Trinity’s attempt to create a broad church establishment confused many about the church’s identity. Samuel Provoost stepped down as an assistant minister at Trinity in 1771. His biographer blamed Methodists for the resignation, for Provoost refused to deliver the enthusiastic, emotional sermons that many congregants desired. But another historian claims that a pro-establishment party forced Provoost’s dismissal, for the theologically liberal Provoost sympathized with New York’s dissenting religious groups, including the Methodists.27 The opposing conclusions suggest that forms of worship divided the church.
Anglicans and Methodists remained officially linked during the colonial era, but the alliance fell short of true union. Trinity rector Samuel Auchmuty viewed the Methodists with less concern than he did the Presbyterians, whom he believed conspired constantly against the established church. But he also considered Methodism an unwelcome nuisance. In one letter to London church officials, Auchmuty described the preacher-soldier Thomas Webb as “turn’d mad and do[ing] a good deal of mischief about the country.” Auchmuty feared that Webb, who had already abandoned a military career, might attempt to gain clerical office from the Church of England, “which would be another affliction to the Clergy here.”28 Thus Auchmuty’s greatest concern about the Methodists was not that they would attempt to destroy the church, but instead wanted to lead it! Even so, such concern did not compel him to bar Webb from taking communion at Trinity’s chapel.
Although strains developed in the Anglican-Methodist alliance, both churches shared a common cultural and religious background that made movement between Episcopal and Methodist churches more likely than between other denominations. Well into the nineteenth century, after the churches had institutionally separated, Methodist ministers who wished to settle down and acquire a regular salary often joined the Episcopal Church. Upon surveying an area for evangelism, Francis Asbury confidently proclaimed that the local Methodists would achieve lasting success, “because the inhabitants are generally Episcopalians.”29 In addition to these affinities, both churches shared a willingness to evangelize black slaves.
Blacks under New York’s Religious Establishment
The colony of New York contained more slaves, at a larger percentage of the population, than any other British colony north of the Chesapeake. In 1750, one in seven of the colony’s population was enslaved blacks, with New York City’s proportion closer to one in six. The Greater New York metropolitan region, including Long Island and east New Jersey, contained an especially dense slave population. Most slaves in the colony lived in rural regions adjoining New York City on Long Island, especially in King’s County (later Brooklyn). By the early 1770s, an estimated 18,000 blacks lived in Greater New York City. In the city, slaveholding was widespread, with even poorer whites owning slaves.30
Historians have observed that racism toward blacks increased dramatically in the late-seventeenth-century British colonies. Antiblack racism became prominent, and more obvious, as the numbers of Africans imported through the Atlantic slave trade grew dramatically and after colonies stipulated clear slave codes in law. Under early Dutch rule, the city’s blacks owned and accumulated property, drilled with the militia, and initiated lawsuits in courts of law. Blacks’ status eroded in later New Netherland, as slavery grew more important, and under English rule slipped further. In the early eighteenth century, waves of new slaves from Africa bolstered general cultural assumptions about Africans’ inability to assimilate, and their basic inequality with whites.31
On this issue, Anglican churchmen held a position contrary to that of most colonists. English imperialists looked to religious establishment to consolidate their control of English possessions. The aim of the Church of England in New York was not merely religious conversion, but also the cultural Anglicization of the population. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel stood at the forefront of these efforts, seeking the education and conversion of not only Dutch subjects, but also African slaves. The SPG funded a missionary, Elias Neau, to catechize New York blacks at Trinity Church for the first two decades of the eighteenth century.32
Many Dutch and English alike remained suspicious of blacks’ involvement in the church. A long-standing debate in Christendom involved whether Christians could enslave fellow baptized individuals. As such, many whites hoped to avoid the question by barring blacks from religious participation. Neau took another tack. A French Huguenot, Neau had been imprisoned in a French galley and sympathized with his charges as slaves. But Neau held a more personal and pietistic vision of faith than did the typical Anglican. He did not challenge the institution of slavery, but rather emphasized the heartfelt conversion of his charges. This gained him the grudging support of New York’s more prominent Anglicans, who valued the cultural supremacy that the church promoted.33
Neau reported thirty regular communicants in his first years on the job, but such good fortune would not last. Neau’s efforts nearly derailed in 1712, when almost three dozen enslaved blacks joined in a blood oath to throw off the shackles of slavery. Setting fire to buildings, they hacked apart fleeing whites with swords and hatchets before authorities subdued them. Six rebels killed themselves before capture. Officials tried twenty-five survivors, and executed seventeen. As one participant was a Neau convert, many white New Yorkers called for an end to the mission.34
The rebels of 1712 rejected most of the surrounding society’s values, but did share a few connections with Neau’s ministry. The conspirators’ blood oaths and suicide before capture suggest African rituals, as pantribal confraternities participated in such undertakings. But blacks sought religious power where they could find it, including in the church of their masters. Neau’s convert had reportedly been angry that his master had not granted him permission to be baptized, and other whites complained that blacks desired the magical (or possibly abolitionist) powers of baptism. Other rebels probably attended Neau’s Anglican school to gain literacy, a form of power that could hold magical promise, but also pragmatic resistance. New York’s blacks took Africa with them, but did not shut out the possibility of Christian influence.35
New York’s governor, Robert Hunter, continued to support Neau’s efforts, so the Anglican instruction of blacks continued through Neau’s death in 1722. Neau complained in 1718 that it was nearly impossible for him to gain new pupils. Postrevolt laws severely limited blacks’ religious activity. Black catechumens could meet only on Sunday afternoons, when slaves did not have to work, after regularly scheduled religious services, and when blacks could travel in daylight under the gaze of watchful authorities. These strictures limited opportunities for black religious instruction; white opposition nearly ended it completely. One observer contended in the 1720s, “Negroes instructed in Christianity are more conceited than their countrymen who are not.”36 After Neau, Anglican efforts to catechize slaves subsided until shortly before midcentury.
The next visible signs of black unrest, however, would lead to more, not fewer, attempts at evangelization. In 1741, another ostensible rebellion rocked New York City. Mysterious fires coupled with a wave of robberies fueled white fears of a full-scale slave revolt. The trail of evidence led to a few core conspirators, who under torture named others involved in a large-scale plot. City authorities executed thirty-one blacks—thirteen hanged, eighteen burned—and deported seventy more. Courts also condemned and executed four whites suspected of involvement.37
The truth behind the 1741 conspiracy remains shrouded in secrecy. The self-serving nature of the official trial report led an earlier generation of historians to doubt the truth of any rumors of concerted black revolt. They generally agreed with Winthrop Jordan’s assessment that anxiety over a lack of social cohesion led whites to viciously turn on blacks. Ethnic and religious differences among New York’s whites had fueled political factionalism for more than fifty years. The bitter conflicts did not obscure that blacks remained easy targets, lowest on the social ladder. Certainly the trials reveal that white prejudice toward blacks had strengthened by midcentury.38
The rise of anthropological approaches and recognition of African cultural survivals led more recent historians to find evidence of conspiracy in the events of 1741. But the motives for conspiracy remain wide-ranging in these interpretations. Some have stressed