1775 (17 page)

These differences are vital to understanding the chasm between low-church, antibishop, plantation-colony Anglicanism and the high-church, please-send-us-a-bishop, northern-colony variety. The first flourished in the old English-settled southern tidewater or coastal low country—from Chesapeake Virginia through the Carolinas. There, for a century or so, Anglican churches were generally controlled by the same local elites who made the decisions in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the North Carolina General Assembly, and the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly.

The development of local control through Virginia’s Anglican vestries traced back to a combination of seventeenth-century Puritan influence and eighteenth-century emphasis on decision making by the laity, not by London episcopal authorities.
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Until the 1740s and 1750s, Virginia had few dissenters, and local elites routinely governed church affairs. No SPG influence came into Virginia. Indeed, in 1771 the House of Burgesses voted overwhelmingly to commend two local ministers “for the wise and well-timed Opposition they have made to the pernicious Project of a few mistaken Clergymen, for introducing an American Bishop; a Measure by which Disturbance, great Anxiety and Apprehension would certainly take place among his Majesty’s faithful American people.”
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“In no other colony were the parsons so active and united behind the Patriots’ crusade,” said historian Bonomi. “In 20 of 60 counties in the colony, the minister of the parish or some resident minister of the church was elected by the people as a member of the County Committee for Safety…After the war began, all but one of the 14 army chaplains were ministers of the Anglican church.”
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In South Carolina, on top of vestry control, ministers’ salaries were paid by colonial authorities and parishes had become key units of local government. From the start, dissenters had been much more numerous than in Virginia and “were frequently elected [Anglican] vestrymen and churchwardens.” A candid South Carolina Anglican minister wrote in 1720 that his parishioners were “Latitudinarian in Protestantism…and do not imagine much real difference in Principle ’twixt Churchmen and Dissenters of all
Denominations.”
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Four decades later another Anglican minister famously commented that it would be positively unsafe for a bishop to set foot in Charleston.
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In locally dominated churches, where theology was usually relaxed and low church, sentiment in 1775 was by and large pro-Patriot. The Virginia and South Carolina ratios were lopsided. According to Bonomi, “South Carolina was distinguished for the number of ardent patriots among its Anglican clergy, three-quarters of whom supported the Revolution. A similar proportion of the Anglican rectors resident in Virginia in 1776 favored the American cause.”
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High-church and probishop Anglican clergy and churchgoers were hardly unusual in the South. But they did not represent the dominant political culture. High-church southern clergy tended to cluster in places where vestries were weak or nonexistent. The bulk were in parishes substantially dependent on funds from the SPG, as in Georgia or much of North Carolina, or in provinces where a proprietor or royal governor controlled parish patronage. Calculations vary, but in Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia, less than half the local Anglican clergy supported the Revolution.
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With Virginia and South Carolina Anglicanism essentially local and Whiggish, the cockpit of what eighteenth-century dissenters and rebels called “ecclesiastical imperialism” lay in the middle colonies. Episcopal historian John Woolverton is candid: “Far more than Boston, Philadelphia or Annapolis, after 1700 New York would be the key to the expansion of the Church of England north of the Potomac.”
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Four counties in southern New York had an Anglican Church establishment, the only one in the North. Examples of militancy ranged from attempts to extend official Anglican establishment to the Manor of Philipseburg to refusal by the heavily Anglican Governor’s Council to charter dissenting churches and the predominance of Anglicans given positions in New York government.
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Anglican growth in the northern colonies was substantial after 1750, for reasons that ranged from increased support of the established church by royal governors to stepped-up London (SPG) missionary activity at the grass roots. Inroads were also made by Anglican churches that offered traditionalists refuge from the evangelism and religious “enthusiasm” roiling Congregational and Presbyterian ranks. In any event, during the fifteen years after 1760, some one hundred new Anglican churches were built, most in the northern provinces.
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Of these, the largest number were in Connecticut,
especially in the western counties adjacent to New York, but New Jersey and Pennsylvania also showed significant increases. So did inland North Carolina, where royal governor Arthur Dobbs mounted strong support during the 1760s.

Anglican growth in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and especially New York in the 1760s also fattened on alliances and potential mergers with a handful of ethnic denominations that back in Europe enjoyed national church status or prestige—German Lutheran, Swedish Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and German Reformed. The Dutch Reformed Church in particular enjoyed English guarantees under the 1664 Articles of Capitulation, through which New Amsterdam had become New York. Swedish Lutheranism had already joined the Church of England in the old Swedish-settled parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Old-line German Lutherans in New York and Pennsylvania—mindful of the dual practice of Britain’s Hanoverian royalty—also considered conforming to the Church of England.
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Conservative Dutch Reformed congregations extended as far up the Hudson River as Albany, but most of the Old World congregations tied to European church hierarchies and still speaking their ancestral language concentrated in New York, Philadelphia, and the long-settled corridor between those two cities. Collaboration with the established English Church made sense, because the last handful of imperiled French-, Swedish-, and Dutch-speaking churches were also fighting to hold a new generation that spoke English, preferred more democratic church governance, wanted clergy ordained in America, and was probably also more evangelical. Like the Church of England, the Old World churches were also fighting off an American Revolution.

The imperial context was important. In the early 1760s, the government in London was cocky, even arrogant from its huge victory over France and the great territorial gains confirmed in the 1763 peace treaty. International prestige also realigned, and British diplomats now took precedence over their French counterparts in the courts and chancelleries of Europe. The accession of George III in 1760 had put an aggressive Anglican on the throne—a young man, very empire-minded, who chose mostly Tory advisers and friends. By contrast, his German-speaking great-grandfather (George I) and grandfather (George II), Lutheran-born, had been attentive to German politics and had found their English political allies principally among Whigs who were moderate Anglicans and relatively friendly to dissenters.

Patriot leaders, alert to the neoimperial thrust of His Majesty’s government visible in taxation, customs enforcement, and curbs on American frontier settlement, had reason to fear Anglican favoritism in religious matters. But imperial preoccupations also pointed in some new directions. A much bigger empire meant more Catholic subjects—in Quebec, Nova Scotia, Florida, the Caribbean, and Mediterranean, and no longer just in beaten-down Ireland. More tolerance was necessary, as we will see shortly. The Church of England was now the state church of the world’s leading empire. Gone were the days, just two decades earlier, when a German-speaking George II could half dismiss the church as a ragbag of ex-Jacobites, divine-right believers, Scottish nonjurors, and the like. Now the national church must command respect, and the American colonies, the last strongholds of English-speaking religious dissent, were a good place to start.

Historian Carl Bridenbaugh, in his episcopacy-focused tome
Mitre and Sceptre,
emphasized that “no sooner had the Treaty of Paris been signed than the Archbishop of Canterbury prepared to launch his campaign for an American episcopate.” During the 1763 session of Parliament, the archbishop told one correspondent that “we must try our utmost for bishops.”
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Many of the increasingly influential Anglican clergy in the middle colonies and lower New England certainly hoped so. Fanciful rumors in London and Boston newspapers in 1764 had the English Dean of Bristol going to New York with the title Bishop of Albany, and later expectations had bishops going to the West Indies instead. In Quebec, a Roman Catholic bishop had actually arrived in 1766.
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Fierce American reaction to the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 may have nipped aggressive Anglicanism in the bud. Five months earlier, Dr. Samuel Auchmuty, a New York Anglican cleric, had talked about pursuing an act of Parliament to turn that province’s counties into parishes, making all inhabitants pay taxes “toward the support of a minister of the Established Church.” Among the provisions of the Stamp Act, moreover, was one requiring that revenue stamps be affixed to “all documents” in any “court exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction within the said colonies.”
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The New England newspapers found that a disturbing hint.

Anticipating a great contest with hostile Congregational and Presbyterian pastors, Anglican clerics began in the mid-1760s holding annual meetings in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. On the other side, Congregationalist Dr. Ezra Stiles, a future president of Yale, in 1766 formed
a loose confederation of dissenters, mostly Congregationalists and Presbyterians, to guard against Anglican encroachments. Meetings were held every year through 1775. Although Massachusetts did not send delegates, to avoid further provocation of London, participants came regularly from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. The confederation also added Virginia, both Carolinas, and Georgia as correspondents.
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Scholars who call the debate over bishops important in bringing on the Revolution—Bridenbaugh, Bonomi, Ruth Bloch, J.C.D. Clark, James Bell, and others—cite a string of events and publications between 1770 and 1775 that kept the issue alive. These ranged from a Maryland Anglican petition for bishops in 1770 to a 1774 address by New Jersey rector Thomas Bradbury Chandler fulminating against Presbyterians.

Politically, though, there is no evidence that the upper echelons of the British government wanted to send bishops to America in 1775. Ten years earlier perhaps, but not during the immediate pre-Revolutionary period. In our early-twenty-first-century milieu, the idea of bishops and ecclesiastical imperialism being a throbbing issue may seem dubious.
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But protagonists have continued to emerge. To Bridenbaugh, “Anglican bishops became the principal symbol in the American mind of the threatened ecclesiastical tyranny. The American Revolution of 1760-1775 resulted quite as much from a religious as a political change in the minds and hearts of the people.” To Bonomi, “the pervasiveness of American anxiety regarding a bishop cannot be denied. The question was hotly discussed in correspondence, and it was perhaps the pivotal issue in the New York assembly elections of 1769.”
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The similarly minded Bell entitled his 2008 book
A War of Religion.

In 1815, John Adams, looking back after 40 years, leaned in the same direction. At very least, ecclesiastical imperialism and the proposal for American bishops was one of a trio of religious issues that also included Tory embrace of the doctrine of “passive obedience” and widespread colonial arousal over British passage of the Quebec Act in 1774.

Tory “Passive Obedience” Doctrine Versus“Republican” Religion

Clergy in 1775 could see an old disagreement—and a longtime battle—being rejoined. It went back to the 1630s and 1640s, when Puritan and Parliamentary objections to episcopacy and the divine right of kings helped to bring on the English Civil War.

Debate was more complicated by the late eighteenth century, but Congregational and Presbyterian ministers were at least half right in describing prewar Anglicanism as a belief system that encouraged “passive obedience” to authority and, in some cases, continued to hint fond remembrance for Stuart-era “divine right.” Anglican clerics, in turn, were at least half right in calling Congregationalism and Presbyterianism “republican” religions, theologies that almost by nature bred restiveness and antimonarchical sentiments. During the 1760s and 1770s, both sides entered into moral and political combat with zeal, making religion prominent, if not decisive, in the onset of the American Revolution.

Caricature prevailed on both sides. Pennsylvania loyalist Joseph Galloway, in his
Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Rebellion
(1780), blamed the conflict on a seditious alliance of Congregationalists and Presbyterians, “whose principles of religion and polity were equally averse to those of the established church and government.” Quakers in the same province castigated “blood-thirsty Presbyterians, who cut off King Charles’s…Head” and who, in both state and church, shaped government “after the Model of a Geneva Republic.”
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High Anglican clerics in the middle colonies reminded church officials in Britain that the government’s “best Security in the Colonies does, and must always arise, from the Principles of Submission and Loyalty taught by the Church,” which they “were constantly instilling” into their flocks.
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The teachings of the church, in short, strengthened the monarchy. Churchmen especially deplored the New Englanders for instituting oppression and refusing to tolerate freedom of speech or religion. There was some evidence, but then criticism shaded into vituperation, attacking the “republican zealots and bigots of New England; whose tender mercies, when they had power in their hands, had ever been cruel.”
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