By the 1760s, Trinity parish stood as the preeminent example of this expansive Anglican vision. At 148 by 72 feet, the church was the largest public building in the British colonies. It housed the first organ built in the American colonies, where fashionable elites could attend elegant concerts.16 The new church attracted the wealthiest New Yorkers, from Anglicized Dutch and Huguenot merchants to prominent British officials. Located at the foot of Wall Street on Broadway, the church stood at a major intersection of commerce.
Figure 1.2. Anglican and Dutch Reformed church locations, circa 1770; the dark line reveals the extent of city settlement around that date. The Anglican churches claim more prominent locations, and are more geographically expansive, revealing greater confidence. (Map created by Alanna Beason, derived from map from United States Census Office, 1886.)
Nurturing universal aspirations, the church also sheltered the city’s poor and lowly. In the 1760s, Trinity became the city’s leading landlord, as its vestry built affordable housing on its land west and north of the city. Many artisans soon resided there.17The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, which had supplied missionary ministers to New York’s churches since 1701, had also begun evangelization of both Native Americans and African slaves. The British defeat of the Roman Catholic French by 1763, and the subsequent French removal from the continent, seemed to open the continent to missionary expansion. Historian Henry May described such Anglican optimism:
With enough fervor and enough discretion, loyal churchmen could hope for almost anything: a North America all English, all Protestant, united in the same broad and tolerant Church, with even the harshness of slavery mitigated by Christian instruction to both races, with a place for the lowliest and a glorious career for the most talented and devoted, with new worlds to conquer in Africa and India, in an empire united by secular and religious ties.18
But the breadth of the church would prove especially difficult to manage.
Under the umbrella of Anglican evangelization efforts, Methodism stood out as particularly precocious, more energetic, and ultimately longer-lasting than the others. John Wesley founded Methodism as a missionary branch of the Anglican Church, originally analogous to the SPG. Wesley’s Methodists experimented and adapted their methods to reach audiences where the established church had little exposure. In the eighteenth century, that meant success in the heart of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing England. In these new industrial centers in the North, Midlands, and Southwest, the established church had failed to keep up. But Wesley famously remarked, “I look upon all the world as my parish.” Eventually, Wesley’s followers would take such missionary drive to the Americas, where the established church was present, but not prominent.19
An Oxford graduate, Tory in his politics, Wesley embraced Anglican rites and rituals. But along with his brother Charles, Wesley merged his High Church inclinations with Low Church innovations in worship. Scholars have focused on these innovations, for they came to dominate the story of Methodism in the early American Republic. Among them were small prayer groups and worship services held outside the standard (and state-mandated) times. Also important were hymns, especially the thousands of verses that flowed from Charles’s pen, filled with piety and brimming with emotion. And Methodists styled their preaching to melt the heart, even as John Wesley described his own heart as “strangely warmed” in recounting his conversion experience.20
Such innovations did not make Methodists religious radicals, however. Methodists remained Anglicans until after the Revolution, when the vision of universal evangelization under the established church had tarnished. When John Wesley spoke of primitive Christianity, he did not necessarily mean it the same way early Republic evangelicals later did: as a Holy Spirit–filled ecstasy, ushering in the purity and truth of the early church, free from the corruption of succeeding centuries. Anglicans, like dissenting Protestants, embraced the term “primitive Christianity,” but included with it the presence of bishops and sacramental rituals that had accompanied the Christian church in its first centuries.21 Wesley, who straddled the line between High and Low, embraced this ambiguity. In New York, many of his leading congregants would keep it.
Wesley had little formal influence in the American colonies, at first, but his ideas about the importance of a heartfelt conversion paralleled colonial religious change generally. In the 1740s, evangelist George Whitefield promulgated a form of evangelical Anglicanism that many Americans then deemed Methodist. Whitefield was a master of self-promotion whose revivals drew thousands in the northern colonies, leading to what historians have popularly referred to as a Great Awakening. Although Whitefield was Calvinist, and Wesley Arminian, both emphasized conversion at the center of true religious faith. As Whitefield’s and Wesley’s converts from the British Isles filtered into the colonies in the eighteenth century, some added leaven to the Anglican churches that were growing in the seaport cities.22
These previously unidentified Methodists may have numbered in the hundreds by the 1760s. Over time, some rejected established Anglicanism and worshiped in home churches. The Methodist lay minister and former British military officer Thomas Webb discovered five New Yorkers who had begun worshiping at home in 1766. Webb introduced them to other coreligionists, and encouraged the fledgling group to acquire a house of worship. These early New York Methodists moved to a rigging loft on William Street in 1767. The next year they raised four hundred pounds from more than 250 contributors to move to a location on John Street. Lay preacher Philip Embury, one of the original five New York worshipers, preached the inaugural sermon at John Street in October 1768. Unlike the grand procession accompanying the consecration of St. Paul’s, John Street Methodist’s opening received no attention from the New York press. Almost immediately, however, John Street attracted large crowds: former closet Methodists, perhaps, or other evangelically inclined Protestants. Methodist itinerant minister Richard Boardman reported to John Wesley that 1,700 souls regularly attended Methodist services, only one-third of whom fit in the building.23
Trinity’s Anglicans kept close ties with the city’s Methodists. Methodists erected their first chapel on land bought from Mary Barclay, whose husband, Henry, had served as Trinity parish’s second rector. She charged a nominal fee of five shillings in advance, and ground rent of just over fourteen pounds per year. Approximately 250 individuals pledged contributions to raise money for the erection of the chapel. Trinity’s ministers Samuel Auchmuty, John Ogilvie, and Charles Inglis all donated. So did Trinity’s vestry, including such prominent citizens as James Duane, Elias Desbrosses, Andrew Hamersley, Edward Laight, David Clarkson, Gabriel Ludlow, and Nicholas Stuyvesant. At least 10 percent of the individuals on the subscription list affiliated with Trinity.24
Colonial-era Methodists remained Anglicans, for John Wesley did not grant his followers the authority to conduct all the church’s ordinances and rituals. Methodists attended Anglican worship services to receive the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion. On one visit to the city, future Methodist bishop Francis Asbury partook of the Lord’s Supper at St. Paul’s Chapel with several Methodist church leaders, including Thomas Webb. Prominent Methodists Samuel Stilwell, Stephen Sands, William Valleau, and Andrew Mercein, all of whom were trustees, class leaders, or ministers at John Street, had their children baptized at Trinity parish in the late 1770s.25
Some of the Anglican cooperation with the Methodists contained an element of social control. Many of society’s elites believed religious practice set a good example of moral character for the lower orders. Methodism deserved support because it encouraged unruly laborers and slaves to attend church. For this reason, Presbyterian Philip Livingston also contributed to John Street’s building fund. But perhaps some at Trinity hoped that the Methodist chapel would draw the more enthusiastic members from their midst, thereby reinforcing the majesty and decorum of the church’s most visible branch. Historian Richard Pointer notes that during the 1760s, Trinity, the “archetype of European traditionalism,” had “developed an evangelical wing.” As such, a