their purchase cost. Further, Jay was not above selling recalcitrant slaves. And when earlier attempts at manumission failed to pass the legislature, Jay told friends that he was content to do his duty as best he could; the issue simply was not his greatest concern as a politician.18
Trinity’s abolitionists opposed slavery as a part of a larger socioeconomic outlook. In supporting gradual manumission, they affirmed property rights and legal procedures, and further placed themselves at the head of organizations that stressed benevolence toward society’s lower orders, including blacks. One cannot separate their opposition to slavery from what we might deem a cultural Federalism, which recognized hierarchy and property along with an organic interconnectedness of society’s members.
Merchants and Methodists: John Street’s Attempt at Social Unity
During the 1780s, Methodist leaders quickly distanced themselves from the stigma of loyalism that plagued the Episcopalians. Their English-born preachers had largely fled, and the church now revived under locally produced lay ministers.19 New challenges lay ahead. Methodist leaders sought to bring others to Christ, and to make their own people holy in the process. Urban life challenged this ideal. As the first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, Francis Asbury witnessed these problems firsthand and recorded them in his journal. He expressed ambivalence regarding urban growth, welcoming its opportunities, yet fearing its effects.
Although Methodist leaders avoided taking sides in political issues, many of their laity could not resist the temptation. During the Revolution, Asbury lamented that some Methodists “had dipped deep in politics.”20After hostilities ended, electoral strife seduced many Methodists. In 1792, Asbury fretted, “This city has been agitated about the choice of Governor: it would be better for them all to be on the Lord’s side.”21 In 1795, Asbury viewed Independence Day celebrations in New York with regret. Bells ringing, drums beating, and rifles firing: all proclaimed the nation’s love of liberty, but Asbury lamented that, although the preachers shared a communal spirit, the city’s Methodists “are far from being as spiritual as we ought to be.”22
While politics led to obvious snares, more subtle and dangerous were the lures of moneymaking and wealth. After the Revolution, Asbury worried that, as peace brought prosperity, “our preachers will be far more likely to settle in the world; and our people, by getting into trade, and acquiring wealth, may drink into its spirit.”23 Suspicious of wealth, Asbury preferred that the poor fill his churches. During a 1787 visit to a Long Island church, just outside the city but miles away socially, he noted bluntly that “[t]he people on this island, who hear the gospel, are generally poor, and these are the kind I want, and expect to get.”24
Late-eighteenth-century cities were notoriously unhealthy. New York’s crowded, dirty conditions sorely aggravated Asbury’s health. Seasonal epidemics made matters worse, with “fluxes, fevers, and influenzas” marking his congregational visits to all the eastern seaboard cities.25 During those trips, Asbury regularly complained of sickness. In the late summer of 1791, he observed:
The weather is extremely warm and dry: people are sickly and dying, especially children; I find my body very weak: preaching at night, added to the moschetoes [sic], causes me to sleep very little. . . . We rode to New-York; a very warm day. I found myself much injured, but was well nursed at the north side of the city. They have a touch of fever here in George-Street. Sabbath, Oct. 1 We had much rain. Live or die, I preached at the old and new church. . . . I had some disagreeable things and was but ill-fitted in body to bear them.26
Asbury rode thousands of miles on horseback, but despite these physical exertions, his worst health complaints came in tight urban quarters.
For circuit-riding Methodist ministers, the crowded city also meant much work in a short time, with an intensity unmatched in rural locations. On July 5, 1795, for example, Asbury preached in Brooklyn in the morning. He then crossed the river to administer the Lord’s Supper at the Bowery church and met with the black classes. In the evening, Asbury preached at John Street and afterward met with two men’s classes. The next day, Asbury met with nine more classes, “so that I have now spoken to most of the members here, one by one.”27
For Asbury and other Methodist ministers, ungodliness flourished in the city. New York was an especially worldly place of bustle and business. Great wealth and noisy poverty crowded out thoughts of God. Urban anonymity allowed sins to pass unnoticed, far more than in the socially confining small towns and villages of rural America. On one trip into New York, Asbury feared during the ferry crossing that the boarding party had uttered so many curses that God would sink the boat! He then asked another passenger for a piece of chalk, that he might keep track of the number of curses for the duration of the trip. At John Street, after preaching on self-denial, Asbury noted, with great exasperation, “a more gay and indevout congregation I have seldom seen; they were talking, laughing, bowing, and trifling both with God and their minister, as well as their own unawakened souls.” After preaching to another unresponsive congregation in 1804, Asbury concluded, “[New] York, in all the congregations, is the valley of dry bones. Oh Lord, I will lament the deplorable state of religion in all our towns and cities!”28
Despite these lamentations, Asbury valued the stability that prominent members gave to the city’s Methodist congregations. Although Asbury railed against the wealthy in the abstract, his personal friendship with long-standing members anchored him during trying visits to the city. Asbury regularly lodged with such “Old Friends,” strong in the faith, who provided him a deep sense of calm. In 1796, he noted simply “I lodged with Elijah Crawford: this house is for God.”29
To foster holiness, Methodists scorned ostentatious living and public displays of wealth and social status. This stance attracted many poor people into their churches. Methodists welcomed women, blacks, and the poor, groups that republican politics explicitly excluded from the public sphere. As historian Dee Andrews noted in her pathbreaking study of American Methodism, the Methodist societies were socially and racially