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1. The Foundations of Religious Establishment: The Colonial Era

During the 1760s, the New-York Mercury was a modest four-page newspaper in a midsize colonial port town. Its rear section of advertisements typically dwarfed the few columns devoted to news, and most news relayed events occurring outside the city, in Philadelphia, London, and Paris. Nonetheless, on November 3, 1766, the Mercury gave much attention to a procession that had taken place in New York City’s streets the previous Thursday, when Trinity Episcopal Church consecrated St. Paul’s Chapel, its second daughter chapel in the city. New York’s three Anglican worship houses equaled the Dutch Reformed in number for the first time and made the Anglican Church second to none in terms of prestige. The paper’s printer, Episcopal layman Hugh Gaine, deemed the chapel’s ornate Georgian architecture “one of the most elegant Edifices on the Continent.”¹

The proceedings began at 10:00 a.m. at Fort George, at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. A procession of religious and civic officials marched the half mile to St. Paul’s in precise order. Children who received charity from the church walked in front. City and colonial officials followed, along with Trinity’s clergy and prominent laity. At the chapel, Trinity’s rector, the Reverend Doctor Samuel Auchmuty, led a worship service. In his sermon, Auchmuty preached on the text “the place whereon thy standest is holy ground.” The service concluded with the “judicious execution” of several pieces of choral and instrumental music.²

Figure 1.1. Samuel Auchmuty, Trinity’s catechist of blacks and rector, champion of Anglican unity. (From Morgan Dix, History of Trinity Church, Vol. 1 [1898].)

When Samuel Auchmuty presided over St. Paul’s consecration, he must have felt some satisfaction. During the 1750s and 1760s, Anglican opponents led a series of attacks on Anglicanism’s prominence in New York. In his letters to his superiors in London, Auchmuty reported Presbyterian conspiracies against the Church of England around every corner. But at this ceremony only Anglican eminence showed. Gaine reported that thousands of individuals of “all Ranks and Denominations” observed the procession from the streets. Inside the chapel, several thousand more listened to the service with “fixed attention” and “devotion.”³ On this day Trinity Episcopal Church and its two chapels, St. George’s and St. Paul’s, presented an Anglican establishment that, in the colony of New York, had never been stronger. Some Anglicans believed it augured a united, dominant Church of England throughout North America.

This chapter begins the study of four congregations by examining the origins of Trinity and John Street churches. The story opened with the consecration of St. Paul’s because the Anglican concept of church establishment framed the Episcopalian and Methodist churches in colonial-era New York. Although religious pluralism weakened New York’s establishment, Trinity Episcopal parish enjoyed a privileged place in Manhattan. The Methodists who began worship at John Street Chapel also associated with Episcopacy and borrowed from its cultural authority. Establishment provided a springboard for missions. Both groups aspired to a universal evangelism that would reach all members of society.

This chapter also examines the churches’ attitudes toward black congregants, and black responses, in turn. Both Methodists and Anglicans ventured ministries toward blacks, whom other church groups had generally neglected during the colonial era. Before the Revolution, blacks’ inclusion symbolized the universal, authoritative reach of these churches. For their part, black New Yorkers embraced Trinity’s or John Street’s missionizing efforts for their own ends; the Revolution would create an environment where black church members would attempt greater separation and independence from their white coreligionists. Black Anglicans and Methodists who first attended Trinity and John Street would provide the basis for St. Philip’s Episcopal and Mother Zion African Methodist churches.

This background of religious establishment provided a cultural and social model that these churches’ members would retain after the Revolution. Even though the political upheavals of the 1770s and 1780s formally ended official establishment, Anglicans and Methodists in New York promoted the idea of an organic, connected church body as normative. Growth of the city, not the Revolution, would alter the religious commitments of these congregants in the coming decades.

Anglican Religious Establishment, and Its Methodist Offshoots, in New York City

The concept of religious establishment seems strange now, but four hundred years ago it was the norm in European kingdoms and their American colonies. In the early modern period, most European elites believed that a stable and harmonious society required a linkage of church and state, with religious and secular authorities each supervising their subjects. In England, the Church of England was the church of the monarch, and the church of the realm. The monarch appointed its bishops, and these bishops in turn consecrated new monarchs. Public taxes went to church support, and in return, the church administered poor relief. Although England’s colonies had no bishops, Anglican churchmen expected the model of establishment to expand across the Atlantic.⁴

The turbulent seventeenth century altered this ideal. A Civil War in England disestablished the church, but was followed by an intensely prochurch Restoration. At century’s end, the Glorious Revolution resulted in a modified establishment that recognized the permanence, and significance, of dissenters. In the eighteenth century, pro- and anti-establishment camps periodically coalesced around politicized issues of church and state. In the English colonies, the reality of church establishment often varied considerably from the ideal model. Nine of thirteen colonies contained some form of religious establishment. From the Chesapeake region southward, the Anglican establishment mirrored the hierarchical conception of royal government, although wealthy tobacco planters in Virginia, not priests, dominated the parishes. In New England colonies, a thorn in the royal side, renegade Puritans established a Congregational Church, forcing loyal Anglicans to play the role of dissenters. In Pennsylvania, William Penn established a proprietary colony dominated (albeit unofficially) by the Society of Friends. In New York, Anglican interests were stronger than in New England, but weaker than in the South. As a result, pluralism limited formal religious establishments, requiring a shaky compromise with dissenters that lasted, in fits and starts, until the American Revolution.⁵

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 spree thus reflected two aspects of expansion. Anglicans proliferated in all quarters of the city, surrendering none to their opponents. Second, in building near major thoroughfares, the church “dominat[ed] the prime areas of the city” and claimed a symbolic prestige and importance.¹⁵

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 Methodist preacher’s fiery exhortations might upset the propriety of genteel latitudinarian morality, and be better placed outside the mother church.²⁶

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 a proletarian union of blacks and laboring whites against elite merchant overlords; others have focused on the African influence on slaves, whose numbers swelled in the years before the trials. In all these interpretations, the attempted revolt would appear a natural response in the mid-eighteenth century; as Graham Russell Hodges has argued, the uprisings in 1712 and 1741 mark end points of a thirty-year revolt of Africans against white New Yorkers’ increased attempts to strengthen the bonds of chattel slavery in the colony.³⁹

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.