Four Steeples over the City Streets - Kyle T. Bulthuis Early American Places

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streets and fine new houses uptown dwarfed the colonial era’s small crooked alleys huddled at the south end of the island. The four congregations remained, or became, bastions of respectability. Church leaders could not offer a united vision similar to what their forebears had in the Revolutionary era. Rather, they reached out to individuals on a case-by-case basis, offering not social transformation but personal salvation and public respectability. While some historians note the importance of evangelicalism to nineteenth-century American cultural and political life, the experience of New York’s churches suggests that social factors limited whatever influence that the churches and the churches’ leaders could claim.

      American religious scholars have posited that religion has functioned in a variety of important roles in different settings throughout American history. Paul Johnson, for example, asserted that evangelical religion helped newly bourgeois businessmen to control their laborers, and Nathan Hatch contended that the popularization of revival Christian movements liberated lowly upstarts and outsiders to attack the authority of learned clergymen and church hierarchies. For Johnson, religion was a tool of elite control; for Hatch, a force for popular liberation. In a similar vein, Graham Russell Hodges argued that religion invigorated the New York black community’s resistance to white racism.22

      As striking as the works of these scholars are, I found that the churches had a shorter reach in early Republic New York’s urban setting. The expansion of the city, and the expansion and contraction of the city economy, battered and buffeted these downtown churches. Congregants paired their religious lives with identities borne of their living and working spaces. Religious groups rarely influenced events as dramatically as their leaders and prominent members initially hoped. Even when individual church members had important roles in their respective communities, their churches often hesitated in matters of social or political importance. Often, social, economic, and racial concerns eclipsed religious motivations. As time passed, religion became a more private, individual affair. While religion was certainly rich in meaning for the individual believer, the city’s growth and commercialization meant in practical terms that, over time, the churches grew less relevant to the community as a whole.23

      Even so, the parishioners at Trinity and St. Philip’s and the congregants at John Street and Mother Zion chose to identify themselves religiously as well as socially or racially. Religion was significant because the participants deemed it such, not because it provided a functional or measurable tool for them. In an environment that was ultimately uncontrollable even for most elites, these city congregations offered havens where adherents might recapture some control, if only in claiming the option to worship and fellowship with the men and women around them.

      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

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