The range of conspirators condemned in 1741 reveals a fragmented community, at best. Some blacks clearly had ties to African culture, but others embraced a more polyglot identity. New York’s laboring culture could be interracial, as poorer whites and blacks joined in activities ranging from the leisurely to the criminal. And it was pluralistic, as some of the accused blacks were Hispanic sailors who occupied a higher social status in Latin America, but whose Catholic religion and darker skins nonetheless condemned them in the eyes of the judges, and in society as a whole.40
In an environment where both white and black communities remained fragmented, the Anglican Church and SPG advocated social cohesion. This stance gained the church new adherents. Throughout the eighteenth century, SPG officials contended that evangelization would make slaves less, not more, likely to revolt, and would increase their industry and honesty. Following tumultuous decades of master-slave relationships, after 1750 more masters were inclined to agree. SPG missionary Samuel Auchmuty noted a marked increase in the number of slaves attending catechism classes during the early 1760s. Every year he baptized dozens of children and a handful of adults. Each year, Auchmuty judged a few slaves advanced enough in their catechism studies to partake of the Lord’s Supper at regular church services. Scores of African slaves received a rudimentary education under Auchmuty, who reported around thirty regular communicants during the 1760s and early 1770s. No other New York denomination made such an effort to convert blacks before the American Revolution.41
For their part, blacks were more likely to accept catechization after 1750. Slave imports into New York City dropped dramatically after the 1740 revolt, and while the black population grew, the number of new arrivals directly from Africa shrank. Auchmuty’s catechumens were native New Yorkers, and perhaps saw in their activity a way to gain the patronage of the city’s leading government officials and merchants, not to mention their own masters. But in these actions, their identity as outsiders to an inside faith remained. Analyses of New York City’s African burial ground, which colonial blacks used throughout the eighteenth century, reveal continued survivals of tribal rituals.42
Black Movement toward Methodism
Aside from the SPG, most churches did not actively seek black members, yet over time blacks attended some churches. The outpouring of revivalist energy in George Whitefield’s trips to America cracked the door for black conversion, as Whitefield attacked the proud and preached spiritual equality of all before Christ. Later revivalists grew more explicit in promoting social or political egalitarianism. The Great Awakening upended churches’ old social relationships on many fronts. Lay ministers were especially successful among the poor. Blacks converted to Christianity in significant numbers for the first time. Some blacks and women took to the fields to preach. A few revival groups, like the Baptists in Virginia, willingly accepted black converts as equals, a drastic breach of social mores. The Methodists missed these early waves of revivals, but when they entered the colonies in the 1760s, they made up for lost time.43
Methodists fed from the energy of revivalism, and went further than Anglicans to welcome blacks to worship. According to oral tradition, at the first meetings of New York City’s Methodists one of the five participants was a black slave named Betty. Methodist ministers preached the gospel to all individuals, white and black, and welcomed slaves as spiritual equals. Methodist church leaders repeatedly celebrated the presence of black worshipers at their services. New York City missionary Joseph Pilmoor wrote to John Wesley in 1770, “Even some of the poor, despised children of Ham are striving to wash their robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Pilmoor closed with the verse “God is no respecter of persons.” That same verse appeared in the journal of Francis Asbury when he recounted seeing blacks worship in New York. Asbury repeatedly voiced his enjoyment at seeing the “sable faces” of blacks in the services. In a few cases, black exhorters preached to crowds of white and black Methodists.44
Many blacks found low church Methodism more attractive than high church Anglicanism because early Methodists believed slavery to be a sin. Ministers denounced the institution of slavery from the pulpit, and many early Methodist converts freed their slaves after experiencing the grace of Christ.45 In contrast, Anglican messages to black slaves stressed duty and obedience. Even so, both Anglicans and Methodists cared for Africans’ spiritual needs, in marked contrast with most other New York religious groups.
Shortly after the midpoint of the eighteenth century, Anglicans and Methodists had an established place in colonial New York: established by law toward legal preference, but also established in fact as socially acceptable institutions in a burgeoning city. They were part of a church that had little formal power but did hold legal privileges, cultural prestige, and universal aspirations. And both groups ministered to blacks whose degraded status within the community marked them for prejudice and scorn. The American Revolution that would follow destroyed the legal privilege of these churches, but all their other characteristics—their cultural cachet, desire to reach all subjects (now citizens), and biracial missions—would remain.
2. Religious Establishment Challenged, Destroyed, and Re-formed: The Revolutionary Era
Samuel Auchmuty did not live to see his vision of a unified Anglican Church establishment in New York fulfilled. His successor, Charles Inglis, had a front-row seat to its destruction. Inglis complained that the Church of England’s loyalty to Crown in the 1770s only drew “peculiar envy” from “disaffected” patriots. He reported that in the run-up to Revolution, patriot laymen threatened, verbally abused, and jailed recalcitrant priests. Inglis had personally penned a response to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but patriots had seized the essay directly from the press and destroyed it. Even though the British army occupied New York from 1776 until war’s end, Inglis’s anxiety remained. Fleeing American patriots plundered Inglis’s house. And Inglis suspected that rebels under orders from George Washington set fires in the city. “It really seems the conflagration was directed against the interest of the Church,” wrote Inglis, for the flames consumed Trinity’s building. St. Paul’s Chapel and King’s College, directly in the fire’s path, nearly met the same fate, but alert observers doused their roofs with water, sparing those two prominent Anglican symbols from destruction. For the rest of the war, as the king’s troops marched through the streets of New York, His Majesty’s largest church in the colonies would remain a burned-out husk. After the war, Inglis would leave New York alongside the British troops.1
This chapter traces the effects of the American Revolution on New York’s Anglican and Methodist churches. Before the Revolution, proto-patriots attacked the Anglican clergy’s vision as hostile to true liberty. During the Revolution, many patriots associated both groups, including their black coreligionists, with loyalism, and after the Revolution patriot lawmakers disestablished New York’s Anglican Church. Such actions fatally destroyed the clergy’s highest aspirations for political influence. Methodists similarly suffered in the shadow of the larger Anglican conflicts, harmed by their ambiguous relationship with the mother body. Yet most churchmen, especially Anglican lay elites who accepted independence, viewed these setbacks as temporary, and continued to embrace a cultural vision for the church that did not rely upon full political establishment. Both groups kept connections to blacks, a group tainted by all-out loyalism, but Americanized themselves by creating greater distance between white and black congregants. By 1790, many Episcopalians and Methodists expected that their institutions would shake off the setback of disestablishment and continue to provide a socially cohesive vision for the city.
Political Battles over Religious Establishment
During the eighteenth century, the political ramifications of religious establishment ebbed and flowed with the changing times. After heated debates in the 1710s, moderate Anglicanism dominated both sides of the Atlantic for an entire generation. But in the 1750s, old battles took on new forms. In the early 1750s, many New York elites