The English colony of New York had begun as the Dutch colony of New Netherland, and New York City had been New Amsterdam. Because the Dutch burghers who oversaw the colony sought profits more than religious orthodoxy, they allowed a degree of religious toleration remarkable for the seventeenth century.6 When the English conquered the sparsely populated colony in 1664, the new elites did not wish to disturb old practices, and risk new rebellion, by imposing a heavy-handed religious conformity. In addition to de facto toleration of other Protestants, the new English leadership placated the Dutch landed elites by allowing Dutch Reformed churches to form corporations and own property, a grant denied to other denominations (the Anglican excepted). But accommodations soon extended beyond the former Dutch masters.7
Ethnic and religious pluralism hampered the royal governors at every turn, especially in New York City. By the late seventeenth century, the modest seaport of four thousand people displayed a remarkable variety of religions, and irreligion, to the consternation of Governor Thomas Dongan, who reported in 1687:
New York has first a chaplain belonging to the Fort of the Church of England; secondly a Dutch Calvinist; thirdly a French Calvinist; fourthly a Dutch Lutheran—there be not many of the Church of England; few Roman Catholics; abundance of Quaker preachers men and women especially: singing Quakers, ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-Sabbatarians, some Anabaptists, some Independents, some Jews: in short of all sort of opinion there are some, and the most part none at all.8
British governors struggled to nurture an Anglican conformity as existed in the mother country. The Anglican establishment that took hold in New York, however, was a veneer of respectability, barely masking both the continued pluralism and the tenuous hold of Anglican authority.
There were simply too few Anglicans in the colony to justify a full establishment. In the 1690s in New York, dissenters outnumbered Anglicans forty to one. In 1693, Governor Benjamin Fletcher strong-armed through the legislature a modified Anglican establishment in the four southernmost counties—New York, Westchester, Richmond, and Queens—where Anglicans were most numerous, although still a minority. This law, called the 1693 Ministry Act, called for the election of ten vestrymen and two wardens for each county. This vestry held the power to tax the citizenry for the local poor relief and the support of a minister. In New York, then, religious establishment encountered several limits from the start: it was not colony-wide, the local populace controlled it, and local interests could theoretically favor some other, non-Anglican church.9
In the three counties outside the city, the Anglican Church’s control over the vestry was weak, nominal, and contested. The vestry tax often supported a non-Anglican minister. In New York City, Anglican interests fared better. In 1696, Anglicans captured a bare seven-to-five majority in the city vestry and elected William Vesey to serve as minister. Vesey had been raised in a non-Anglican family. Moderate in his theological views, Vesey willingly compromised on matters of faith. He proceeded to serve as Anglican rector in New York for more than forty years. His parish was Trinity Episcopal Church, incorporated in 1697, the year after his appointment, located at the foot of Wall Street on Broadway. Vesey’s easygoing tenure calmed suspicious dissenters and allowed Trinity parish the precedent of having its senior minister’s salary supported by public tax. It also granted Trinity a measure of privilege and esteem otherwise lacking among skeptical antichurch colonists.10
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, two other sources of funding gave the Church of England in New York increased vitality, especially at Trinity parish. First, in 1705, New York’s Governor Cornbury granted Trinity a land grant, or glebe, of the Queen’s Farm on the west side of Manhattan Island, which secured a comfortable income to pay assistant ministers’ salaries. Second, mission-minded Anglican priests founded the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (or SPG) in 1701 in London. The SPG aimed to evangelize every subject in Her (soon thereafter, His) Majesty’s realm. The SPG paid the salaries of missionary priests to staff the wide-flung parishes throughout the North American continent, and supported evangelization efforts among Native American tribes and African slaves. By the time of the Revolution, seventy-seven SPG-funded missionaries worked in North America, most serving north of the Chesapeake. They included a regular catechist at Trinity Church, who taught both poor white students and African slaves the fundamentals of Christianity, and non-English speakers the basics of the language.11
Such projects led to an increased optimism among Anglicans in the colonies over the eighteenth century, especially in the northern colonies where the church had lagged behind the southern colonies’ full establishment. Trinity’s steeple was the first in New York City with a bell to call congregants to worship. Trinity’s rise initiated a flurry of church construction in New York, with parishes raised in Staten Island, Westchester, Eastchester, New Rochelle, and Queens. Between 1690 and 1750, the number of Anglican parishes in the British American colonies increased fourfold; the number north of the Chesapeake line of establishment increased one-hundredfold. By the time of the Revolution, Anglicans sustained more than 450 parishes, an increase of six times the number existing in 1690.12
Such growth was accompanied by theological compromise. Although most rectors at Trinity adopted a High Church position that stressed the significance of bishops, church hierarchy, and sacraments, in practice most Anglicans varied considerably in their beliefs and practices. Faced with Enlightenment challenges to tradition and revealed religion, many Anglican priests and congregants favored a latitudinarian stance in matters of orthodoxy, promoting a rational religion that allowed for broad differences on a variety of doctrines. One historian judged eighteenth-century Anglican sermons as “quiet and prosaic, and always genteel,” appealing to the natural reason of each congregant in persuading him or her to act morally.13 Such a position invited the support of many individuals who were not interested in orthodox doctrine.
This latitudinarianism in matters of faith complemented a pursuit of upward social mobility, as royal governors and government officials favored the church as an official faith. The combination proved irresistible to many ambitious colonists during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Repelled by the fatalism of Calvinist theology and chafing at the demands of strict morality, many merchant families in New England sought a more rationalist faith. Anglican parishes formed in New England’s seaport cities, at the heart of a region traditionally hostile to the Church of England. Local-born Anglican converts ministered to them, encouraged by the famous defection of Yale’s president and four tutors in 1722 from the Congregational to the Anglican Church. In New York, younger Dutch colonists rejected their ethnic heritage for the Anglicans’ expansive vision and English-language services. Second-generation immigrants in German Lutheran and Reformed communities followed the Dutch, as did French Huguenots, whom the Church of England absorbed when Catholic monarchs in France destroyed their mother church.14
A new confidence at midcentury testified to the growth of Anglican influence in the colony. In a study of New York’s colonial-era neighborhoods, historical geographer Nan Rothschild noted that the Anglican churches showed greater growth than those of the Dutch Reformed, and covered a greater population range in the expanding city. Old Trinity already occupied a prestigious spot at the foot of Wall Street on Broadway. Surrounded by three open blocks and commanding a view over the North River, Trinity stood apart from the rest of the city in its own bulk, and in the open space around it. St. George stood on the opposite pole from Trinity, at the higher population densities of the east side on Beekman and Cliff Streets. And St. Paul stood several blocks north of Trinity on Broadway, a stylish landmark of Anglicanism on “what was becoming the most fashionable street in Manhattan.” The Anglican building