Mather Byles, the Rogerenes, and the Quest for Religious Order in Late Colonial New England
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ABSTRACT NO PEACE IN NEW LONDON: MATHER BYLES, THE ROGERENES, AND THE QUEST FOR RELIGIOUS ORDER IN LATE COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND by Jonathan Blake Vaughan In April, 1768 Congregational minister Mather Byles abruptly left his parishioners in New London, Connecticut and converted to the Church of England. Even though Anglicanism had been marginal in colonial New England, Byles joined a growing number of “apostates” who abandoned Congregational orthodoxy for the sense of order and stability afforded by the official church of imperial Britain. Byles stated that among his primary reasons for leaving New London and Congregationalism were the incessant conflicts that arose between him and the religious dissenters known as the Rogerenes. This thesis narrates the conflict between Byles and the followers of John Rogers—a little known series of incidents that occurred during Byles’s tenure in New London—as well as Byles’s subsequent reassessment of the viability of the New England Way and conversion to the Church of England. NO PEACE IN NEW LONDON: MATHER BYLES, THE ROGERENES, AND THE QUEST FOR RELIGIOUS ORDER IN LATE COLONIAL NEW ENGLAND A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of History by Jonathan Blake Vaughan Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2009 Advisor__________________ Carla Gardina Pestana Reader___________________ Andrew R. L. Cayton Reader___________________ P. Renée Baernstein Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Land of Steady Habits? ..................................................................................... 6 Chapter 2: From Bliss to Crisis: Mather Byles’s New London Ministry ......................... 21 Chapter 3: A Congregational Loss—An Anglican Gain .................................................. 31 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 46 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 49 ii Introduction In April, 1768 much of New England was abuzz over reports coming from New London, Connecticut about Congregational minister Mather Byles, Jr. At the end of the month the thirty-three-year-old clergyman returned to his hometown of Boston from New London, where he had served as the minister of the First Congregational Church for ten years. On April 12 Byles had announced to his stunned New London parishioners that he would soon sail to England for Episcopal ordination with the intention of returning to Boston to become minister of the Anglican Christ Church. Byles’s conversion to the Church of England was the most shocking defection from Congregationalism—the established religion of colonial Massachusetts and Connecticut—since former Yale Rector Timothy Cutler led a handful of Congregational ministers and students to convert to Anglicanism in 1722. Byles descended from a long line of illustrious New England divines who had labored to establish and maintain Congregational hegemony in colonial New England. Although Anglicans comprised only a small minority of the New England population, Byles joined a growing number of “apostates” who abandoned Congregational orthodoxy for the sense of order and stability afforded by the official church of imperial Britain. He also escaped an unpleasant situation in New London. In the Connecticut seaport town the young parson had participated in years of conflict with colonial Connecticut’s infamous religious sectarians—the Rogerenes. As Byles looked to embark on a new career as an Anglican minister in Boston, New Englanders wrote about and discussed the minister’s departure from the “New England Way.” The New England Way was established by ministers who migrated to the new colonies in the first half of the seventeenth century. Men such as John Cotton and Richard Mather left England in the 1630s in hopes of establishing a society that would become religiously what Massachusetts governor John Winthrop had referred to in 1630 as “a city upon a hill.” In opposition to the Church of England, these early New England divines believed that religious authority should reside in individual churches and communities. They gave shape and definition to the ecclesiology which came to be known as Congregationalism—an ecclesiastical system whereby churches are self-governing congregations. In 1648 a synod of ministers from Massachusetts and Connecticut drew 1 up the Cambridge Platform. The declaration endorsed the Westminster Confession and upheld Congregationalism as the appropriate form of ecclesiastical organization. The concept of a local covenant, or contract between God and his elect, pervaded the theology and social relationships of early New England Congregationalists. Power, therefore, was decentralized in seventeenth-century New England society and placed in many hands within local contexts. The ultimate authority in both political and religious spheres was the Bible, but the commitments made to congregation and community through voluntary obedience to covenants ensured order and a functional system of political and religious governance. Churches were established only by means of a local covenant and individual members could only be granted release from their sacred oath with the concurrence of their local congregation. As Harry Stout has noted about the power of the local covenant, “Persons leaving without the consent of the body sacrificed not only church membership but also property title, which was contingent on local residence.”1 Thus, seventeenth-century New England towns achieved high levels of social cohesion as the organization of town life—the election of “selectmen” to run the town’s day-to-day affairs and the distribution of property titles—mirrored in practice the autonomous, self-ruling congregations that bound each community member to its minister and to one another. “By locating power in the particular towns and defining institutions in terms of local covenants and mutual commitments,” Stout argues, “the dangers of mobility and atomism—the chief threats to stability in the New World—were minimized.”2 Most New England towns of the seventeenth century proved remarkably successful in maintaining internal peace, order, and uniformity of religious expression. By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, the religious and social ideals established for New England society by the generation of John Cotton and Richard Mather had already faced significant challenges both from the expansion of communities and from the growing problem of religious dissent. The mid-century revivals of the Great Awakening further exposed the weaknesses of New England’s Congregational establishment, and by the American Revolution some individuals had simply lost faith 1 Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 23. 2 Ibid. 2 altogether in the New England Way. New London’s Congregational minister—Mather Byles, Jr.—was one of those individuals. Historians have paid little attention to Byles’s ministerial career even though it speaks to a number of significant developments in late colonial New England. For more than ten years, Byles ministered to the New London congregation that called him at the age of twenty-two to serve as its pastor. But his years in Connecticut convinced the parson that the religious and social institutions his forefathers established nearly a century and a half before failed to secure order in his New London church and community. In particular, Byles’s clashes with the infamous New London sectarians known as the Rogerenes revealed to the minister the inability of Congregationalism to contain religious dissent. This thesis narrates the conflict between Byles and the followers of John Rogers—a little known series of incidents that occurred during Byles’s tenure in New London—as well as Byles’s subsequent reassessment of the viability of the New England Way and conversion to the Church of England. Byles’s conflict with colonial Connecticut’s most famous sectarians deserves the attention of historians for a number of reasons. The New London clash can help us to understand better the cultural diversity of colonial Connecticut. Scant scholarly research has been devoted to the religious, social, and cultural history of this colony as historians have regularly presented research on colonial Massachusetts as representative of all of New England. Denizens of eighteenth-century Connecticut often cultivated different socio-religious values from even their closest neighbors and were less entrenched in imperial affairs than those who lived in places such as Boston. The Rogerenes, for example, presented one of the earliest and most vitriolic criticisms of Congregational hegemony beginning in the 1670s in New London—a town that was also home to many of Connecticut’s most influential Congregational leaders during the colonial period. Until recently scholars largely ignored John Rogers and the Rogerenes—the first indigenous sect in Britain’s mainland colonies. Susan Chongmi Kim’s doctoral dissertation written in 2006—“Mr. Rogers’s Neighborhood: Religious Dissent in New London, 1674-1721”—is the most complete work to date on the Rogerenes’ dissenting 3 beliefs and practices.3 Kim’s dissertation explores