This book contains eight chapters. Each chapter covers a chronological time but also examines a theme, in overlapping segments. The first chapter traces the creations of Trinity Church and John Street Methodist. The colonial-era concept of religious establishment granted Trinity a prominent place in the city, which reinforced congregants’ organic conception of society. Churchmen hoped that the Anglican Church would mediate between state and society, upper and lower orders, and different races, uniting them under its spiritual leadership. John Street Methodist Chapel initially shared these assumptions, for while Methodists believed they created a new close-knit family of believers, they accepted nominal oversight and leadership from the established Anglican Church. Both churches ministered to blacks, which made them unique among many of the city’s religious groups. For their part, blacks attempted to use religious instruction to their own ends, as race relations in colonial New York were punctuated by periods of outright conflict.
The second chapter discusses the Revolutionary era’s challenges to formal, legal establishment, and the persistence after the Revolution of a social vision of unity in both churches. Accusations of loyalism dogged both Anglicans and Methodists, and both groups’ connections to blacks heightened such uncertainty, given British-black interaction in New York. During the American Revolution, the State of New York formally disestablished the Episcopal Church, and both churches faced signs of hostility. After the Revolution, however, many assumptions of organic society persisted. Episcopalian and Methodist leaders continued informal associations that promoted a vision of a united society under their leadership. Both groups included blacks within their communities, but kept them at a distance to conform more clearly to cultural assumptions that many white Americans shared.
The third chapter sketches a social portrait of each congregation during the 1790s. Trinity Episcopal Church retained its colonial-era aura of prestige. Prominent politicians, professionals, and merchants filled its front pews. Yet many from the middling and lower orders attended, and gentlemen who led the church viewed it as a model or reflection of the society at large, a piece of de facto establishment continued after the Revolution. In general, Methodism tended to attract artisans and laboring people. But John Street Methodist Chapel’s location near merchant and retail centers caused social stratification within the church. As at Trinity, men of wealth and influence occupied positions of leadership at John Street, but the church contained members from all ranks and both genders, thereby illustrating the ideal of an organic society.
In the 1790s, black Methodists and Episcopalians took their first steps toward forming the distinct congregations of Mother Zion and St. Philip’s. Many whites refused to worship with black members and attempted to push their black coreligionists to the margins. Consequently, free blacks in both white churches formed separate houses of worship. Black artisans tended to lead the Methodists, whereas black Episcopalians reflected a broader range of occupations. Both groups, however, remained firmly within their respective denominational traditions. While pushing to improve their own status, black churchmen remained theologically close to the white churches. And their early steps were tentative: black Methodists only met at times when white ministers did not offer services, and black Episcopalians delayed holding separate worship for another decade.
Chapter 4 explores the place of women in the churches in the growing city. Women constituted a numerical majority in each congregation. After 1800, wealthy women quietly entered the public sphere. They organized charitable institutions that focused on widows and children. These benevolent societies preserved traditional assumptions about poverty and the organic vision of society of the colonial era. Paradoxically, however, such organizations opened the way for more radical forms of action, as they provided public spaces, however circumscribed, for society’s wealthiest women. Many more women in the churches preserved conventional gender roles by choosing private pious contemplation and steady attendance at worship services. The close connection of some of these women to their ministers heightened social tensions in the churches.
The fifth chapter explains the intersections of gender with race in church life. In the larger society, slavery, poverty, and menial status meant that black men risked being labeled feminine and without power. Thus in the black churches men, not women, took primary place, mimicking the white church’s example in an exaggerated form. Black women, however, remained numerous in the churches, and supported their leaders through the emergence of auxiliary benevolent societies and in quiet, obedient forms of piety, similar to most white women. Just as white women gained a place in the public sphere through benevolence, so did black men in public processions and benevolent societies. These black men used a universal language of unity, which mirrored colonial-era church language, but like those earlier forms masked the strongly middle-class and masculine identities of the actors.
In chapter 6, to investigate the connections between religious and social experiences, I revisit the well-documented ecclesiastical battles within each congregation during the 1810s and early 1820s. The increased strains of city life frame these disputes, which church historians have long presented largely as internal theological issues. Episcopalians divided over the bishop’s authority, and the right to form ecumenical evangelizing societies, but the struggles also represented a clash between competing Anglican forms of social organization within the congregation. Methodists divided over local and lay versus regional and clerical control over their congregations. Black Methodists tangentially entered white Methodists’ debate by defining their identity as independent from white schismatics and churchmen alike, while keeping their local independence from other black churches. Black Episcopalians avoided serious battles in this decade, largely because their perilous financial position impelled them to cling to the High Church Party in the Episcopal Church leadership. In all these cases, ecclesiastical disputes had social dimensions. Local congregations’ geographic locations helped determine their positions in these clashes.
Chapter 7 illustrates how the tensions of city growth shaped congregational life. After 1820, business and residential districts began to separate as poor and rich increasingly lived in distinct neighborhoods. All four congregations, located downtown, attracted wealthier worshipers than their coreligionists farther uptown. Even the black churches, near poor and crime-ridden areas, aspired to the bourgeois standards of the white leaders at the Trinity and John Street churches. As a result of this domestication, wealth brought greater privatization to church life. At St. Philip’s, some service workers attained great prosperity, transforming the church into a body seeking collective refinement. At Mother Zion, gentility entailed male leadership and preaching bourgeois standards of education, respectability, and rationality. In the white churches, a suburban mentality encouraged some members to flee from the city. Trinity’s chapels gained new prominence. Seeing its members less like one large family and more like a grouping of private families, John Street focused on a domesticity that limited the prior aims of Methodism. Education and cultural refinement joined spiritual fervor as paths to leadership.
The eighth chapter examines the full consequences of this domestication of church life in the 1830s and 1840s. Racial fissures grew absolute, and swept the last remains of hope for racial unity from the churches. Yet black churchmen continued to articulate loyalties to denominational traditions that recognized the local relationships fostered in each church. Many white Methodists and Episcopalians embraced nativist politics as a way to re-create the lost world promoted in the colonial era, a truncated version that continued racial separation while promising to soften class conflict among whites. But neither racial separation nor nativist dreams of unity could wind back the clock on the city’s economic and demographic growth. Economic slowdowns and the flight of downtown residents caused the churches’ once prominent position to decline.
A conclusion extends the narrative to the Civil War. In the 1840s and 1850s, a number of larger developments in American religious and intellectual history suggested that a new unity could be created in New York, whether it lay in evangelical revivalism, Broad Church Episcopalianism, or generalized Romanticism. But the reality of how church members lived highlighted major differences with the colonial era’s promotion of organic unity. Social difference, and private religious experience, was the norm for the members of these churches.
In 1860, New York City was the United