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3. Creating Merchant Churches: The 1790s

During the 1790s, America’s economic recession lifted, as the new federal government offered a secure platform from which commerce boomed. When war between Britain and France revived in 1793, the neutral United States benefited by assuming the carrying trade around the globe. With its fine harbor and expansive hinterland, New York capitalized on the opportunity. Between 1790 and 1800, the city’s population doubled, growing from thirty thousand to sixty thousand inhabitants.¹

By 1790, both Methodist and Episcopal churches could celebrate tangible signs of postwar recovery. In 1790, Rector Samuel Provoost consecrated a new Trinity Church, rising from the ashes of the old site to proclaim a new grandeur. Following Trinity’s example, Episcopalians erected new churches throughout the state, and the denomination’s numbers grew. The American Episcopal Church’s prestige renewed with the election of Samuel Provoost as bishop of New York, emphasizing that hierarchy still had a place, even if it no longer emanated from the Crown of England.²

The Methodists also prospered. By 1784, the Methodist Episcopal Church was no longer an ambiguous branch of the Anglican Communion but a denomination in its own right. Shortly after the war, Methodist records first referred to John Street as a “church” instead of a “meeting house,” suggesting a greater stability and permanency. In the expanding city, New York’s Methodists added to their numbers. In 1789, they built a second chapel on Second Street (now Forsyth), near Division—also known as the Bowery church—to accommodate their growing membership. The Bowery church was the site of several revivals, in which new members joined in great numbers. By the end of the 1790s, New York’s Methodists had built two more chapels.³

The city’s growth posed new challenges to the churches. The Episcopal Church confronted an increasingly complex and divided community, one that defied the inclusive yet homogeneous vision that Anglicans had championed before the Revolution. The massive influx in immigrants strained conceptions of an organic society. The decline of deference by common people to their betters also challenged political elitism. After the Revolution, Anglicans ceased to automatically dominate political office. Church officials could not expect society’s wealthiest and most prominent members, who sat in the front pews, to govern the city.

For the Methodists, the challenges of growth led to greater internal divisions within the church. Now several hundred members, and growing, Methodists were no longer the close-knit body of believers of the 1760s. The familial, communal nature of late-colonial Methodism necessarily strained as the church incorporated large numbers of rich and poor. During revivals, the poorer wards to the north generated more new members. Methodist leaders built a new chapel to accommodate them in 1789; these new converts thus had decreasing contact with the older, wealthier members downtown. In the 1790s, social stratification began to appear among the Methodists.

Episcopalians and Methodists also dealt with the challenges of being multiracial communities in a society that increasingly feared such as threats to the social order. Free blacks occupied an undefined space in a republican society, and often faced white hostility. Before the 1790s, both churches accepted blacks but relegated them to marginal positions. As the number of free blacks increased, the presence of blacks in both churches grew less welcome. In the first years of prosperity following independence, both groups encouraged racial separation in worship. Leaders in both groups, however, contended that blacks remained under their institutional oversight, a separate but unequal body of believers.

Black worshipers made steps to assert themselves in their respective congregations. Tensions over race at Trinity seemed less pressing in the decade, as many loyalist blacks had left the city. Black Anglicans who remained affirmed their denominational identity, accepting messages of obedience and promises of future liberation. They did so under the title of the African Society, which offered hints of a larger heritage and resistance, but as yet had little public presence, and firmly identified with white benefactors. Among Methodists, a group of skilled black males sought independent worship, taking steps to be not just Methodists, but African Methodists. Even so, these black Methodists remained connected to white church leaders. Further, black churchmen remained silent in the public sphere, whether due to the widespread presence of slavery in New York, or the lack of significant literate leadership to initiate debate. In 1790s New York, blacks were not able to disrupt the white churches’ self-images as reflecting the religious norm.

In facing these social and racial challenges, both Trinity and John Street fashioned themselves as merchant congregations. They exemplified a preference for hierarchy, and organic connection, among their members. All had a place in the church—laborer or professional, black or white—but elites offered both bodies most of their stability and leadership. As such, the congregations exemplified connections to Federalism prominent in the era, albeit less in a political way than in a cultural and social preference. Therefore, in this decade the city’s growth challenged, but did not disrupt, church leadership.

Federalists at Prayer: Trinity’s Social Hierarchy

The wounds that the Revolution inflicted upon Trinity parish healed by the 1790s, as the parish’s patriots genially embraced their former opponents. The radical bent of the city council demanded that in 1784, the parish’s Whigs depose the Tory vestry and its hand-picked rector, Benjamin Moore. But the victors did not lord their triumph over the vanquished. This shakeup was temporary, and had few lasting effects on the church’s governance. Shortly after this action, loyalists trickled back into positions of church leadership.⁴ More important, the church retained its wealthy members, and its insistence that hierarchy, privilege, and wealth should persist.

Most of Trinity’s Whigs became Federalists. During the later 1780s and 1790s, Federalists dominated political events. Having successfully framed and ratified the Constitution, Federalist officeholders occupied the majority position in state and federal legislatures. Federalism promoted hierarchy, the rule of society’s betters, and a conception of an organic society. Culturally Anglophile, Federalists advocated improved relations with Britain, and welcomed back former loyalists; indeed, loyalists often joined conservative Whigs as party leaders.⁵

Figure 3.1. Federalist-era Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street, with Federal Hall on the right displaying the connections between social, political, and religious prominence. (Collection of The New-York Historical Society.)

Although New York’s Revolutionary state constitution abolished the Anglican religious establishment, Federalists strengthened the symbolic ties between church and state, between divine rule and temporal order. During the two years the federal government remained in New York City, Federalists emphasized the mutual ties of Episcopalianism and republican government. Trinity rector and bishop of New York Samuel Provoost served as chaplain to the United States Senate. Trinity’s chapel, St. Paul’s, became the destination of several governmental processions. Trinity’s vestry affixed a presidential seal over the pew where George Washington sat at St. Paul’s Chapel, and a seal of New York State on the pew reserved for the governor, at the opposite side from Washington.⁶

The Federalist emphasis on the benefits of hierarchy and order energized opponents suspicious of monarchy. Pennsylvania senator William Maclay sharply criticized any monarchical trappings. His censorious diary reveals a deep suspicion of pro-Anglican politicians who linked Episcopacy and government. He scorned the Episcopal “churchmen” who moved that Congress accompany the newly sworn-in President Washington to “attend divine service” at St. Paul’s Chapel. Maclay failed to block the measure. Two weeks later, Washington addressed Congress, and then led another procession to St. Paul’s, where Provoost prayed.⁷

Figure 3.2. Samuel Provoost, patriot rector of Trinity Church, first bishop of New York. (From Morgan Dix, History of Trinity Church, vol. 2 [1901].)

During the 1790s, Trinity’s parishioners bolstered this Anglican vision, which united the larger society behind a moderate and genial Christianity. Samuel Provoost offered a rational and orthodox theology that persuaded few but likewise offended few. He exemplified familial ties and kinship alliances at the top. As Senate chaplain, and as minister of and relative to leading government officials, he embodied a tangible connection between church and government. Filled with pews arranged according to prominence and wealth, the church’s building illustrated this organic vision of all society united in a coherent whole, with the wealthiest at the front.

From Trinity’s 1790 pew rent lists and New York City directories, I developed an occupational sketch of Trinity Church’s members. Both sources display upward bias. City directories tended to record established individuals with their own businesses and residences.⁸ Unskilled and poorer laborers would be more transient or more likely to board or share rooms, decreasing the possibility of their being listed in any given year. Likewise, pew lists record the congregation’s wealthier members. Although every church provided a few pews without charge for those who could not afford a minimal rent, such individuals did not appear in the lists. Even given these caveats, Trinity parish’s 1790s pew lists clearly portray a largely upper-class church. But because many occupations included both wealthier and poorer individuals, and because even poorer occupations appeared in the pews, an individual might scan the church building each Sunday morning and assume that Trinity represented New York as a whole.⁹

Politicians and professionals constituted a significant percentage of pewholders. Between 16 and 18 percent of Trinity’s pewholders were in the professional and government category, a figure that more than doubled the 7 percent city average. At the beginning of the decade, John Jay served as the first Supreme Court justice of the United States, and by mid-decade he was elected governor of New York. At $17.50 annually, he paid the second-highest rent at Trinity Church, suggesting a prominent location. Jay’s brother-in-law Robert R. Livingston, who served as chancellor of the state, also paid $17.50. Both men’s pews probably overlooked the congregation from prominent spots in the gallery. Within this occupational category, the individual with the lowest pew rent, William Strong, appeared in the directory as an inspector; his rent of five dollars nevertheless placed him above the bottom decile of pewholders.¹⁰

Retailers and merchants comprised fully half of Trinity’s pew renters. Between 46 and 54 percent were merchants, grocers, or other retailers, a number double the city average of 26 percent. Merchants such as Charles Ludlow and Edmund Seaman rented the most expensive pews prominently located in the front of the church. Not all merchants were as well-off as the Ludlows and Seamans, however, for many sat in pews priced in the middle ranges, around ten dollars annually. Grocers operated on narrow margins, and many grocery ventures were small-scale sales of produce grown just outside the city limits. A handful of small grocers and a merchant occupied the cheapest pews alongside poorer artisans, huddled in the backs of aisles or in corners of the gallery.¹¹

The diverse and numerous artisan category included everyone from impecunious cordwainers and shoemakers to prosperous shipbuilders and silversmiths. They comprised from 19 to 22 percent of Trinity’s pewholders, half that of the 40 percent appearing in the directory, and about one-third the number of artisans historians believe resided in the city.¹² Trinity’s artisans included many in lucrative and prestigious trades. Philip Hone and Robert Carter were both cabinetmakers, whose skills were “the most refined of the mechanic branches.” If their rents are the only indication of wealth, however, the two had differing rates of success: Hone’s pew rent of $14.75 placed him in the top quintile of rent prices, whereas Carter’s $5.00 pew ranked just above the poorest rents. Hugh Gaine appears in the artisan category as a “printer-bookseller-stationer,” and his pew rent of $15.00 reveals that he had made the transition from small-scale manufacturer to overseer of a larger shop and retailer. In general, however, artisans occupied the lower rent levels, including a tailor, cooper, and shoemaker each in the bottom decile.¹³

The lower occupational levels were especially underrepresented in Trinity’s pews: from 9 to 13 percent of Trinity’s pewholders filled the combined service-transport-marine category, also only half the city averages. Shipmaster Richard Black and branch pilot Matthew Daniel held positions of greater prestige than the typical mariner, and William Robinson, Edward Bardin, and John Battin as tavern keepers held greater sway than other service workers. All five, however, rented pews below the median rate of $10.00. Not surprisingly, the fewest pewholders in number were those identified as unskilled, the “laborer” category, making up no more than 4 percent of Trinity’s pewholders. The number of unskilled workers attending must have been higher, for those too poor to pay for pews do not appear in the lists. Further, twenty-eight males on the pew lists do not appear in the directories at all, many of whom were probably unskilled workers.¹⁴

In the 1790s, Trinity church held a level of public prestige unmatched by other churches, for it participated in public displays associated with the new government in which other churches could not. Trinity’s parishioners also tended to be in wealthier and more prestigious occupations than even upwardly weighted city averages. Individuals from all occupational categories rented pews at Trinity, however, and as John Jay took his seat above the sanctuary, or as Charles Ludlow walked to the front of the church, they surveyed poorer individuals who worshiped with them. More important, the poorer and middling individuals who attended Trinity saw the most prominent men at their head, or above them. On any given Sunday, Trinity remained white and affluent, but it still approximated the traditional image of an organic, inclusive church.

Anglican politicians also continued their attempt to properly educate blacks and move the state toward voluntary, gradual manumission. John Jay ascended to governor in 1795, and presided over a legislature that passed the gradual manumission law of 1799. Jay and his fellow Episcopalians in the New York Manumission Society had achieved one of the major goals that they had held at that institution’s founding in 1785. The law offered nothing for existing slaves, promising freedom only to slaves born after July 4 of that year, and then only at age twenty-eight for men and twenty-five for women. Young slave men and women thus spent many of their most productive years paying for the ostensible costs of their childhood. Of the states north of the Chesapeake, only New Jersey was slower to pass a gradual manumission law.¹⁵

That a law was passed at all is testament, however, to the determination of NYMS members. In a burgeoning economy, successful shopkeepers became merchants, small merchants became large merchants, the numbers of professionals increased, and successful individuals at all levels bought slaves when they could afford them. In the 1790s, the percentage of men holding slaves rose from one-quarter to one-third of the population. It took a long, determined effort to convince a majority of New Yorkers that slavery should end.¹⁶

The New York Manumission Society’s bylaws did not demand immediate manumission from its participants, and actually placed guidelines on its members more lenient than the 1799 law. Trinity’s parishioners, who were also the most prominent politicians within the society, men such as John Jay, James Duane, Alexander Hamilton, and Rufus King, all held slaves. Historians have debated the significance of this connection. An older generation of scholars, now reinforced by new scholarship, has highlighted the real abolitionist intentions of the NYMS. David Gellman characteristically argued that “pragmatic incrementalism and moral idealism” marked the society’s efforts, and that, no matter the compromises, society members always pushed the status quo toward, rather than away from, abolitionism. On the other side, scholars studying the black community have noted the heavy-handed paternalism of NYMS members, and critiqued the fact that those members widely held slaves even as a statewide manumission law passed. Shane White noted that the percentage of known slaveholders in the NYMS was significantly higher—perhaps double—than in the city as a whole, and further that slaveholding members owned nearly 50 percent more slaves than the average city slaveholder.¹⁷

Whereas Gellman finds idealism, and White hypocrisy, Trinity’s Anglican abolitionists occupied a place where slavery was simply secondary to their larger concerns. Alexander Hamilton, for example, was consumed by ambition and a desire to remain within the social elite. Despite antislavery convictions on national or international issues, Hamilton kept his slaves because New York’s elites kept slaves, as ultimate status symbols. John Jay, a more devout Episcopalian and more ardent abolitionist than Hamilton, nonetheless kept his slaves until he judged they had worked off their purchase cost. Further, Jay was not above selling recalcitrant slaves. And when earlier attempts at manumission failed to pass the legislature, Jay told friends that he was content to do his duty as best he could; the issue simply was not his greatest concern as a politician.¹⁸

Trinity’s abolitionists opposed slavery as a part of a larger socioeconomic outlook. In supporting gradual manumission, they affirmed property rights and legal procedures, and further placed themselves at the head of organizations that stressed benevolence toward society’s lower orders, including blacks. One cannot separate their opposition to slavery from what we might deem a cultural Federalism, which recognized hierarchy and property along with an organic interconnectedness of society’s members.

Merchants and Methodists: John Street’s Attempt at Social Unity

During the 1780s, Methodist leaders quickly distanced themselves from the stigma of loyalism that plagued the Episcopalians. Their English-born preachers had largely fled, and the church now revived under locally produced lay ministers.¹⁹ New challenges lay ahead. Methodist leaders sought to bring others to Christ, and to make their own people holy in the process. Urban life challenged this ideal. As the first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America, Francis Asbury witnessed these problems firsthand and recorded them in his journal. He expressed ambivalence regarding urban growth, welcoming its opportunities, yet fearing its effects.

Although Methodist leaders avoided taking sides in political issues, many of their laity could not resist the temptation. During the Revolution, Asbury lamented that some Methodists “had dipped deep in politics.”²⁰After hostilities ended, electoral strife seduced many Methodists. In 1792, Asbury fretted, “This city has been agitated about the choice of Governor: it would be better for them all to be on the Lord’s side.”²¹ In 1795, Asbury viewed Independence Day celebrations in New York with regret. Bells ringing, drums beating, and rifles firing: all proclaimed the nation’s love of liberty, but Asbury lamented that, although the preachers shared a communal spirit, the city’s Methodists “are far from being as spiritual as we ought to be.”²²

While politics led to obvious snares, more subtle and dangerous were the lures of moneymaking and wealth. After the Revolution, Asbury worried that, as peace brought prosperity, “our preachers will be far more likely to settle in the world; and our people, by getting into trade, and acquiring wealth, may drink into its spirit.”²³ Suspicious of wealth, Asbury preferred that the poor fill his churches. During a 1787 visit to a Long Island church, just outside the city but miles away socially, he noted bluntly that “[t]he people on this island, who hear the gospel, are generally poor, and these are the kind I want, and expect to get.”²⁴

Late-eighteenth-century cities were notoriously unhealthy. New York’s crowded, dirty conditions sorely aggravated Asbury’s health. Seasonal epidemics made matters worse, with “fluxes, fevers, and influenzas” marking his congregational visits to all the eastern seaboard cities.²⁵ During those trips, Asbury regularly complained of sickness. In the late summer of 1791, he observed:

The weather is extremely warm and dry: people are sickly and dying, especially children; I find my body very weak: preaching at night, added to the moschetoes [sic], causes me to sleep very little. . . . We rode to New-York; a very warm day. I found myself much injured, but was well nursed at the north side of the city. They have a touch of fever here in George-Street. Sabbath, Oct. 1 We had much rain. Live or die, I preached at the old and new church. . . . I had some disagreeable things and was but ill-fitted in body to bear them.²⁶

Asbury rode thousands of miles on horseback, but despite these physical exertions, his worst health complaints came in tight urban quarters.

For circuit-riding Methodist ministers, the crowded city also meant much work in a short time, with an intensity unmatched in rural locations. On July 5, 1795, for example, Asbury preached in Brooklyn in the morning. He then crossed the river to administer the Lord’s Supper at the Bowery church and met with the black classes. In the evening, Asbury preached at John Street and afterward met with two men’s classes. The next day, Asbury met with nine more classes, “so that I have now spoken to most of the members here, one by one.”²⁷

For Asbury and other Methodist ministers, ungodliness flourished in the city. New York was an especially worldly place of bustle and business. Great wealth and noisy poverty crowded out thoughts of God. Urban anonymity allowed sins to pass unnoticed, far more than in the socially confining small towns and villages of rural America. On one trip into New York, Asbury feared during the ferry crossing that the boarding party had uttered so many curses that God would sink the boat! He then asked another passenger for a piece of chalk, that he might keep track of the number of curses for the duration of the trip. At John Street, after preaching on self-denial, Asbury noted, with great exasperation, “a more gay and indevout congregation I have seldom seen; they were talking, laughing, bowing, and trifling both with God and their minister, as well as their own unawakened souls.” After preaching to another unresponsive congregation in 1804, Asbury concluded, “[New] York, in all the congregations, is the valley of dry bones. Oh Lord, I will lament the deplorable state of religion in all our towns and cities!”²⁸

Despite these lamentations, Asbury valued the stability that prominent members gave to the city’s Methodist congregations. Although Asbury railed against the wealthy in the abstract, his personal friendship with long-standing members anchored him during trying visits to the city. Asbury regularly lodged with such “Old Friends,” strong in the faith, who provided him a deep sense of calm. In 1796, he noted simply “I lodged with Elijah Crawford: this house is for God.”²⁹

To foster holiness, Methodists scorned ostentatious living and public displays of wealth and social status. This stance attracted many poor people into their churches. Methodists welcomed women, blacks, and the poor, groups that republican politics explicitly excluded from the public sphere. As historian Dee Andrews noted in her pathbreaking study of American Methodism, the Methodist societies were socially and racially heterogeneous. They included the poorest and the richest: unskilled laborers and hardscrabble journeymen on one hand, and great planters and emerging capitalists on the other.³⁰ But in the bustle of city life, merchants and entrepreneurial “new artisans” remained when laborers came and went, and they funded the struggling churches in ways that the poor could not.

Divisions over occupation or wealth within Methodism therefore imbedded in the movement from its start; they did not merely represent a later declension, but rather the realities of a movement that appealed to groups across the social spectrum.³¹ A study of churches on the congregational level reveals this clearly. When John Street Chapel was the only Methodist building in New York City, believers could hail the spiritual unity of its members. As John Street Church in the 1790s, the building represented a congregation, one of two (and by 1800, four) Methodist bodies. Occupational and wealth divisions very quickly strained the unity of early Methodism and highlighted the difficulties of preserving a heterogeneous movement.³² But at the congregational level, the wealthiest members, merchant-professionals, attended John Street alongside workingmen. Such elites befriended ministers and could view the church as a unity of believers. While Methodists in New York did not typically share outright their Episcopalian brothers’ tendency toward political Federalism, John Street’s Methodists specifically embraced an organic unity in Christ that functioned very similarly on a social and cultural level.

New York City’s 1796 Methodist classes reveal a church largely drawn from laboring occupations. One-third of all white males in the lists did not appear in the city directories, which suggests that their position was too poor or transient to enter the record. In the occupation categories of government, professional, retail, service, and marine workers, the Methodist society members were, compared to city averages, underrepresented in all categories. Within the service sector, cartmen accounted for two-thirds to three-quarters of the category. Cartmen might be considered closer to artisans in spirit than to other service workers, given their group solidarity, and their ability to regulate entry to their occupation through licensure. The largest job category in the Methodist classes, well above city averages, belonged to artisans.³³

Artisans in the early Republic were hardworking, but not necessarily working-class. Artisans typically placed themselves in a middling category between the parasites at the top of society—ranging from bankers to lawyers to landlords—and the under classes at the bottom, with few skills or prospects. Some Methodist artisans had transcended the daily grind of production to manage and oversee shops. The New York Methodist society’s large artisan population thus reveals not a church of the poor, but rather one dominated by a large middling section, many of whom were anxious of their eroding status and increasingly militant in defending it.

During the 1790s, class meetings lay at the center of Methodist spiritual life. Through 1820, New York’s Methodist ministers recorded membership by class lists, not congregation. They listed each class one after the other, numbered consecutively, with no mention of what church each group may have attended. Assuming that geographic proximity to a church made attendance more likely, I identified individual white male Methodists as either John Street or Bowery attendees depending upon their places of residence as listed in city directories. If a class had a preponderance of members identified with one church, I associated the entire class with that church. I have labeled two classes as highly likely to belong to John Street, and two as somewhat likely. I have labeled four classes as probable Bowery classes and one as somewhat likely. And finally, two classes remain ambiguous in their allegiance. In both, about half their members do not appear in the city directories.³⁴

All five of the Bowery and Bowery-leaning classes contain more artisan members than any other occupational category. In each, artisans proportionately outnumbered both city and New York Methodist society averages. Four of the five classes, ranging from 55 to 90 percent artisan, included more artisans than individuals of any occupation labeled as Bowery by residence. In other words, even artisans who lived closer to John Street tended to join Bowery artisans for worship. For example, in class number eleven, the coppersmith Peter Peterson of George Street was the only one of twelve men who lived closer to John Street Church. Although alone by residence, Peterson was among friends occupationally, as he was one of seven artisans (the class also included two cartmen). In class number twenty, a John Street–area shipwright, baker, and shoemaker joined with nail-makers, carpenters, and coopers (as well as laborers and a grocer) who lived closer to the Bowery church. Bowery classes were, more than any other characteristic, artisan classes.³⁵

In comparison, the John Street classes reveal a mixed occupational base. Merchants and retailers appeared in greater numbers than in any Bowery class, but did not numerically dominate any single class. In three of the four classes, retailers comprised roughly the same numbers as artisans, outperforming both the city and Methodist averages for retailers. For example, John Street’s class number thirty contained five retailers—four of them grocers—and five artisans out of fifteen members. John Street class number twenty-eight, the only class led by a merchant, contained five retailers and seven artisans, out of a group of seventeen.³⁶ In that same class, John Wilson may have been a shipmaster, physician, or cartman (the city directory lists all three occupations for that name). In a class that contained no majority of any occupational group, however, Wilson appears more significant than he might in a class comprised of 80 percent artisans, as was the case in the Bowery church.³⁷

Figure 3.3. Location of Methodist churches in the 1790s, also showing expansion of settlement from colonial era. John Street lies near merchant homes, whereas the Bowery church encompasses laboring districts. The Zion Chapel, here in the rough Five Points neighborhood, would move west in 1800. (Map created by Alanna Beason, derived from map from United States Census Office, 1886.)

Close to retail and wholesale shops on Pearl, William, and Broadway Streets, John Street attracted more merchants. The Bowery church drew artisans from nearby marine industries and artisan shops on Cherry and Second Streets. But statistically, artisans grouped together in even greater numbers than their places of residence suggested. On the other hand, retailers did not form a single class of their own, but joined with a minority of artisans and other occupational classes. At the Bowery church, occupation trumped other factors, suggesting a common identity based upon work, along the lines of the artisan republicanism described by historian Sean Wilentz.³⁸ At John Street, in contrast, the classes modeled what Methodist leaders wanted the church to be, by including rich and poor from all walks of life, revealing a unity in the body of Christ.

Most Methodist class leaders were artisans. But these leaders did not embrace a working-class consciousness, for they led meetings at both John Street and Bowery churches. Many leaders were older members of long residence in the city, the “Old Friends” whom Asbury described in his diary. Many were masters, often at odds with their journeymen coreligionists. Others worked in prosperous trades. For example, class leader Philip Arcularius of 11 Frankfort Street worked as a master baker during the Revolution. During the 1790s, city directories list him as a tanner, the occupation of his father-in-law, in which he also held master status. When journeymen shoemakers banded together to raise wages, Arcularius joined with fellow tanners in opposing their demands. Although he led a women’s class in 1796, few rank-and-file journeymen, shoemakers especially, would care to be associated with Arcularius, and as such, they probably headed north to attend the Bowery church. Other class leaders worked in the building trades, where an expanding port economy and steady growth northward on Manhattan Island ensured continuous employment for masons, carpenters, and shipwrights. In contrast, shoemakers and tailors found that large-scale manufactories undercut the prices paid for their work, and they struggled to achieve competence, or comfortable subsistence, in the increasingly competitive market.³⁹

It is easy to exaggerate the differences between artisans at this time, however, especially among Methodist leaders committed to unity. Although a shoemaker, Peter McLean led a class at John Street, probably alongside master tanner Arcularius. Elias Vanderlip, a shoe- and bootmaker, led classes at the Bowery alongside leaders who were carpenters, masons, and plaster of paris manufacturers. But differing class attendance patterns suggests that many of the Methodist rank-and-file detected a difference and voted with their feet.

John Street’s classes contained merchants, artisans, unskilled laborers, cartmen, and tavern keepers, all joined in worship. The inclusion of all occupations suggests an organic social conservatism, in which the society of the class mirrored the city as a whole. John Street members apparently sought security and social stability in their class meetings: the revivals of this decade largely occurred uptown at the Bowery church, not at John Street. This religious conservatism also meant a greater willingness to associate with the new rich and entrepreneurial artisans and merchants who broke with older craft traditions. In contrast, more militant artisans went uptown to church. By bonding together, they highlighted the split emerging between social classes. As at Trinity, the upper-middling individuals who led John Street appear to have clung to the principle of a holistic, organic society.

Silent Struggles: Blacks in New York Churches, and Their Early Steps to Independence

Blacks had long worshiped at Trinity and John Street churches, where leading Episcopalians and Methodists had opposed slavery. This stance contrasted to some degree with most other churches in New York. During the 1790s, as both Trinity and John Street enjoyed increasing prestige and wealth, New York’s free black community grew extensively. Most members of both churches did not welcome free blacks as equal members, and continued to associate free blacks with slaves. Consequently, while blacks in these churches did not break from the larger institutions, they carved out separate spaces for worship, where they might enjoy their new status and occupy positions of leadership. While in other northern cities African, Revolutionary, or reform identities may have predated the black church, in New York it appears that black men first acted in the public sphere largely as black churchmen. That is, for them religious, and specifically denominational, identity came first.