Trinity Church
Stories in this Chapter:
• A City of Many Gods
• The Church of State
• The Revolution as “Holy War”
• Peace for the Loyalists? A Forgotten Exile
City of Many Gods
Unlike New England colonies such as Massachusetts, New York had an extraordinary level of religious diversity. Between the North and East rivers, in the middleclass North Ward, one could find Protestant churches of all stripes — from the imposing Anglican chapels of Trinity and St. Paul’s to Dutch Reform and Lutheran parishes, Scottish Presbyterian congregations, French Huguenots, Moravians, Baptists, Anabaptists, Methodists, and Quakers. New York was also home to Shearith Israel, the nation’s first synagogue. While most of the enslaved worshiped in their owners’ churches, some probably continued to practice Islam or animism in secret. A few Muslim traders could be found at different times, too.
Most of the time, these communities coexisted with relative harmony. Only Roman Catholics were consistently persecuted and intimidated, the city forbidding "papists" to vote, and jailing or executing "priests and Jesuits," until 1784. (The small numbers of immigrants from southern Ireland likely also worshiped clandestinely.) But although the Church of England was the established church in New York, the “dissenting” or non-Anglican faiths enjoyed legal protection, or toleration.
Hugh Gaine, “Prospect of the City of New York,” woodcut appearing in New York Almanac (1771), 49. Already by 1687, Gov. Dongan could report: “New York has four ministers, an Anglican, a Dutch Calvinist, a French Calvinist, and a Dutch Lutheran. There are few Anglicans or Roman Catholics; plenty of Quaker preachers, singing Quakers, Ranting Quakers, Sabbatarians, Anti-Sabbatarians, Anabaptists, Independents, Jews. In short, there are some of all sorts of opinions, while the most part are of none at all.”
By 1776, just 26 of the 239 churches in the colony were Anglican. In New York, the capital, Anglicans made up no more than 10 percent either. Trinity Church had just 2,000 parishioners, many of them Englishmen. Like the elites in the Dutch Reformed and Scottish Presbyterian congregations, however, these men dominated the political, social, and economic landscape. Faith was often a marker of social class, like ethnicity or race. While the DeLanceyites were mostly Anglican, the Livingston faction split between these other two major sects.
Many of the Anglicans at Trinity and St. Paul’s Chapel, and most of their leadership, became staunch Loyalists by the eve of war. The very term derived from its religious teachings. For the Church of England, loyalty to Parliament was a religious duty as well as a civic responsibility. While most Anglicans resented the legislation shaping the Imperial Crisis, they ultimately decided that a break with the Empire was a bridge too far. But some rebelled against the doctrine of passive obedience to governmental authority, propelled by colonial grievances. And many of the Dutch Reformed and Methodists became Loyalists, too. Lutherans appeared to split. And Quakers, viewed as Loyalist, in fact strove to remain neutral, being pacifist.
The Church of State
During the Imperial Crisis, rebels increasingly targeted Anglican churches as royal institutions. By the eve of war, organizations like the Sons of Liberty demanded they remove the signs and symbols of British authority from their houses of worship. Clergymen became pointed marks, as some of the most articulate, respected enemies of independence. Anglican leaders became perhaps the most important mouthpiece of the imperial cause, sharing messages to loyal parishioners across the colonies. For that reason, men like Isaac Sears jailed and exiled ministers like Charles Inglis, Samuel Seabury, and Myles Cooper in 1775-76. As one resident complained: “The Episcopal Churches in New York are all shut up, the prayer books burned, and the Ministers scattered abroad. It is now the Puritan’s high holiday and they enjoy it with rapture.”
During the occupation, the British and many of the Loyalists who came to New York worshiped at St. Paul’s, which became the headquarters of Anglicanism after the Great Fire consumed Trinity. They also punished certain dissenting Protestants they held responsible for broadcasting rebel propaganda, commandeering the churches of Baptists, Presbyterians, the Dutch, and Quakers, and turning them into barracks, hospitals, and prisons.
But Holy Ground, the red-light district at the northwestern end of Trinity’s 215-acre set of land, became Canvas Town, a refugee camp. And the military flattened the graves at Trinity, closed tombs, and set up a fenced green with benches around the ruins of the former elite church, hanging lanterns from trees and hiring bands to serenade the officers and ladies who now used it to stroll at night. The British and other residents began calling it The Mall, after the promenade outside Buckingham Palace and Whitehall in London. Alongside the bawdy plays at John Street and lavish parades, the seeming blasphemy of this place (pictured in the banner) increased the sense of distance between set of New Yorkers who considered themselves Englishmen before the war and the real Englishmen now running the city.
The denominational nature of King’s College, established just west of the Common on Trinity land in 1754, was a major point of disagreement between the DeLancey and Livingston factions. But it failed to rouse most New Yorkers during the Imperial Crisis, although it eventually became a target for rebels, as the only college in North America to remain loyal.
The Revolution as “Holy War"
While New York’s religious diversity set it apart, the differences that led to the Revolution often manifested in religious spaces. Many viewed the conflict along such lines from the start. Support from Protestant leaders was a confirmation of presumed legitimacy for each side. And while public debate continues over the Founders’ religiosity and intentions for church-and-state in the nation they built after the conclusion of the war, New Yorkers voiced a set of concerns on very different issues. By turning the rebellion into a righteous cause, and spreading that message from the pulpit to all in the colonies, ministers transformed a political war into a holy one. Patriots nationalized the millennialist bent of colonial theology, with victory taken as sign that the US was God’s chosen nation.
Peace for the Loyalists? A Forgotten Exile
In the years between the defeat of the British at the Battle of Yorktown (Oct., 1781) and the signing of the Treaty of Paris (Sept., 1783), Loyalist New Yorkers lived in a state of constant limbo. Many wished to remain in the city, but feared for their livelihood and safety. Several current and former members of Trinity’s congregation, for example, had been named by the rebel New York State Legislature in an Act of Attainder in late 1779. Accused of treasonous affiliation with the occupying British military government and other loyalist activities, they were to be “for ever banned” from the state and their property forfeited. Those named were a veritable Who’s Who of pre-war colonial New York — and later, it’s Loyalist wing. The list included two former royal governors, members of the colonial Council, former Justices of the Supreme Court, and several eminent merchants including James DeLancey, Frederick Phillipse, William Bayard, and Miles Sherbrook. Further down the pecking order was Trinity’s own rector, Charles Inglis. Despite his status as a clergyman, if captured by New York State authority, he could be “attainted and executed for high treason.”
Inglis was indeed a Loyalist. Like the rectors before him at Trinity, he used his position to garner political influence with NYC’s municipal and colonial leaders. And like other northeastern Anglican clergymen of his generation, like Samuel Seabury of Connecticut or Thomas Bradbury Chandler of New Jersey, he had also took on a public role, penning broadsides in the Bishop Controversy of the 1760s (advocating Anglican Bishops for the American colonies) and later against the rebellion and the leadership of the Continental Congress.
Still, he was not a firebrand or ultraconservative Tory. Inglis sympathized with colonial grievances against Parliament. He questioned the Anglican doctrine of passive obedience and non-resistance to governmental authority. He did not leave his post in New York for England when the revolutionary crisis reached a boiling point after 1775, staying with his flock through the gyrations of the war years. He was what Benjamin Rush might call a “moderate man.”
After the war, Inglis faced ignominious exile to England and later, the frigid climes of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Inglis lacked connections among the Patriot leadership. His wartime ministry, support for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and vituperative attacks on Continental leaders such as John Jay added to his “heavy load of guilt” in Patriot circles. His major sin, what Inglis called the “catalogue of my political transgressions,” was the publication of a pamphlet attacking Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in the crucial early months of 1776, when independence became a live issue of debate.
Inglis’s mistake was not one of ideology or argument. It was radically misreading public opinion. Like Paine’s Common Sense, his pamphlet was published after the battles at Lexington and Concord. Inglis’s reputation both as a writer and as the leader of North America’s most powerful Anglican congregation was such that rebels saw it as a real threat to the popular support for their cause. One of his parishioners, Sons of Liberty leader Isaac Sears, learned of the pamphlet’s imminent publication one week in advance and broke into James Rivington’s print shop, destroying not only the half-printed copies but the manuscript as well. He then posted notes at every other printer in New York, warning that if they printed Inglis’s work “or suffer [it] to be printed” in their press by others, “death and destruction, ruin and death, will be your portion.” Inglis had a second copy smuggled all the way to Philadelphia, but where Paine had made a bang, Inglis found a whimper. Although widely read, it failed to sway hearts and minds. Inglis was speaking to a shrinking audience, as the independence movement gained steam. It would doom him to exile, along with much of his congregation. More than half of Trinity’s congregation evacuated the city at the conclusion of the war, leaving for England and for other British colonies. Many Episcopalian priests and the wealthy Loyalists in the other colonies had been leaving from the start.
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See Kate Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (UNC Press, 2021); Spencer W. McBride, Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (University of Virginia Press, 2016); Mark Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002); and Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (Oxford University Press, 1986).