Dividing the Faith: the Rise of Racially Segregated Northern Churches, 1730-1850 by Richard J. Boles BA in History, May 2005

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Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Racially Segregated Northern Churches, 1730-1850

by Richard J. Boles

B.A. in History, May 2005, Boston College M.A. in History, December 2006, Boston College

A Dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Colombian College of Arts and Sciences The George Washington University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

May 19, 2013

Dissertation directed by

David J. Silverman Professor of History

Dewey Wallace Professor of Religion

The Colombian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Richard J. Boles has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of February 8, 2013. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Racially Segregated Northern Churches, 1730-1850

Richard J. Boles

Dissertation Research Committee:

David J. Silverman, Professor of History, Dissertation Co-Director

Dewey Wallace, Professor of Religion, Dissertation Co-Director

Eric Arnesen, Professor of American Labor History, Committee Member

Robert J. Cottrol, Professor of Law, History, and of Sociology and Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law, Committee Member

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Acknowledgments

The work of historians is sometimes portrayed as an isolated, solitary endeavor involving days alone in dusty archives researching and writing. My experience in creating this dissertation has been anything but solitary, and I am pleased to be able to thank many of the people who have shared this process with me.

My research would not have been possible without the work of dedicated librarians, archivists, and other library staff members and the institutions that have made their collections available to researchers. I would like to thank the people who work at the following libraries and archives: Adams County Historical Society, Andover-Harvard

Theological Library, Andover Newton Theological School’s Franklin Trask Library,

Boston Athenæum, Boston Public Library, Congregational Library, Connecticut

Historical Society, Connecticut State Library, Heinz History Center Archive and Library,

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library of Congress, Massachusetts Historical

Society, New England Historical Genealogical Society, Newport Historical Society,

New-York Historical Society, New York Public Library, Pettaquamscutt Historical

Society, Presbyterian Historical Society, Princeton University Rare Book and Manuscript

Department, Rhode Island Historical Society, Trinity Church Wall Street Archive, and

University of Rhode Island Special Collections Unit. I especially want to thank and acknowledge the staff members of the Boston Athenæum, Congregational Library,

Connecticut State Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, and New-York Historical

Society; their abundant kindness and helpfulness made long research trips not only fruitful but also enjoyable.

Fellowships and grants made research trips across the North possible, and I am pleased to recognize the institutions that provided me with invaluable support. Some of my coursework was funded by a District of Colombia Daughters of the American

Revolution Graduate Fellowship, and my first research trip for this project was funded by the Cosmos Club Foundation’s Cosmos Scholars program. Significant research trips to

Boston and New York were funded by a Massachusetts Historical Society’s African

American Studies Fellowship (2010-2011), a Gilder Lehrman Fellowship (2011), and an

American Congregational Association-Boston Athenæum Fellowship (2011-2012). None of my graduate studies and research would have been possible without consistent support from the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, the University Writing Program, and the History Department at The George Washington University, which provided six years of a graduate teaching assistantship and occasional summer funding. From the History

Department I would especially like to thank Michael Weeks, William Becker, and Katrin

Schultheiss.

The hospitality of friends and family also made research trips pleasant and convenient. Thank you to Kevin Vetiac, Pete DeLuca, Tracy Noga, Geoff and Sam

Short, Brian and Meg Gregor, Jared and Jenai Humphreys, John and Kristen DeVries, and the Snoke family for welcoming me into your homes during my research travels.

I am grateful to the colleagues, friends, and family members who have read, critiqued, and commented on portions of my work. For the parts of this project that are noteworthy and illuminating, I share credit with these people; for the remaining faults in this work, I take sole responsibility. Thank you Stephen Jackson, Mary McPartland,

Felix Harcourt, Bell Clement, Natalie Deibel, Kelsey Flynn, Jon Keljik, Janet Kilian,

Sara Berndt, Andrea O’Brien, Jared Hardesty, Jonathan W. White, Joanne Pope Melish,

Carol Boles, and Christiane Boles for critically reading and responding to my work. In particular, I am grateful to Stephen Jackson for reading and evaluating not only every chapter of this dissertation but also nearly everything else I wrote in the last year during the process of writing, revising, defending, and applying for jobs.

I could not have had more supportive dissertation directors and committee members whose critical readings of my work greatly improved its quality. David

Silverman and Dewey Wallace, thank you for pushing me to write about a challenging topic, for patiently dealing with my questions and requests, for carefully reading, and for advocating for me in all regards. Eric Arnesen, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Robert J.

Cottrol, and Denver Brunsman, thank you for the thought-provoking questions and critiques that will continue to inspire me to improve my telling of this history.

At every stage of my education, there have been caring and capable educators, many of whom focused on history, who took the extra effort and time to encourage my academic growth. I know that without these teachers, I would not have succeeded in high school and college, much less earn a doctorate in history. Thank you to Kerry Kurtzman,

Alfred Corral, Joyce Dougan, Laura Douglas, John Thompson, Julianne Benzel, and

Cynthia L. Lyerly; excellent teachers and mentors all.

Finally, my family deserves recognition. Thank you to my sister, Allison, and my extended family for always cheering me forward. I dedicate this dissertation to my wife

Christiane, parents Bruce and Carol, and grandparents Beth, Jim, June, and Garth, who have supported my studies and this project in unique and vital ways. My parents and grandparents always demonstrated the value of education and hard work, and their

vi generous provisions made my undergraduate and master’s degrees at Boston College feasible. Thank you for setting your examples, believing in me, and backing my many years of study. And to my wife, Christiane, more than anyone, you have patiently borne the challenges and shared the joys of graduate studies with me; I am grateful for your indispensable love, advice, and encouragements.

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Abstract of Dissertation

Dividing the Faith: The Rise of Racially Segregated Northern Churches, 1730-1850

This dissertation uses the study of interracial church worship to argue that the

American North experienced a high level of racial integration in the early to mid- eighteenth century and became more racially segregated following the Revolution.

Churches, as both religious and social institutions, were on the frontlines of this change.

This work argues that most northern Protestants experienced formal religion in interracial contexts between 1730 and 1820, but it is also attentive to differences among denominations and to change over time. It argues that scholars should have a complex view of the religious agency of oppressed peoples because significant numbers of blacks and Indians chose to participate not only in the evangelical and revivalist denominations but also in the more hierarchical and traditional forms of Christianity. By scrutinizing the similar and dissimilar experiences of blacks and Indians in the North, this dissertation also contributes to the growing historiography on the construction of racial identities and helps to fill the need in the American historiography to “triangulate” racial dynamics during the colonial and early national eras.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Abstract of Dissertation ...... viii

Table of Contents ...... ix

List of Figures ...... x

List of Tables ...... xi

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: “Not of whites alone, but of blacks also”:

Black, Indian, and European Protestants, 1730-1749 ...... 18

Chapter 2: “I claim Jesus Christ to be my right Master”:

Interracial Religious Conflicts and Indian Separatists, 1740-1763 ...... 113

Chapter 3: Revolution, Antislavery, and the Diversification of

Interracial Religious Worship, 1763 to 1790 ...... 181

Chapter 4: City Churches and the Revolution:

The Diversification of Interracial Religious Worship, 1763 to 1790 ...... 246

Chapter 5: “To Restore Our Long Lost Race”:

The Rise of Separate Black Churches in the North, 1791-1820 ...... 309

Chapter 6: Black and Indian Christian Radicalism and the Jim Crow North, 1821-1850 ...... 377

Epilogue...... 431

Bibliography ...... 437

List of Figures

Figure 1-1: Map of Congregational and Anglican church locations in southern

New England that baptized or admitted blacks or Indians, 1730-1749 34

Figure 1-2: Old South (Third) Church Boston, built 1729 37

Figure 1-3: First Church (Old Brick) Boston 44

Figure 3-1: The Reverend Lemuel Haynes 203

Figure 4-1: Ezra Stiles, minister of Second Congregational

Church, Newport, R.I. 270

Figure 5-1: The African Meetinghouse, built by the First African

Baptist Church in 1806. 328

List of Tables

Table 1-1: Select list of Congregational churches in which blacks and/or Indians

were baptized and/or admitted to full communion, 1730-1749 29

Table 1-2: Black baptisms in Boston’s Congregational Churches 1730-174 41

Table 1-3: Select list of Congregational churches in which one or more Indians

were baptized and approximate number of baptisms, 1730-1749 53

Table 2-1: Black baptisms in Boston’s Congregational and Anglican

churches, 1730-1763 122

Table 2-2: Select list of Congregational churches in which two or

more blacks were baptized 1750-1763 (Connecticut, Massachusetts,

and Rhode Island) 128

Table 2-3: Select list of Church of England parishes in which two

or more blacks were baptized 1750-1763 133

Table 2-4: Selection of Churches in which one or more Indians were

baptized and approximate number of baptisms, 1750 to 1763 136

Table 3-1: Number of Slaves and Free Blacks Numerated in the 1790

Federal Census 190

Table 3-2: Congregational churches in which two or more blacks were

baptized and/or admitted to membership 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 193

Table 3-3: Episcopal churches in which two or more blacks were

baptized 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 205

Table 3-4: Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in

which two or more blacks were baptized and/or admitted to

membership 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 211

Table 3-5: Baptist churches in which two or more blacks were baptized

and/or admitted to membership 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 218

Table 3-6: Examples of Methodist Societies and number of white

and black members, 1790 229

Table 3-7: Select list of churches in which one or more Indians were

baptized or admitted and approximate numbers, 1750 to 1763 235

Table 4-1: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to Boston’s

Churches, 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 250

Table 4-2: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to Select

Newport Churches, 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 263

Table 4-3: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to Select

New York City Churches, 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 279

Table 4-4: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to Select

Philadelphia churches, 1764-1776 and 1777-1790 292

Table 5-1: Black churches by location founded 1791 to 1820 316

Table 5-2: Dutch Reformed churches in which two or more

blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820 336

Table 5-3 Presbyterian churches in which two or more blacks

were baptized and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820 339

Table 5-4: Congregational churches in which two or more blacks

were baptized and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820 343

Table 5-5: Predominantly white Episcopal churches in which

xii

two or more blacks were baptized, 1791-1820 347

Table 5-6: Lutheran churches in which two or more blacks were

baptized, 1791-1820 352

Table 5-7: Examples of predominantly white Baptist churches in which

two or more blacks were baptized or listed as members, 1791-1820 355

Table 5-8: Numbers of white and colored members in the Methodist

churches in northern states, 1796-1801 360

Table 5-9: White churches in which one or more Indians were baptized

and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820 363

Table 6-1: Congregational churches in southern New England and

New York with two or more black, Indian, or Afro-Indian

baptisms or members, 1821-1850 384

Table 6-2: Predominantly white Episcopal churches with two or more

black baptisms, 1821-1850 392

Table 6-3: Reformed and Presbyterian churches with two or more

black baptisms and/or black members, 1821-1850 396

Table 6-4: Baptist and Lutheran churches with two or more black

baptisms and/or black members, 1821-1850 400

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Introduction

In downtown Boston, on Tremont Street across from the Old Granary Burial

Ground, is the Tremont Temple Baptist Church. The current edifice, completed in 1896, is decorated in an imposing Florentine style that is uncommon among New England churches.1 Above one of the church’s doorways is written “First Integrated Church in

America – Organized 1838.” This congregation was indeed intended to be open to all people, as neither race nor class determined who could worship or where they could sit.

One of the leading founders, Timothy Gilbert, was an abolitionist who had been dismissed from the Charles Street Baptist Church because he had invited several African

Americans to sit with him in his ground-floor church pew. However, the claim that

Tremont Temple was the first integrated church in America is false. In 1738, a hundred years before Tremont Temple, nearly every church in Boston included black congregants, sometimes in large numbers. A few Boston churches of the eighteenth-century also included American Indians. The sentiment behind Tremont Temple’s claim reflects a blind-spot common in the historic memory of most Americans that this study seeks to correct.

This dissertation is a history of race relations in northern Protestant churches from the period of the First Great Awakening to the Second Great Awakening. It argues that a significant proportion of northern Protestants, and in some areas most Protestants, worshipped in interracial contexts between 1730 and 1820. Most Americans and many historians still think that the North’s churches were simply “white” institutions. To the extent that scholars recognize black or Indian participation in northern churches, they

1 Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler, From Meetinghouse to Megachurch: a Material and Cultural History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 96-98. 1 tend to associate it with only a few outlying or eccentric congregations. But no broad, comparative study of black and Indian church affiliation exits that treats both changes over time and denominational differences. This historiographical neglect obscures the rich interracial church history of the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions. This study traces levels of black and Indian participation in Congregational, Anglican, Dutch

Reformed, German Reformed, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Moravian, Methodist, and Baptist churches. These churches reflected the diversity of eighteenth and nineteenth-century northern societies, which recent generations of scholars have been describing with greater specificity and nuance.

Many of the North’s churches included interracial religious activity during the period of 1730 to 1820. Among some denominations, a majority of congregations were interracial. By interracial, I mean that people who contemporaries judged to be of different races jointly participated in almost all the religious activities and rituals of these churches. Numerous blacks and Indians were baptized, had their children baptized, partook of communion, listened to sermons, sang Psalms and hymns, and prayed, along with their fellow white congregants. These churches were interracial not only because of the physical presence of blacks and Indians but also because diverse people entered through religious rituals into a defined community of a local church that was imagined as part of a broader spiritual community. Interracial worship, however, does not imply that blacks and Indians received equal treatment in predominantly white churches. These churches generally did not allow blacks and Indians to vote in church affairs or to hold leadership or pastoral positions. They required blacks and Indians to occupy segregated seats in the balconies or in the back of the main floor during worship. Yet the fact

2 remains that blacks and Indians were present in and sometimes members of a sizable number of northern churches, thereby making churches one of the most common sites of interracial relations. In turn, churches also became important sites for the contestation of racial issues during an era of democratic ferment. The ways that racial issues were decided in churches influenced society more broadly because churches were one of the most common places of public gatherings.

No other historian has ever examined the levels of black, Afro-Indian, and Indian participation in so many northern churches and denominations, though a few recent historians have gestured in this direction. This work is influenced by Linford D. Fisher and Graham Russell Hodges, who have made significant use of church records in their histories. Fisher carefully details levels of Indian participation in the Congregational churches of southern New England during the early to late eighteenth century. He shows that significant numbers of Indians affiliated with Congregational churches in

Connecticut and Rhode Island in the 1740s, but that they generally withdrew from these churches by the 1750s. Hodges examines large numbers of church records from New

York and New Jersey from the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century and convincingly describes black participation levels in various types of churches.2 With these two exceptions, however, no other historian has used baptismal and membership lists from a large number of northern churches to study early black and

Indian religious history.

2 Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Culture in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665-1865 (Lanham, Md.: A Madison House Book, 1997); Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 3

Just as church historians have overlooked blacks and Indians, so too have historians of blacks and Indians slighted predominantly white churches as important institutions for those populations and church records as informative sources. Blacks and

Indians in northern colonial churches have been understudied partly because of the

“whitening” of New England’s history that persisted until quite recently. As Joanne

Melish argues, after the 1780s, “New England whites employed an array of strategies to

[…] efface people of color and their history in New England,” and only recent generations of historians have replaced this erasure with detailed histories of black and

Indian New Englanders. Blacks in northern churches have also been understudied partly because many scholars of church history have tended to dismiss early conversion and church participation of enslaved Africans as forms of oppression.3 Therefore, church records from predominantly white churches have been under-utilized as sources of black and Indian religious practices.

Some scholarship on the First and Second Great Awakenings exhibits a tendency to describe African Americans as particularly emotional in worship and whites as more rational. It is hard to disagree that blacks in a number of settings tended to favor charismatic churches, but there is also plenty of evidence, especially in the North, that significant numbers of blacks did not. Scholars who have argued that the emotionalism of revival preaching was alluring to blacks include Albert J. Raboteau, William D.

Piersen, Catherine Adams, and Elizabeth Pleck. This dissertation complicates the treatments of black religious life in the North by focusing on all the different types of churches in which blacks affiliated and the multiple factors that influenced their religious

3 Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 2. 4 choices.4 Historians have generally overemphasized the appeal of evangelical denominations, such as Methodists and Baptists, among northern blacks, especially during the eighteenth century. The fact is that significant portions of the North’s black populations chose to affiliate with more subdued forms of Protestantism, particularly

Anglican churches, before 1800. This dissertation provides a nuanced history of black religious choices and history of the North, and is even sensitive to differences between the mid-Atlantic and New England regions. One of the important contributions that this dissertation makes is to demonstrate that these groups affiliated not only with evangelical and revivalist churches but also with the more hierarchical and traditional forms of

Christianity between 1730 and 1850. Moreover, they did so for a variety of pragmatic and principled reasons.

There has also been a tendency among historians of African American churches and Christianity to read later developments back into the colonial period or Revolutionary era. This is especially easy to do given the lack of extant early religious sources written by northern blacks. We should not assume, however, that blacks in the colonial North automatically favored Baptist and Methodist traditions to the exclusion of other forms of

Protestantism just because blacks favored Baptists and Methodists by the 1830s and

1840s. This research contextualizes early nineteenth-century black churches within late

4 Raboteau’s treatment of African American Catholics and later African American religious history reflects a more complex and nuanced treatment of the relationships between religion, rationality, and emotions; Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 20-23; William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro- American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 68; Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 82-85, 101; Sylvia R Frey, “Shaking the Dry Bones: The Dialectic of Conversion,” in Black and White Cultural Interactions in the Antebellum South, edited by Ted Ownby (University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 33; Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 214.

5 colonial religious developments, and it tracks the levels of black participation in all the

North’s churches, not just Methodist and Baptist churches. When most scholars address black religious activity in these years, they overwhelmingly focus on black engagement with Methodist and Baptist churches and ignore their engagement with other churches in the North.5

In recent decades, a number of histories have been published that complicate the story of segregation and discrimination in churches in the South, and these histories inform my study. Conversely, there have been surprisingly few attempts to comprehensively portray race relations within and among churches in the North.

Histories by Jon Sensbach, Christine Heyrman, Charles Irons, Cynthia L. Lyerly,

Randolph F. Scully, and others chronicle race relations in southern churches. All these books reveal that surprising degrees of integration existed within some congregations in the South before the 1830s.6 As Sensbach, Heyrman, and Lyerly make clear, southern

5 For examples of histories that do not address African Americans in these years, see Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones; Timothy E. Fulop and Albert J. Raboteau, ed., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997); George W. Harper, A People so Favored of God: Boston’s Congregational Churches and Their Pastors, 1710-1760, Second Edition (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2007); C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). Exceptions to this statement include Cedrick May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Richard Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 6 Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997); Charles F. Irons, Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Jon F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Randolph F. Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740-1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Nicholas M. Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies 1650-1780 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009); and Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 6

Moravians, Baptists, and Methodists were all known for their acceptance of black members and their opposition, in some cases, to slavery and the white elite culture in the late colonial and Early Republic periods. Christians in these denominations accepted both enslaved and free blacks into their fellowships and churches on semi-egalitarian bases. While each denomination eventually moved away from its relatively egalitarian stances toward women and blacks, there still remained regular interactions between white and black Christians until at least the Civil War. In terms of the experience of black

Anglicans, Robert Olwell examines how slaves were selectively admitted into South

Carolina’s Anglican churches in ways that reinforced the slaveholders’ power but also occasionally reversed the normal hierarchies of class and race. All these studies have in part inspired and influenced the approach of this dissertation.

Though Americans have tended to think of the North as a “raceless” society because of the assumed unimportance of slavery there, its religious life was in fact characterized by racial integration in the early- to mid-eighteenth century. This dissertation builds on the works of a growing number of scholars who have been describing, with greater and greater levels of sophistication, the lives of blacks and

Indians in the North in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including histories by

Daniel R. Mandell, Jean M. O’Brien, John Wood Sweet, Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Graham

Russell Hodges, Robert K. Fitts, Catherine Adams, Elizabeth Pleck, Joanne Pope Melish,

Richard Bailey, and Gary B. Nash.7 Building on this broad scholarship, my work furthers

7 Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North; Hodges, Root & Branch; Robert K. Fitts, 7 the conversation by demonstrating that the North had a dynamic history of racial integration and segregation and that Protestant churches were on the frontlines of creating the first Jim Crow society in American history during the early nineteenth century.

Furthermore, since churches were at the frontlines of the North’s move toward segregation after the Revolution, this work challenges the image, promoted by events in the 1850s and 1860s, that northern churches were always progressive forces on the subject of racial justice.

Racial integration in churches included Indians and Afro-Indians as well as blacks, and this speaks to the need in American historiography to “triangulate” racial dynamics during the colonial and early national eras. Works by Daniel Mandell, David

Silverman, John Wood Sweet, and others show the necessity of including Indians in the study of race and racism in the North. Daniel Mandell argues that “examining relations between Indians and blacks in southern New England illuminates the fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history, and it offers new insight into the complexity and uncertainty of ethnic identity and assimilation.”8 This dissertation contributes to this work by examining the role that religion played in the categorization and creation of racial castes and identities. By scrutinizing similar and dissimilar experiences of blacks and Indians in the North, this dissertation also

Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth Century Narragansett, Rhode Island (Rhode Island: Taylor & Francis, 1998); Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Melish, Disowning Slavery; Bailey, Race and Redemption. 8 Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880,” Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (Sept. 1998), 470, 466; Daniel R. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 181-183; Sweet, Bodies Politic. 8 contributes to the growing historiography on the construction of racial identities in early

America and shows the need to treat churches as important social institutions, not just religious ones. The construction of racial identities in churches impacted and reflected broader social change.

Several prominent scholars have debated whether the mainland British colonies in this period of time were becoming more like their political and economic center, Great

Britain, or whether the colonies were becoming distinctly “American” in the years before the imperial crisis that concluded with an independent United States, and this dissertation supports the Anglicization thesis.9 The history of religious integration and segregation between 1730 and 1763, in some ways, supports both sides of this debate, but the growing number of black and Indians in Protestant churches was part of an Anglicization process that entailed Evangelical Protestantism becoming an important part of British patriotism and identity. The inclusion of many blacks and occasionally Indians within the North’s Protestant churches made colonial churches look substantially different than almost any church in Great Britain. However, the successful spread of the Church of

England parishes, including the incorporation of many blacks into Anglican worship, meant that worship in the northern colonies had never before been more similar to worship in England than in during the 1750s and 1760s. Moreover, blacks and whites in

9 John Murrin, T. H. Breen, Brendan McConville, Ned Landsman, and others have argued that the colonies were becoming much more like Great Britain (“Anglicized”) in their politics, legal system, consumer culture, intellectual life, religious life, deference, and participation in the empire’s military campaigns, on the eve of the break with Britain. Jon Butler and Michael Zuckerman emphasize more a distinctively Americanizing trends. John M. Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1966; T.H. Breen, “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 4 (Oct.,1986), 467-499; Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture 1680-1760 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Nicolas Canny and Anthony Pagden, ed., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 9 other denominations in northern colonies were firmly attached to the political and economic policies of Great Britain between 1750 and 1763, especially in their support of imperial wars that combatted Catholic enemies and helped spread British Protestantism.

The inclusion of blacks and Indians in so many of the North’s churches by 1776 represents a triumph of an Anglicization because greater numbers of colonists, including blacks and Indians, were participating in the types of Evangelical Protestantism that was drawing the colonies closer to Britain.

This dissertation also compares the rise of separate Indian and separate black churches. This comparison reveals some of the important shared experiences and also disparate conditions of these groups of people in the North. Indians who had affiliated in predominantly white churches in southern New England withdrew and founded new churches in the 1750s, and blacks across the North, especially in the mid-Atlantic, began founding separate churches after 1790. These churches became segregated not simply because whites did not want to worship alongside people of color, but because Indians and blacks themselves chose to found these churches for both religious and non-religious reasons. This comparative story also shows that the North became more racially segregated as slavery collapsed and revolutionary political principles took hold.

This study historicizes the rise of separate churches by comparing several significantly different early black churches. Historian and theologian Henry H. Mitchell discusses “the inevitable desire of mixed churches to separate by race.” By stating that segregation or separation was “inevitable,” however, Mitchell and others avoid the difficult task of analyzing the specific circumstances that produced segregation. An

“inevitable” history has the tendency to over simplify and downplay the agency and

10 options available to blacks. This tendency to describe racially separate churches as inevitable has also made some historians dismissive toward those blacks who chose to stay in predominantly white congregations after separate black churches were formed.

Mitchell and others have done well in explaining how “black religion in North America had roots in African and the Caribbean,” but they have done so at the expense of the agency of individual African Americans because they describe their actions as inevitable.10

Those unfamiliar with researching eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth- century blacks and Indians will be surprised by how few quotations from these people appear in this dissertation, especially in the chapters that cover 1730 to 1764. This lack of black and Indian voices, especially before the 1770s, is due to the fact that so very few written sources were created by these people and even fewer have survived. Even sources written by whites about what blacks may have thought or believed are rare.

Nearly all extant black and Indian sources related to religion that do exist from the period of 1730 to 1776 from the North are included in this study. As the evidence in this dissertation makes clear, many blacks and Indians willingly participated in predominantly white churches by attending, being baptized, becoming members, and taking communion.

However, most of the Indians and most of the blacks who had participated in predominantly white churches eventually formed separate churches instead. Rarely do first person accounts or even slightly removed secondary accounts say much about why they participated in white churches and why they left when they did. In a field of study where few written sources are available, I try to construct reasonable explanations of the

10 Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), xvi and 51. 11 actions of individuals who did not generally create or leave written explanations. As a result, some of the arguments and explanations in this dissertation are speculative. These arguments, however, explain observable occurrences in ways that are supported by available evidence and that are respectful of the complexities and diversity of early blacks and Indians. Though imperfect, this approach is better than drawing conclusions from a wider range of sources whose origins were outside the time and geographic specificity of this study.

The type of sources most central to this dissertation are church records, particularly lists of members and persons baptized. These sources, written by white ministers or clerks, are the best and most reliable sources for determining levels of black and Indian participation in predominantly white churches. That said, some of the people who wrote church records did not use racial notations, which in some cases makes it much more difficult for us to determine black or Indian participation levels. Whites, especially after 1780, increasingly described Indians or Afro-Indians as blacks, which also conceals some Indian participants in these churches. The analysis in this dissertation does not imply that the racial identifiers or categories used by whites necessarily matched the ways that blacks and Indians identified themselves. Moreover, these sources and the records of white churches provide hardly any specific information regarding why blacks or Indians chose to affiliate with any given church. Despite the drawbacks to this information, by surveying large numbers of churches and identifying general trends, this dissertation describes the religious choices and preferences of many northern blacks and

Indians with greater detail and nuance than has ever been presented by historians thus far.

This study does not make claims about the extent to which northern blacks or

Indians were Christians. There is no reliable way to even determine the portion of a city’s or state’s black or Indian population that was baptized since population data for the colonial period was so inconsistent and incomplete and since baptism was generally a once in a lifetime event. Moreover, I do not assume that the attendance at a church or the participation in a Christian ritual, such as baptism or communion, signifies anything concrete about the beliefs or doctrines held by the participant. Rituals can signify a wide range of meanings to the people who participate in them. Blacks and Indians practiced

Christianity and adopted at least some of its theology, but they did not necessarily believe the same things as European Christians and many of them incorporated Christianity into preexisting beliefs, rituals, and spiritual practices.11

Finally, this dissertation examines black and Indian participation rates in most of the North’s Protestant denominations, but it does not, for the most part, address the

Society of Friends (Quakers). In the period in question here, Quakers did not generally proselytize and they did not baptize members. Since much of this study is dependent on baptismal records and since the Society of Friends’ mixed attitudes toward blacks have been well studied by others, they are excluded from my study. Although Quakers eventually prohibited slaveholding among their members and opened schools for blacks,

11 Michael D. McNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity,” Church History 69, no. 4 (Dec., 2000), 834-859; Neal Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North America,” Ethnohistory 50, no. 2 (Spring 2003), 247-259; David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, “The Sociology of Conversion,” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984), 167-190; Jane T. Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior's Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 54, no. 4 (Oct. 1997), 739-744. 13 they only rarely sought or allowed blacks to become members of their societies.12

Quakers proved strikingly different from the North’s other Protestant denominations.

Chapter Outline:

The first chapter of this study covers the years 1730 to 1749 and details the levels of black and Indian participation in the North’s dominant Protestant churches –

Congregational, Anglican, Dutch and German Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and

Moravian – and argues that Indian and black participation was not limited to New Light or revival-focused congregations because blacks and some Indians also chose to participate in churches not associated with revivals. Most blacks and Indians in this period chose to affiliate with Anglican or Congregational churches, but a smaller number affiliated with Lutheran and Moravian churches. Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches, conversely, rarely baptized or admitted blacks. The lack of missionary activities in these denominations and policies that made baptism less accessible to blacks and Indians prevented their widespread participation in these sects. Chapter One also argues that the participation of blacks and Indians, even those who were enslaved, in these churches reflected their willing choices and religious agency.

The second chapter, which covers the period of 1740 to 1763, deals with the conflicts between whites, blacks, and Indians that resulted from the widespread diversity evident in the North’s Anglican and Congregational churches. It also chronicles the rise of new, separate Indian churches in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and elsewhere, and

12 Scholars have thoroughly addressed the Society of Friends and its relationship to abolitions and blacks, including: Ryan P. Jordon, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Jane R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Henry J. Cadbury, “Negro Membership in the Society of Friends,” Journal of Negro History, 21 (1936), 151-213. 14 addresses why Indians, who had affiliated with predominantly white churches, formed independent churches roughly four decades before blacks did. The lack or relative availability of community resources and attention to the benefits verses disadvantages of affiliation explains not only the timing of the new Indian churches but also the later rise of separate black churches. Although the available sources that show black and white conflicts in churches are scarce, the structure of power that kept many blacks enslaved was also present in churches and led to some tensions and conflicts between whites and blacks.

Chapters Three and Four together cover the revolutionary era from 1764 to 1790 and argue that a dramatic diversification of interracial worship occurred during this period, especially in the mid-Atlantic. With the rise of American Methodist churches and the expansion of Baptist churches, many new congregations included both white and black members. In addition, Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches also began to include some blacks, especially after 1780. These two chapters argue that, contrary to common perceptions, the development of white antislavery opinions did not generally precede or cause the increase in black participation in these churches. In some cases, black participation grew in churches that did not articulate any antislavery stances, and, in other cases, black participation declined in some of the churches that did promote abolition. Chapter Four, which compares the churches within the North’s four largest cities, shows that the diversification of interracial worship occurred despite the disruptions of the Revolutionary War and that blacks made religious choices after they considered much more than a church’s antislavery politics.

Chapter Five addresses the rise of separate black churches across the North between 1791 and 1820 and the surprising increase in black participation in predominantly white Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches during the same period.

It also addresses how Indian churches in the North were sites of interracial worship, as blacks and Afro-Indians joined Indian communities. Black communities in many cities by the 1790s had the resources necessary to support independent churches, and many blacks, like their Indian predecessors, decided that the benefits of affiliation in predominantly white churches, including access to education and spiritual sustenance, no longer outweighed the disadvantages, such as segregated seating and proscriptions against holding leadership positions. However, some blacks, including a minority of those who lived in major cities and those who lived in rural locations, still had reasons that favored affiliation with predominantly white churches. Finally, this chapter addresses the rapid and multiple changes in how whites conceived of and categorized blacks and Indians in the North.

The last chapter covers the swift decline of black participation in predominantly white churches between 1821 and 1850. In this period, anti-black violence peaked in the

North and Jim Crow style segregation spread across northern society. In response to these developments, African Americans and Indians articulated radical, Christian critiques of white society and white Christians. Blacks and Indians in the North chose to leave white churches but they did not leave Christianity, which they used as the institutional and intellectual basis for continued demands for equality and respect from white fellow-believers. This chapter also addresses the continued participation of very small numbers of blacks in white churches, and an integrationist movement led by both

16 blacks and whites that unsuccessfully argued for the reintegration of the North’s churches in the 1830s and 1840s as a means of combating the continued racism that blacks and

Indians faced.

The diversity evident in many of the North’s eighteenth-century churches, and the change over time in black and Indian participation in predominantly white churches, is a story that includes evidence of the tragic oppression of blacks and Indians in America.

However, it also contains moments in which religion challenged the prejudices of white northerners. For people more accustomed to thinking in terms of contemporary

American churches, this is a surprising history indeed.

Chapter 1: “Not of whites alone, but of blacks also”: Black, Indian, and European Protestants, 1730-1749

For the Reverend Eliphalet Adams of the First Church of Christ in New London,

Connecticut, the sacrament of baptism was a sacred duty performed regularly for the children of believing parents and adults who made professions of faith in Christ. Infants, children, and adults could all receive this sacrament, either on the testimony of a guardian’s faith or by their own profession. Children James, Ziba, Sylvanus, and Ishmael and adults Katherine Garrett and Phillis were among the people baptized by Adams between January and October 1738. While participation in these rites was common for many New Englanders, these individuals differed from the majority of congregants at

First Church New London. Garrett was a Pequot Indian and the others were enslaved blacks owned by the Reverend Adams. Although a minority in the New London church, they were hardly the only non-white worshippers. In the 1730s and 1740s, there were at least sixteen Indians (nine adults and seven children) and fifteen blacks (eight adults and seven children) baptized at this church.1 At the very same time, people of color from across the region were joining presumably “white churches” as individuals and in small groups. Collectively, they were making those churches more representative of the diversity in colonial society. Sunday morning might be the most segregated time of the

1 Adams was not consistent in identifying people as Indian or black, so these numbers might be a little low; Manuscript Records of the First Church of Christ in New London, microfilm, CSL, pp. 23 and 128; Connecticut Church Records, State Library Index, New London First Congregational Church, 1670- 1888 (Hartford: CSL, 1949), 449-453; Linford D. Fisher, ‘Traditionary Religion’: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-1776 (ThD diss. Harvard University, 2008), 400-410. Frances Manwaring Caulkins writes that “Baptisms followed close upon births; numerous instances may be found where the child was but one, two or three days old; children of ministers, deacons, &c, were usually less than a week old. To renew, or own the covenant of baptism, entitled a parent to the privilege of presenting his or her children for baptism. And not only children, but grandchildren, children bound to the person as apprentices, and slaves, might be presented by giving a pledge for their Christian education.”; See his History of New London, Connecticut: From the first survey of the coast in 1612 to 1852 (Hartford: Press of Case, Tiffany and Company, 1852), 194. 18 week in modern American society, but that was not the case during the tenure of

Eliphalet Adams and his contemporaries.2

This chapter addresses integration and segregation in northern Protestant churches during the era of the Great Awakening, a period of community-specific religious revivals in many locations across the British Atlantic world. During the 1730s and 1740s, significant numbers of blacks and Indians were baptized in Congregational churches in southern New England and in Anglican churches from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire.

Strikingly, most people in southern New England and a significant minority of people in the rest of the North experienced formal religion in interracial contexts between 1730 and

1749. The willing participation of many blacks and Indians in these churches made them sites of interracial worship. Levels of black and Indian participation and affiliation can best be determined through baptismal and membership lists, but the daily presence of these minorities in churches was significant too. Many churches were interracial religious communities because blacks and Indians engaged in the same religious activities as whites, including baptism, communion, public worship, singing, and other communal religious events. Furthermore, a marked number of English colonists and some German colonists sought to make their congregations interracial by seeking to incorporate blacks and Indians into their church communities.

In the 1730s and 1740s, long before separate black churches were formed, black

Christians were regularly connected to predominantly white churches. The North had a black population that exceeded fifteen thousand by 1730, made up overwhelmingly of slaves to white colonists. Although separate Indian churches existed before 1730, Indians

2 Although he was not the first to state this trend, Martin Luther King Jr. is often cited as observing that Sunday mornings are the most segregated time in America. 19 began to participate in predominantly white churches in substantial numbers only during the Great Awakening. Even though black and Indian Christians produced few written records in the 1730s and 1740s, their participation in some churches and their absence from others reveal the extent of their agency in religious matters and also their desires and preferences for a variety of Christian denominations. The various levels of black and

Indian church affiliation also indicate some of the different opinions of whites regarding whether blacks and Indians should be proselytized and what their status within churches should be.

Historians have overstated the role of revivalism in causing black and Indian participation in predominantly white churches in the North. Historians of African

American religious history, in particular, have overemphasized the role of the Great

Awakening in the religious history of northern blacks.3 The emotional preaching and lay- participation in religious services of the Great Awakening, which was clearly an important cause of some black and Indian participation, is often misidentified as the primary – or even only – source of their participation in Christian churches. Awakenings, whether seen as localized revivals or as a “great,” multi-faceted Revival, are less important than historians have argued for understanding black and Indian Christianity in the colonial era. In some of the New England churches that became centers of revivalism, Indian participation increased from hardly any adherents to a noticeable minority of members. Some pastors and churches that promoted revival did have

3 For examples of historians who have argued that emotionalism of revival preaching was alluring to blacks see: Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 21-22; William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro- American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 68; Catherine Adams and Elizabeth Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 82-85, 101; Sylvia R Frey, “Shaking the Dry Bones: The Dialectic of Conversion,” in Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interactions in the Antebellum South (University Press of Mississippi, 1993), 33. 20 amazing success in bringing Indians into churches. Likewise, in some revival focused congregations, blacks were among the broader population who were convinced of their need for repentance and conversion. This dissertation qualifies the history of revivalism, however, by showing that black and Indian participation was not limited to revivalist churches and that significant numbers of blacks and some Indians also chose to affiliate with anti-revivalist or traditional churches.4 While the First Great Awakening encouraged greater numbers of blacks and Indians to enter churches, the revivals can explain only so much. The identification of revivals should not substitute for a more nuanced understanding of black and Indian church affiliation during the 1730s and 1740s because different forms of Christianity were appealing to blacks and Indians for disparate reasons.5

This chapter examines Protestant denominations one-by-one because the extent of black and Indian participation varied greatly by denomination and region. In the

Congregational churches of southern New England and the Church of England congregations throughout the North, blacks and Indians were regular and active participants in the Christian sacraments. In contrast, few blacks or Indians were baptized in Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, or Presbyterian churches, which were located primarily in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Some Lutheran and Moravian churches, also located in the mid-Atlantic, did baptize these minorities, but at lower rates than the Congregationalists and Anglicans. The differences among these denominations

4 John Sweet argues that some blacks and Indians found Old Light, anti-revivalist churches appealing. I am furthering this argument by detailing participation levels in a wide number of churches. John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 108-110, 123. 5 Histories of the “Great Awakening” include: Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton University Press, 2001). 21 suggest that the conditions of blacks and Indians differed substantially among northern colonies.

Explanations exist for the differences in blacks and Indian participation. The different levels of black and Indian participation in churches were affected by the laws that regulated slavery, the portion of a colony’s populations that was black or Indian, and the existence in some denominations of missionary organizations. Above all, differences in the practice and theology of baptism and debates regarding the status of Christian slaves influenced the rates of black and Indian baptisms in each denomination. As these various churches and denominations debated about who could and who could not be baptized or admitted to full membership, they made access to Christian sacraments either easier or more difficult for the enslaved blacks and Indians in their midst. The baptismal practices among Congregationalists, which were influenced by the Half-Way Covenant, made baptism more accessible to blacks and Indians. Church of England and Lutheran churches made the sacrament of baptism, and even communion, similarly accessible. In contrast, Dutch Reformed churches did not make baptism accessible through any measure such as the Half-Way Covenant. Dutch churches required admittance to full membership for an un-baptized adult who wished to be baptized, and this higher standard for baptism was a weighty factor in making black and Indian participation more difficult and less frequent in Dutch Reformed churches.

These findings challenge much of the existing scholarship on religion in the colonial North by arguing that a significant amount of white, black, and Indian interaction occurred in the North’s churches. Historians have underestimated the participation of blacks and Indians in colonial churches by relying too heavily on the

22 letters and diaries of missionaries and ministers. Church records, which note baptisms, members, marriages, and deaths, reveal trends in black and Indian participation that contradict missionary laments about poor success rates in ministering to these groups.

Perhaps even dozens of conversions might have seemed few to missionaries ardent for grander results. American religious history has not adequately followed the scholarship on early America that incorporates blacks and Indians into the center of the historical narrative, and this dissertation seeks to help remedy that deficiency.

For some colonists the question of whether slaves should be catechized, baptized, and admitted to churches intersected with questions regarding whether the Christian gospel truly applied to all people; whether blacks and Indians were inferior humans; and whether Christianity and slavery were compatible. Some white Christians saw that baptizing blacks and Indians could challenge the exploration of these groups, and therefore they blocked their entrance into churches. Dutch Reformed pastor Henry

Selyns of New York, for example, believed that enslaved blacks “wanted nothing else than to deliver their children from bodily slavery” when they requested baptism and as a result he rarely baptized blacks.6 Anglicans in New York helped pass laws in the early eighteenth century to specifically broadcast that baptizing slaves did not lead to their emancipation. Most white Congregationalist and Anglicans and some German Protestant saw no problem with enslaved blacks within their churches. For these Christians, black and Indian church members reinforced instead of challenged the existing social hierarchies of race and class, and the inclusion of black or Indian worshippers did not cause them to reflect upon the exploitation of these groups. By attending to the

6 Quoted Gerald Francis De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,” Church History 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1971), 432. 23 differences in these denominations and regions, this chapter begins to explain why blacks and Indians were regular and active participants in some of the North’s churches but not in others.

Blacks and Indians in the North 1630 to 1730

Already by 1730, blacks, Indians, and Europeans in the northern colonies had been coexisting, although rarely peaceably, for more than a century. During the century that followed the founding of Massachusetts Bay, the number of Europeans and blacks grew substantially in the North while war, enslavement, poverty, and diseases diminished

Indian populations. The three groups interacted daily in homes, marketplaces, and churches, and at least a minimal understanding of the conditions of blacks and Indians in the North from 1630 to 1730 is necessary for understanding their religious actions in the

1730s and 1740s.

Even before English and Dutch migrants created permanent settlements in

Massachusetts and New York, the Indian tribes that lived in the northern woodlands and coastal regions had traded with Europeans and had felt the devastating effects of

European diseases. Epidemic diseases continued to have a heavy impact on Indian communities in the North. Initially, Europeans were dependent on Indians for trade and even food, but as European settlements grew in strength and size, colonists increasingly sought to claim more Indian land and labor for themselves. Some attempts were made to convert Indians to Christianity, especially between the 1640s and 1675. Puritan minister

John Eliot established fourteen Indian “Praying Towns” for Christian Indians in

Massachusetts and Thomas Mayhew Jr. and Richard Bourne established churches among

24 the Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. But conflict rather than charity more often characterized English and Indian relations. Several major wars and numerous smaller conflicts occurred between Indians and colonists, and colonists often convinced one tribe to fight against another by capitalizing on longstanding tribal differences. The

Pequot War of 1636-1637 devastated what had been one of the most powerful tribes in

New England. King Philip’s War in 1675-1676 ended with similar devastation for the

Wampanoag, Narragansett, Podunk, and Nipmuck tribes: “an already declining population of approximately 11,000 in southern New England experienced an estimated

5,000 casualties.” In addition to deaths in battle, English colonists enslaved and displaced many other Indians. As Margaret Ellen Newell notes, “New England armies, courts, and magistrates enslaved more than 1,300 Indian men, women, and children in the seventeenth century alone.”7 Some of these slaves were exported to other parts of the

Atlantic world. Despite the substantial losses from war and disease, eighteenth-century

Indian communities, many of which had fought on the side of the English in King

Philip’s War, remained throughout the North. Wampanoag communities could be found near Plymouth and on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket in Massachusetts.

There was a Narragansett reservation in Charlestown, Rhode Island, and the Mohegans and Pequots held reservations in southeastern Connecticut. The Montauketts and

Shinnecocks were a substantial presence on Long Island. More than a dozen different tribes, including Delawares and Shawnees, lived in polyglot communities on the

Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. Smaller Indian enclaves existed near Farmington,

Kent, Bridgetown, and Lyme Connecticut, near Worcester in central Massachusetts, and

7 Margaret Ellen Newell, “Indian Slavery in Colonial New England,” in Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 31. 25 at Crossweeksung and Cranberry, New Jersey. The Iroquois Confederation remained, six nations strong, in the northern and western parts of New York as a buffer between the

English colonies and New France.8

Colonists forcibly brought African slaves to northern colonies within the first decades of European settlement. The abundance of land and scarcity of labor, even in the absence of staple crop economies, made slaves and indentured servants highly valued.

Many of the slaves carried to the North came in small numbers of two or three at a time, and most came from other parts of the Americas. The Dutch West India Company was especially active in bringing slaves to New Netherland. “At the time of English conquest in 1664,” Ira Berlin explains, “slaves comprised about 20 percent of the population of the city and about 5 percent of the population of the entire colony, a proportion not substantially different from that of the Chesapeake region at the time.” Between 1700 and 1730, perhaps 70 percent of slaves that New Yorker purchased originated or had first lived elsewhere in the Americas.9 The first enslaved blacks in Boston came on a ship named Desire in 1638. The number of blacks grew following the Pequot War of the

8 Important books on Indians in the colonial North include: James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essay in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity 1745-1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: the 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Richard W. Cogley, John Eliot's Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Daniel R. Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Nathaniel Philbrick, Abram’s Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island (Nantucket, Mass: Mill Hill Press, 1998); David Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sweet, Bodies Politic. 9 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 49, 51. 26

1630s as colonists sold Indian prisoners of war to the West Indies in exchange for enslaved Africans. Enslaved blacks were engaged in all types of work in the North, from farming and fishing to skilled crafts and manual labor. As Lawrence Towner writes, “no task was too menial, or too skilled,” for the enslaved laborers in the North to undertake, and most blacks lived and worked in close proximity to whites.10

Berlin shows that “slaves were neither an inconsequential element in northern economic development nor an insignificant portion of the northern population during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” There were approximately 14,081 black slaves in the North in 1720 and the number grew to 30,172 by 1750; more than a third of these blacks were in New York. Blacks were mostly clustered near port cities and towns, though they could be found practically anywhere in colonial America.11 Most of the colonial North should be described as societies with slaves, which is to say, as societies that had slaves but did not rely exclusively on them. However, places such as

Narragansett, Rhode Island and Monmouth County, New Jersey can be properly called slave societies because of the centrality of enslaved labor to their economy and society.12

The northern British mainland colonies were already ethnically and religiously diverse by

1730, and they continued to become more so over the course of the eighteenth century.13

10 Lawrence W. Towner, A Good Master Well Served: Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620-1750 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 115. 11 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 54 and 369. 12 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665-1865 (Lanham, Md.: A Madison House Book, 1997); Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England's Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth Century Narragansett, Rhode Island (Rhode Island: Taylor & Francis, 1998). 13 Important books on blacks in the colonial North include: Berlin, Many Thousands Gone; Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North; Robert K. Fitts, Inventing New England's Slave Paradise; Towner, A Good Master Well Served; Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom; John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic; Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626- 1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community 1720-1840 27

This diversity was reflected in many of the churches of the North, and was most clearly evident in the Congregational churches of southern New England.

Congregational Churches in Southern New England

Blacks and Indians participated in a large number of Congregational churches in southern New England between 1730 and 1749. In churches across Massachusetts,

Rhode Island, and Connecticut, they not only attended but were also baptized and accepted by whites as members.14 Because so many Congregational churches included black baptisms and members and because social conventions encouraged broad church attendance, it is likely that almost all Congregational churches included black attendees at worship services. Table 1-1 provides a list of some of the Congregational churches in southern New England in which blacks and/or Indians participated. The churches on this list had at least two people identified as black or Indian in baptismal or membership records between 1730 and 1749. This information is also presented in the map below.

While some congregations in New England only baptized one black in the course of a decade, other congregations baptized up to ten in a year. Though blacks and Indians were most prevalent in the churches of port towns and/or communities located near

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Joe William Trotter and Eric Ledell Smith, ed., African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550- 1812 (New York: Penguin Books, 1969); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997); Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Athenaeum, 1969). 14 Historians have long been aware of some blacks who were baptized or joined Congregational churches, especially famous individuals such as Phillis Wheatley. However, since no broad survey of black participation levels has been conducted until now, most historians who address this topic treat black members and baptisms as somewhat isolated events and not as the common practices that it was. 28

Indian reservations, they also appeared practically everywhere in this region. They were a regular part of southern New England church life.

Table 1-1: Select list of Congregational churches in which blacks and/or Indians were baptized and/or admitted to full communion, 1730-1749

Church Names Town/City Location State Location Congregational Church in Canterbury Canterbury Connecticut New London First Congregational Church New London Connecticut North Woodstock Congregational Church North Woodstock Connecticut Woodstock Hill First Church Woodstock Connecticut Cromwell First Congregational Church Cromwell Connecticut Redding Congregational Church Redding Connecticut Bolton Congregational Church Bolton Connecticut East Haddam First Congregational Church East Haddam Connecticut Griswold First Congregational Church Griswold Connecticut Norwich First Congregational Church Norwich Connecticut Fairfield First Congregational Church Fairfield Connecticut Lebanon First Congregational Church Lebanon Connecticut New Haven First Congregational Church New Haven Connecticut Middletown First Congregational Church Middletown Connecticut Colchester First Congregational Church Colchester Connecticut Stonington First Congregational Church Stonington Connecticut North Stonington Congregational Church North Stonington Connecticut Windham Congregational Church Windham Connecticut Old Saybrook Congregational Church Old Saybrook Connecticut Oxford Congregational Church Oxford Connecticut Southington First Congregational Church Southington Connecticut Groton First Congregational Church Groton Connecticut Old Lyme First Congregational Church Old Lyme Connecticut Bozrah Congregation Church Bozrah Connecticut Lisbon Newent Congregational Church Lisbon Connecticut Hampton Congregational Church Hampton Connecticut Hartford First Congregational Church Hartford Connecticut East Hartford First Congregational Chh East Hartford Connecticut New Hartford First Congregational Chh New Hartford Connecticut Newtown First Congregational Church Newtown Connecticut Mansfield First Congregational Church Mansfield Connecticut Portland First Congregational Church Portland Connecticut Plainfield First Congregational Church Plainfield Connecticut Somers Congregational Church Somers Connecticut Suffield Congregational Church Suffield Connecticut First Church Boston Boston Massachusetts

Second Church Boston Boston Massachusetts Old South (Third) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts Brattle Square (Fourth) Church Boston Massachusetts New North (Fifth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts New South (Sixth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts New Brick (Seventh) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts Hollis Street (Eighth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts West (Ninth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts First Church Charlestown Charlestown Massachusetts First Parish Church Dorchester Dorchester Massachusetts West Roxbury First Congregational West Roxbury Massachusetts First Church Cambridge Cambridge Massachusetts First Parish Church Brookline Brookline Massachusetts Scituate First Church Scituate Massachusetts Scituate Second Church Scituate Massachusetts First Church in Bridgewater West Bridgewater Massachusetts Topsfield Congregational Church Topsfield Massachusetts Rowley First Congregational Church Rowley Massachusetts Methuen First Congregational Church Methuen Massachusetts Plymouth Congregational Church Plymouth Massachusetts First Church Lancaster Lancaster Massachusetts Brockton Christ Congregational Church Brockton Massachusetts Pilgrim Congregational Church Merrimac Merrimac Massachusetts First Parish Hingham Hingham Massachusetts First Congregational Church Weymouth Weymouth Massachusetts First Congregational Church Watertown Watertown Massachusetts Milton Congregational Church Milton Massachusetts Middleborough First Church of Christ Middleborough Massachusetts Boxford First Congregational Church Boxford Massachusetts Boxford Second Congregational Church Boxford Massachusetts Bradford First Congregational Church Bradford Massachusetts First Church Abington Abington Massachusetts Amesbury North Parish Church Amesbury Massachusetts Middleton Congregational Church Middleton Massachusetts Stoneham Congregational Church Stoneham Massachusetts First Church in Salem Salem Massachusetts Northampton First Church Northampton Massachusetts Truro Congregational Church Truro Massachusetts Tewksbury Congregational Church Tewksbury Massachusetts Wenham Congregational Church Wenham Massachusetts First Church of Reading (Wakefield) Wakefield Massachusetts First Church of Rumney Marsh (Revere) Revere Massachusetts Weston Congregational Church Weston Massachusetts First Church Falmouth Falmouth Massachusetts

Second Church Wrentham Wrentham (Franklin) Massachusetts Barnstable West Parish Church Barnstable Massachusetts Barnstable East Parish Church Barnstable Massachusetts Brewster Congregational Church Brewster Massachusetts Second Church in Rochester (Mattapoisett) Mattapoisett Massachusetts First Church Salisbury Salisbury Massachusetts Beverly First Parish Church Beverly Massachusetts Chebacco Church or Fourth Chh Ipswich Ipswich Massachusetts First Church Hanover Hanover Massachusetts Evangelical Congregational Chh Grafton Grafton Massachusetts Newman Congregation Church East Providence Rhode Island First Congregational Church of Barrington Barrington Rhode Island United Congreg. Church Little Compton Little Compton Rhode Island Bristol First Congregational Church Bristol Rhode Island First Congregational Church Newport Newport Rhode Island Westerly Congregational Church Westerly Rhode Island New South Congregational Church Portsmouth Portsmouth Hampshire New Newington Congregational Church Newington Hampshire See the Bibliography for Sources

Blacks and Indians participated in a very high number of Congregational churches in part because Congregationalists were the most numerous and influential Christians in

New England. Nearly every village, town, and city in Massachusetts and Connecticut had at least one Congregational church. These churches were outgrowths of the churches established by seventeenth-century English Puritan migrants to New England. Rooted in

Puritanism, they all still maintained moderate to strict forms of Reformed Christianity

(Calvinism). Rhode Island was more heterogeneous than any other part of New England, with greater numbers of Baptists, Quakers, and Jews, but it still had numerous

Congregational churches in the eighteenth century.

The Puritans who founded many of New England’s Congregational churches had originally sought to purify churches in England by removing remaining vestiges of

Roman Catholicism and by promoting greater piety. In America, Puritans continued their mission by limiting church membership and sacraments to the elect, those people who were believed to be predestined by God for salvation. In the words of Edmund S.

Morgan, “The English emigrants to New England were the first Puritans to restrict membership in the church to visible saints, to persons, that is, who had felt the stirrings of grace in their souls, and who could demonstrate this fact to the satisfaction of other saints.”15 While no person could know with certainty about whether God has predestined them for salvation or condemnation, New England’s churches limited access to baptism and communion to people who made a profession of faith, attested to experiencing God’s saving grace in their life, and seemed to live an outwardly godly life. For the early

Puritans, Holy Communion or the Lord’s Supper was only for church members and only children of church members could be baptized.

In 1662, baptism became more accessible in New England’s Congregational churches with the Half-Way Covenant, which was a change in church policy that eventually influenced the levels of black and Indian participation in these churches. This change, adopted by a large portion of New England’s Congregational churches, lowered the standard for who could be baptized. Now, people who had been baptized as infants but who had not become full church members could have their own children baptized, if their lives were free from scandalous behavior and if they owned the covenant (which is to say, publically adopted the statement of faith associated with baptisms and submitted to the discipline of other church members). Put another way, the grandchildren and even

15 Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 113; also see Anne A. Brown and David D. Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Early New England,” in David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41-68. 32

Congregational and Anglican churches in southern New England that baptized and/or admitted blacks or Indians, 1730-1749 Map courtesy of William Keegan

great-grandchildren of New England’s founding saints could receive baptism and come under church government as half-way members even if their parents had not yet shown evidence of saving grace. These half-way members could not vote in church affairs or receive communion, but the sacrament of baptism became open to more people in New

England and more people participated at a level of membership lower than that of full communicant.16

Although an unintentional consequence, the Half-Way Covenant opened the way for greater participation by blacks and Indians in Congregational churches by lowering the standard on what was required of candidates for baptism. Before the Half-Way

Covenant, an un-baptized adult had to become a full member of a church in order to be baptized. By the eighteenth century, adults were being baptized upon a simple profession of faith and not on the more rigorous standard required for full church membership.

Black and Indian adults who “owned the covenant” but who did not become full members were baptized in these churches, and their children could also be baptized. As

Table 1-1 and Map 1-1 suggest and as this section explains, most Congregational churches in southern New England baptized blacks and Indians in the 1730s and 1740s, and the particular way that Congregational churches administered baptism was one factor that enabled blacks and Indians to become active congregants in many New England churches.

16 Morgan, Visible Saints, 130-132, 150-151; Robert G. Pope, The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 33

Figure 1-1: Map of Congregational and Anglican church locations in southern New England that baptized and/or admitted blacks or Indians, 1730-1749 Map courtesy of William Keegan

Massachusetts

Connecticut

Rhode Island

Boston, the largest town in colonial New England and one of the largest in the

North, was a center for interracial religious activity. Blacks participated in churches in many of the same ways as whites, except they usually could not vote or hold offices, and many whites sought to include blacks and Indians within their churches. All of Boston’s

Congregational churches during the 1730s and 1740s (whose records have survived) baptized blacks and most of the churches admitted some black people to full membership.17 As described in a later section, each of Boston’s three Church of England congregations also baptized blacks. In some of these churches, a small number of Indians also participated and were baptized. Boston was also a town with many enslaved blacks,

17 “No records at all survive for Eleventh Church, organized in 1748, and only a few miscellaneous items for Tenth Church, organized 1742.” George W. Harper, A People so Favored of God: Boston’s Congregational Churches and Their Pastors, 1710-1760, Second Edition (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 47. 34 since “one-third to one-half of all the slaves in Massachusetts lived and worked in and around Boston.” While all nine of Boston’s oldest Congregational churches baptized blacks, there were noteworthy differences in the levels of black participation in these churches.18

Many blacks were baptized in the Boston churches connected to the Great

Awakening’s revivalism, but some blacks were also baptized in the moderate churches that opposed the Great Awakening. In other words, more blacks were attracted to revivalist churches than were attracted to the moderate anti-revivalist churches because revivalist churches were more engaged in actively seeking out black congregants. These blacks did not always come to churches in search of emotional or enthusiastic revivalism, and their experience suggests that even the black participants in New Light churches were less attracted by enthusiastic revivalism than some historians have argued.19 While the location of churches likely impacted attendance levels, what seems to have most attracted blacks to predominantly white churches was the personal influence of pastors who were active in parish visitations and catechisms. George W. Harper has shown that the rates of baptism and admittance to membership were lower for all people, white and

18 I focus extensively on Boston’s churches for practical as well as methodological reasons. Boston contained more churches than any other city in New England, and the churches varied by theology and disposition. Examining Boston’s churches, whose records are generally accessible and complete, allows for detailed comparisons between different types of Congregational churches (particularly New Light and Old Light churches). Also, given the number of slaves in Boston, it is a fitting place to examine church race relations; Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704-1781,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 59, no. 3, (Jul., 2002), 630. 19 To my knowledge, there are no sources written by blacks or Indians from the colonial North that explicitly state that they preferred “emotional” Christianity or “liturgical” Christian to the exclusion of the other. Given the lack of sources written by blacks and Indians, or even white people recording what they believed blacks and Indians thought, it is necessary to interpret their observable behavior. Therefore, since blacks and some Indians willingly affiliated with and participated in Anglican churches and other non- revivalist churches, often in significant numbers, I argue that they blacks did not always come to churches in search of emotional or enthusiastic revivalism The scholars who claim otherwise usually use evidence from other times (often the early nineteenth century) and other places (such as the South) and/or base conclusions on assumptions that few blacks affiliated with Anglican churches. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, 21-22; Piersen, Black Yankees, 68-69; Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom, 82-85, 101. 35 black, in the churches that opposed revivalism (as compared to the churches with activist pastors). The churches that showed the most vitality and that baptized and admitted the most people during the Great Awakening, according to Harper, were those whose pastors frequently visited and catechized their congregants. Churches with pastors focused primarily or solely on preaching, study, and prayer generally had fewer baptisms and admittances during this period. Harper argues that it was not differences in theology

(most pastors were still moderate Calvinists), but differences in ecclesiology – how pastors ministered to their congregations – that determined the vitality of congregations.20

Harper’s findings apply to black congregants, though they are not a concern of his. While all of Boston’s Congregational churches baptized blacks, significantly higher numbers were baptized in the churches where pastors not only embraced the theology of the Great Awakening but also practiced “systematic visitation, catechesis, religious societies, and other tools of hands-on ministry.”21 Where the pastor visited with parishioners and encouraged voluntary devotional practices, higher numbers of whites and blacks participated in church. This pattern of religious participation suggests that personal interactions were at the center of religious conversion for both blacks and whites. Meeting with white and black congregants, rather than weekly sermons, were the most effective means available for pastors who sought to convince people to be baptized or to join a church.

20 For the Great Awakening in Boston, see Harper, A People so Favored of God and J. Richard Olivas, “Partial Revival: The Limits of the Great Awakening in Boston, Massachusetts, 1740-1742,” in Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, ed., Inequality in Early America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999). 21 See Table 1-2 and Harper, A People so Favored of God, xv. 36

Old South (Third) Church, Brattle

Street (Fourth) Church, and New North

(Fifth) Church in Boston were among the

churches identified by Harper as being the

most vibrant, the most in favor of

revivalism, and the most active in pastoral

engagement with laity.22 These three

churches also had the highest number of

baptisms of black men and women of any of

Boston’s Congregational churches. The

pastors of these churches, including Joseph

Figure 1-2: Old South (Third) Church Sewall, Thomas Prince, William Cooper, and Boston, built 1729. Source: S.N. Dickinson, The Boston Almanac for the Benjamin Colman, were engaged in what Year 1843 (Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 1843), pp. 70 Harper calls an “activist pastoral paradigm.”23 At least forty-six blacks were baptized at Brattle Street Church between

1730 and 1749; twenty-six males and twenty females. Blacks accounted for about four percent of the 1,134 baptisms at Brattle Street in these years. Old South Church baptized at least thirty-five blacks in this period; fourteen were male and twenty-one were female.

Blacks thereby accounted for about three percent of the 1,158 baptisms at Old South.

Finally, New North Church baptized approximately thirty-one blacks; fifteen were male and sixteen were female. This was only about 1.8 percent of the 1,726 baptisms at the

22 Harper, A People so Favored of God, 63-99. 23 Harper, A People so Favored of God, 146. 37

New North Church (See Table 1-2).24 All of these churches, moreover, admitted some blacks as full members. Old South admitted five black men and four black women to full membership while Brattle Street admitted eleven black men and nine black women.

Since the sex ratio was more equal among black Christians than among contemporary white Christians, we can assume that the religious experiences of these groups were different. Perhaps the marginalized position of black men more inclined them to become full members of churches at a greater rate than white men. White men could achieve various types of status in work or politics. For enslaved black men, being a full church member was one of the only socially-sanctioned positions of status that they could attain.

However, the number of black men in Boston and elsewhere in the North outnumber the number of black women, so these ratios may simply reflect the demographic imbalance.25

Overall, black church affiliation was appealing to both black men and black women.26

The levels of black participation in these three churches can be explained by the lay devotional activities that the pastors promoted and encouraged. The pastors at these three churches were much more likely than their ministerial colleagues in Boston to visit the homes of parishioners and encourage religious societies. In these visits, the pastors asked blacks about their religious beliefs, encouraged masters to educate their slaves in

Christian doctrine, and catechized white as well as black children. Joseph Sewell stated in a 1716 sermon that, “The Heads of Families should take care to Instruct their Houses,

24 Old South Church Records, Manuscript, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass (hereafter CL); The Manifesto Church: Records of the Church in Brattle Square Boston, 1699-1872 (Boston: The Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, 1902); Manuscript Records of the New North Church in North-Street Boston, Boston Public Library, Boston, Mass (hereafter BPL); For total number of baptisms, see Harper, A People so Favored of God, 158-159. 25 Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom, 31. 26 I have found no satisfactory way to determine or sources enable me to determine how many blacks remained outside of the church altogether or what percentage of the black population in Boston was baptized. Lists of church attendees never existed. Colonial censuses that included numbers of blacks were very infrequent and often inaccurate. 38 and to Teach them the good Knowledge of the Lord… They should take care to Catechise their Children and Servants.”27 Benjamin Colman went even further in a 1728 sermon, where he argued that those fathers and masters who did not teach Christianity to their children and servants risked eternal damnation. For these Christians, patriarchal privilege theoretically came with the ideal of patriarchal responsibility. In such as case, Colman warned, “His Offspring and Servants will rise up in Judgment against him, and accuse him, that he never instructed them by Word and Example in the Worship and Fear of

God.”28 The pastors of these churches encouraged masters to teach slaves Christianity.

These activist pastors also generally encouraged religious meetings among pious parishioners, in which lay men and women would pray, sing, and read scripture together and where ministers would occasionally preach.29 These activities also encouraged black participation in their churches. Blacks in Boston and elsewhere, who heard the encouragements to meet privately for devotional activities, formed religious societies that complemented their attendance at regular church services (some of these societies included Indians and whites too). George Whitefield and Daniel Rogers each preached to assemblies or societies of blacks in Boston; some of Boston’s pastors likely spoke to these groups as well.30 Later written accounts from enslaved and free blacks testify to the role that family devotions and conversations with white pastors had in their movement

27 Quoted in Harper, A People So Favored of God, 67. 28 Benjamin Colman, An Argument for and Persuasive unto the great and important Duty of Family Worship: With Rules and Directions for the due Performance of it (Boston: Gamaliel Rogers, 1728), 36. 29 Harper, A People so Favored of God, 40-41, 66-67; Olivas, “Partial Revival,” 81. 30 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 86, 98, 115, and 129; Daniel Rogers Diary, Manuscript, Rogers Family Papers, MS 523, The New-York Historical Society (herafter NYHS). 39 toward Christianity.31 Old South Church, Brattle Church, and New North Church all baptized blacks before and after the Great Awakening, but the records show an increase in the number of blacks being baptized and admitted to communion during the years 1740 to 1743 when revivalism was strongest in Boston. All these factors combined, including pastoral visitation, catechisms, fervent preaching, and private religious societies, brought more blacks into these three churches than into the churches whose pastors did not engage in similar pastoral activities.

First Church (Old Brick), Second Church, New South (Sixth) Church, New Brick

(Seventh) Church, Hollis Street (Eighth) Church, and West (Ninth) Church generally stand in contrast to the three churches above. The ministers of all these churches did not participate in the revival movement and/or did not do as much to encourage devotional practice outside the church walls. In total, these six churches baptized only sixty-three black people between 1730 and 1749, with twenty-two of these baptisms occurring at

Second Church. All these churches showed significantly fewer white and black baptisms during the 1730s and 1740s than the above revival-focused congregations. At First

Church (Old Brick) fifteen of the 738 baptisms (2.03 percent) were black persons. At

Second Church, the ratio was much higher but there were still only twenty-two blacks baptized. Twenty-two of the 623 baptisms (3.53 percent) were blacks, which was a lower total than the revivalist churches but stands as a reminder that blacks were not simply attracted to revivalist, emotional Christianity. As Table 1-2 shows, the other churches in this category each had fewer total black baptisms. Although total numbers of black baptisms and percentages of black baptisms suggest slightly different conclusions about

31 Cato Pearce, Jailed for Preaching: The Autobiography of Cato Pearce, a Freed Slave from Washington County, Rhode Island, edited by Christian M. McBurney (Kingston, RI: Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, 2006; Olivas, “Partial Revival,” 75. 40 black participation, the data on the whole supports the two claims that blacks participated in all Boston’s churches, including those who did not promote revivalism, and that there was greater black participation in the churches with activist, revivalist pastors.

Table 1-2: Black baptisms in Boston’s Congregational Churches 1730-1749

Boston churches and year founded # of Black Total Baptism Black (in order of # of black baptisms) Baptisms 1730-1749 percentage of baptisms Brattle Street (Fourth) Church, 1698 46 1,134 4.06% Old South (Third) Church, 1669 35 1,158 3.02% New North (Fifth) Church, 1714 31 1,726 1.80% Second Church, 1650 22 623 3.53% First Church (Old Brick), 1630 15 738 2.03% New Brick (Seventh) Church, 1722 9 593 1.54% West (Ninth) Church, 1737 8 263 3.04% New South (Sixth) Church, 1719 6 881 0.68% Hollis Street (Eighth) Church, 1732 3 313 0.96% Total 175 7,429 2.36%

See Bibliography for Sources

Overall, the absence of activist pastors and opposition to the changing religious culture of the Great Awakening in the six churches with the fewest black baptisms accounts for the lower levels of total baptisms and the lower numbers of black baptisms, but opposition or indifference from some people to black participation might have also existed. Anglican minister Roger Price in Boston wrote in 1739 that the “baptizing of negroes is too much neglected,” which suggest that some Bostonians were at least indifferent to baptizing slaves.32 The pastors at these six churches spent much less times shepherding and meeting with their parishioners than their revival-focused counterparts, so they would have been less likely to inquire about the religious state of blacks or to

32 William Stevens Perry, ed., Papers Related to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, A.D. 1676-1785 (Privately Printed, 1873), 326. 41 encourage masters to promote the religious education of their slaves.33 They did not spend as much time directly encouraging the spiritual lives of their white and black parishioners (except through sermons), and as a result fewer people attended, fewer were baptized, and fewer were admitted to membership in these churches. While only small numbers of blacks participated in these churches, we should not overlook the experiences of those who did. The blacks and Indians who joined or were baptized in churches opposed to the Great Awakening did not need enthusiastic revivalism to find meaning in

Christianity. For at least a minority of black and Indian Christians, traditional New

England Calvinism and traditional preaching was appealing.

The location of each Boston church affected levels of attendance, but the churches located nearest to the concentration of urban blacks did not always have the highest levels of black participation. The North End section of Boston had the largest concentrations of blacks in the city, and this section of the town included Second Church, New North

(Fifth) Church, New Brick (Seventh) Church, and Christ Church (Episcopal).34 Despite their proximity to many of the city’s blacks, Second Church and New Brick did not baptize as many blacks as the churches with activist pastors. First Church, Old South

(Third) Church, and Brattle Street (Fourth) Church were all centrally located in Boston, and anyone could have easily walked to attend church at these meetinghouses, but higher numbers of black only attended the two churches with activist pastors. Conversely, New

South (Sixth), Hollis Street (Eighth), and West (Ninth) churches were located in

33 Harper A People so Favored of God, 47-63, 99-123. 34 Peter Benes, “Slavery in Boston Households, 1647-1770” in Peter Benes, ed., Slavery/Antislavery in New England: The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2003 (Boston: Boston University, 2005), 15; William Price, “A New Plan of ye Great Town of Boston in New England in American with the many Additionall Buildings & New Streets to the Year 1743,” engraved map (Boston, 1743). 42 relatively isolated and less densely populated portions of the city, and generally had smaller congregations overall. The location of churches affected the number of congregations and the number of baptisms, but the differences in pastoral activism and approaches proves a more convincing explanation for the differences in black participation levels.

At the New South (Sixth) Church, the Reverend Samuel Checkley, Sr. was inclined toward the revivals and had an active pastoral ministry in the 1730s, but his health declined in the 1740s and few blacks were baptized at his church. Only six of 881 baptisms (0.68%) were blacks, so perhaps other factors besides his theology and pastoral style (including the church’s location) influenced the participation of blacks at this church. Perhaps Reverend Checkley was simply not interested in ministering to blacks.35

It is also possible that influential members of his church opposed the inclusion of blacks.

Certainly, not everyone in Boston’s Congregational churches was happy about the participation of blacks in these churches.

35 Robert Dunke and Ann Smith Lainhart, ed., Hollis Street Church Boston Records of Admissions, Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths 1732-1887 (Boston: The New England Historical Genealogical Society, 1998); Manuscript Records of New South Church Boston, BPL; Second Church (Boston, Mass.) Records 1650-1970, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass (hereafter MHS); “Records of the West Church, Boston, Mass.,” New England Historic and Genealogical Register, Vol. 91 (1937), Vol. 92 (1938), Vol. 93 (1939), Vol. 94 (1940); Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Volume XXXIX, The Records of the First Church in Boston, 1630-1868, edited by Richard D. Peirce (Boston: Published by the Society, 1961); “New Brick Church, Boston,” The New England Historical & Genealogical Register and Antiquarian Journal XIX, no. 3 (July 1865), 237; Harper, A People so Favored of God, 47-63, 99-123. 43

Included in the fifteen black baptisms that occurred between 1730 and 1749 at

First Church Boston were two children of an enslaved woman named Rose, who was owned by Nathaniel Byfield. Rose was baptized and admitted as a member and two of her other children were baptized in 1729. Rose had been brought from the West Indies in

1718, when about thirteen years old.

Byfield, in his will, wrote that Rose

“proved a faithful Servent, she hath

with Great Pains & Diligence

learned to Read & attained to

Considerable knowledge of Religion,

Concerning whom I am persuaded to

Believe that she truly fears God,

which obliges me to set her free from

the Servitude she stands obliged to

Me both by Purchase & Custom.”

Although granting freedom to slaves Figure 1-3: First Church (Old Brick) Boston. Source: Arthur B. Ellis, History of the First Church was an uncommon practice, Byfield in Boston, 1630-1880 (Boston: Hall and Whiting, 1881), 172. believed that Rose’s sincere Christian faith and faithful service entitled her and her children to freedom. She was freed in 1733, upon Byfield’s death.36 Rose participated as a member in First Church and brought her children to the church for baptism, but her affiliation in this church was not motivated by

36 Benes, “Slavery in Boston Households, 1647-1770,” 12; Records of the First Church in Boston, 113, 399-402. 44 emotional worship or revivalism. More people of all races participated in the churches with activist pastors, but some blacks still found anti-revivalist churches appealing.

Few blacks and Indians were baptized at the anti-revivalist Hollis Street Church, but their experiences exhibit the diversity of the blacks and Indians who were active in

Congregational churches. Two of the three blacks baptized, and the one black man who owned the covenant, were free persons, while one black and one Indian who were baptized were slaves or unfree persons. Primus, an “Indian servant belonging to Hon.

Anthony Stoddard,” was baptized on November 26, 1738, and Dinah, “negro servant to

Deacon Clough,” was baptized March 21, 1742.37 Some members of the Clough family were already members of this church when Dinah was baptized, but Stoddard and his family do not appear elsewhere in these church records. The description of Primus as a

“servant belonging to Hon. Anthony Stoddard” matches common descriptions of black slaves in New England church records. The description of Primus “belonging” to

Stoddard could mean that he was a hired servant, an indentured servant, or a lifetime slave, given the range of statuses for Indian laborers in New England.38 Some of the blacks baptized at Hollis Street were free. John Cuffee a “free negro” was baptized on

July 27, 1746 and a free black child named Sarah Vingus was baptized on October 19,

1735. Sarah Vingus was the seven year old daughter of John Vingus. In order to have his daughter baptized, he “owned the covenant” on the day she was baptized. Like many white parents in New England, the desire to have his child baptized was the immediate cause of Vingus’ official affiliation with this church.39 These baptismal records provide an unusually detailed description of John Vingus. The record states that he was “a free

37 Dunke, Hollis Street Church Boston Records, 44, 229-230. 38 Newell, “Indian Slavery in Colonial New England,” 49-53. 39 Brown and Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice,” 53-54. 45 negro, baptized in his own country by a Romish priest, who also owned the covenant with us.” In all likelihood, “his own county” was somewhere in Africa, perhaps the

Kingdom of Kongo, where Catholicism had been practiced by Kongolese royalty and other Africans since the end of the fifteenth century. Ira Berlin notes that “although

Kongolese converts saw no reason to surrender their own deities, which were incorporated into the new system of beliefs, the Kongolese were knowledgeable believers who knew their catechism, the pantheon of saints, and the symbols and rituals of the

Cross.”40 John Vingus, therefore, was likely raised as a Roman Catholic in Africa, and was baptized and catechized as such. We do not know when or under what circumstances he reached Boston, but he was there and was free since at least 1725. He married Parthenia Barteno on July 8, 1725; they were listed as “free negroes” and were married by the Reverend Peter Thatcher, the associate minister of New North (Fifth)

Church.41 It is possible that Vingus was a person who could fit Ira Berlin’s description of an “Atlantic Creole,” a person whose skills and knowledge of the commercial world of the Atlantic allowed him or her to transverse European empires and to move in and out of slavery.42 Perhaps he crossed the Atlantic as a slave only to regain his freedom or perhaps he was a sailor or translator who used his skills in commerce and came to Boston as a free man. Whatever the case, it was important to him that his daughter be baptized, and he was willing to ascribe to the doctrines of this Protestant church in order to have it

40 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 73; Also see John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750,” Journal of American History, 25 (1984), 147-167; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 41 A Report of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston, Containing the Boston Marriages from 1700 to 1751 (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1898), 129. 42 Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 53, no. 2 (April 1996), 251-288. 46 done. The white Christians evidently judged him worthy to be in fellowship with them.

While most church records tell us very little about the blacks and Indians who participated in the North’s churches, rare examples like this one help show the diverse origins and religious histories of the blacks who participated in these churches and illustrates an example of a black man who clearly valued access to Christian sacraments in a Congregational church.

While it is significant that all of Boston’s churches baptized blacks, it is impossible to determine the percentage of Boston’s black population that was baptized or what portion of the population attended a church regularly. Population estimates of blacks in Boston were infrequent and often inaccurate, so comparing the number of baptisms, which was usually a once in a lifetime event, to rare population estimates does not provide meaningful conclusions. However, it is clear that more blacks were baptized than were admitted to full communion/membership, which was the same for white church attendees. It is also safe to say that the number of black people at a weekly service was higher than the number of black baptisms at each church, and, as such, black men, women, and children were present at the majority of worship services in Boston’s

Congregational churches despite hindrances to their participation.

Even though blacks could be found in most Congregational churches in southern

New England, there were still deterrents to their full participation, and white Christians held diverse opinions regarding black and Indian Christians. Historian J. Richard Olivas and others have noted that there were still obstacles that kept some slaves from baptism and church membership, regardless of whether they desired it or not. Some masters forbade the baptisms of their servants and slaves on the grounds that it might suggest the

47 equality of blacks and whites or that Christianity might be used by blacks to obtain freedom, though historians appear to have overstated this opposition. Some masters were at the very least ambivalent about the baptism of slaves, for the Reverend Roger Price complained in 1740 that “till masters can be persuaded to have a greater value for their own souls, we have but small hopes they will be very anxious about the salvation of their negroes.” Following the preaching of Whitefield, Tennent, and others, “awakened and convicted Bostonians sought conversion by visiting pastors in overwhelming numbers.”

Since the number of people desiring spiritual guidance from pastors exceeded the ability of pastors to meet with all people, Olivas argues that pastors gave preferences for relatives of church members and white congregants. Olivas concluded that Benjamin

Colman of Brattle Street Church “welcomed blacks and indentured servants, but he welcomed others more.”43 The black and Indian men who did become full members were rarely given a vote in the hiring and firing of ministers or the admission of new members (women usually did not vote either). The racism and economic exploitation that led to black men and women being identified as “negro” in the church records also prevented some blacks from having free access to the sacraments of baptism or communion.

While at least some whites desired the conversion of blacks and Indians to

Christianity, whites generally opposed any suggestion that blacks and Indians were their social equals. The constant use of words such as “negro” and “servant” demonstrated the

43 Olivas bases his analysis on the number of people who were “awakened” compared to the number of people admitted to membership in these churches. He provides an example of a white servant whose master kept him from baptism, but he does not provide evidence for the claim that “ministers encountered deep resistance when they sought to admit enslaved persons” to full membership in the church; Olivas, “Partial Revival,” 78-79; Perry, Papers Related to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 341. 48 social distances that whites sought to maintain between themselves and black Christians.

In the period in question, there is very little evidence that black churchgoers caused whites Congregationalists to muse on the implications of enslaving fellow Christians.

They simply did not see slavery and Christianity as incompatible. Rather, the social hierarchy in church reflected and reinforced the social hierarchy outside of it. In societies so centered around churches, the inclusion of at least some Indians and blacks implicitly validated the existing social order. This dissertation shows that many blacks and Indians participated in the North’s Protestant churches, and they did so despite segregated seating, proscriptions against their voting in church affairs, and the other ways that their low status in the social hierarchy was reinforced within churches.44 Such was the case not only in major cities like Boston but across southern New England.

In the coastal towns of Weymouth and Hingham, located south of Boston, blacks and Indians also participated in church life during the 1730s and 1740s, and their participation mirrored that of blacks and Indians in Boston’s anti-revival churches. There were about eight blacks and three Indians baptized at the First Parish of Hingham, including “Emme George an Indian woman baptized Nov. 21, 1742,” “Francis a

Molattoe woman” baptized in 1744, and “Jack a Negroe” baptized in 1746. Blacks and

Indians were also married by the Reverend Ebenezer Gay at First Parish and their deaths were recorded separately from the death records of whites. “A negro man named Jack” appears to have been the only black person admitted to full membership in this period at

44 For white colonists’ tolerance or intolerance of Indian and black spirituality, see Richard W. Pointer, “Native Freedom? Indians and Religious Tolerance in Early American,” and Jon Sensbach, “Slaves to Intolerance: African Christianity and Religious Freedom in Early America,” in Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). For analysis of how black participation in churches justified the social order, see Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, & Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 103-140. 49

Hingham’s First Parish. 45 The Reverend Gay, a close associate of Charles Chauncy and

Jonathan Mayhew of Boston, was also an opponent of the Great Awakening. In 1743,

Gay signed a statement called “The Sentiments and Resolutions of an Association of

Ministers convened at Weymouth,” which criticized George Whitefield and opposed the emotional practices of the revival. Like the anti-revival churches in Boston, the First

Parish of Hingham was open to baptizing and admitting some blacks and Indians.46 At the Second Parish of Hingham, where the Reverend Nehemiah Hobart was pastor from

1721 to 1740, one Indian and six blacks were baptized between 1730 and 1747. In the same period, the marriages of four black couples were also recorded.47 At the First

Church of Weymouth, the Reverend William Smith baptized ten blacks between 1734 and 1749, including his slave “Thomas a Negro” in 1741 and “Hagar daughter of Tobias a negro” in 1746.48 At these churches, as was common in many of New England’s smaller towns, some blacks and Indians participated in Congregational church life. Their participation was not always the result of emotional, revival preaching. It was simply a normal part of New England church life for blacks and Indians to choose to be baptized at

Congregational churches.

Connecticut’s Congregational churches, much like those of Massachusetts, commonly baptized blacks and Indians. For example, at the First Church Colchester, at

45 “Records kept by Rev. Ebenezer Gay, including marriage records 1718-87, deaths of area ministers 1766-69, deaths of Indians and Blacks 1743-87, baptisms 1718-87, admittances to full communion 1718-86, deaths 1718-87,” First Parish (Hingham, Mass.) records, MHS. 46 Samuel Eliot, Heralds of the Liberal Faith, Volume I, The Prophets (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910), 1-19. 47 “Rev. Nehemiah Hobart’s records, 1721-47 (Second Parish), including admissions to full communion, deaths, Baptisms, marriages, deaths of Blacks and Indians 1723-34,” First Parish (Hingham, Mass.) records, MHS. 48 “Church book, 1734-1837,” First Church (Weymouth, Mass.) records, MHS. 50 least eighteen blacks and three Indians were baptized between 1730 and 1749.49 At several points in time, the Connecticut legislature had encouraged Congregational churches to reach out to blacks and Indians. In 1727, a law was passed that directed masters and mistresses to attentively teach Indians servant to read English and to understand Christianity. The General Assembly in 1738 stated that infant slaves of

Christian masters could be baptized on the authority of the master’s faith and that it was the duty of masters to educate the enslaved children of their household in Christianity.50

While these laws may not have been uniformly or vigorously followed, the force of law did promote the religious participation of blacks and Indians.

Several of Connecticut’s churches, particularly those near the Mohegan, Pequot, and Western Niantic reservations, had relatively high numbers of Indian participants, in addition to some black congregants. Linford Fisher, who has carefully studied Indian participation in southern New England’s churches during the Great Awakening, identifies the Congregational churches of Groton, Stonington, New London, Lebanon, Old Lyme,

Hebron, and Norwich, Connecticut as places where Indians were most active. Fisher identifies “a small core of influential men” who began ministering more directly to Indian communities near their churches before and during the Great Awakening, including

“David Jewett (North Parish, New London), Eleazar Wheelock (Lebanon), Jonathan

Parsons (Lyme), George Griswold (East Lyme), Benjamin Pomeroy (Hebron), Andrew

Croswell (Groton), John Owen (Groton), Joseph Park (Westerly, RI), James Davenport

49 Connecticut Church Records, State Library Index, Colchester First Congregational Church, 1732-1986 (Hartford: CSL, 1949), 347-352. 50 Bernard Christian Steiner, “History of Slavery in Connecticut,” in Adams Herbert, ed., Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Eleventh Series (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1893), 386. For more on laws related to slavery, see A. Leon Higginbotham, In the matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 51

(Southold, LI), and Jonathan Barber.” These towns were located relatively close to sizable Indian communities or reservations, and these pastors actively sought to bring

Indians into their churches. Though Indians attended these churches occasionally before the Great Awakening, there was a considerable spike in Indian participation from 1741 to

1743 when the revival peaked in New England. As Fisher argues, ministers had been laying the foundations for Christianity among Indians for decades, but it was during the

Great Awakening that a substantial number of Indian formally owned the covenant, were baptized, and joined “white” Congregational churches. Fisher also indicates that it was not simply “radical” revivalists who were laying the foundations for Indian affiliation in

Congregational churches, for several moderate or even conservative pastors also worked to teach Christianity to the Indian communities near their churches.51

The Indian and black populations in New England were clustered in different areas during the early to mid eighteenth century, and these differences were one of the main reasons why Indians participated less uniformly in New England Congregational churches than black people. Some Indians lived and worked in major cities, but the largest number of Indians resided in distinct communities and reservations often at some distance from white population centers. Predominantly white churches with the greatest numbers of Indian participants tended to be located near Indian communities. Table 1-3 provides a list of some of the Congregational churches where one or more Indians were baptized during the 1730s and 1740s. In many of these churches, only a small number of

Indians were baptized, and they consisted mostly of Indian servants, such as Primus at

Hollis Street Church Boston. Yet in the Congregational churches located nearest to

Indian communities, substantial numbers of Indians affiliated the predominantly white

51 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 146. 52 congregations. Thus, the only predominantly white churches in which Indians could find a critical mass of other Indians were those in English towns closest to distinct Indian communities.

Table 1-3: Select list of Congregational churches in which one or more Indians were baptized and approximate number of baptisms, 1730-1749:

Church Name Church Location Nearby Indian # of reservation or Indian community, if baptisms applicable Bristol First Congregational Bristol, R.I. Freetown/Troy- 1 Watuppa Westerly Congregational Church Westerly, R.I. Narragansett 64 First Church Middleborough Middleborough, Teticut & Betty’s 5 Mass. Neck (Middleborough) Bradford First Church Bradford, Mass. 1 Weston Congregational Church Weston, Mass. Natick 1 Church of Christ at Cambridge Cambridge, Mass. 1 First Church Scituate Scituate, Mass. Mattakeedit 1 (Pembroke) Second Church Scituate Scituate, Mass. Mattakeedit 2 (Pembroke) Old South Church Boston Boston, Mass. 1 Hollis Street Church Boston, Mass. 1 Beverly Second Church Beverly, Mass. 1 Pilgrim Church Merrimac Merrimac, Mass. 1 Charlestown First Church Charlestown, Mass. 1 First Parish Dorchester Dorchester, Mass. 4 First Parish Hingham Hingham, Mass. 3 Second Parish Hingham Hingham, Mass. 1 First Church Watertown Watertown, Mass. 1 Milton Congregational Church Milton, Mass. Punkapoag 2 (Canton) Barnstable East Parish Church Barnstable, Mass. Mashpee 3 Truro First Church Truro, Mass. Potawaumacut 1 (Eastham) Evangelical Congregational Chh Grafton, Mass. Hassanamisset 9 Grafton First Church Marlborough Marlborough, 1 Mass. Cromwell First Church Cromwell, Conn. 1 Redding Congregational Church Redding, Conn. Paugussett 1

(Bridgeport) Griswold Congregational Church Griswold, Conn. 1 Norwich Congregational Church Norwich, Conn. Mohegan 2 (Montville) Lebanon First Church Lebanon, Conn. Mohegan 4 (Montville) Colchester First Church Colchester, Conn. Mohegan 3 (Montville) Stonington First (West) Church Stonington, Conn. Pequots 47 (Pawcatuck) North (Second) Stonington Church Stonington, Conn. Pequots 21 (Pawcatuck) East Stonington Church Stonington, Conn. Pequots 35 (Pawcatuck) Old Saybrook Church Old Saybrook, Niantic (Lyme) 2 Conn. Groton First Church Groton, Conn. Mashantucket 9 Pequots Old Lyme First Church Old Lyme, Conn. Niantic (Lyme) 2 Lyme East Parish Church Lyme, Conn. Niantic (Lyme) 13 Kent First Church Kent, Conn. Schagticoke 1 (Kent) Hartford First Church Hartford, Conn. Tunxis 1 (Farmington) New Hartford First Church New Hartford, 12 Conn. White-Haven Church New Haven, Conn. 1 Plainfield First Church Plainfield, Conn. 1 Canterbury Church Canterbury, Conn. 1 New London Church New London, Mohegan & 16 Conn. Mashantucket Pequots Total 280 See Bibliography for Sources

Returning to the First Church of New London and the Reverend Eliphalet Adams, where this chapter began, we can see some of the varied experiences of Indians and blacks who came to be involved in Congregational churches in Connecticut. Phillis, one of the blacks baptized in 1738, was identified in New London’s church records as a

“servant” of Adams, but servant was a common synonym for slave. She made a profession of faith, owned the covenant, and was baptized on October 29, 1738.

Immediately after, Phillis’ children James, Ziba, and Sylvanus were baptized. A

“servant child Ishmael” was also baptized at the same time; Ishmael was the child of another of Adams’ slaves. The record states that, “there were also, children of the servants in my family baptized named Ishmael, James, Ziba, Sylvanus, the three last are the children of Phillis and for all their education I also publically engaged.”52 Adams, publically promised to educate these children in Christianity as part of his responsibility as their metaphorical patriarch, a role typically assumed by English masters of bound laborers, when he stated “for all whose education I also publically engaged.”53 Pastors across the North frequently owned slaves, and it was common for the slaves of pastors to be baptized and admitted to membership at the pastor’s church. Adams owned at least seven people at different times; in 1736 he had sold a twenty-year-old enslaved, mulatto woman named Flora for one hundred pounds of current New England money.54 Phillis and her children were among the multitude of enslaved men, women, and children and occasionally free black persons who were baptized and admitted into Connecticut’s

Congregational churches in this period. Some white Congregationalists believed it was their duty to teach blacks the doctrines of the Christian faith and to welcome them into their churches, and many blacks found aspects of Christianity appealing and willingly participated in the sacraments. Benjamin Colman, for one, in a 1740 sermon told whites and blacks alike that “Your Ministers welcome you to the Table of CHRIST […and that ]

52 Index New London First Congregational Church, 1670-1888 (CSL, 1949), 1; New London Church Records, Vol. 1, microfilm, pp 23, 128, 130, 131. 53 Silas Leroy Blake, The Later History of the First Church of Christ, New London, Conn. (New London: Day Publishing Company, 1900), 72. 54Adams, Eliphalet, “Bill of sale or indenture made by Eliphalet Adams of New London, Conn. to Joseph and Jonathan Trumble of Lebanon, Conn. whereby he sells his mulatto girl Flora, a slave for life,” CSL, Main Vault 326 Ad15. 55 the pious Master, who is CHRIST’s Servant, will be glad to see his Negro above a

Servant, a Brother at the LORD’s Table with him.”55

Katherine Garrett, also baptized at New London’s First Church by Adams, was a

Pequot Indian who was likely born on one of two Pequot reservations, Mashantucket or

Pawcatuck, located near New London and Stonington, Connecticut, respectively.

According to church records, Garrett confessed her sins, owned the covenant, and was baptized on January 29, 1738. She was admitted to full communion in the First Church in New London on February 5, 1738.56 Adams wrote that she was “descended from one of the best families among them,” which he probably knew because he had labored occasionally as a missionary to the Pequots for the Society for the Propagation of the

Gospel in New England. In her childhood, Garrett was sent to live as a servant with the

Reverend William Worthington of Old Saybrook. Indian children sometimes became live-in servants in white households to relieve their parents of the cost of raising them and in the hope of acquiring skills like literacy and the English language, but other

Indians were indentured to whites as a result of their parents’ indebtedness or were indentured to whites by colonial officials (white people were also occasionally forced into similar unpaid or unfree labor as punishment for debt or theft).57 The benefit of this service, Adams claimed, was that “she was taught to read well and to write & instructed

55 Benjamin Colman, Souls flying to Jesus Christ pleasant and admirable to behold: A sermon preach'd at the opening an evening-lecture, in Brattle-Street Boston, Tuesday October 21. 1740 (Boston: G. Rogers and D. Fowle, 1740), 24-25. 56 New London Church Records, Vol. 1, microfilm, pages 23 and 128. 57 For information about forms of unfree and indentured labor, see Newell, “Indian Slavery in Colonial New England,” 34; Towner, A Good Master Well Served: Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts; and Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “Pauper Apprenticeship in Narragansett County: A Different Name for Slavery in Early New England,” in Peter Benes, ed., Slavery/Antislavery in New England: The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 2003, (Boston: Boston University, 2005), 56-70. A black woman named Ginney was owned by the Rev. William Worthington; The Historical Magazine: notes and queries concerning the antiquities, history, and biography of America III, Third Series, no. 1 (January 1874), 83. 56 in the principles of religion.”58 For some Indians and most blacks, exposure to

Christianity was in the context of bonded labor to whites. They often had to listen to family religious devotions in white households and attended church services with white families.

Garrett’s introduction to the Reverend Adams and participation in New London’s

First Church took place under unique and uncommon circumstances. She was convicted of infanticide by a white, male jury in New London, after she had apparently killed her unwanted newborn child. Adams sought to provide spiritual comfort and direction to the young Indian woman after the court sentenced her to be executed. It seems that her experience in the New London court may have spurred a crisis of conscience in her and she was receptive to the spiritual message that Adams presented. During the six months between her conviction and execution, Garrett regularly attended two religious services on Sundays and mid-week lectures. Garrett was brought into the church through the rite of baptism in the following way:

Having Never been Baptized, she was Earnestly Desirous of that, wherefore pains were taken to Acquaint her with the main principles of the Christian Religion and the Nature of the Covenant of Grace. The understanding of which her former good Education, made more Ease to her. And after some time, upon her making an Open Acknowledgement of her great and Crying Sins, taking shame to her self & manifested her Sorrow on that account; Professing the Christian Faith & Consenting to the Covenant of grace, she was Baptized.

Shortly after her baptism, Garrett desired to become a communicant and full member. During this time, full membership required a life that exhibited evidence of godliness and often a public statement of the reasons why the person hoped that God had

58 Eliphalet Adams, A sermon preached on the occasion of the execution of Katherine Garrett: an Indian- servant, (who was condemned for the murder of her spurious child,) on May 3d. 1738: To which is added some short account of her behaviour after her condemnation: Together with her dying warning and exhortation. Left under her own hand (New London: T. Green, 1738), 38-39. 57 indeed redeemed him or her. To be admitted to a church usually required a vote and approval from a majority of the church members. Evidently, Garrett met these qualifications because “she was Extremely Desirous to partake with us at the Lord’s

Table before she Suffer’d, And upon it appearing that she understood the Nature &

Design of that Ordinance, at her request she was allowed and had the opportunity to

Communicate with us twice.”59 Put another way, Garrett, an Indian, participated in a ritual that was closed to some white church attendees. At the communion table, this young Pequot woman, condemned to death, participated in a ritual that proclaimed her spiritual status as a Christian saint.

What is remarkable about this case is that English men and women in colonial

Connecticut actively sought to convert not only a Pequot Indian servant but one who was convicted of infanticide. Adams expressly affirmed that Indians were equally human and as needy of redemption as any English man or women (a view not shared by all colonists). He stated that “We cannot help being Concerned for You as our Fellow-

Creature & the more since You are become our Fellow-Christian.”60 Adams and perhaps many in New London’s First Church actively sought to bring Indians and blacks into their church, and the exploitation of blacks and Indians in colonial society did not prevent interracial churches. The racism that existed in the colonial North was not so inflexible as to require total exclusion or segregation, and the society’s hierarchical orders were reinforced within churches by the inclusion of blacks and Indians.

59 Adams, A sermon preached on the occasion of the execution of Katherine Garrett, 39-40. 60 Adams, A sermon preached on the occasion of the execution of Katherine Garrett, 31; For another scholar’s analysis of Garrett, see Katherine Grandjean, “‘Our Fellow-Creatures & our Fellow- Christians’: Race and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Indian Crime” American Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2010), 925-950. 58

The other Indians who participated in the sacraments at New London’s First

Church were more independent than Garrett had been at the end of her life, and the contrast reveals the diverse experiences of Indians in New England’s churches. Among the Indians who were baptized and joined the First Church of New London were the

Mohegan sachem Benjamin Uncas II and his family members, Benjamin Uncas III,

Benjamin Uncas IV, Mercy Uncas, Esther Uncas, Ann Uncas, Josiah Uncas, and Mary

Uncas. Adams was an early but essentially moderate promoter of revivalism during the

Great Awakening. He was publically attacked by some radical evangelists (James

Davenport publically burned Adams’ sermons and other books in New London in March

1743), but Adams did promote a moderate form of revivalism and sought to bring all types of people to repentance and faith.61 The process by which these Mohegan Indians came to be baptized in this Congregational church has been carefully explained by

Linford Fisher. He states that:

Dozens of Mohegan children had learned how to read and write in English, had memorized parts of Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly and the Lord's Prayer, and had been attending occasional lectures on Mohegan lands given by Eliphalet Adams and other area ministers throughout the 1730s. The long list of educational beneficiaries included the sachem himself, Ben Uncas II, along with his son, Ben Uncas III. Additionally, the New London church records indicate a small trickle of Indian baptisms and memberships in the 1720s and 1730s.62

Indians did not suddenly become convinced of the truth of Christianity by revivalist preachers. In many cases, Indians were taught the English language and Christian doctrine over a long period of time before some Indians officially affiliated themselves with a church. Ben Uncas II and his family strengthened their connection to Adams’

61 Index New London First Congregational Church, 449-453; Fisher, 'Traditionary Religion,” 157, 400-408; Kidd, The Great Awakening, 8, 9, 112, 153. 62 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 157. 59 church in the late 1730s and early 1740s when he was seeking white support against a

Mohegan faction dissatisfied with his leadership.63 While their circumstances and motivations varied, many blacks and Indians became active participants in New

England’s Congregational churches.64

In a few exceptional cases, such as the Congregational church in Natick,

Massachusetts during the 1730s, Indians and whites participated in churches on relatively equal terms. Because the church at Natick was financially supported as an Indian mission, whites showed a greater willingness to have an Indian serve in the leadership role of deacon. Indians in the Natick church were not drawn there because of the Great

Awakening. Rather, these Indians were part of a long history of Indian engagement with

Christianity in Massachusetts. Natick was established in 1650 as the first of fourteen

Indian praying towns in which the colony guaranteed Indians land in exchange for their pursuit of Christian and civilized reforms under the guidance of missionary John Eliot.

Indians also used the town as a means of maintaining some traditional cultural practices,

Indian leadership, and control of land while under colonial pressure. An Indian church had been established in Natick in 1660, with eight Indian full members, and both white and Indian ministers had led this congregation until it dissolved after 1698 (several Indian pastors still ministered in Natick until 1719). Meanwhile, more and more whites acquired land in Natick, both legally and illegally, especially after 1719 when the

Indians’ communal lands were permanently divided among individuals. A new

Congregational church was organized in Natick in 1729 under white minister Oliver

Peabody. Peabody was employed by the New England Company, a missionary organized

63 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 116-121. 64 As will be explained below, participation does not always signify adoption of specific beliefs or conversion narrowly understood. 60 founded in London in 1649, and was especially charged with ministering to Indians.

Although Peabody had a condescending attitude towards the Natick Indians at times, a number of Indians were members and participants in the Natick church under his watch.65

Three Indian men and five white men, including Peabody, were the original members of the new church when it was organized. Joseph Ephraim, Sr., an Indian, was elected to the office of deacon soon thereafter. The record states that “Joseph Ephraim was chosen

Deacon by a fair Majority of Written Votes & he Accepted: N:B: he being an Indian I think every English man in the Church Voted for him & ye Indians Voted for English men not unanimously.” At this point in time, Natick’s white Christians seemed to acknowledge the primacy of the Indian identity of this church and accepted some Indian leadership therein. Englishman Ebenezer Felch in 1731 and Englishman Nathaniel

Chickering in 1735 joined Ephraim as deacons of this church. As is examined in the next chapter, such cooperation did not last. However, during the 1730s and 1740s, at least, this church was the spiritual home of Indians, whites and a few blacks.66 Between his ordination in 1729 and his death in 1752, the church records indicate that Peabody

“Baptised about 161 Indians and 413 White persons.” Between 1729 and 1740, nineteen

Indians and fifty-three whites were admitted as members. In the 1740s, the ratio of

Indians continued to decline, and by 1749 only twenty-five Indians had been admitted to

65 For histories of Natick, see Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Daniel Mandell, “‘To Live More Like My Christian English Neighbors’: Natick Indians in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 48, no. 4 (Oct., 1991), 552-579; and Harold Field Worthley, An Inventory of the Records of the Particular (Congregational) Churches of Massachusetts Gathered 1620-1805 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 399-400. 66 Oliver Peabody, Records of the Church of Natick, manuscript held by the CL, online edition at the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, . 61 membership compared to one hundred and twenty whites.67 Although the Natick church was a unique case because whites and blacks gradually displaced a Christian Indian community, it was not exceptional in the sense of being an interracial church in New

England.

While the Great Awakening was not the sole or primary cause of black and Indian participation in New England’s churches, it does help explain why some people of color participated when they did. Some of the revivalists, in fact, deliberately sought out blacks and Indians. Revivalists George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and Eleazar

Wheelock each commented on the participation of blacks and Indians in their revivals.

These pastors were willing to meet with blacks and Indians in order to encourage their participation in the North’s churches. Some of the radical evangelists and ministers, in contrast to moderate evangelists and anti-revivalist ministers, were especially engaged in preaching to Indians and blacks. Thomas Kidd notes that James Davenport’s ministry

“seemed to enjoy great success among the poor and disenfranchised,” including blacks and Indians.68 The same could be said of radical pastor Daniel Rogers.

The diaries written by Reverend Rogers from 1740 to 1753 contain many notes about black and Indian participation in his religious meetings. In April and May, 1741,

Rogers preached almost weekly to “a Number of Negroes, Indians & a Numbr of white

People” in private settings in Boston. On Sunday May 17, 1741, Rogers recorded an especially revealing interaction with some blacks:

Was asked to pr [preach] in the Evening to Some Negroes, was backwd to it, was tempted to deny ‘em. But God enabled me to overcome it, brot a Text into my mind viz. Romans 6 [illegible word] and opened it to me, enlarged me to speak

67 Peabody, Records of the Church of Natick, 47; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 121; Mandell, “To Live More Like My Christian English Neighbors,” 562. 68 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 143. 62

upon it wth great Freedom for more than an Hour, tho I had not tho’t upon it before. Admired be his free Grace. I hope Good was done. One of ye men servants weept. I believe God will call more of ye poor Negroes to ye knowledge of his Son. Lord make me willing to do any thing for ‘em.69

Although Roger was “tempted” to deny the request of these blacks, he felt that God enabled him to overcome the temptation and he was pleased with the results of his work.

The next morning, Roger “felt my self refresh’d and comforted,” and he asked God to

“strengthen ye heart more and more. Deliver me from ye Fear of Man which bringeth a snare, ye ground of wch is Pride.”70 This text reveals that “pride” and perhaps racism hampered the willingness of pastors (even radical ones) to minister to all people, but it also reveals a remarkable moment when the belief in the universality of the gospel for all humans transcended boundaries of class and race in the colonial North. Rogers hoped that the “fear of man” would never make his “backward” against ministering to blacks.71

Many blacks and Indians participated in the Congregational churches of the North because of the willingness of pastors such as Rogers to minister directly to them.

Daniel Rogers also engaged with white and black people outside of Boston in towns such as Ipswich, Massachusetts, where an enslaved black woman named Flora lived, worked, and worshipped. Revivalism, particularly the itinerant ministers and enthusiasm it brought, was controversial in the small, coastal town of Ipswich, in part because of Rogers’ preaching. As described by historian Erik Seeman, in 1746 the evangelicals, angry that their pastor, the Reverend Theophilus Pickering, who would not promote revivals, separated from him and started a new congregation (the Congregational

Church of Chebacco or Fourth Church). Seeman states that the newly formed

69 Daniel Rogers Diary, March 27, 1740/1 to May 17, 1740/1. 70 Daniel Rogers Diary, May 18, 1740/1. 71 For more on Daniel Rogers see Thomas S. Kidd, “Daniel Rogers’ Egalitarian Great Awakening,” Journal of The Historical Society VII, no. 1 (March 2007), 111-135. 63

“evangelical congregation welcomed African Americans: four of the first twenty-two full members, including Flora, were slaves.” He further explains how Flora joined this church:

On June 15, “the Neagro Binah Declar'd what God had Done for her Soul in Relating his various Dealings with her in Conviction & Consolation: voted that she be Propounded for full Communion . . . and Likewise Negro Flory.” Both whites and blacks thus had to offer a conversion narrative before they could join the congregation. After Flora had been accepted as a full member, she signed the church’s articles of faith and the church covenant with a mark, indicating that she could not write (although that did not mean she could not read).72

Flora was likely born in Ipswich in 1723, and was owned by the prominent local man named Thomas Choate. During a revival, her faith was stirred, and she seemed to have exhorted or preached to others during some of the revival meetings. She joined the church through a public profession of her faith, but within a short period she was required to again speak in front of the congregation. Her 1748 public confession of sin was recorded and thereby provides an example of the faith of one early black Christian.

In her confession, Flora acknowledged how “spirituall Pride, Ingratitude,

Unwatchfulness and Levity or Lightness” ultimately led her to fall into a worse but unnamed sin. She described the deep despair that engulfed her when she realized the extent of her rebelliousness and sin, and how she was freed from despair when “the pardoning Love of God again flowed into my Soul & caused my Heart to melt & flow with penetential streams.” She asked her fellow congregants for their forgiveness, and prayed that they would “Restore me to your Charity and Fellowship and the Privileges that I have forfitted, by my Fall.” Throughout the confession, Flora exhibited her knowledge of the Christian scriptures by interweaving biblical passages with her own

72 Erik R. Seeman, “’Justise Must Take Plase’: Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 56, no. 2 (April 1999), 396. 64 phrases. The text shows, as Seemen argues, that “she had a deep and personal relationship with her God.” After the twelve hundred-word confession was read twice to the congregation, and after several members asked her questions, the church voted to restore her to full membership status. She remained a member for the rest of her life.73

Many blacks and Indians participated in southern New England’s Congregational churches and, for some like Flora, the attachment to their church was deeply rooted and lasting.

Overall, the evidence is overwhelming that blacks and Indians were regular and common participants in the Congregational churches of southern New England between

1730 and 1749. They attended these churches, but, more significantly, many of them were active participants in the sacraments of baptism and communion. Unfree blacks and

Indians in the homes of English colonists also participated in family devotions and catechisms. These men, woman, and children encompassed a wide spectrum of ages and degrees of freedom/unfreedom. The experiences of these black and Indian Christians, moreover, was more diverse than is often portrayed by historians. The focus on the religious experiences of blacks and Indians during the revivals of this period, particularly the radical revivals, obscures part of this story even as it illuminates one extreme. Too often scholars have emphasized that it was the emotional practices of the Great

Awakening that appealed to blacks and Indians. Emotional preaching and revival meetings did appeal to some blacks, Indians, and whites, but blacks and Indians also participated in churches before the revivals began and in churches opposed to the Great

73 Seeman, “Justise Must Take Plase,” 396-399 and 407-411; For another take on Flora, see Adams and Pleck, Love of Freedom, 87-88. 65

Awakening, including anti-revival Congregational churches. Such was also the case of black and Indian participation in Anglican churches.

Church of England in the North

The records of the North’s Church of England parishes further demonstrate that blacks and Indians participated in many of the North’s churches and that their religious practices cannot be narrowly understood as a product of the Great Awakening. Black and

Indian participation in Church of England congregations differed from Congregational churches in some significant respects. The presence of blacks and Indians in worship services and their participation in the ordinances of baptism, communion, and marriage were not directly tied to the revivalism of the First Great Awakening. Church of England clergy and congregations generally distrusted the revivals as eccentric, leveling, and even devilish, though George Whitefield was an ordained Church of England clergyman.

Some Anglican clergy campaigned passionately against revivalism.74 Despite this conservatism, the Church of England remained attractive to a number of blacks in cities from Portsmouth, New Hampshire down to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Though Church of England congregations were few in numbers compared to the

Congregational churches in New England, the wealth of parishioners and their locations in port towns made them more influential than their numbers imply. Many Church of

England parishioners were slaveholders who encouraged their slaves to come to church, thereby making Anglican churches common places of interracial worship. Blacks were baptized in Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s Queen’s Chapel, in Newburyport,

Massachusetts’ Queen Ann Chapel, in Marblehead, Massachusetts’s St. Michael’s

74 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 47, 48, 85, and elsewhere. 66

Church, in Boston’s three Anglican churches (King’s Chapel, Christ Church, and Trinity

Church), in Rhode Island’s four oldest Anglican churches (Trinity Church Newport, St.

Paul’s Narragansett, St. Michael’s Bristol, and King’s Church, Providence), in New York

City’s Trinity Church, in Staten Island’s Saint Andrew’s Church, in Christ Church

Shrewsbury, New Jersey, and in Christ Church Philadelphia between 1730 and 1749.75

At least one Indian was baptized at Trinity Church Newport, St. Paul’s Narragansett,

Christ Church Stratford, Connecticut, and Christ Church Philadelphia during the same period.76 Graham Russell Hodges has argued that in New York and New Jersey,

“Anglicans became the denomination most visible in proselytizing Africans.”77 Church of England theology, missionary efforts, and the ways they administered sacraments help

75 Old North Church Records, N-2249, MHS; James N. Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island 1636-1850, First Series, Birth, Marriages and Deaths, A Family Register for the People, Vol. VIII. Episcopal and Congregational (Providence, RI: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1896); Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Vol. 56, Collections, The Records of Trinity Church Boston II.; King’s Chapel (Boston, Mass.) Records 1686-1942, MHS; Vital Records from the Paris Register of Queen’s Chapel Portsmouth, New Hampshire. [Copied and Indexed by] Prscilla Hammon 1943, New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS); Historical and Genealogical Miscellany: Data Relating to the Settlement and Settlers of New York and New Jersey, Vol. 1, John E. Stillwell, (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1970); Trinity Church Records, Newport Historical Society (NHS); “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Vol. 1 Bap. 1709-1768” Red. 10 Exp. 6.5. Microfilm XCH11.4. Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP); William Updike, A History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island, including a History of the Other Episcopal Church in the State, Volume III, Second Edition (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1907), 72-88; “Baptisms of coloured people,” Queen Ann’s Chapel/St. Paul’s Church records, Newburyport, Mass., information kindly provided by Bronson de Stadler; “St. Michael’s Records of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials of Individuals of Non-European Origins,” St. Michael’s Church, Marblehead, Mass. Archive, compiled September 2010; S Frank J. Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church VIII, No. 4 (December 1939), 345-346; Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch, 85-86. Trinity Church New York’s early records were lost in a fire in the late eighteenth century. Hodge found records of some blacks baptized in relation to the Richard Charleton school in records at Oxford, England. 76 James N. Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island 1636-1850, First Series, Birth, Marriages and Death, A Family Register for the People, Vol. X, Town and Church (Providence. RI: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1898); Connecticut Church Records, Stratford/Christ Church and Episcopal Society, 1722-1932 , v. 1-4, 8, 12. Reel #367; “Book of Record Trinity Church Rhode Island 1709,” NHS; “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Vol. 1 Bap. 1709-1768” Red. 10 Exp. 6.5 Microfilm XCH114, HSP. 77 Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 28. 67 to explain why it was very common to have blacks and Indians participating in Anglican churches.

The Church of England approach to the sacraments of baptisms and communion enabled many blacks and Indians to participate its worship. Authorities in England sought to increase the church’s size and scope in America during the eighteenth century, as Anglicans were vastly outnumbered by Congregationalists in New England, Dutch

Calvinists in New York, and the mix of Quakers, Presbyterians, and others in

Pennsylvania. The Church of England baptized children of believing parents and used catechisms to teach them doctrines. Notorious sinners were about the only adults who would have been, in practice, excluded from the sacrament of baptism by Anglican clergy. In terms of unbaptized adults, including blacks and Indians, Church of England clergy generally sought to educate them about the doctrines of their faith before admitting them into the church by baptism. This education often included memorizing catechisms, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and perhaps other religious texts. Anglican churches functioned as parishes that were open and available to anyone who lived nearby, and not as covenanted communities of believers such as Congregational churches. The

Anglican notion of parishes made these churches by definition more accessible to everyone in a community, including blacks and Indians. Through the process of basic education and baptism, numerous blacks and some Indians entered the Church of

England.

With the American colonies becoming increasingly valuable economically and militarily to Britain during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Church of

England turned its attention to bringing wayward colonists, blacks, and Indians into its

68 fold. To that end, in 1701 leading Anglicans founded the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Foreign Parts (SPGFP). It sent ordained clergy to America – Anglican clergy could only be ordained in Britain proper – and sought to thereby enhance the prominence of the church in the colonies. Starting in the 1720s, the Society gave increasing attention to catechizing and converting slaves, including the establishment of a fund in 1729 to pay for clergy for that purpose.78 The Secretary for the SPGFP wrote in

1725 that the Society does “require all their missionaries who have any negroes or other slaves of their own to instruct them in the principals of the Christian religion and to baptize them as soon as they are sufficiently instructed and are willing to receive baptism.”79 Missionaries were to set an example for other Anglicans by educating and baptizing their slaves, if their slaves were willing, and a majority of missionaries did so after acquiring and educating slaves in the North. Apart from sending priests to parishes in the North, the SPGFP also encouraged the opening of schools to educate and catechize enslaved blacks.

Trinity Church in New York City was one of the churches where these initiatives bore fruit in the form of classes for enslaved blacks and Indians, where they were instructed in reading and taught church doctrines. The Reverend Elias Neau began work in 1704 as a catechist among blacks and held school sessions that included black slaves,

78 Travis Glasson, “‘Baptism doth not bestow Freedom’: Missionary Anglicanism, Slavery, and the Yorke-Talbot Opinion, 1701-30,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 67, no. 2 (April 2010), 310; For more on the SPG see Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Charles Frederick Pascoe, Two hundred years of the S.P.G: An Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1900 (London: published at the Society's Office, 1901); Henry Paget Thompson, Into all lands: The History of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1950 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1951); Jean Fittz Hankins, “Bringing the good news: Protestant missionaries to the Indians of New England and New York, 1700-1777,” Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Connecticut, 1993; and Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 307-371. 79 Quoted in Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 339. 69 free blacks, and a small number of Indians.80 In 1726, the Rector, Vestry, and Wardens of Trinity Church sent a letter to the Society requesting a new catechist to minister to blacks and to assist the Rector. Since “about One Thousand and four hundred Indian and

Negro Slaves” were in New York, they wrote, the need for a catechist was great. “A

Considerable number of those Negroes by the Society’s charity have been already instructed in the principles of Christianity, have received Holy Baptism, are

Communicants of our Church and frequently Approach the Altars,” but many more were in need of instruction.81 The Reverend Richard Charleton operated Trinity Church’s school for blacks from 1733 to 1747, and according to historian Graham R. Hodges,

“seventy black students attended Charleton’s school, and fifteen to twenty baptisms occurred annually.” One scholar states that Charleton “baptized two hundred and nineteen negroes, of whom twenty-four were adults” between 1732 and 1740, and that the number of black catechists “considerably increased” in 1746. 82 Sermons and letters from members of the Society for the Propagation of Gospel attest to a widely held desire, at least among Anglican clergymen, to baptize blacks and Indians.

Church of England clergymen always claimed that baptisms did not alter the bondage of enslaved blacks, and historian Travis Glasson even argues that it was clergy, such as George Berkeley (now well known as a philosopher), who helped promote the

80 John H. Hewitt, Jr., Protest and Progress: New York’s First Black Episcopal Church Fights Racism (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 1-12; Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 309-324. 81 “July the 5th 1726 letter,” Copy of Minutes of the Vestry, 1697-1791, Corporation of Trinity Church, Volume 1, Trinity Church Wall Street Archive (TCWSA). 82 Hodges, Root &Branch, 85-86; William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Episcopal Pulpit; or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished Clergymen of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1859), 17. 70 legal opinions in England that “Baptism doth not bestow Freedom.”83 George Berkeley, while in Newport, Rhode Island in October 1729 preached a sermon on baptism, arguing that “Our Saviour commandeth his disciples to go & baptize all nations,” and he specially stated that this command to baptize all nations included enslaved blacks. He also insisted that children and slaves should be baptized under the authority of the head of the

Christian households, and that “Christianity maketh no alteration in civil rights,” i.e. in the right to own slaves.84 New York’s legislature, at the request of Anglican missionaries, passed legislation in 1706 stating that baptism did not confer freedom on slaves.85 By meeting with slaves directly and by encouraging masters to promote religion among their slaves, the Society successfully laid the foundation for interracial church life during the eighteenth century. The work of the SPGFP and the clergy associated with it

(and not revivalism) account for the high levels of black and Indian baptisms in Church of England parishes during the 1730s and 1740s.

While little information and no autobiographical accounts are available to help us understand who the black and Indian Anglicans were, some telling characteristics can be extracted from church records. Many of the blacks and Indians were baptized as adults, and there was a roughly equal balance between males and females. At Christ Church

Boston, approximately fifty-five blacks were baptized between 1730 and 1749 (more than were baptized at any one of the city’s Congregational churches). Of these, twenty-five can be identified as female and twenty-two as male. These fifty-five baptisms account

83 Morgan Godwyn, argued as early as 1680 that baptisms did not alter obligations of servants to maters. Edmund Gibson, while Bishop of London, also promoted baptisms and instruction of slaves in the early eighteenth century. Glasson, “Baptism doth not bestow Freedom,” 279, 280, 297, 301, 304, and 308. 84 George Berkeley, The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyen, Volume IV, edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1871), 638-640. 85 Glasson, Mastering Christianity, 81-82; Virginia also had early laws stipulating that Christianity did not make blacks free; Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 114. 71 for about 5.5 percent of the roughly one thousand total baptisms during this period, and they show the prevalence of black participation in this church.86 In the 1740s, Boston’s population was somewhere between seven and ten percent black.87 We can speculate that blacks were usually in attendance at Christ Church’s services as it is very likely that some blacks who attended church were never baptized and these baptisms occurred at relatively steady intervals over time. If masters were as hesitant to baptize their slaves as missionaries claimed and if ministers only baptized those who met general standards of religious knowledge, then five percent black baptisms was a relatively substantial percentage for this Boston church.88 This example and other like it show that Anglican churches in the North were interracial religious communities because whites accepted blacks into their fellowship through rituals that indicated, among other things, belonging.

At Christ Church Philadelphia, at least seventy-eight people are clearly identified as blacks in the baptismal records between 1730 and 1749, which exhibits how regularly blacks were encouraged to participate in this Anglican parish. Deborah Gough notes that within the first five years of Reverend Robert Jenney’s ministry at Christ Church, he had

“baptized more than fifty blacks or more than 5 percent of the city’s black population.”89

Most of these people were identified as “negro” but four people were identified as

“mulatto” in the church records. In addition, at least two Indians were baptized at Christ

Church in 1733: “John, Son of Peter & Margret Moutanne, an Indian” was baptized on

October 3rd and “Anne daughter of Amoritta, Mr. Lawrences Indian woman,” was

86 Old North Church (Christ Church in the City of Boston) records, MHS. 87 See appendix in Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 338. 88 See the following article for examples of opposition to slave baptism on the grounds that the slaves would be freed: Glasson, “Baptism doth not bestow Freedom,” 279-318. 89 Deborah Mathias Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia: The Nation’s Church in a Changing City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 68. 72 baptized December 26th. Of the blacks baptized, forty-two were male and thirty-six were female. These people appear to have been, moreover, equally divided between adults and children/infants.90 The high proportion of adult baptism stands in stark contrast to the normal trend among whites. English Anglicans were much more likely to have been baptized as children. These ratios serve as a reminder that blacks, many of whom were forcibly abducted and carried across the Atlantic, were less often born into circumstances in which they would have learned about Christianity from parents and that different standards were applied to blacks and whites in Anglican churches.91 While the vast majority of blacks baptized in the Church of England in this period were enslaved, a few black people at Christ Church Philadelphia were free: two “negro” adult women baptized were identified as free and two different couples of free blacks had a child baptized.92

The small free black population, as well as the larger enslaved black population, were targets of the Church of England’s evangelism, especially the evangelism of the SPGFP, and many blacks and some Indians in the North participated in Anglican churches.

At Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island, at least fifty-seven people were identified as “negro” and two people were identified as Indians in the baptismal records from 1730 to 1749. Here too, blacks participated in Anglicans churches in considerable numbers. In 1746, this church was described as a “large and increasing congregation, not of whites alone, but of blacks also; no less than twelve of the latter sort having been

90 Adults were identified as adult, woman, or man. Children/infants were identified as child, infant, boy or girl. It is possible that some of the people identified as boy or girl could have been adult age. The records for Christ Church Boston did not have similar, uniform identifications, so a comparison was not possible. 91 Few church records indicate the place of birth for blacks, but since slaves were imported from African to mainland North America (with or without a seasoning in the Caribbean) in significant numbers in the 18th century, there likely at least some African-born blacks in this congregation; Nash, Forging Freedom, 9-11. 92 “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Vol. 1 Bap. 1709-1768”, Red. 10 Exp. 6.5, Microfilm XCH114, HSP. 73 admitted members of it, by the holy sacrament of baptism, within twelve months.”93 Of the blacks, twenty-two appear to have male names and twenty-eight appear to have female names. Twenty-three of them, about forty percent, were identified as adults.

Over this period, it was common in any given year for four or five percent of the people baptized by the church to be identified as “negro.” A few years (1734, 1741, and 1744), blacks accounted for only two or three percent of all baptisms. Between 1746 and 1749, however, an exceptional number of blacks were baptized at this church: fifteen of seventy-one baptisms (21.1 percent) in 1746; thirteen of fifty-two baptisms (25 percent) in 1747; eight of fifty-one baptisms (15 percent) in 1748; and four of thirty-nine (10 percent) in 1749 were identified as black people.94 In these few years, the percentages of blacks baptized at Trinity Church neared or exceeded the percentage of Newport’s population that was black, but the cause of these high rates of baptisms is unclear. A substantial number of blacks participated in Trinity Church Newport, and their participation lends support for the conclusion that it was not simply revival-focused, emotional churches that appealed to blacks in the North.

St. Paul’s Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island provides a slightly different example than the churches above, but it too illustrates how common interracial churches were. While Philadelphia, Boston, and Newport were among the largest cities in the northern colonies, St. Paul’s Church was located in a more rural location. Narragansett

(South County) was a farming region noted for horse breeding and cheese production.

Robert K. Fitts has convincingly argued that this area had a plantation economy in the

93 Wilkins Updike, History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island, including a History of other Episcopal Churches in the State, with an Appendix (New York: Henry M. Onderdonk, 1847), 462-463. 94 “A list of Such Persons as have ben Received Into the Church by the Holy Sacrem’t of Baptism Since the 11th Day of October 1719 at Newport Rhod Island,” Trinity Church Records, NHS. 74 eighteenth century. The percentage of its population that was enslaved was among the highest in the rural North. Fitts notes that the population in Narragansett was about fifteen percent black in 1730 and thirteen percent black in 1748.95 In addition, three to four hundred Narragansett Indians lived nearby on a reservation, and many of them labored as indentured servants or wage workers for white masters. Some Indians were baptized at St. Paul’s, along with a portion of the local black population. The Reverend

MacSparran, who appears to have been a harsh or even brutal slave master, baptized at least ten of his slaves at St. Paul’s Church. He also catechized and baptized the slaves of other masters. On August 2, 1741, before the normal church service, he “catechised the negroes, and there were present on that occasion, at church, near about or more than one hundred.”96 The Indians baptized here included, “Judeth adult, Indian servant of Mrs.

Eliza Cole” in 1730 and “Jane, Indian, servant of Mrs. Card” in 1737. While there was clearly black and Indian participation in this church between 1730 and 1749, the levels of black and Indian baptisms were much lower than might be expected given the high percentage of the population of Narragansett that was black or Indian.97 Nonetheless, even if only a small percentage of the black and Indian population was active in this

Anglican parish, St. Paul’s was still a place of interracial religious activity.

In addition to the parishes located in cities and coastal areas, there were other

Anglican priests who sought to minister to Indians, Africans, and colonists on the outskirts of Britain’s North American empire. The Reverend Henry Barclay recorded

95 Fitts, Inventing New England's Slave Paradise, 83 and 102. 96 Quotes from MacSparran diary in William D. Johnson, Slavery in Rhode Island: Papers from the Historical Seminary of Brown University, Volume V, edited by J. Franklin Jameson (Providence: Publication of the Rhode Island Historical Society, 1894), 12; William and Cheryl Simmon state that the Narragansett population was 350 persons in 1765; William S. and Cheryl L. Simmons, ed., Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776 (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1982), xxx. 97 Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island, Vol. X, 363-371. 75 nearly three hundred baptisms at the Queen Ann Chapel located at Fort Hunter, New

York between 1735 and 1746. Fort Hunter marked the border between English settlements on the Mohawk River west of Albany and the territory of the Mohawk

Indians. In the setting of a military and commercial outpost, Barclay ministered to and taught Indians (he could speak some Mohawk) until he left in 1745 to become rector of

Trinity Church New York. Not only was this a place of interracial trade and diplomacy, but it was also a site of interracial religious exercises, supported by the SPGFP.98

Although the racial notations in these records appear haphazard and inconsistent, at least four “negroes” were baptized at Queen Anne Chapel, all slaves of John Wemp or Captain

Hellen. Some of the Indians baptized there were identified as Oneida Indian, Tuscarora

Indian, or simply as Indian. The names recorded in the records suggest that people of

English, Dutch, and Indian ancestry were all baptized in this Episcopal chapel between

1735 and 1746. Although English and Dutch last names predominate, there are dozens of

Indian last names recorded.99 It is likely that these families and baptized individuals of different ethnicities worshiped and took communion together on at least some occasions.

Even at the edges of the empire, or perhaps especially at the edges of the empire, religion often occurred in interracial contexts.

In most cases, the blacks who were baptized in Church of England parishes were identified by their race, status, and master’s name. Such examples include “Simon an adult Negro belonging to Mr. Bautenot” who was baptized at Trinity Church Boston in

98 William Bryan Hart, “For the good of our souls: Mohawk authority, accommodation, and resistance to Protestant Evangelism, 1700-1780,” Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1998, pp. 213-217, 228-238. 99 Arthur C.M. Kelly, ed., Vital records of Queen Anne Chapel (Episcopal) Fort Hunter, NY, Town of Florida, Montgomery County, 1735-1746 (Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Kinship, 2000); For information on earlier English and Dutch missionary work among Mohawks see, Daniel K. Richter, “‘Some of Them... Would Always Have a Minister with Them’: Mohawk Protestantism, 1683- 1719” American Indian Quarterly 16, no. 4, (Autumn 1992), 471-484; and Hankins, “Bringing the good news,” 44-48. 76

1747; “Jane negro servant of Dorothy Wharton,” an infant, baptized at King’s Chapel

Boston in 1740; “Venus negro child of Dorcas Bradford” baptized at Queen’s Chapel

Portsmouth in 1749; and “Pompsey, an adult negro slave belonging to ye minister of ye parish” baptized on April 28, 1745 in Christ Church Philadelphia.100 Identifying these black men, women, and children in this manner meant, their legal status as slaves and blacks was reinforced at the very same time white society formally recognized them as

Christians. In baptism, they took on the name of Jesus and his death as a payment for their sins, but becoming a child of God did not alter their earthly bondage.

While the norm was to record master’s name instead of parents’ names when black children were baptized in Anglican churches, there were exceptions. In a few cases

(perhaps less often than at Congregational churches) the enslaved parents were listed for a child’s baptism with or without the owner’s name. As such, “Mingo son of Casco &

Nanny: Blacks” was baptized in 1737 at St. Michael’s Parish, Bristol, Rhode Island, and

“Salisbury, son of Richard & Dinah slaves of Griffith” was baptized in 1748 at Christ

Church Philadelphia.101 While black families under slavery were liable to be separated, black family relationships were to an extent accepted and approved in the cases that appear in these records. The parents, the white ministers implied, as well as the masters, had a responsibility to raise the slave children in the Christian faith. Trinity Church

Newport’s records, likewise, included aberrations from the normal patterns. In these records, as was much more common in Rhode Island than in any other northern colony,

100 Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Vol. 56, Collections, The Records of Trinity Church Boston II.; King's Chapel (Boston, Mass.) records, MHS; Vital Records from the Paris Register of Queen’s Chapel Portsmouth; “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Vol. 1 Bap. 1709-1768,” Red. 10 Exp. 6.5, Microfilm XCH114, HSP. 101 St. Michael's Church (Pawtucket, RI) Records of St. Michael's Church, Bristol URI and “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Vol. 1 Bap. 1709-1768”, Red. 10 Exp. 6.5, Microfilm XCH114, HSP. 77 blacks were often identified in church records with last names. Trinity Church’s records also rarely included names of slave owners. As a result, we see that Philip Berkely,

Anthony Berkely, and Agnes Berkely, who were baptized on June 11, 1731, were identified as “negroes” but were not otherwise noted as slaves. Prince Updike, Hannah

Chaloner, and Susannah Layton were baptized on Sept. 21, 1747 and were identified simply as “Negro adults.”102 Some of these last names were held by wealthy, slaveholding Newport families, and many of them probably indicate who owned these enslaved men and women. Nonetheless, these people’s identity in the records, as ascribed by white clergy, was less focused on their status as slaves than was common across other parts of the North.

In addition to being baptized at Anglican churches, blacks and Indians took Holy

Communion, were married by priests, and were buried under the auspices of the church.

Lists of people admitted to communion in northern Anglican churches have rarely survived from the eighteenth century, but one list from St. Michael’s Church in Bristol,

Rhode Island indicates that three blacks were communicants between 1732 and 1734.103

The vestry minutes from Trinity Church New York indicate that blacks took communion there in this period. Blacks who had been through catechism classes and who had been baptized likely took communion in all the Anglican churches in the North. Some of the people married or buried by Anglican priests do not appear elsewhere in the church records, which indicates that blacks were selective in how they chose to participate in

102 “A list of Such Persons as have ben Received Into the Church by the Holy Sacrem’t of Baptism Since the 11th Day of October 1719 at Newport Rhod Island,” Trinity Church Records, NHS. 103 Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island, Vol. VIII, 187, 191, 196. 78 these churches and/or that white masters did not always allow blacks to be baptized.104

The records from the available Anglican churches in the North conclusively show that it was common to have blacks and to a lesser extent Indians within these churches. These

Church of England parishes should rightfully be understood as interracial religious communities, even though the participation by blacks and Indians at times reinforced the inferior or servile meanings that whites ascribed to darker complexions. In attendance at services, through the sacraments of baptisms and communion, and in catechism classes, blacks and Indians became a significant minority in the Church of England in the North.

Their presence as well as their selective adoption of Anglican Christianity should not be ignored or underestimated.

Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Moravian Churches of the Mid-Atlantic

Compared to Church of England parishes and Congregational churches, very few blacks and Indians participated in the Reformed and Presbyterian churches of the mid-

Atlantic during the 1730s and 1740s. Some of the Lutheran and Moravian churches in the mid-Atlantic ministered to blacks or Indians, but there were still fewer blacks and

Indians in Lutheran and Moravian churches than among the Anglicans and

Congregationalists. Given that New York and New Jersey by 1750 had over half the

North’s 30,000 enslaved blacks, the low levels of black baptisms in most non-Anglican mid-Atlantic churches is even more striking.105 A lower slave-owning rate among

German migrants helps explain the absence of blacks in German Reformed churches, but

104 For some examples of black marriages and funerals see “Vol. 40 Register of burials, 1714- 1843” and “Vol. 41 Register of marriages, 1718-1841,” King's Chapel (Boston, Mass.) Records 1686-1942, MHS; Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island, Vol. X, 333; St. Michael's Church (Pawtucket, RI) Records of St. Michael's Church, Bristol University of Rhode Island. 105 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 369. 79 the specific standards for baptism in Reformed and Presbyterian churches, a general lack of missionary societies, and different opinions about the compatibility of slavery and

Christianity, also affected the levels of black and Indian participation in these mid-

Atlantic churches. Dutch Reformed churches in particular had such stringent standards for baptisms that the policy made this sacrament less accessible to blacks and Indians.

The Dutch Reformed churches in New York and New Jersey had been well established under Dutch rule and continued to be the largest denomination in these regions well into the eighteenth century, even though the Church of England sought to convert its members with some success.106 Black slaves had been admitted to the Dutch

Reformed Church of New Amsterdam (New York City) during the early seventeenth century, but for the most part, very few blacks were baptized in Dutch Reformed congregations in the eighteenth century. At least two enslaved blacks, “Francis Neger” and “Elisabet Bicker Negerin,” were members of the First Reformed Church of New

York City in this period, and eight of their children were baptized at this church between

1731 and 1743.107 Graham Russell Hodges, the preeminent scholar of black religious practices in early New York and New Jersey, asserts that “by the English conquest in

106 For conflict between Dutch Reformed churches and the Church of England, and the splintering of Dutch culture and churches see Randall H. Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch and English Cultures in the Middle Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Glatfelter states that “In the eighteenth century, the Dutch Reformed was probably the largest and most influential church in New York.”; Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1792, Volume I, Pastors and Congregations (Breinigsville, Pa.: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1980), 215; Richard Pointer has identified the number of Protestant churches in New York by denomination: In 1700, there were 2 Anglican, 9 Congregational, 19 Dutch Reformed, 4 French Protestant, 2 Lutheran, 4 Presbyterian, and 8 Quaker congregations in the state (total 48). In 1750, there were 20 Anglican, 4 Baptist, 5 Congregational, 48 Dutch Reformed, 4 French Protestant, 7 German Reformed, 26 Lutheran, 1 Moravian, 35 Presbyterian, and 14 Quaker congregations in the state (total 164); Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Religious Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 4. 107 Other blacks appear as sponsors of these baptism; Tobias Alexander Wright, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam and New York: baptisms from 1 January 1731 to 29 December 1800, Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Volume III (New York: Printed for the Society, 1902), 17, 38, 47, 58, 66, 73, 79, 92, and 103. 80

1664, Reformed ministers had virtually ceased catechizing or baptizing blacks.” Hodges, who examined baptismal records from over fifty Reformed churches in the years 1680 to

1776, was able to only find “scattered black baptisms.”108 Attendees and members of

Dutch Reformed churches probably owned the greatest share of the enslaved blacks in

New York and New Jersey, in part because of the denomination’s size, but they allowed few blacks to participate in the sacraments.109 The reasons for the differences between these churches and the Congregational churches of New England related to fears that baptisms would lead to freedom and the lack of Dutch missionary organizations.

However, the standard for baptisms, as discussed below, was the greater factors in preventing black baptisms.

Dutch Calvinists seem to have been more likely than Congregationalists or

Anglicans to believe that Christians could not enslave other Christians and that baptism necessarily led slaves to freedom. Although laws had been passed in several colonies, including New York and New Jersey, stating that baptism did not necessitate the

108 Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 26, 39; Here are some examples of Dutch Reformed Church records in which I did not find any blacks or Indian baptisms between 1730 and 1749: Records of the First Reformed Church of Coxsackie in West Coxsackie, Greene County, NY, Vol. 1, Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Edited by Royden Woodward Vosburgh (New York City, 1919); Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Catskill in the town of Catskill, Greene County, NY, Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Edited by Royden Woodward Vosburgh (New York City, 1919); Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. V, Minister Valley Reformed Dutch Church Records (New York: Printed for the Society, 1917); Charlotta Taylor Luckhurst, ed., Schenectady Dutch Church members, 1694-1839, Carbon copy typescript, New York Public Library (NYPL); Maria Noll Cormack, ed. Schenectady, New York First Dutch Reformed Church: births and baptisms, 1649-1781, Typescript, NYPL; Josephine C. Frost, ed., Baptismal record of the Reformed Dutch Church at Newtown, Long Island, New York, 1736 to 1846, Carbon copy typescript, NYPL; M. M. Bowman and. Lilia Smith Seegmiller, ed., Pompton Plains Reformed Dutch church: marriage records, 1735-1746, 1793-1809, baptismal records, 1735-1871, Typescript, NYPL; Ralph H. Weller, ed., Members of the German Reformed Church, Montgomery, Orange County, New York, 1732-1802, Photocopy of typescript, NYPL; B. Fernow and Gerritt Hubert van Wagenen, ed., The records of the Dutch Reformed Church at New Paltz, Ulster County, N.Y.: from 1683 to 1816, manuscript, NYPL; Records of the Reformed Church of Linlithgo in the town of Livingston, Columbia County, New York, Carbon copy typescript, NYPL. 109 Noel Leo Erskine, Black People and the Reformed Church in America (Reformed Church Press, 1978), 37. 81 manumission of slaves, Hodges states that “many slave owners still felt that church membership led to emancipation, a step few were willing to undertake.” 110 Hodges describes the likely origins of such beliefs:

The Dutch West India Company of New Amsterdam set the tone for the region by obeying the 1618 Council of Dordrecht declaration that Christians could not remain enslaved. During the 1640s Africans working as servants of the Dutch West India Company routinely gained freedom through assimilation and by baptism into the Reformed Church.111

Despite later statements to the contrary, some Dutch Christians in New York and New

Jersey seem to have retained the older prescription against enslaving Christians, even well into the eighteenth century. Fearing that blacks sought to use Christianity to gain freedom, it appears that Dutch Christians kept them away from church sacraments. On

June 9, 1664, the Dutch pastor Henry Selyns of New York wrote to the Classis of

Amsterdam the following about why few blacks were being baptized:

As to baptisms, the negroes occasionally request, that we should baptize their children, but we have refused to do so, partly on account of their lack of knowledge and of faith, and partly because of the worldly and perverse aims on the part of said negroes. They wanted nothing else than to deliver their children from bodily slavery, without striving for piety and christian virtues. Nevertheless when it was seemly to do so, we have, to the best of our ability, taken much trouble in private and public catechizing. […] Not to administer baptism among them for the reasons given, is also the custom among our colleagues.112

Dutch clergymen withheld baptism from blacks, even those who requested it, because of a lack of religious knowledge among blacks and because they believed that slaves were simply seeking to improve their earthly position. These reservations seemed to have continued among Dutch Christians into the eighteenth century. English Anglicans and

110 Hodge, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 25-28; De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America”; Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 312. 111 Hodge, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 26. 112 Hugh Hastings, ed., Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York, Volume 1 (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1901), 548. 82

Congregationalists had fewer fears or qualms about holding black Christians as slaves, but Dutch Christians were somewhat more hesitant to hold Christian slaves, even ones whose skin color was darker than their own. Moreover, the Dutch Reformed Church did not have any missionary organization, like those of the Congregationalists and Anglicans, to provide finances for educating and proselytizing blacks and Indians. Without extra financial support from abroad and with opposition from many Dutch parishioners, few

Dutch clergymen endeavored to minister to blacks and Indians.113

Unlike the Congregational churches of New England, the Dutch Reformed,

German Reformed, and Presbyterian churches in the mid-Atlantic did not adopt a measure like the Half-Way Covenant, so it was more difficult for blacks and Indians to be baptized in these churches. Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Presbyterian, and

Congregational churches held similar beliefs and theology, but they had different standards for baptisms. The different standard for baptism helps account for differences in how many blacks and Indians participated in these denominations. All these churches ascribed to Reformed theology (Calvinism), as stated in such documents as the

Westminster and Heidelberg Catechisms. However, within this broad theological tradition, there were differences in church practices and beliefs. Dutch Reformed churches in the 1730s had among the most restrictive baptismal practices of any denomination. In most cases, only children of full members were baptized in Dutch

Reformed churches. As Gerald Francis De Jong notes:

The children of non-Christian Negroes could not be baptized until their parents were baptized; but the parents could not be baptized until they were ready to become full, communicant members. To become a communicant member, however, one had to appear before the dominie [minister] and the Consistory and

113 The Dutch missionary impulse had been weak even relative to Indians during the rule of New Netherland; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 86-87. 83

demonstrate a good comprehension of the basic beliefs of the Dutch Reformed Church, which was no easy task.114

The high standard of religious knowledge required to become a church members and the requirement that only church members could be baptized was prohibitive to black and

Indian participation. The more restrictive nature of the sacraments of baptism and communion in Dutch Reformed churches and the general lack of interest among most

Dutch slaveowners in instructing their slaves for fear of Christianity’s potential leveling effects explains why the Dutch Reformed churches had so few black participants.

The number and percentage of blacks in parts of New York and New Jersey were comparatively high for the North, which might also explain why the white population was less inclined to allow blacks and Indians into their churches. The higher number of blacks in New York and New Jersey may have made whites there more fearful and uneasy about Christianizing slaves.115 Perhaps Dutch New Yorkers felt more threatened by the equality that Christianity could imply and worried more about the influence that large numbers of blacks would have on their own religious practices than English

Christians (Anglicans and Congregationalists). Or perhaps, as cultural outsiders in

British colonies, Dutch and German speaking Christians worried about being associated with the lowest caste of colonial society.116

English Christians, compared to Dutch and German Christians, were more comfortable allowing every social rank, including slaves and servants, into their churches. For English Congregationalists and Anglicans, including black and Indian

114 Quoted in De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,” 432. 115 I believe the same held true for parts of the South where the black percentage of the population was equally high or higher. 116 For Dutch conflicts or antagonism with the English, see Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion. 84

Christians in churches did not disrupt the social hierarchy. Rather, the presence of

Indians and enslaved blacks in Congregational and Anglican churches supported the whole colonizing project, including the taking of Indian land and the importation of

African slaves. These injustices were excused by English Christians by claiming that blacks and Indians were actually being helped because they were being introduced to

Christianity.117 Such logic may have not existed among Dutch and German colonists who were under British rule and who seemed less comfortable with the idea of holding any type of Christian as a slave.118

Thus only a few Dutch Reformed Churches in New York and New Jersey baptized blacks or Indians and admitted them to membership from 1730 to 1749. The

Old Dutch Church of Kingston, New York (located along the Hudson), baptized two black men during this period. Leonardus, “a negro of Hendrick de Joo” was baptized in

1732 and Henry, “a negro of Johannes Wynkoop” was baptized in 1741.119 Needless to say, these baptisms were a very small minority of the hundreds of baptisms performed at

117 Reminiscing about older perceptions of the slave trade in Newport, William Pattten wrote: “So far was the impression from being general that the trade was morally wrong, that it was considered not only lawful and just, but even as humane and Christian. It was said, that all were heathen, and many of the natives of Africa were condemned to slavery or death, by violation of laws or custums of their country, which were not founded in any moral principle, and from the penalty of which they might be rescued by being bought by Christian traders, servitude to whom was a great privilege compared with bondage to their own countrymen. It was likewise said that the African tribes were almost continually at war with each other, and that many of their prisoners were slain, but that by purchasing them they would be rescued from death. But the most quieting and satisfactory argument was, that by bringing them to Christian lands, they would have an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the gospel, and thus, numbers of them might be saved.”; William Patten, Reminiscences of the late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D.D. of Newport, R.I., illustrative of his character and doctrines, with incidental subjects (Providence: Isaac H. Cady, 1843), 80-81; Olwell makes a similar argument about how the select inclusion of blacks in Anglican churches in South Carolina supported the social order; Olwell, Masters, Slaves, & Subjects, 103-140. 118 For information on Dutch Church conflicts with the dominant English rule and culture see Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion; Frank J. Klingberg seemed to suggest in one article that Anglican minister in New York, included Elias Neau and William Vesey, had difficult convincing Dutch and French slaveholdings in particular that baptisms did not entitle slaves to freedom. Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 312. 119 Roswell Randall Hoes, ed. Baptismal and Marriage Registers of the Old Dutch Church of Kingston, Ulster County, New York, 1660-1809 (Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 1980), 192, 254. 85 this church. In these baptismal records, as is the case with other Dutch and German churches, there were more children listed as “illegitimate” than children listed as “negro”; white children born out of wedlock (whose parents were Christians) were seen as worthier than black children of receiving baptism by these Dutch Christians.

The ministry of George Michael Weiss in New York and the Reformed

Congregation at Schoharie, New York are interesting counter-examples to the typical lack of interest among New York’s Reformed churches in ministering to Indians and blacks. George Michael Weiss originally migrated to Pennsylvania from the Palatinate

(southwest Germany) in 1727, and he was one of the first German Reformed pastors in the colony who was officially ordained in Europe. His interactions with and views about blacks and Indians set him apart from many of his Reformed contemporaries. Weiss ministered to German congregations in Pennsylvania from 1727 to 1730, but he moved to

New York and ministered to several different congregations there between 1731 and

1746 before moving back to Pennsylvania.120 While serving as a temporary or missionary pastor at the High and Low Dutch Reformed Congregation at Schoharie,

Weiss may have baptized several Indians. Weiss was in Burnetsfield (German Flatts),

New York from 1735 to 1742, and during this time he ministered to some of the neighboring Mohawk Indians. He wrote a couple letters to the Classis of Amsterdam in

1741, stating that on several occasions he had spoken to the Indians through an interpreter about Christian doctrine, and he “had baptized many of them; at their request.”

He also suggested that more urgency and effort should be put into converting the Indians, especially since the French in Canada were doing so much to convert them. Weiss wrote

120 Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: Volume I, 160-161; Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1792, Volume II, The History (Breinigsville, Pa.: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1981), 288. 86 a ninety-six page book titled “A faithful description of the savages in North America” that he mailed to the Classis (no copies have survived). He may have intended to promote missionary work among the Mohawks with this book.121 The High and Low

Dutch Reformed Congregation at Schoharie, New York baptized more Indians than perhaps any Reformed congregation in the North. Roughly thirty-four Indians, including a number of adults who made a “profession of their faith,” were baptized there between

1731 and 1749.122 These examples of Reformed churches ministering to Indians stand in contrast to the typical labors of Reformed clergy in New York and New Jersey during the

1730s and 1740s. Overall, there were very few Indians who participated in Dutch and

German Reformed churches in this period.

Weiss moved to Rhinebeck, New York in 1742 at the joint call from two congregations – one High-Dutch (German) and one Low-Dutch (Netherlander, Dutch) – and there he ministered to some blacks.123 From 1742 to 1746, while serving these congregations, Weiss baptized at least four black men and women. Church records state that, “On their knowledge and confession of the true faith are baptized Johannes & Maria,

Mr. Robert Livingstein’s Neger and Negerin.”124 On June 3, 1745, Weiss baptized a black child named Petrus: “Petrus, de neger van Isaak gedoopt en syn belydenis gedan.”

121 Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York, Volume IV (Albany: J.B. Lyon Company, 1902), 2760-1761, 2778-2779; William John Hinke, A History of the Goshenhoppen Reformed Charge, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania (1727-1819) (Lancaster: The Pennsylvania-German Society, 1920), 43. 122 Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the High and Low Dutch Reformed Congregation at Schoharie, now Reformed Church in the town of Schoharie, Schoharie County, N.Y. Volume 1 part 1, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Bound Typescript, New York City, June 1917, LOC, 1-31. 123 John B. Drury, The Reformed (Dutch) Church, Rhinebeck, New York: An Historical Address Delivered at the 150th Anniversary of its Organization (Chatham, N.Y.: Courier Steam Printing House, 1881), 22-23. 124 General Church Book of the Reformed Congregation in Reyn Beck, organized by G. M. Weiss, preacher to the two Low Dutch Congregations in Kats Kill and Kocka Hocky: records of the Reformed Church of Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, New York, copied by the Montrgomery County Department of History and Archives from a hand written transcript of the original records, on file in the New York Genealogical and Bibliographical Society, Carbon copy typescript, NYPL, pp. 11. 87

The text states that “Petrus, the son of Isaak a black, was baptized and in his father’s faith.” This awkward phrase stresses the point that it was the father’s faith that enabled

Petrus to be baptized. On June 30, 1745, Samuel was baptized and his parents were listed as “Sam de neger, Bettie de neger.” Albartus Schryver and Eva Louwerman were the sponsors for this baptism.125 In 1760 Weiss owned an enslaved black family, who were baptized, so it is also possible that he owned one or more slaves while he was in New

York. Although there were still few baptisms of blacks at his churches, Weiss certainly baptized blacks at a higher rate than most Reformed clergymen in New York and New

Jersey during the 1730s and 1740s.

Although few blacks were baptized in Dutch Reformed Churches during this period, blacks were regular attendees at some Dutch churches, and they participated in the Dutch religious festival of Pinkster (Pentecost). For the Dutch, “Pinkster functioned both as an agriculturally based community gathering and as a deeply private religious occasion.” Hodges further notes that “the observation of Pinkster created a momentary equality and community among African and Dutch and was a safety valve for household tensions.” In this season, religious activities included animated preaching and exhorting by men and women and by blacks and whites. These religious experiences, sometimes described as a “Holy Wind,” were meant to imitate the Holy Spirit’s descent onto the early Christian disciples at Pentecost.126 For blacks, Pinkster also included community activities such as dancing, drumming, and parades that included religious significance

125 Baptisms and marriages recorded in the General Church Book of the Dutch Reformed Church on the Rhinebeck Flatts in Dutchess County: organized on the 28 of June 1731 by the Reverend Petrus Vas of Kingston, Ulster County, New York, by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, Fonda, N. Y., from a hand-written transcript of the records, made by Samuel Burhan's Jr., for the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, NYPL, pp. 11. 126 Hodges, Root and Branch, 87-88. 88 very different from Dutch Christianity. Sterling Stuckey has shown how Pinkster also became “an expression of African spirituality” in colonial New York: “the prominence of dance and music in their ceremonies, meant that what was for them, in significant measure, a form of spiritual solace was perceived by whites as mere entertainment. Thus, dance served to conceal religious activity, there being no clear line between sacred and secular dance in the African aesthetic.”127 Blacks did not need to articulate Dutch

Reformed theology to participate in Pinkster, and since the festival already allowed for the crossing of social boundaries and norms, the participation of blacks did not subvert broader social cohesion or hierarchy. As both an expression of African religious practices and as a moment when Dutch Christians opened their religious activities to the participation of blacks, Pinkster was an important exception to the trend of black exclusion in the Dutch Reformed churches of New York and New Jersey.

During the 1730s, German Lutheran and German Reformed churches in

Pennsylvania were weak and struggling to become well established, especially when compared to the Dutch Reformed Church in New York, but blacks did occasionally participate in some Lutheran churches. German and Swiss migrants were growing in numbers and were spreading out from Philadelphia in the first decades of the eighteenth century, but there were few ordained clergy among them.128 A few laymen ministered to

127 Sterling Stuckey, “African Spirituality and Cultural Practice in Colonial New York, 1700- 1770,” in Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, Inequality in Early America (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 168 and 171. Also see Shane White, “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley,” Journal of American Folklore 102, no. 403 (Jan. - Mar. 1989), 68- 75; Shane White, “‘It Was a Proud Day’: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741- 1834,” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (Jun., 1994), 13-50. 128 For background on German migration to America, see Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonia America, 1717-1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). For background on German Lutherans, see A.G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 89 the needs of these migrants, but as Charles Glatfelter notes, from 1733 until 1742,

“Casper Stoever was the only ordained German Lutheran clergyman in the province” of

Pennsylvania. In this nine year period, Stoever baptized at least 1,418 people, some of whom were identified as English (blacks and Indians were not the only people distinctly identified in church records). The first German Lutheran church in Pennsylvania was organized in 1717 or 1718, but dozens were planted across Pennsylvania in the 1730s and

1740s, and in some of these churches small numbers of black participated.129

The conditions of Germans and their churches did not make them natural centers of interracial religious experiences. Given the early years of German congregations in

Pennsylvania and the immigrant status of most Germans, few blacks or Indians were baptized in German Lutheran or German Reformed churches in Pennsylvania during the

1730s and 1740s. Most of the recently arrived German and Swiss immigrants lacked the money to purchase slaves (even if they had had a desire to purchase them), so there were fewer blacks among Germans than among English or Dutch colonists. According to

Glatfelter, “few German farmers had slaves,” and Gary Nash argues that Germans in

Philadelphia “eschewed slaveholding to a remarkable degree.” Some Germans in

Pennsylvania and elsewhere owned slaves, but they appear less often than among English and Dutch colonist.130 Some of the German migrants were themselves bound to years of service as payment for the cost of transportation to America, and German farmers generally preferred indentured Germans over enslaved blacks, at least while the supply of

129 Glatfelter, Pastors and People: Volume II, 20, 27-29. For an account of the establishment of German and English church in eighteenth century Lancaster, Pennsylvania, see Mark Häberlein, The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730-1820 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). 130 Glatfelter, Pastors and People: Volume II, 288; Gary B. Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 30, no. 2 (Apr., 1973), 254-255; For slaveholding in Lancaster, Pa. and black participation in churches throughout the eighteenth century, see Häberlein, The Practice of Pluralism, 173-179. 90 indentured servants remained steady.131 In many instances, moreover, it is impossible to determine if blacks or Indians participated in any of the earliest German Reformed churches in Pennsylvania because many of the records have not survived. From 1725 until 1749, Philip Boehm ministered in Pennsylvania – baptizing, marrying, and administering communion – but apparently none of his pastoral records have survived.132

Overall, it seems that little ministerial work was conducted among Indians and blacks in

Pennsylvania by Germans during the 1730s and 1740s, but there is some limited evidence of instances of Germans and blacks in interracial religious settings, particularly among

Lutherans and Moravians.

There was a greater concentration of blacks in Philadelphia than in any portion of the Pennsylvania countryside, and at least a few blacks appear in the records of

Philadelphia’s German Lutheran Church and the St. Gabriel Swedish Lutheran Church located northwest of Philadelphia. At St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church in

Philadelphia, one free black couple had their son baptized in 1747 (the earliest baptism available for this church is 1745). “Wilhelm Peter son of Peter & Mary (free negroes)” was baptized there on September 13, 1747, just a week after his birth. Wilhelm Karster, his wife, and Peter Hey were the sponsors or witnesses for this baptism. While these were the only blacks noted in the church records of this period, the records do reflect a diversity of people. The baptisms included an illegitimate child of a German mother and

131 Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia,” 299-232. 132 Glatfelter, Pastors and People: Volume II, 40. 91

English father and people who were identified as Lutheran, Reformed, and even

Catholic.133

At the Swedish Lutheran Church of St. Gabriel’s, located about forty-five miles northwest of Philadelphia, at least four black children were baptized in the 1740s. On

August 14, 1741, the four sisters Elizabeth Cudgeon, Abigail Cudgeon, Dina Cudgeon, and Sarah Mulcaster were baptized. Their parents were “John and Jane, black people and servants to Philip John.” The owner of this enslaved black family, Philip John, also had two children baptized on the same day; their names were Margaret John and John

John.134 Pennsylvania Lutherans baptized few blacks from 1730 to 1749, but the absence of blacks was mostly due to the low levels of slave-ownership among German and

Swedish migrants and not to a disposition to exclude blacks. In general, the nascent

Lutheran churches of Pennsylvania ministered to very few blacks and Indians during the

1730s and 1740s.

The Lutheran Church of New York, which included German, Dutch, and

Scandinavian Lutherans, “was weak and struggling” until the first years of the eighteenth century, but was more open to blacks and Indians than the Reformed churches in New

York because of how they practiced baptisms. After 1725, when William Christopher

Berkenmeyer was installed as pastor for several Lutheran churches in the colony of New

York (including New York City, Albany, and Hackensack), the Lutheran congregations

133 “St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, PA Baptisms 1745-59 Part 1.” “Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Vol. XXX Philadelphia, 1897, pp. 19, 27, and 31. 134 F. Edward Wright, Berks County Church Records of the 18th century, Volume 1 (Westminster, Md.: Family Line Publications, 1994), 11; St. Gabriel’s Church joined the Episcopal denomination after the American Revolution. For a history of this church, see Kim-Eric Williams, The Eight Old Swedes' Churches of New Sweden (New Sweden Centre: Kalmar Nyckel Museum Institute, 1999). 92 grew in numbers and strength.135 Very soon after his arrival, the Reverend Berkenmeyer wrote to the Amsterdam Lutheran Consistory requesting their opinion about how to administer baptisms. Lutherans, unlike Reformed churches (Congregational,

Presbyterian, Dutch, etc.) officially believed in the doctrine of “de necessitate baptismi,” whereby it is necessary to baptize children as soon as possible in order to avoid the possibility of children dying before having been baptized. In the context of New York

City, where there were many religious groups and many nationalities (including blacks and Indians), Berkenmeyer wanted the opinion of theologians and church officials in

Europe as to how widely this doctrine applied. He wrote:

I am in doubt about the words: “The pastors must baptize all children that are not baptized when they are requested to do so.” Therefore I ask, (1) if that is to be understood to refer to children in my own congregation; or, if I can baptize children also (2) of other Lutheran congregations (3) of Reformed congregations; (4) those born of savage parents, if I am requested to do so.136

These questions were immediately related to a woman from another congregation who asked Berkenmeyer to baptize her illegitimate child, but baptizing blacks and Indians was also on his mind.

The Amsterdam Lutheran Consistory responded with statements that indicate the

Lutheran stance on baptism and suggests that Lutheran churches should have baptized at least some blacks and Indians. The Consistory argued that children should almost always be baptized, even if born out of wedlock, because “withholding baptism is a punishment for the child, for one deprives it meanwhile of the merits of Christ; one leaves it in a state of unbelief, since baptism is a means of planting faith in the hearts of children and

135 Glatfelter, Pastors and People: Volume I, 215-217. 136 “Records relating to the Lutheran Church in Colonial New York, 1649-1772, Evangelisch Luthersche Kerk (Netherlands), NYPL, Box 2, November 1/12, 1725, pp. 270.

93 thereby enabling them to accept Christ.” This recommendation to baptize children extended to Christians outside the Lutheran Church, including children of Reformed parents (Reformed churches, it should be remembered, placed limits on who could be baptized). The requirement to baptize regardless of the parents’ denomination did not, however, extend to indiscriminately baptizing Indians. The Consistory wrote:

As far as children of Indian parents are concerned, if the latter still are and remain in the blindness of heathenism and would keep their children after baptism in their care and under their authority, these cannot be baptized, but if such children at and after their baptism become Christians, to be brought up and instructed by them, they can and must be baptized, as such children, by right of cession, adoption, gift or purchase, or being acquired in any other way, can and must be regard as personal property.137

In essence, Indians who did not convert to Christianity and Indian children who remained with unbelieving parents should not be baptized. Indians who believed were to be baptized on their profession, and Indian children who were raised in Christian households

(either as slaves or servants) were to be baptized under the authority of their master’s faith. The letter also implied that baptism did not change the enslaved status of bondsmen and bondswomen. While the letter does not discuss enslaved blacks, it is reasonable to assume that Lutheran pastors would have treated them in a similar way.

Blacks and Indians in Lutheran households, therefore, should have been baptized according to the doctrines of Lutheranism.

Graham Hodges states that the Lutheran churches in New York were “sufficiently open to black membership as to be considered interracial communities,” and they seemed to particularly attract free blacks.138 At the New York City Lutheran Church, there were at least nineteen blacks baptized in the 1730s and 1740s. These individuals included the

137 “Records relating to the Lutheran Church in Colonial New York, 1649-1772, Evangelisch Luthersche Kerk (Netherlands), NYPL, Box 2, November 1/12, 1725, pp. 331. 138 Hodges, Root & Branch, 86. 94

1731 baptism of Eva, the illegitimate child of “Maria Poppelsdorf, white and an unknown negro”; the 1734 baptism of “Preter Jaksen, a free negro, about 20 years old”; the 1735 baptism of “David, a negro slave of Niclaes Walther”; and the 1748 baptism of Abraham, the son of “Joseph Matthyeen and Annatje, free negreoes.”139 These black individuals, some free and some enslaved, requested baptism at the Lutheran church and likely attended services there. These New York Lutherans, unlike their Reformed counterparts, encouraged black participation in the rites of Christianity, and it seems that the difference in theology between the Lutherans and the Reformed churches explains why the

Lutherans, although smaller in number, baptized more blacks than their Dutch counterparts. The Lutheran theology of baptism made them more open to baptizing blacks and Indians than the Dutch Reformed churches.

Like the Dutch and German Reformed Churches, few blacks or Indians were baptized in the Presbyterian churches of the mid-Atlantic during the 1730s and 1740s.

The Presbyterian Congregation at Pilesgrove, New Jersey, founded in 1741, listed one black and one Indian among its baptismal records before 1750. “Rhode an Indian girl on her actual profession of the Christian Faith” was baptized in 1743 and “Bethina, a negro maid of John Johnson” was baptized in 1747. Bethina was also admitted to membership in this church. Moses Clemens and Mary Lot, “free negroes,” were married by the minister of this church and may have attended services there, but they did not appear on the baptismal or membership list.140 Presbyterian churches tended to approach baptisms and church membership from the same perspective as the Dutch Reformed churches. To

139 Lutheran church records, 1703-1802 New York, Albany, and other places, manuscript, New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection, NYPL, pp. 98, 101, 102, 141. 140 Charlotte D. Meldrum, ed., Early church records of Salem County, New Jersey (Westminster, Md.: Family Line Publications, 1996), 235, 237, 239, and 244. 95 be baptized, one generally had to become a full member (not an easy task even for all white attendees) or one had to be the child of a church member. Contrary to the practices of Anglicans and Congregationalists, Presbyterians generally would not baptized enslaved children on the authority of masters or mistresses until late in the eighteenth century. Therefore, few blacks or Indians participated in Presbyterian churches in this period.

The Old Tennent Presbyterian Church of Manalapan (formerly Freeport), New

Jersey was one of the Presbyterian churches significantly affected by the Great

Awakening and one exception to the general Presbyterian trend because more blacks were baptized there. The church traced its origin to 1692, when it was founded by

Scottish dissenters. Its fourth pastor was William Tennent, Jr., whose father had been a founder of the Log College (precursor to Princeton) and whose brother was radical revivalist Gilbert Tennent. William and Gilbert Tennent supported the Great Awakening and were leaders of the New Side Presbyterian faction. Graham Hodges notes that

William Tennent Jr., who also worked with George Whitefield, began baptizing blacks during the Great Awakening and the first black person was baptized in Manalapan in

1741. Although the church records do not generally have racial notations, judging by the first names common among slaves and by the lack of last names, there were likely eleven blacks baptized at this church between 1741 and 1749.141 An 1845 biographer of

141 Hodge wrote that, “In Freehold the Tennent brothers, welcomed Whitefield with open arms. In response to his message, they began baptizing slaves in 1741 and continued to attract a trickle of converts until the Revolution. On July 5, 1741, Mink, ‘the Negro Man of Arent Schenck,’ became the first black baptized in Freehold’s Old Tennent Church. He would remain one of the few. Over the next thirty-five years the Presbyterians baptized only nine slaves and no free blacks.” However, in the published church records I examined for Old Tennent Church, there appear a significant number of people who were baptized who did not have last names, who often had names common to slaves, and who did not have parents listed. I believe these were slaves, and in that case, a much higher number than nine slaves were baptized there between 1741 and 1776. Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 76; Anna Miller 96

William Tennent Jr., Arichibald Alexander, noted that Tennent frequently visited his congregants and used catechisms, like some of the Congregationalists in Boston, to promote religion among both white and black children. Alexander explained that by visitations, “children and servants are in this way prepared for the teachings of the sanctuary, and to reap the full benefit of the word publicly preached. He made it a practice in all these visits to enforce practical religion on all, high and low, rich and poor, young and old, master and servant.”142 Most other Presbyterians, however, especially the

Old Side Presbyterians, did not baptize blacks or Indians in this period. Hodges argues that, “despite the Great Awakening, Presbyterians did not open doors to the general population of African Americans,” except in a few unique cases. “Like Pinkster in the

Dutch Reformed Church, the Presbyterian sacramental season was uncharacteristically egalitarian. Love feasts, open to all, instilled a temporary equality before God.”143 But, apart from a couple churches and apart from the sacramental season, the Reformed faith of the Presbyterians in the mid-Atlantic generally was not open to black or Indian participants.

The Moravian Church (Renewed Unity of Brethren), an evangelical and pietistic

Protestant sect from central Europe, ministered to some blacks and Indians in the North during the 1740s. The Moravians promoted an emotional piety that was focused on semi- communal living, heartfelt devotion to Christ, and world-wide missionary efforts. As Jon

F. Sensbach’s histories indicate, Moravians were already engaged in missionary work to thousands of blacks on the Danish Caribbean Island of St. Thomas by 1740. Other

Watring, ed., Early Church Records of Monmouth County, New Jersey (Lewes, Del.: Colonial Roots, 2004), v and 1-3. 142 Archibald Alexander, Biographical Sketches of the Founder, and Principal Alumni of the Log College (Princeton: J. T. Robinson, 1845). 143 Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 76; Hodges, Root and Branch, 126. 97 eighteenth-century Moravians settled in North Carolina, New York, Connecticut, and

Pennsylvania, and some of these Moravians also ministered to blacks and Indians.144 A group of Moravians from Saxony settled in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1740 with the intension of practicing their religion without state harassment and of ministering to

Pennsylvania Indians. Eventually, by the 1760s, Moravians established five communities in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut for Delaware, Mohican, and other Indians interested in Christianity.145 Rachel Wheeler describes Mohican engagement with

Moravian Christianity at one of these missions, the Mohican town of Shekomeko, New

York, and she pays particular attention to the ways that Moravian rituals were likely understood from the perspective of Mohicans and to the differences between male and female religious experiences.146 Missionary work at Indian villages, such as Shekomeko,

New York, was a central component of the faith of these German and central European

Christians, which helps explains why they ministered to more blacks and Indians than most of the other mid-Atlantic, non-Anglican churches. Moravians also did not demand that their converts possess a high degree of religious knowledge or memorization of doctrines before baptism, and Moravians sought to learn Indian languages and could be more accepting of traditional Indian practices than most English Protestants. All that was required of adults seeking baptism was a simple profession of faith, and as such,

144 Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jon. F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763-1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); For records of Moravian missionary efforts in Connecticut, including baptismal lists, see Corinna Dally-Starna and William A. Starna, ed., Gideon’s People: Being a Chronicle of an American Indian Community in Colonial Connecticut and the Moravian Missionaries Who Served There, Volumes 1 and 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 145 Jane T. Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior's Blood: Moravians and the Indian Great Awakening in Pennsylvania,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 54, no. 4 (Oct., 1997), 727, 736. 146 Rachel Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 67-171. 98

Moravians made this sacrament relatively accessible to blacks and Indians, especially compared to Reformed Church baptismal requirements.147

In Moravian communities, households, and missions, a small number of blacks participated in church life in the 1740s. Daniel B. Thorp has written about Andrew the

Moor, or Ofodobendo Wooma, who “was both a member and the property of Bethlehem's

Moravian congregation from 1746 until his death in 1779.”148 As with all Moravians,

Andrew’s life story was recorded and has survived in the Moravian Archive.149 Andrew was born about 1729 in the Igbo nation in what is now southeastern Nigeria. Around

1737, after the death of his father, he was used by an older brother to secure a loan, and was unfortunately ushered into white hands and the brutal slavery of the Atlantic world.

Andrew crossed the Atlantic in bondage and was sold to a Jewish merchant in New York in 1741.150

After about two years in New York, there was a prospect that he would be sold again, and the fear of being sold to a bad master compelled Andrew to pray. Andrew leaned the Lord’s Prayer from neighbors and he prayed “O Lord, our neighbors said you were so good and you gave each man what he asks from you. If you will help me to a good master in this city, then I will love you for it.” He was purchased by a Moravian merchant named Thomas Noble. In the Noble household, Andrew learned to read and was told about Christian doctrines, some of which sounded untrue to him. In a

147 Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood,” 736; Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope, 74-76, 84-93. 148 Daniel B. Thorp, “Notes and Documents: Chattel with a Soul: The Autobiography of a Moravian Slave,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 3 (Jul., 1988), 434; In his autobiography, Andrew states that his name was Ofodobendo Wooma and uses “Andrew the Moor” to describe himself. Since “the Moor” is tantamount to a racial notation and is not really a last name, I am using only the name Andrew in my text. 149 Although we do not know whether Andrew could write or not, Thorp argues that “Both internal evidence and what we know of early Moravian funerary practices indicate that the memoir is truly autobiographical”; Thorp, “Chattel with a Soul,” 435. 150 Thorp, “Chattel with a Soul,” 436, 439-440, 448. 99 remarkable passage from his autobiographical testimony, Andrew states that the

Moravian Brethren “often told me that our Savior had shed his blood for me and all black men and that He had as much love for me, and everyone, as for white people, which I did not believe. On the contrary, I thought that God only loved people who were important in the world, who possessed riches, and so forth.” Despite his skepticism, Andrew continued to learn about Christianity and was sent to school part time. He had a New

Testament, and he “read from it whenever [he] had the time and opportunity.” Andrew was often present during morning and evening family prayers, but he never prayed with the Noble family. Instead, he “went in my room later and prayed and did as I had seen and heard.”151

After a moment of crisis and distress, in which he contemplated suicide, Andrew had a moment of spiritual transformation. He stated that “the Savior's love and mercy and his selfless passion and death made such an impression on my heart that I wished nothing so much as to become a genuine black offering to Jesus and a member of the congregation.” He requested baptism, but Noble hesitated at first. Some Moravians were uncomfortable with baptizing blacks, even though their theology proclaimed the all people needed Christ’s redemption. At the same time, perhaps Noble wished to test

Andrew’s faith before consenting to his baptism. Andrew met George Whitefield when

Whitefield stayed with the Noble family in New York, and Whitfield “once offered to baptize [him],” but Andrew was finally permitted to be baptized months later in 1746.

He travelled from New York to the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, began meeting with pastor Nathanael Seidel, and was baptized on February 15, 1746

“into Jesus’ death by Br. Christian Rauch and named Andrew.” He took communion

151 Thorp, “Chattel with a Soul,” 442, 445-446, 449-450. 100 with the Moravians on the subsequent Sunday. The black woman who Andrew would eventually marry, Magdalena, became a church member in Bethlehem in 1748. While

Andrew would spend the rest of his life with his Moravian brothers and sisters, working and worshiping along with the free, white church members, he still remained a slave.152

Other enslaved blacks in Bethlehem were not admitted to the church and did not participate in the sacraments. Moravians admitted a small number of blacks to their church community as full members, and created an interracial church, but they did not see any need to eliminate slavery.

In addition to the small number of black Moravians, Indians also affiliated with

Moravian Christianity in Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut, usually in Indian towns that were visited by missionaries. Jane Merritt argues that, “Indians at the Forks of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, like their Susquehanna neighbors to the west, also made both calculated and heart-felt decisions about how they might interpret and apply

Christian theology and ritual in their communities.” Several families of Delawares decided to be baptized by Moravian in the late 1740s and 1750s, and roughly sixty-six

Delaware or Mohican females were baptized in 1749 alone. As Merritt indicates, “after the flood of baptisms, the Indians at Meniolagomekah requested that Moravian missionaries be sent to live permanently in their village.” Delawares, often felt pressures both from growing white settlements and from the more powerful Six Nations.

Consequently, for some Delawares, Christian affiliation and missionaries were seen as means of maintaining community cohesion and local autonomy. The Moravian missionary town of Gnadenhütten became an important site of Indian Christianity, and some Indians moved there for both spiritual and material benefits, including some of the

152 Thorp, “Chattel with a Soul,” 442. 445-446, 449-450. 101

Mohicans from Shekomeko, but other Delawares remained skeptical and disinterested in

Moravian Christianity and white alliances.153

Women Moravians played central roles in many of the spiritual interactions with

Indians. Amy Schutt argues that several eighteenth-century female Moravian missionaries in New York and Pennsylvania “developed many abiding relationships with

Indians,” particularly at the Gnadenhütten mission, and Rachel Wheeler argues that

Moravian Christianity appealed to some Mohican woman because of the “spiritual resources” and “the new network of social support” that it provided.154 Moravian women such as Jeannette Mack met individually with Indian women, discussed religious beliefs with them, and encouraged their spiritual growth. When Indians were baptized into the

Moravian church in the 1740s, white Moravians served as sponsors or godparents for

Indian children, and correspondingly, Indians sometimes served as sponsors or godparents for white children.155 Schutt describes how some of the relationships facilitated spiritual as well as physical support among the Indians at the Moravian mission:

Throughout years of migration and struggle, Indian women relied on their relationships with Euro-American missionary women as well as with other Indian women to cope with the dramatic changes in their lives. Traditional Native constructions of female identities and roles as well as Moravian construction of gender powerfully shaped Indian women’s responses to Christianity.156

153 Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood,” 728-729, 731, 737, and 737 note 48. 154 Amy C. Schutt, “Female Relationships and Intercultural Bonds in Moravian Indian Missions,” in William A. Penack and Daniel K. Richter, ed., Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 87; Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope, 146, 167-171. 155 Examples of baptisms see Schutt, “Female Relationships and Intercultural Bonds,” 94, 96, and 99. 156 Schutt, “Female Relationships and Intercultural Bonds,” 89. 102

The central role played by Moravian women in missionary work among Indians in the

1740s and 1750s was one of the key factors that made these missions successful examples of interracial Christianity.

The Moravian missionaries who created personal friendships with Indians in

Pennsylvania and elsewhere show one way in which interracial religious activities flourished in the 1740s, but such experiences were fragile and not shared by all whites and Indians in Pennsylvania and New York. New York persecuted the white Moravian missionaries at Shekomeko in 1744 by charging that they were in league with French

Catholic and by expelling white Moravians. The migration of the whites and some

Indian Moravians effectively ended this interracial religious community in New York. In

1755, some of the white pacifist missionaries and Indian converts were killed by

Delaware Indians who were fighting back against colonial expansion (other Moravian

Indians were massacred by colonists during the American Revolution). White colonists in Pennsylvania unleashed indiscriminate violence against Indians in retaliation for specifically targeted Delaware attached on white settlements, but as Jane Merritt argues,

“the violence that broke out in 1755 and 1756 was not between strangers; it was between people who had become neighbors, if not kin.”157 Religious societies that were interracial and in which some measure of equality was practiced did occasionally exist in the early eighteenth century, but these endeavors came into conflict with the inequality and injustice that more often characterized relations between whites and Indians.158

Most of the churches of the mid-Atlantic region were much less uniform than

Anglican parishes throughout the North or Congregational churches in New England in

157 Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700- 1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 8-9. 158 Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood,” 746. 103 ministering to blacks and Indians, and consequently there were fewer churches where blacks and Indians formally participated from 1730 to 1749. The Dutch and German

Reformed churches rarely baptized blacks and Indians, George Michael Weiss being the exception that proved the rule. Likewise, few Presbyterian churches ministered to blacks or Indians. The strict standards for baptisms that were maintained by the Reformed and

Presbyterian churches and fears among white Christians that baptized slaves would have to be freed were the most significant factors in limiting access to sacraments. Some of the Lutheran churches, composed of several European ethnicities, and the Moravians were more active than Reformed churches in ministering to Indians and blacks, but still relatively few minorities participated in these churches. The Lutheran theology of baptism and the Moravians’ missionary-identity explain why these churches ministered to blacks and Indians more often than Reformed churches. Church of England congregations, however, were still the churches most active in baptizing and ministering to blacks and Indians in the mid-Atlantic during the 1730s and 1740s.

Understanding Black and Indian Beliefs and Motivations

While it is abundantly clear that blacks and Indians participated in a significant number of the Protestant churches in the northern mainland colonies, the lack of sources written by and about these men and women severely limits our ability to understand how they perceived their participation in these churches and what they believed. Participation in the sacraments of baptism and communion should not be understood as evidence of conversion or belief. Rituals can signify a wide range of meanings to the people who

104 participate in them.159 While we do not know exactly what black and Indian Christians believed in this period, evidence suggests that they were willing and active participants in these churches. Baptism and church membership for black and Indian adults was by their own active choice and these religious practices held some sort of meaning and significance to them.

Naturally, the claim that blacks and Indians were willing participants in these churches cannot be supported in all circumstances. Infants and children baptized in these churches, either on the authority of their parents or on the authority of white masters, were not given the choice of whether or not to be baptized. Some of the slave children and infants who were baptized under the direction of white masters likely did not grow into professing adult Christians. In a couple of cases, it is clear that white masters applied great pressure and even violence in order to compel slaves to adopt Christian morality, so it is possible that unfree adult persons could have been compelled to participate in Christian rites. The Reverend James MacSparran of St. Paul’s Episcopal

Church in Narragansett noted in his diary that he gave his slave “Maroca one or two

Lashes for receiving Presents from Mingo,” a male slave. Elsewhere MacSparran called

Maroca a Christian, but he was upset that she “seemed not concerned about her soul not minds her promise of chastity.”160 In this case, MacSparran used means ranging from violence to verbal coaxing to try to get Maroca to comply with the standards of behavior that he expected a female Christian slave to have toward a male slave (Mingo). Enslaved

159 Michael D. McNally, “The Practice of Native American Christianity,” Church History 69, no. 4 (Dec. 2000), 834-859; Neal Salisbury, “Embracing Ambiguity: Native Peoples and Christianity in Seventeenth-Century North America,” Ethnohistory 50, no. 2 (Spring 2003), 247-259; David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, “The Sociology of Conversion,” Annual Review of Sociology 10 (1984), 167-190; Merritt, “Dreaming of the Savior’s Blood,” 739-744. 160 James MacSparran, A letter book and abstract of out services written during the years 1743- 1751, edited by Daniel Goodwin (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1899), 15 and 29. 105 men and women in the North were compelled to labor for others and may have been compelled to attend church, listen to religious instruction, or adhere to Christian morality, but that does not necessarily mean that enslaved men or women were compelled to be baptized or to join churches.161

The baptisms of both free and enslaved adults that occurred in the North’s churches are themselves substantial evidence that many blacks and Indians were willing participants in these Protestant churches. Their willingness could have resulted from spiritual desires and/or from a desire to obtain patronage or an education. In the case of free blacks and Indians, there was no one to compel them to attend church or to be baptized. The free blacks who were baptized at churches in the North (including at some of Boston’s churches, Christ Church Philadelphia, New York’s Lutheran Church and elsewhere) and the free Indians baptized in many of Connecticut’s churches were clearly willing participants in this Christian rite. Although it is less apparent at first glance, the unfree black and Indian adults who were baptized were also willing participants in these churches. The theology and practices of the North’s Protestant churches inclined them to restrict baptism to people who appeared to genuinely believe or to people who could show evidence of God’s saving grace in their lives. Especially in the cases of Reformed or Calvinistic churches, Protestant theology stressed that baptism held no value apart from genuine belief (whether it was the faith of an individual or the faith of parents standing for a child). At least in theory, baptism as a physical act meant nothing without correct beliefs and the work of God in providing his grace; no ritual or sacrament could provide salvation if the person did not have faith. As such, to forcibly baptize an adult

161 For an example of slaves of an Anglican pastor who attended church but were not ready for baptism, see Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 341. 106 would be of no value and would be inconsistent with their Christian beliefs. David Hall and Anne Brown have shown that a majority of parents in New England generally sought to have children baptized very quickly after birth, thereby suggesting that many believed there was an intrinsic benefit or efficacy in the rite of baptism.162 Nonetheless, baptism was not forced on unwilling adults. Even the enslaved adults who were baptized did so by their own volition, and what held true for baptism was even truer for admittance to communion and full membership. These churches did not mandate baptism or church membership for any adult, whether white, black, or Indian.

The active volition that some slaves applied to their religious lives is perhaps no more evident than in the case of one enslaved man who was baptized and joined Christ

Anglican Church Boston and an enslaved man who joined the Congregational church in

Hopkinton (then part of Framingham), Massachusetts. In 1736, the Anglican minister

Timothy Cutler described “a negro servant to a Dissenter, and in the prime of life, who, from great irregularities, is become a serious & somber man.” The owners of this slave were Congregationalists (Dissenters), but this slave chose to affiliate with the Church of

England. Although the minister seemed concerned about having the master’s approval, this unnamed slave was clearly active in the decision to practice Christianity in the

Church of England instead of a Congregational church.163 Likewise, an enslaved black man named Nero Benson, who was owned by the minister of the First Congregational

Church in Framingham, Massachusetts, joined the Hopkinton Congregational Church in

1737. Nero Benson apparently chose this church over his master’s church because of a

162 Brown and Hall, “Family Strategies and Religious Practice,” 53. 163 Perry, Papers Related to the History of the Church in Massachusetts, 297, 307. 107 theological dispute.164 These two men, despite their status as slaves, clearly chose where and how they would participate in churches.

While the participation in these churches was to a great degree by free volition, the participation in these churches did not necessarily mean that a black or Indian person adopted consistent Christian beliefs or converted (in the western sense of the term).

Conversion, especially when understood as a dramatic change in disposition or belief, is almost impossible to address in this context because most people who participated in these churches (and almost all blacks and Indians) left no written expressions to describe their experiences.165 Many of the blacks and Indians who attended or who participated in these churches no doubt adopted elements of Christianity that made sense to them or that corresponded to pre-existing beliefs, but they did not necessary abandon other beliefs that whites saw as inconsistent with Christianity. As many scholars have noted, black and

Indian conversion to Christianity was likely syncretic or transcultural. Men and women adopted portions of Christianity and incorporated them with the beliefs and cultural practices that they already possessed. For example, Christian rituals could easily signify traditional values and the ethic of community life for Indians. Blacks who were taken as slaves directly from Africa and Indians raised in Indian communities were likely to incorporate or syncretize Christian sacraments and ideas into traditional religious beliefs and practices rather than wholly convert to new beliefs.

On the other hand, blacks who were raised since childhood solely or mostly among white Christians were more likely to adopt Christian beliefs and practices little

164 William Barry, A History of Framingham Massachusetts: Including the Plantation from 1640 to the Present Time (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1847), 63; Towner, A Good Master Well Served, 126. 165 Furthermore, Snow and Machalek argue that even written accounts are not reliable sources for measuring or determining conversion; Snow and Machalek, “The Sociology of Conversion,” 167-190. 108 different from those of white Christians. Clergymen were content with and approved the religious knowledge of some blacks and Indians. This may have been the case with Flora of Ipswich, Massachusetts, for example. Mr. Usher, an Anglican missionary in Bristol,

Rhode Island wrote in 1730 that “sundry negroes make application for baptism that were able to render a very good account of the hope that was in them, and their practices were generally agreeable to the principles of the Christian religion.”166 Evidently, these black

Christians and others like them knew Christian doctrines well enough to receive the approbation of white clergymen.

Of course blacks and Indians in predominantly white churches did not participate on equal terms. Women of every race and poorer white colonists were not treated as equals to white men of high status either. While acknowledging and describing the discrimination that blacks, Indians, women, and others faced in churches and society is important, doing so does not take us very far in understanding why these people participated in churches. Blacks and Indians who attended predominantly white churches were usually forced to sit in a portion of the gallery or in back portions of the church.

Seating arrangements generally reflected the social hierarchy of the whole society, with the wealthiest people sitting in the best seats and the poorest and those of the lowest status sitting in the least desirable seats. At Old South Congregational Church in Boston, in 1730 and 1731, the church voted to have a person provide “oversight of the children & servants in the galleries” and “that in Honour to his Excellency our Governour there be a

Canopy Erected over His Pew.”167 Differences in status affected where people sat in church and were reinforced by the seating arrangements. In some cases, women and men

166 Johnson, Slavery in Rhode Island, 11-12. 167 “CR 1: Records of the Old South Church and Congregation, 1735-1767,” Records of Old South (Third) Church, Boston, MA, CL. 109 also had separate seating areas, so wealth, color, age, marital status, and gender could all be factors in determining where people could sit in church.168 While some Indians and blacks exhorted or preached during this period, no denomination ordained black or Indian men during between 1730 and 1749. Yet, many blacks and Indians participated in the

North’s churches despite the discrimination they faced and the limits placed on their involvement.

There are many possible motives that could have influenced black and Indian participation in Protestant churches. No doubt, some blacks and Indians found comfort and emotional support in the religion of the suffering Christ, even though they worshipped with men and women who exploited them. The few early written accounts that are available and later written accounts give important evidence that Christianity could be comforting, empowering, or life-enriching to some blacks and Indians, just as it was to some whites. Without doubt the religious practices comforted numbers of the black and Indian participants.

Often, material and spiritual motives were both present for the blacks and Indians who participated in these churches. Thomas Kidd argues that for most blacks “accepting evangelical Christianity was both a spiritual and a social move.” To greater or lesser degrees, Christianity provided “spiritual solace and a means to assert individual and collective identity.”169 Linford Fisher notes that, “In the Great Awakening, many Indians found themselves at a cultural crossroads, and chose to publicly affiliate with Christianity in part, at least, in hopes of finding practical aid in their ongoing land disputes with colonial officials.” The help that educated and sympathetic ministers could provide to

168 Sweet, Bodies Politic, 111. 169 Kidd, The Great Awakening, 219. 110

Indians was an important incentive for some Indians who participated in predominantly white churches.170 While there can be no simple or narrow explanation for Indian and black participation in the North’s churches, they participated in so many churches that their religious practices must be taken seriously by scholars. Black and Indian participation in Christian churches was not peripheral to the religious history of the

North. Rather, the widespread participation of blacks and Indians in the North’s churches means that they played a formative role in religious developments in the colonial North.

For too long, many educated people and historians have written about the colonial

North’s churches as if there were no blacks or Indians present. On the contrary, most

Congregational churches in southern New England, most Church of England parishes throughout the North, some Lutheran and Moravian churches, and a few Reformed or

Presbyterian church in the mid-Atlantic were interracial religious communities between

1730 and 1749. Blacks and Indians willingly and regularly participated in these churches as attendees and through the rituals of baptism and communion. Their presence was not solely the result of Great Awakening revivals because blacks and Indians participated in churches before the Great Awakening began and were participants in churches whose leadership emphatically opposed the Great Awakening. Rather, blacks and Indians found various types of Protestant Christianity appealing for the spiritual and material benefits it could confer. While it would take several more decades of black religious activities and activism before significant numbers of whites in these denominations would question the compatibility of slavery and Christianity, already blacks and Indians were remaking the

170 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 131-132; For extended discussions on why some Indians affiliated with Christianity or converted, see Fisher, “Traditionary Religion”; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees; and Silverman, Faith and Boundaries. 111 religious landscape of the early American North by their regular and active engagement with Protestant churches.

112

Chapter Two – “I claim Jesus Christ to be my right Master”: Interracial Religious Conflicts and Indian Separatists, 1740-1763

On a November evening in 1740 Boston, an enslaved man was told to entertain the whites in attendance at his master’s house by impersonating the preacher George

Whitefield. The black man began with a prayer and started a sermon despite the jesting and laughter of the white dinner guests. The mood quickly turned somber, however, when the enslaved man said something akin to the following:

I am now come to my Exhortation; and to you my Master after the Flesh: But know I have a Master even Jesus Christ my Saviour, who has said that a Man cannot serve two Masters. Therefore I claim Jesus Christ to be my right Master; and all that come to him he will receive. You know, Master, you have been given to cursing and Swearing and blaspheming God’s holy Name, you have been given to be Drunken, a Whoremonger, Covetous, a Liar, a Cheat, &c. But know that God has pronounced a Woe against all such, and has said that such shall never enter the Kingdom of God. And now to conclude (saith he) except you shall repent you shall likewise perish.1

This slave’s exhortation is suggestive of the conflicts and tensions that existed between some blacks and whites in the North’s churches.2 Conflicts occurred when slaves decided that they could not serve two masters – their God and the person who claimed to own them. The slave in this story said that his true and right master was Jesus Christ, who receives “all that come to him.” Not only did this slave insist that he answered to a higher power than his “Master after the Flesh,” but he also contended that he would reach

1 “A remarkable Account of a Reformation among some Gentlemen, at Boston in New-England; being an Abstract of a Letter from G. D. of that Place, to his Friend W. N. in Biddiford, Dated Nov. 22, 1740,” in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, October 1919-June 1920, Volume 53 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1920), 200. 2 The letter that included this story was printed in a newspaper in Glasgow, Scotland, the Glasgow-Weekly-History. The printer sought to further promote revivalism by sharing stories of its successes. From the point of view of the publisher and writer, the central significance of the story lay in the apparent suddenness and completeness of the gentleman’s conversion from sinful to godly living at hearing Whitefield’s message (even though it was delivered by a slave). The slave’s speech apparently ended the dinner. I find the account of the slave’s speech authentic because the focus of the publisher and/or letter writer was on the effectiveness of Whitefield’s message and was not overly focused on the slave’s critique of slavery. 113

heaven instead of his master as long as this gentleman continued to be a sinner and “hater of Religion.”3 This enslaved black man used the message of evangelical Christianity, likely gained from attendance at interracial religious services in Boston, to critique the person and by implication the institution that kept him enslaved.4 His actions lay bare a portion of the underlying social tensions or conflicts that existed with the participation of blacks and Indians in so many of the North’s predominantly white churches. The social hierarchy in the British colonies, which resigned blacks and Indians to the lowest positions in society, did not always coexist easily with the egalitarian and evangelical strains within Christianity, even though the social hierarchy outside of church was commonly reinforced within churches. In determining whether or not to participate in predominantly white churches, blacks and Indians considered the benefits versus the disadvantages of affiliation, including the disadvantages of conflicts with whites. For the particular slave mentioned here, one benefit of Christianity was a theology that could be used to critique his master.

During the period of 1740 to 1763, religious and personal conflicts with whites attended black and Indian participation in many the North’s Protestant churches.

Interracial conflict in churches was by no means restricted to this period, but during the

1750s many Indians stopped participating in predominantly white churches and formed separate churches. Blacks, however, remained in predominantly white churches irrespective of conflicts between Christianity and their enslavement or between themselves and their owners. Examining religious conflicts between whites, blacks, and

3 “A remarkable Account of a Reformation among some Gentlemen,” 200. 4 Since there were no black churches in Boston at this time, since all predominately white churches contained some blacks, and since revivalists such as George Whitefield generally preached to large, mix-raced audiences, it seems likely that this black man heard the message of Christianity at interracial religious services. 114

Indians helps to address why Indians formed independent churches in Connecticut,

Rhode Island, and Long Island roughly four decades before blacks formed separate churches in the North.

Two interrelated questions likely influenced whether blacks and Indians would continue to affiliate with predominantly white churches or whether they would form separate churches. Firstly, people of color, both individually and communally, asked whether the benefits derived from affiliation with white churches were accessible only within these churches and whether these benefits outweighed the racial subordination that they often experienced within white churches. The benefits included meaningful worship, spiritual fulfillment, white advocates, access to education, and the status of being a church member in colonial society. The Reverend Harry Munro noted two of the benefits that attracted blacks to his church, including “the great desire of the negroes have of learning” and the “care and attention to their spiritual concerns” that they received.5

The disadvantages of affiliation for blacks and Indians could include exclusion from the pulpit and leadership positions, implicit support for the systems that protected racial exploitation, being treated as inferior or subservient, and greater white authority and supervision over behavior. Blacks and Indians were rarely allowed to vote in church matters or hold leadership positions. The second related question was whether the black or Indian communities possessed enough resources to maintain independent churches, including resources such as leaders, community cohesion, land, money, and access to education. This argument is necessarily speculative because few blacks or Indians in this time period explained their actions in writing. However, available evidence does suggest

5 Quoted in Frank J. Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church VIII, no. 4 (December 1939), 359-360. 115

the existence of both tangible benefits and negative proscriptions for black and Indians in white churches, and it is difficult to imagine that they did not consider these factors when choosing whether or not to affiliate with white churches.

For many Indians during this period, most of the benefits received from affiliation with white churches could be obtained in Indian churches or from other sources without the negative disadvantages associated with participation in white churches. Moreover, many Indian communities, even though often poor and marginalized compared to white communities, did possess the resources necessary for maintaining churches. For many blacks, there were still benefits that could be derived from predominantly white churches that could not readily be found elsewhere, and blacks lacked even the modest autonomy and resources available to Indians during this era. Most importantly, the majority of blacks in the North were still slaves. Thus, despite conflict with whites, many blacks and some Indians continued to willingly participate in many predominantly white churches into the 1760s.

Congregational and Anglican churches continued to have the highest levels of black and Indian participation between 1750 and 1763, although Indian participation declined dramatically as Indian communities founded separate churches. Throughout this period, many in the North continued to experience public worship in interracial settings, but the rates of black participation in the sacrament of baptism changed. At many of the

Congregational churches in southern New England, rates of black baptisms declined relative to the 1730-1749 period, particularly among adults. In some locations, the number of white and black baptisms both declined in Congregational churches. At

Anglican churches, conversely, black participation levels tended to be higher in this later

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period, which was partially due to continued educational and missionary work by

Anglican clergy. Indian participation at all churches declined substantially. Recently converted Indians began practicing Christianity independent of whites whereas they had formerly affiliated with predominantly white churches.

A wide variety of interracial conflicts existed within the North’s integrated churches, and blacks and Indians faced some conflicts simply by participating in predominantly white churches. These conflicts broadly included theological disagreements, church schisms, church discipline, and resistance to slavery. Some conflicts between whites and Indians correlated with the rise of separate Indian churches, but other conflicts occurred in the churches where both whites and Indians continued to attend together. For many blacks, participation in predominantly white churches still provided advantages, including access to education, channels of patronage and protection, and spiritual nourishment. Enslaved blacks, however, did occasionally assert their rights as Christians and church members against the wishes of owners. In increased numbers, black adults had their children baptized (themselves having been baptized earlier), and sometimes blacks and Indians forcibly expressed their own views on

Christianity, often to the surprise and disapproval of whites. There is evidence for a wide variety of conflicts between whites, Indians, and blacks that relate to church affiliation and religious matters, but many blacks continued to affiliate with white churches, despite conflicts, because of the benefits that they could derive from the churches. Indians generally did not continue their affiliation with predominantly white churches after the

1740s.

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* * * *

The period of 1740 to 1763 was heavily influenced, perhaps even defined, by warfare and violence. King George’s War, the North American portion of the War of the

Austrian Succession, particularly affected New York, Massachusetts, and New

Hampshire from 1744 to 1748. English colonists and their Indian allies fought French forces and their Indian allies along the border between the English colonies and New

France.6 The Indians who fought with the English included many individuals who had affiliated with predominantly white churches in the North. Similar but more sustained and devastating fighting occurred again between these rivals during the French and

Indian War (Seven Years’ War) from 1754 to 1763.7 Whites reacted to Indian engagement in these conflicts in Pennsylvania with widespread fear and retaliatory violence, as historian Peter Silver argues. Graphic written accounts of frontier warfare contributed to the spread of white fears of Indian violence and shrill anti-Indian discourse. In many ways, this was a period in which Indian-hating crystalized among whites in the North.8 It seems entirely likely that white Christians transferred a growing anti-Indian animus onto their fellow Indian Christians as a result of the military clashes, especially since whites even attacked settlements of pacifist, Christian Indians during the war. The growth in white distrust and animosity toward Indians certainly made Indians less inclined to remain in predominantly white churches.

6 See Douglas Leach, Northern Colonial Frontier, 1607-1763 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966); and Richard Johnson, “The Search for a Usable Indian: An Aspect of the Defense of Colonial New England,” Journal of American History 64, no. 3 (Dec., 1977), 623-651. 7 For a history of the French and Indian War, see Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). 8 Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). 118

Another result of these wars was increased importations of African slaves to many northern cities. Gary Nash notes that “the beginning of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 marked the onset of a decade in which slavery and slave trading reached their height in colonial Philadelphia.” The increased demand for slaves in this city was due to “the sudden drying up of the supply of indentured German and Scotch-Irish laborers who had disembarked at Philadelphia in record numbers between 1749 and 1754.”9 Graham

Hodges also found evidence for increasing slave importations from the 1740s through the

1760s in New York. “In Kings County,” he writes, “the black population increased from

645 to 783 in the three years between 1746 and 1749. [...] The increase in the local black population occurred primarily via the African slave trade.” Roughly 130 to 150 voyages between 1748 and 1774 brought thousands of new African slaves to the New York area.10

Robert Desrochers Jr. shows that the importation of black slaves to Massachusetts declined after the period of 1720-1740, because of poor economic conditions in

Massachusetts, but it rebounded near the end of the Seven Years’ War. Slave importation to Massachusetts increased again after 1758, and “African importations peaked in

Massachusetts and elsewhere in British colonial America in the late 1750s and early

1760s.”11 Recently-arrived adult African slaves were less likely than American born blacks to affiliate with churches, at least during their first years of enslavement.

9 Gary B. Nash, “Slaves and Slaveowners in Colonial Philadelphia” in William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), 229. 10 Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613- 1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 104-105. 11 Robert E. Desrochers, Jr., “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704 1781,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 59, no. 3, (Jul. 2002), 654-661. For more on northern economies during this period, see John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Margaret Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Cathy Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 119

Moreover, the slave status of most blacks restricted the ability of blacks to form autonomous communities and to obtain the resources necessary for establishing churches throughout the colonial period.

Increased numbers of enslaved blacks in the North and politicized fear of Indians were two of the broader changes that occurred in the North from 1740 to 1763 that inevitably impacted white perceptions of blacks and Indians and race relations in churches. While these colonial wars and the slave trade are not detailed in this chapter, they form a significant part of the context to race relations in this period. In his study of the Seven Year’s War, Fred Anderson argues that “this immense conflict changed everything, and by no means only for the better.”12 This change included growing white hostility and violence against all Indians and increases in the North’s enslaved black population. Despite conflicts within and outside of churches, however, a significant portion of people in the North continued to experience formal religion in interracial contexts. In the case of the Indians who began to worship in separate churches, the benefits of affiliation no longer outweighed the disadvantages, especially in locations where they possessed community autonomy and resources. But for many blacks, the benefits of affiliating with churches continued nevertheless to outweigh the disadvantages.

Black and Indian Participation Levels 1750-1764

In the period of 1750 to 1763, it was still common for blacks to be active in the

Congregational churches of southern New England and the Anglican churches throughout the North. Blacks still chose to affiliate with many of these churches because they were

12 Anderson, Crucible of War, xxi. 120

attracted to the worship and because of opportunities for education, but there were some changes in the rates of their participation. Blacks were baptized less frequently between

1750 and 1763 than between 1730 and 1749 at many of the Congregational churches in southern New England. There were often fewer baptisms of both white and black congregants in this later period, but, in many cases, the black to white ratio of baptisms also decreased. Black participation in Anglican churches, conversely, increased in many parishes during the 1750s and early 1760s, as the Anglican churches offered increasing numbers of religious classes in which blacks could also learn to read. Black participation remained relatively stable and low in Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutheran,

Presbyterian, and Moravian churches throughout this period.13

Black men and women continued to participate in all of Boston’s Congregational churches whose records have survived, during the period of 1750-1763, but generally they participated less frequently than in the two previous decades. In the majority of

Boston’s Congregational churches, the total number of black baptisms, the average number of black baptisms per year, and the black share of the overall number of baptisms decreased as compared to the previous period. As Table 2-1 shows, the available indicators suggest that fewer black people participated in the sacrament of baptism in a majority of Boston’s Congregational churches from 1750 to 1763 than from 1730 to

1749. For example, the yearly average number of black baptisms at Brattle Street Church

13 The only historians who have paid careful attention to baptismal and membership in regards to blacks and Indians are Graham Russell Hodges in the contexts of New York and New Jersey, Linford Fisher for Indians in southern New England, and to a lesser extent John Sweet for southern New England. Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Graham Russell Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665-1865; Linford D. Fisher, ‘Traditionary Religion’: The Great Awakening and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Southern New England, 1736-1776 (Th.D. diss. Harvard University, 2008); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 121

decreased from 2.3 yearly (1730-1749) to 0.93 yearly (1750-1763) and the percentage of all baptisms that were black baptisms decreased from 4.06 percent to 2.95 percent. At three of the eight Congregational churches whose records survive –Old South Church,

New South (Sixth) Church, and New Brick (Seventh) Church – the percentage of all baptisms that were black increased. At Old South, the yearly average number of black baptisms decreased from 1.75 to 1.57, but the percentage of baptisms that were black baptisms increased from 3.02 percent to 4.21 percent. While the increase of black participation in these three churches was insubstantial, the data shows an active and deliberate engagement of some blacks in these churches. In these three churches the rate of white baptisms deceased at a faster rate than the decrease in black baptisms. The decreased number of black baptisms at many of Boston’s Congregational churches, however, stands in contrast to a relative increase in black baptisms in Boston’s Anglican churches. Although the rates of black baptisms generally decreased, many blacks continued to seek the benefits of church affiliation.

Table 2-1: Black baptisms in Boston’s Congregational and Anglican churches, 1730- 1763

1730 to 1749 1750 to 1763

Boston Number Average Total Black % Number Average Total Black % churches of Black # of number of total of Black # of number of total Baptisms black of baptisms Baptisms black of baptisms baptisms baptisms baptisms baptisms per year per year Brattle Street 46 2.3 1,134 4.06% 13 0.93 441 2.95% (Fourth) Old South (Third) 35 1.75 1,158 3.02% 22 1.57 522 4.21%

New North 31 1.55 1,726 1.80% 7 0.50 1064 0.66% (Fifth) Second (1730- 22 1.10 623 3.53% NA NA NA NA 1747)

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New Brick 9 0.45 593 1.54% 6 0.43 192 3.13% (Seventh) West (Ninth) 8 0.40 263 3.04% 4 0.29 158 2.53%

First (Old Brick) 15 0.75 738 2.03% 3 0.21 224 1.34%

New South 6 0.30 881 0.68% 5 0.36 467 1.07% (Sixth) Hollis Street 3 0.15 313 0.96% 1 0.07 208 0.48% (Eighth) King’s Chapel 9 0.45 574 1.57% 32 2.29 798 4.01% Episcopal Christ Church 55 2.75 1010 5.44% 23 1.64 520 4.42% Episcopal Trinity (1738- 15 1.25 432 3.47% 24 1.71 531 4.52% 1763) City Totals & 254 12.70 9,445 2.69% 143 10.21 5,125 2.79% Averages See Bibliography for Sources 14

Several factors affected the numbers and rates of black baptisms. Colonial populations are difficult to determine accurately, especially for blacks, but it does appear that Boston’s white population declined slightly from the late 1740s to 1760 while

Boston’s black population stayed roughly constant or grew slightly.15 Since the Great

Awakening spurred increases in adult baptisms among whites and blacks, even if it was not the only or sole cause of black religious participation, the waning of revivalism did

14 The sample size and comparison of only two historical periods does not lend well to making statistically significant conclusions about rates and trends of black baptisms. I use the data presented in these table to give an impression of what seems to have occurred in the participation of blacks. Further study and greater amounts of data would be necessary to make statistically significant claims. 15 William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 164; Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Athenaeum, 1969), 338, 347; George W. Harper, A People so Favored of God: Boston’s Congregational Churches and Their Pastors, 1710- 1760, Second Edition (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf & Stock, 2007), 160; Desrochers, “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts,” 654, 662. 123

make new adult baptisms a little less common. On the one hand, some of the moderate revivalist churches and the anti-revivalist churches in Boston were less willing to minister to blacks as they expressed growing concern about the “enthusiasms,” or irregular religious practices, of some blacks, women, and radical white evangelicals during the

Awakening.16 On the other hand, it seems that at least part of the decrease in black baptisms reflected a stabilization or normalization of black baptisms in which fewer adults were baptized and more blacks were baptized as infants. Despite the lower rates of black baptisms in many churches, affiliation remained appealing to some blacks.

Blacks who were baptized between 1750 and 1763 at the Old South Church

Boston were more likely to be children than those baptized in the previous two decades, which indicates that the rate of black baptisms was stabilizing at a level closer to the birth rate. Moreover, it became more common to see black parents listed with the baptisms of infant blacks. At Old South Church, there were primarily two ways that black baptisms were recorded: (1) with the name of baptized person followed by the status description,

“negro servant of,” and the master’s name, or (2) the name of baptized person followed by parents’ names and the designation “negroes.” The former type usually signified that the person was baptized on the authority of the white master, who publically “engageth for his [or her] Education.” In the latter group, the children were baptized on the authority of their parents, who had formerly owned the covenant and been baptized themselves. In the period of 1730-1749, about thirty percent of the black baptisms were done on the authority of the children’s parents. In the period of 1750-1763, this group increased to roughly fifty-five percent. These baptismal records do not have information

16 Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 213. 124

about the ages of the people being baptized, but the records suggest that the rate of black children being baptized rose in relation to adult baptisms.17 Overall there was a general trend toward a normalization or stabilization of the black baptisms at this church as most people, black and white, were baptized as children. More blacks were baptized as children than as adults, and black parents, who had been baptized earlier, were bringing their children back years later to be baptized upon their own authority. Although the rate of black baptisms rose at Old South, the lower rate of black participation in some of

Boston’s other churches may not have been the result of less interest among blacks in participating in these churches. As revivalism waned, fewer adults were being converted and baptized, which decreased the total numbers of black baptisms in many churches even though black children continued to be baptized. Even lower rates of black baptisms could reflect a normalization of black access to this sacrament and indicate that many blacks continued to value the benefits of affiliation with predominantly white churches.

The records of the First Church of Watertown, Massachusetts help explain how black participation in Congregational churches was stabilizing in some churches after the

1740s, whereby blacks baptized in the 1740s continued their affiliation with churches in the 1750s by having their children baptized. Three “negroes,” two “mulattoes,” and one

Indian who owned the covenant were baptized between 1730 and 1749. They all appear to have been adults when baptized because they publically owned the church covenant.

These adult baptisms included a slave owned by the church’s minister, for the church records state that, “Nymphas, my Negro, entered into Cov’t & was baptized” on

December 7, 1745. In contrast, between 1750 and 1760, only one “negro” adult but three

17 I chose Old South for this example because the number of black baptism in both periods was high enough to provide a sample size large enough for a fair comparison. “Baptisms 1669-1875, VS B I,” Old South Church Records, CL. 125

“negro” children were baptized in Watertown. “Jenny Negro woman of Saml Parry owned ye covenant & was baptized” in 1751, but “Nymphas, ye Son of my Negro Man, was baptized” in 1753, “Phillis, ye daughter of Nymphas, a negro, was baptized” in 1755, and “Katy ye daughter of Nymphas (my negro)” was baptized in 1757. Since Nymphas had owned the church covenant and became a half-way member in 1745, it was possible in the 1750s for his three children to be baptized under his authority as a half-way member.18 Watertown had seven male and five female black residents over the age of sixteen in 1755, so it seems likely that about half the town’s blacks were baptized at this church.19 The changing nature and number of black baptisms in this church after the

1740s shows that at least one black adult continued to participate in this predominantly white church by having children baptized. The desire to have children baptized was one factor that encouraged blacks to affiliate with white churches.

As Table 2-2 indicates, blacks continued to participate in the rite of baptism and publically affiliate in a significant number of Congregational churches in southern New

England between 1750 and 1763. This pattern demonstrates the continued interracial nature of New England’s churches, whereby blacks participated in most aspect of community religious life. At some of these churches, the rate of black baptisms remained steady or increased, but in large portion of these churches, the rate of black baptisms decreased because whites may have become less welcoming to blacks in some places and because fewer black adults were being baptized. In some of the smaller towns in New

England, small numbers of blacks continued to be baptized at steady or growing rates over time. At the First Parish Congregational Church in Brockton, Massachusetts

18 First Parish Record Book, 1668-1818, First Church (Watertown, Mass.) Records 1668-1981, MHS, pp. 225-235. 19 Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 339. 126

(originally the Fourth Church Bridgewater), six blacks were baptized between 1740 and

1750; six more blacks were baptized between 1751 and 1763.20 At the Second Church of

Christ in Amesbury, Massachusetts (known today at the Pilgrim Congregational Church in Merrimac), only one black child and one Indian child were baptized in the 1740s; four black children were baptized there in the 1750s. Amesbury had an estimated population of five blacks over age 16 in 1755.21 At the First Church of Hartford, Connecticut the rate of black baptisms increased slightly. Between 1730 and 1749, twelve blacks were baptized (yearly average of 0.60 baptisms), and between 1750 and 1763, thirteen blacks were baptized (yearly average of 0.93 baptisms).22 At these churches and others listed on

Table 2-2, blacks continued to participate through baptisms and membership for themselves and for their children.

At other churches, however, fewer blacks participated in the sacrament of baptism after 1750, which reflects stabilizing baptismal rates but also some cases when church affiliation may have become less appealing because of local circumstances. At the First

Church of Mansfield, Connecticut only two blacks and two Indians were baptized between 1750 and 1763 compared to eight black baptisms in the two decades prior to

1750. The First Church of New London, Connecticut saw an even larger decrease.

Roughly sixteen Indians and fifteen blacks were baptized there between 1730 and 1749 compared to two blacks and one Indian between 1750 and 1763. While the death of

Reverend Adams in 1753 and several years without a resident pastor likely impacted the

20 Church Covenant, baptisms, marriages, other administrations of 4th Church of Christ in Bridgewater, Box 1, Brockton, Massachusetts, Christ Congregational Church United Church of Christ, Records, 1738-1980, CL. 21 Baptisms in Amesbury, Pilgrim Congregational Church (Merrimac, Mass.) manuscript records, CL; Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 340. 22 Historical Catalogue of the First Church in Hartford, 1633-1885 (Published by the Church, 1885), 199-226. 127

baptismal rates, this church seems to have become less welcoming to blacks and Indians after 1750.23 Although rates of black baptisms fluctuated, Table 2-2 shows that in a significant portion of the communities in southern New England, some blacks continued to participate in the local Congregational church between 1750 and 1763 because, on the whole, church affiliation remained attractive to many northern blacks.

Table 2-2: Select list of Congregational churches in which two or more blacks were baptized 1750-1763 (Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island):

Church Names Town/City Location State Location New London First Congregational Church New London Connecticut North Woodstock Congregational Church North Woodstock Connecticut Woodstock Hill First Church Woodstock Connecticut Cromwell First Congregational Church Cromwell Connecticut Redding Congregational Church Redding Connecticut Northford Congregational Church Northford Connecticut Bloomfield Congregational Church Bloomfield Connecticut Bolton Congregational Church Bolton Connecticut East Haven First Congregational Church East Haven Connecticut East Haddam First Congregational Church East Haddam Connecticut Griswold First Congregational Church Griswold Connecticut Norwich First Congregational Church Norwich Connecticut Fairfield First Congregational Church Fairfield Connecticut Wethersfield First Congregational Church Wethersfield Connecticut Lebanon First Congregational Church Lebanon Connecticut New Haven First Congregational Church New Haven Connecticut Middletown First Congregational Church Middletown Connecticut Colchester First Congregational Church Colchester Connecticut Old Saybrook Congregational Church Old Saybrook Connecticut Oxford Congregational Church Oxford Connecticut Southington First Congregational Church Southington Connecticut Groton First Congregational Church Groton Connecticut Old Lyme First Congregational Church Old Lyme Connecticut East Hartford First Congregational Church East Hartford Connecticut Bozrah Congregation Church Bozrah Connecticut Berlin Kensington Congregational Church Berlin Connecticut Lisbon Newent Congregational Church Lisbon Connecticut

23 Historical Catalogue of the First Church in Hartford, 199-226; Connecticut Church Records, State Library Index, Mansfield First Congregational Church, 1710-1892 (Hartford: CSL, 1967), Susan W. Dimock, ed., Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and Deaths from the Records of the Town and Churches in Mansfield, Connecticut, 1703-1850 (New York: The Baker & Taylor Company, 1898), 360-389; Connecticut Church Records, State Library Index, New London First Congregational Church, 1670-1888 (Hartford: CSL, 1949); S. Lerov Blake, The Later History of the First Church of Christ New London, Conn. (New London, Conn.: The Day Publishing Company, 1900), 491-522. 128

New Hartford First Congregational Church New Hartford Connecticut Newtown First Congregational Church Newtown Connecticut Mansfield First Congregational Church Mansfield Connecticut Preston First Congregational Church Preston Connecticut Portland First Congregational Church Portland Connecticut Plainfield First Congregational Church Plainfield Connecticut First Church Hartford Hartford Connecticut First Church Boston Boston Massachusetts Old South (Third) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts Brattle Square (Fourth) Church Boston Massachusetts New North (Fifth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts New South (Sixth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts New Brick (Seventh) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts Hollis Street (Eighth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts West (Ninth) Church Boston Boston Massachusetts First Church Cambridge Cambridge Massachusetts Second Church Cambridge Cambridge Massachusetts First Church Charlestown Charlestown Massachusetts West Roxbury First Congregational West Roxbury Massachusetts First Parish Church Dorchester Dorchester Massachusetts Scituate First Church Scituate Massachusetts Scituate Second Church Scituate Massachusetts Topsfield Congregational Church Topsfield Massachusetts Rowley First Congregational Church Rowley Massachusetts Plymouth Congregational Church Plymouth Massachusetts First Church Salem Salem Massachusetts Brockton Christ Congregational Church Brockton Massachusetts Pilgrim Congregational Church Merrimac Merrimac Massachusetts First Parish Hingham Hingham Massachusetts First Congregational Church Weymouth Weymouth Massachusetts First Congregational Church Watertown Watertown Massachusetts Milton Congregational Church Milton Massachusetts Groton Congregational Church Groton Massachusetts Sturbridge Congregational Church Sturbridge Massachusetts Lincoln Church of Christ Lincoln Massachusetts Boxford First Congregational Church Boxford Massachusetts Boxford Second Congregational Church Boxford Massachusetts Bradford First Congregational Church Bradford Massachusetts Amesbury North Parish Congregational Church Amesbury Massachusetts Amesbury South Parish Congregational Church Amesbury Massachusetts Beverly First Parish Church Beverly Massachusetts Billerica First Congregational Church Billerica Massachusetts Second Church Lancaster (Chocksett Church) Lancaster Massachusetts Pembroke Second Church of Christ Pembroke Massachusetts Middleton Congregational Church Middleton Massachusetts Stoneham Congregational Church Stoneham Massachusetts Truro Congregational Church Truro Massachusetts Barnstable West Parish Church Barnstable Massachusetts

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Barnstable East Parish Church Barnstable Massachusetts Second Church of Christ Medway Medway Massachusetts Second Congregational Church in Rochester Rochester (Mattapoisett) Massachusetts Wenham Congregational Church Wenham Massachusetts Tiverton Congregational Church Tiverton Rhode Island Bristol First Congregational Church Bristol Rhode Island See Bibliography for Sources.

Blacks and some Indians continued to participate in many of the North’s Church of England parishes between 1750 and 1763, which demonstrates that most Anglican churches in the North were interracial. In fact, in most Anglican churches, the rate of black baptisms increased in this period, in part because of the specific benefits that

Anglicans offered. At Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island there were fifty-one black baptisms and four Indian baptisms in this fourteen year period compared to fifty- seven black and two Indian baptisms in the twenty years prior. The yearly average number of black baptisms increased from 2.85 to 3.64 at this church.24 At Christ Church

Philadelphia there were about a hundred and five blacks baptized from 1750 to 1763; the yearly average number of black baptisms increased from 3.9 to 7.5. Twenty-five of the black persons baptized at Christ Church Philadelphia were identified as “free negroes,” which was a significantly higher percentage than the four free blacks baptized at the same church from 1730 to 1749. The increase in black baptisms at Christ Church was likely the result of the work of Reverend William Sturgeon, who became “catechist to the negroes” in 1747 with the support of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.25

Sturgeon, like many Anglican catechists, offered valuable educational opportunities for

24 “A list of Such Persons as have ben Received Into the Church by the Holy Sacrem’t of Baptism Since the 11th Day of October 1719 at Newport Rhod Island,” Trinity Church Records, NHS. 25 “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Vol. 1 Bap. 1709-1768”, Red. 10 Exp. 6.5, Microfilm XCH114, HSP; Richard I. Shelling, “William Sturgeon, Catechist to the Negroes of Philadelphia and Assistant Rector of Christ Church, 1747-1766,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 8, no. 4 (December 1939), 388-401. 130

black adults and youths that including learning both reading and religious material. In

Newport and Philadelphia, the Anglican churches were interracial and many blacks saw spiritual and material benefits to participation in these Anglican churches.

Although most of Trinity Church New York’s records were destroyed in a 1776 fire, there is evidence to suggest that black baptisms and participation occurred at a significant level at this church during the 1750s and 1760s. Surviving baptismal records indicate that at least twenty-one blacks were baptized at Trinity Church New York in

1759 alone, and it seems that many more blacks were baptized there during this period.26

The Reverend Samuel Auchmuty was appointed as a catechist for New York City by the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and he taught, catechized, and baptized scores of blacks. In 1750 he wrote:

Since my last [December 1749] I have baptized about twenty-five negro infants, and eight adults, and can with truth assure you that my black catechumens daily increase, and seem to be fonder of becoming Christians than they were when I first came among them. I must acquaint you that the Masters of the slaves in this place have also become more desirous than they used to be, to have servants baptized, and instructed in the principles of our most holy religion.27

It seemed that many blacks sought instruction and baptism at Trinity Church New York and masters generally promoted the same object. Other Protestant denominations stressed that owners should teach slaves about Christianity, and many Congregationalists taught slaves to read the Bible at home, but Anglican churches paid people to teach blacks and slaves how to read and the doctrines of faith in weekly classes. Trinity

Church offered education and perhaps the hope of better relations with masters, and many slaves affiliated with Christianity at this church. Based on his missionary reports, it

26 Marriages Parish 1746-1816 and Baptisms 1759, Trinity Church Wall Street Archive, New York, pp. 22. 27 Quoted in Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 332-333. 131

seems that Auchmuty continued to baptize and educate substantial numbers of blacks.

Between October 1750 and October 1751, he baptized another thirty-nine black infants and sixteen black adults, and a couple black adults were preparing to be admitted to communion through further religious study. Auchmuty reported in regular letters that he baptized 371 black infants/children and 65 black adults from 1750 to 1763.28 Even though the baptism information from the church records is incomplete, it appears that blacks participated at Trinity Church New York in higher numbers during the 1750s and early 1760s than in previous decades.

The yearly average number of black baptisms and the percentage of all baptisms that were black rose in two-thirds of Boston’s Anglican churches in this period (as shown in Table 2-1), which indicates how Boston’s Anglican churches also appealed to blacks and continued to be interracial churches. Black people were baptized at higher rates in

Boston’s three Anglican churches than in any of Boston’s Congregational churches excepting the Old South Church. As Table 2-3 indicates, the available Church of

England baptismal records overwhelmingly show that blacks continued to participate in most of the North’s Anglican churches. Enslaved blacks and free blacks participated in

Anglican churches at higher rates than in earlier decades, which was at least partly the result of the continued missionary and teaching work among blacks conducted by

Anglican clergymen.

28 Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 332-336; Hodges, Root & Branch, 119-120. 132

Table 2-3: Select list of Church of England parishes in which two or more blacks were baptized 1750-1763:

Church Names Church Location Number of Yearly black baptisms Average Queen’s Chapel Portsmouth Portsmouth, N.H. 2 0.14 King’s Chapel Boston Boston, Mass. 32 2.29 Christ Church Boston Boston, Mass. 23 1.64 Trinity Church Boston Boston, Mass. 24 1.71 St. Michael's Episcopal Church Bristol, R.I. 2 0.14 St. Paul's Church Narragansett Narragansett, R.I. 7 1.00 Trinity Church Newport Newport, R.I. 51 3.64 King’s Church Providence Providence, R.I. 9 (1758 to 1763) N/A Middletown Christ Church Middletown, Conn. 6 0.43 Christ Church Stratford Stratford, Conn. 29 2.07 Trinity Church New York29 New York, N.Y. 436 31.14 Christ Church Shrewsbury Shrewsbury, N.J. 30 2.14 Christ Church Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. 105 7.50 Total and Yearly Average Number 756 54 See Bibliography for Sources.

Writing in 1766 and 1767 from Westchester County, New York, the Reverend

Harry Munro commented on the two major benefits that blacks saw in participation in

Anglican churches. Munro noted “the remarkable proficiency of my young catechumens, the great desire of the negroes have of learning” and that the blacks in his parish “seem to be extremely thankful for my care and attention to their spiritual concerns.”30 Many of the Anglican churches in the North offered both spiritual and educational benefits to blacks. Significant numbers of blacks were baptized in the parish churches in New York

29 The number 436 is based on the number of baptisms reported by Rev. Auchmuty in a few letters that are recorded in Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 332-336. The baptismal registries owned by the church contain information for only one year prior to 1776, which indicates that at least twenty-one blacks were baptized at Trinity Church New York in 1759. Marriages Parish 1746-1816 and Baptisms 1759, Trinity Church Wall Street Archive, New York, pp. 22. 30 Quoted in Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 359-360. 133

City and Philadelphia where there were Anglican catechists and schools specifically funded to teach blacks.31

As had been the case during the 1730s and 1740s (see Chapter One), few blacks participated in Christian sacraments in the non-Anglican churches of the mid-Atlantic from 1750 to 1763, although Lutheran and Moravian churches were generally more interracial than Reformed churches. The number of blacks in all these churches, however, was generally low.32 Approximately sixteen blacks were baptized at the Old

Tennent Presbyterian Church of Manalapan (Freeport), New Jersey, but this church was exceptional.33 Overall, the most prevalent churches in the mid-Atlantic (Dutch

Reformed, German Reformed, and Presbyterian) still showed little interest in proselytizing blacks and Indians during the period of 1750 to 1763, and very few blacks

31 Hodges writes that “Between 1740 and 1782 Anglican missionaries baptized at least 350 blacks in New Brunswick, Newark, Elizabethtown, and Perth Amboy,” New Jersey. I have not yet been able to verify baptismal rates with all these church records. Hodges, Root & Branch, 121. 32 A couple of blacks were baptized in the Lutheran churches located in Philadelphia and York, Pennsylvania, and nine black persons were baptized at the Lutheran church in New York City; Two black people were baptized at the First Moravian Church in Philadelphia, four or perhaps five blacks were baptized at the First Moravian Church in New York City, and others continued to participate in Moravian Christianity in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A couple blacks participated in the Dutch Reformed churches located in Schenectady and Rhinebeck, New York, and in the German Reformed churches located in Germantown and Perkasie, Pennsylvania; “St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, PA Baptisms 1745-59 Part 1,” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. XXX (Philadelphia, 1897); Christ Evangelical Lutheran Church, York, York County, PA, Part I, Baptisms 1733- 1794, Adams County Historical Society; Lutheran church records, 1703-1802 New York, Albany, and other places, Manuscript, NYPL; “First Moravian Church Phila, PA Baptism, Marriages,” HSP; New York Moravian Church records : baptisms 1744-1890, with an index compiled by Thelma E. Smith, 1991, NYPL; Schenectady, New York First Dutch Reformed Church: births and baptisms, 1649-1781, transcribed by Maria Noll Cormack, NYPL; Baptisms and marriages recorded in the General Church Book of the Dutch Reformed Church on the Rhinebeck Flatts in Dutchess County, by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, Fonda, N. Y., from a hand-written transcript of the records, made by Samuel Burhan's Jr., for the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, (New York: 1947); F. Edward Wright, Bucks County, Pennsylvania Church Records of the 17th and 18th Centuries, Volume 1 (Westminister, MD: Willow Bend Books, 2001); F. Edward Wright, ed., 18th Century Records of the Germantown Reformed Church of Pennsylvania (Westminster, Md.: Family Line Publications, 1994). 33 Anna Miller Watring, ed., Early Church Records of Monmouth County, New Jersey (Lewes, DE: Colonial Roots, 2004), v and 1-3. 134

accessed the sacraments in these churches.34 These Reformed churches continued to have strict baptismal policies that were prohibitive to blacks and Indians, and these denominations lagged behind the missionary efforts of Congregationalists and Anglicans as they had during the 1730s and 1740s. Some of the Lutheran and Moravian churches, although smaller in number than Reformed churches, continued to be interracial religious communities that were appealing to blacks.

Indians participated in predominantly white churches, particularly Congregational churches, at much lower rates during the 1750s and 1760s. The lower participation levels suggest that most Indians decided that the benefits of affiliation could be gained elsewhere and/or did not outweigh the disadvantages of affiliation. Indeed, this trend corresponded to the rise of new Indians churches. As Table 2-4 indicates, one or more

Indians were identified in the baptismal records of only fifteen predominantly white

Congregational churches, four Anglican churches, and one Reformed church from 1750 to 1763, including an Afro-Indian (“free negro” father and Indian mother) who was baptized at Scituate in 1750.35 Conversely, Indians were baptized in at least forty

Congregational churches, four Anglican churches, and two Reformed churches from

34 See Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, and Presbyterian church records cited in Chapter One with no black baptisms; Hodges, Root & Branch, 122-124. 35 James N. Arnold. Vital Records of Rhode Island 1636-1850, First Series. Birth, Marriages and Deaths. A Family Register for the People, Vol. VIII. Episcopal and Congregational (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1896); Vital Records of Scituate; Connecticut Church Records, Stratford/Christ Church and Episcopal Society, 1722-1932 , v. 1-4, 8, 12, Reel #367, CSL; King’s Chapel (Boston, Mass.) Records, MHS; “Book of Record Trinity Church Rhode Island 1709,” NHP; Index Cromwell First Congregational Church 1715-1875; Index Southington First Congregational Church 1728-1876; Index Guilford Second Congregational Church at Nothern Guilford 1720-1859; Index New Hartford First Congregational Church (Old Town Hill Church) 1739-1854; Index Mansfield First Congregational Church 1710-1892; Index Plainfield First Congregational Church 1747-1832; Connecticut Church Records. Index New London First Congregational Church, 1670-1888 (CSL, 1949); Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the High and Low Dutch Reformed Congregation at Schoharie, now Reformed Church in the town of Schoharie, Schoharie County, N.Y. Volume 1 part 1, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Bound Typescript, New York City, June 1917, LOC, pp. 34-58; Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 408-209. 135

1730 to 1749 (as detailed in Chapter One). Comparing the number of churches in which

Indians were baptized indicates that Indians participated in a significantly fewer number of predominantly white churches in the 1750s and early1760s compared to the earlier years. In addition, there were no large concentrations of Indian baptisms in this period, such as had occurred in the 1740s in places such as Westerly, Rhode Island and

Stonington, Connecticut. The rise of new Indian churches in southern New England brought Indian participation in predominantly white churches almost to an end, especially in locations where Indian communities were strong enough to support their own churches.

Table 2-4: Selection of Churches in which one or more Indians were baptized and approximate number of baptisms, 1750 to 1763:

Church Name Church Location Number Nearby Indian of reservation or Indians community, if applicable Congregational Churches: Tiverton Congregational Church Tiverton, R.I. 4 Troy-Watuppa Mattakeedit Second Church Scituate Scituate, Mass. 1 (Pembroke) Second Church of Christ Medway Medway, Mass. 1 Barnstable West Parish Church Barnstable, Mass. 1 Mashpee First Church Hanover Hanover, Mass. 3 Cromwell First Congregational Church Cromwell, Conn. 1 Southington First Congregational Church Southington, Conn. 1 Guilford Second Congregational Church Guilford, Conn. 1 Groton Congregational Church Groton, Conn. 1 Mashantucket Pequots New London, Mohegan & New London Congregational Church Conn. 1 Mashantucket Pequots East Stonington Congregational Church Stonington, Conn. 1 Pequots (Pawcatuck) North Stonington Congregational Church Stonington, Conn. 2 Pequots (Pawcatuck) New Hartford, New Hartford First Church Conn. 2 Mansfield First Congregational Church Mansfield, Conn. 2 Plainfield First Congregational Church Plainfield, Conn. 1 136

Church of England parishes: Christ Episcopal Church Stratford Stratford, Conn. 1 King's Chapel Boston Boston, Mass. 1 Trinity Church Newport Newport, R.I. 4 Freetown/Troy- St. Michael's Episcopal Bristol Bristol, R.I. 1 Watuppa Reformed churches: Reformed Congregation at Schoharie Schoharie, N.Y. 41 For sources, see above footnote, number 35, and the Bibliography

Linford Fisher confirms that fewer and fewer Indians in Connecticut and Rhode

Island affiliated with predominately white churches after the Great Awakening waned. In the case of the Congregational churches in Stonington, Connecticut, Fisher states, “the number of adult Indians being baptized or admitted to full membership in the Stonington churches drops off sharply after 1742, […and] even though there are several Indian children who were brought forward for baptism between 1744 and 1750, after 1750 the baptism of Indian children ceases completely.”36 Indians were affiliating in

Congregational churches much less frequently than they did before. After the late 1740s, many Indians formed and participated in independent Indian churches, while others stopped practicing Christianity in any formal setting. The benefits of affiliation to white churches no longer seemed worthwhile to most Indians.

The Rise of Independent Indian Churches

The late 1740s and 1750s was a period when many Indians stopped attending and affiliating with predominantly white churches and new Indian churches were formed in places such as Narragansett, Rhode Island, and Montauk, Long Island. Unlike

36 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 198. 137

Massachusetts, these locations did not have a long history of Indian churches, so those who left predominantly white churches had to start congregations from scratch. The establishment of new Indian congregations was significantly affected by the existence of

Indian ministers, community resources, Separatist theology, and a long history of autonomous Indian decision making, but changing views regarding the benefits and drawbacks of church affiliation determined the timing of the rise of these new churches.37

Tensions and conflicts within religious bodies are perhaps never more evident than in cases of schisms and the formation of new churches, but the rise of independent

Indian churches was less about dramatic, public conflicts and more about communal decisions regarding the benefits and disadvantages of affiliation. The benefits of affiliation with white churches were no longer strong enough to maintain Indians participation in predominantly white churches. Indians in many locations possessed the resources to maintain their own churches. They had articulate and sometimes literate

Indians who could be ministers, they lived in autonomous Indian communities, and they even had Separatist theology that could justify separation from white churches. Some

Indian communities had funding from missionary organizations for preachers and teachers, including at Montauk on Long Island where an English minister and Samson

Occom (Mohegan) were employed. These Indian churches offered the same or even greater spiritual benefits than predominantly white churches had provided, but Indians could also sit in the best seats, hold leadership positions, and preach in Indian languages.

37 My treatment of these Indian churches is deeply influenced by Linford Fisher’s scholarship, and I thank him for the conversations about his research and my research that helped to crystalize my thoughts. The causes of Indian churches that I identify here are identified in Fisher’s research, so I am not making a completely original argument, especially in regard to the influence of Separatist theology. I do hope, however, to shine further light on this subject with the original comparison of conflicts between Indians and whites to conflicts between blacks and whites. 138

Indian churches allowed for the freedom to experience the spirit in more satisfying ways than was usually possible in white churches. Missionary societies were willing to pay for school teachers to live in Indian communities, so predominantly white Congregational churches, which had never put much effort into educating Indian members or their children, were certainly not needed for education. The benefits that had helped make affiliation with white churches appealing could generally be obtained elsewhere for many

Indians by 1750.

There were numerous reasons propelling Indians away from predominantly white churches and toward Indian churches in this period, and Linford Fisher has carefully explored the reasons that were particular to several Indian communities and individuals.

Most Indians in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Long Island began to prefer Indian-led religious services because Indian churches could conduct services in Indian languages.

Some Indians were also influenced by Congregational Separatists or Baptist Separatists, who preached that true believers should separate from the not-fully-purified established churches. As Fisher argues, “The ‘Separate’ movement encouraged by radical New Light revivalists such as James Davenport and Gilbert Tennant in the Great Awakening offered a model of retaining Christian practices while dropping Anglo-Christian affiliation, an option which Christian Indians increasingly chose in the years immediately following the

Great Awakening.” Some Indians were disappointed with the little that English ministers and churches did to help them protect their lands and resources from white theft and encroachment. Moreover, some of their fellow white congregants were the very people fleecing them.38 In attending English churches, Indians experienced at least some of the

38 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 211; for extended discussion on reasons behind the Indian exodus from white churches, see Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” Chapter Five, particularly, pp 211-222. 139

prejudice that was so dominant in white colonial society in the form of segregated seating and other proscriptions, and predominantly white churches did not generally accept

Indians as pastors or leaders. The mass exodus of Indians from predominantly white churches and their decision to practice Christianity independently suggests that Indians preferred churches free from restrictions and white supervision. Indian churches could better meet the individual and communal needs of Indians than predominantly white churches after the late 1740s.

The presence of Indian ministers in several communities hastened and reinforced the separation of those Indians who desired to practice Christianity. Linford Fisher covers in detail how Samson Occom (Mohegan), Samuel Ashpo (Mohegan), and Samuel

Niles (Narragansett) led Indian congregations in, respectively, Long Island, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Each one of these Indian men was influenced by revival preaching during the First Great Awakening and each affiliated with English churches at various points in their lives. Many of them had received formal education in English schools.

However, they ultimately chose to practice and preach Christianity away from white churches and white supervision.39 Their active leadership, complicated relationships with

English clergymen, and relatively frequent appearances in colonial records make them important windows for understanding the rise of new, independent Indian churches in the

North from 1740 to1760 and for understanding the importance of Indian leadership in the creation Indian churches.

These skilled, articulate Indian ministers were probably the greatest factor in bringing so many Indians into the new Indian churches. The most famous and influential of eighteenth-century Indian ministers was Samson Occom. Occom was born in 1723

39 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 231, 240, 246. 140

and was raised in Mohegan, Connecticut. He received some education and may have gained a rudimentary knowledge of Christianity from the Englishmen who taught and preached at Mohegan in the 1730s. Occom was influenced by revivalists in the Great

Awakening, including James Davenport, and his interest in education and Christianity increased in the 1740s. When he was seventeen years old, as he later wrote, he had “a

Discovery of the way of Salvation through Jesus, and was enabld to put my trust in him alone for Life & Salvation.” In 1742, Occom began serving as a counselor for Mohegan sachem Ben Uncas II, and in 1743, with the assistance of his mother Sarah, he also began studying theology and Latin with the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock in Lebanon,

Connecticut. While Occom often traveled home and to other Indian communities, he studied with Wheelock until November 1747 and with Benjamin Pomeroy in 1748. He also taught school occasionally in Mohegan and talked to other Indians about religion.

Soon thereafter, his career as a teacher and minister began in earnest in Montauk, Long

Island, where independent Indian Christianity thrived under his leadership. 40

In 1749, the Montaukett Indians on Long Island requested Occom to be their teacher, but he quickly became the minister as well, displacing an English minister.

Occom’s experience at Montauk demonstrates the role that Indian leadership and

Separatist theology played in forming Indian churches and that Indians could provide the same benefits that white minister had provided but without many of the disadvantages.

The English pastor, Azariah Horton, who was supported by the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, had been preaching to Indians on Long Island since 1741. However, as Occom noted in an autobiographical statement that he intended

40 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 222-225; Joanna Brooks, ed., The Collected Writing of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xxi, 52-54, 248-251. 141

for white audiences, Occom began holding four services a week at Montauk. Occom wrote that he “began to Carry on their meetings, tho’ they had a Minister, one Mr.

Horton, the Scotch Society’s Missionary; but he spent, I think, two thirds of his Time at

Sheenecock, 30 Miles from Montauk. We met together 3 times for Divine Worship every

Sabbath and once on every Wednesday evening.” At these services, Occom read scripture and would “expound upon Some perticular Passages in my own Toung,” although he was not yet ordained. From Occom’s own account, it seems clear that the

Montauketts valued his spiritual leadership, and perhaps especially his more constant residence among them and his Indian sensibilities. Horton was not always present and could only preach in English. As Fisher writes, “That Occom so quickly began fulfilling pastoral duties (instead of just keeping a school) seems to indicate that the Montaukett, in their invitation to him, saw him as replacing Horton entirely, which is what quickly happened.” Fisher also notes that Horton had complained about the Indians being influenced by Separatist New Light preachers, who may have encouraged the

Montauketts to stop attending Horton’s lectures and services.41 Occom also positioned himself to be a leader in this community when he married Mary Fowler who was from one of the Montauketts’ elite families. While separatist doctrines and perhaps dissatisfactions with Horton influenced the development of Indian services at Montauk, the presence of the articulate and knowledgeable Occom made independent worship more appealing and possible.

Occom’s ministry to independent Indian churches and Christian communities only increased after his 1759 ordination by the Long Island Presbytery, but so did his contract with white churches. Occom promoted independent Indian churches even while

41 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 225- 229; Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 54-55. 142

his relationship to whites remained relatively collegial. Occom was first examined for ordination by a group of Congregational ministers in Connecticut on July 13, 1757. He wrote that, “I pass’d an Examination before the Rev’d Messrs Solomon Williams, Eleazar

Wheelock, Benjamin Pomproy, Nathan Strong and Stephen White, - and they were so far

Satisfied, as to Conclude to proceed to an ordination.” However, it was also concluded that Occom should be ordained by the Presbyterians rather than by Congregationalists.

On August 29, 1759, Occom was examined on his Latin and theological abilities by ministers of the Long Island Presbytery, which was the local governing body of the

Presbyterian Church, and he was ordained a minister on the next day during a public service. In numerous journal entries from 1759 to 1761, Occom recorded instances of preaching to different Indian communities and some English churches, as well as his participation in Presbytery meetings with other clergymen. Colonists were sometimes attracted to the novelty of an Indian preacher, but no English congregation would have accepted an Indian as their full-time minister. In this period, he preached to Indians at

Shinnecock, Montauk, and Shelter Island Harbor, Long Island; at Mystic, Mohegan, and

Farmington, Connecticut; and to the Oneida Indians in upstate New York. He preached to predominantly white churches at Easthampton, Oyster Bay, Smithtown, and

Huntington, Long Island, and at Albany, New York. In most cases, there were whites, blacks, and perhaps some Indians in the audience at these predominantly white churches.

He also attended church services led by English pastors at Bridgehampton, Huntington,

Easthampton, and Southampton, Long Island.42 Although Occom spent the vast majority of his time ministering to Indians, his journal entries suggest that his ministries to Indian

42 Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 253-264; Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 231- 232. 143

communities across the North expanded at the very same time as his connections to white churches and clergymen were also deepening. While his relationship to white clergy was more conflicted than his relationship to Indian churches, he sought to maintain a relationship to white churches and ministers in order to secure financial resources and political allies to help maintain Indian land and community autonomy. One of the factors that made independent Indian churches possible, especially those that Occom promoted, was the financial support of missionary organizations that provided money for Occom’s preaching tours and work as a teacher. Occom’s early work as a minister to Indians across the North was made financially possible with limited aide from whites.

Although Occom worked with white colleagues and preached to white audiences, he complained about the ways in which some white Christians treated him. White racism and Eleazar Wheelock’s betrayal of his commitment to Indian education pushed Occom toward Indian autonomy and independent churches. Occom was willing at times to tolerate insult and racism from whites, especially early in his career, in order to obtain financial resources for Indians and to promote Christianity. However, conflicts with whites weighed heavily upon him. Writing in 1768 about his time of ministry and teaching on Long Island, Occom criticized the Boston Commissioners of the Society for

Propagating the Gospel in New England for their racism, which was displayed in unequal missionary salaries. Occom received £15 a year from the Boston Commissioners as he taught and preached on Long Island, but “these Same Gentlemen, gave a young

Missionary, a Single man one Hundred Pounds for one year, and fifty Pounds for an

Interpreter, and thirty Pounds for an Introducer.” These gentlemen accused Occom of

“being Extravagant” for needing more than £15 for him and his growing family, but they

144

willingly paid £180 for a white missionary. To add insult to injury, the Boston

Commissioners did not always pay him on schedule, and Occom once went two years without receiving “a peney from the Gentlemen at Boston.” Occom could come to no other conclusion except that the pitiful pay and inferior treatment were due to his skin color. He lamented that he did not receive just compensation, and wrote that “it is because I am [a] poor Indian.” Throughout his life, Occom was paid less than whites whenever he was requested by whites to do missionary or fundraising work. In 1761,

Occom stated that “Ministers of all Sects and Denomination are Extremely Kind to me” and he maintained close friendships with some white clergymen for his entire life, but whites held him to different standards and treated him differently because he was an

Indian.43 The racism and unequal treatment that Occom and other Indians experienced at the hands of their white Christian brethren were disadvantages of attending predominantly white churches, and Occom’s experiences of white prejudice contributed to his promotion of autonomous and self-sufficient Indian communities centered upon

Indian churches in later decades.

Although his experiences with and relation to white ministers differed greatly from those of Samson Occom, Samuel Niles’ leadership was likewise important for the existence of an independent Indian church among the Narragansetts in western Rhode

Island and reveals the change in that community from affiliation with a white church to the rise of a separate church. Much of what we know about the religious practices of

Niles and his Narragansett church comes from the Reverend Joseph Fish, who preached to Pequots near his parish in Connecticut from 1757 to 1781 and to Narragansetts in

43 Brooks, Collected Writings of Samson Occom, 57-58, 64, 67; Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 229-231. 145

neighboring Rhode Island from 1765 to 1776. Fish preached in both communities for decades, but these Indians generally preferred Indian preachers. Fish wrote in a 1762 letter about how the Pequots skipped his preaching in order to attend services led by other

Indians: “the number of Indians attending, at different Lectures, is various. […] the principal cause, I apprehend, has been their great Fondess for the Indian Teachers and their Brethren, (Separates,) from the Narragansetts, who were frequently, if not constantly, with Our Indians, or in the Neighborhood, the same day of My Lectures.”44

Narragansett preachers often deprived Fish of Indian listeners at his lectures by preaching at the same times. The Narragansetts had a church of their own, which was led by

Samuel Niles since the early 1750s, so they were generally uninterested in the monthly lectures offered by Fish (although some small numbers of Indians, blacks, and whites did attend Fish’s lectures at Narragansett). After 1750, many Pequots and Narragansetts showed no or little interest in listening to white preachers. However, the Narragansetts had not always been averse to attending services led by English clergy or churches with many white congregants.

The Narragansetts’ initial affiliation with Christianity, as explained by William and Cheryl Simmons, occurred in an interracial context: “The majority of the tribe converted to Christianity in 1743 during the height of the revival and after Davenport’s visit to the Stonington area. At first they merged with the English New Light congregation of the Reverend Joseph Park of Westerly, Rhode Island.”45 When Park first formed a church in Westerly in 1742, it consisted of only English Christians. “The

44 Quoted in William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, editors, Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), xxviii. 45 Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, xxx. 146

Number of Professors first entring into the Bonds and Fellowship of the Gospel,” Park wrote, “was fourteen Souls, eight Male and six Females, all English.” Soon after hearing the preaching of James Davenport and receiving encouragement from some Christian

Pequots from neighboring Connecticut, the Narragansetts began to affiliate with Park’s church. He stated in 1743 that since the revival started, twenty-six people joined the church, and “of those added six are Indians, and two Negroes.” In the second year of its existence, at least six Narragansetts and two blacks joined this church, and there were nearly a hundred Indians that came “very constantly” to Park’s services. The affiliation continued at a remarkable pace, for by February 1744, sixty-four Indians had joined the church by “a professed Subjection to the Gospel of Christ.”46 During the Great

Awakening, the Congregational Church in Westerly, Rhode Island became a site of interracial religious activity as a large portion of the Narragansett tribe affiliated publically with Christianity. However, it did not take long for the Narragansetts to see that they could also practice Christianity apart from whites because they had a leader who could facilitate independent services.

The Narragansetts promoted religion among themselves in a way that met Park’s approval, but the devotional activities practiced in this Indian community helped promote a separate Indian church. Such independence occurred in Narragansett after 1750 because whites took actions to restrict the preaching of Samuel Niles and because these

Indian had the ability to maintain a community church on their own. In addition to

46 “The Christian History: Containing Accounts of the Propagation and Revival of Religion in England, Scotland and Americaa,” Saturday August 27, 1743, No. 26, pp. 201-208; “The Christian History: Containing Accounts of the Propagation and Revival of Religion in England, Scotland and America,” Saturday September 3, 1745, No. 27, pp. 209; “The Christian History: Containing Accounts of the Propagation and Revival of Religion in England, Scotland and America,” Saturday March 17, 1744, No. 55, pp. 23-24; Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 244; William S. Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” American Ethnologist 10, no. 2 (May, 1983), 261-262. 147

attending public worship, Park noted that his Indian congregants “have set up the

Worship of God in their Families” and “have frequent private Meetings among themselves for Prayer and Praise.” Sometimes Park would meet with the Indians in small groups “to pray with and for them, to read the Word of God, and preach, and discourse with them upon Matters of Importance.”47 The mix of private and public religious practices was very common among Congregationalists, especially those influenced by revivalism. Pastors usually hoped that private religious activities would remain orderly and would only promote greater piety and participation in established churches, but among the Narragansetts, it was a relatively easy transition from private devotional activities to an independent church. In addition, since Indian communities had long traditions of autonomous decision making and leadership, establishing an independent church was, in some regards, only natural for them. As Fisher states, “Natives in New

England had been gathering apart from their white counterparts for more than a century or longer to elect leaders, prepare for war, deal with communal issues, create alliances with neighboring tribes, or to commemorate important festivals in the lunar year.”48 So the progression from private devotional activities to an independent church was an easy and natural step for the Narragansetts, and their new church provided spiritual benefits without any white racism or oversight.

In the late-1740s, many of the Narragansetts and some of the English church members in Westerly were influenced by Separatists preachers, including Stephen

Babcock, and they left Park’s church. The Narragansett members of Park’s church were

47 “The Christian History: Containing Accounts of the Propagation and Revival of Religion in England, Scotland and America,” Saturday March 24, 1744, No. 56, pp. 25; Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 218. 48 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 219. 148

also offended that Samuel Niles was chastised by whites for exhorting in the church.

Ezra Stiles, after a meeting with Niles, recounted that Niles “was dealt with for exhorting in the Congregation: upon which he and about a hundred Indians withdrew.”49 Separatist theology influenced the initial Narragansett move away from predominantly white churches, but the Indian church and its chosen leader were supported through communal decision making. A Separatist church was organized by Babcock and other whites, and some of the Christian Narragansetts attended the Separatist church. According to Joseph

Fish, the Narragansetts left Park’s church at roughly the same time as Babcock:

They left Mr. Parks Church and Ministry, I think, about the time that one Deacon Babcock and others fell off from the Standing Churches, and Set up for Teachers about 15 or 20 years ago [about 1750]. And Were for Some time, Under the Inspection and Influence of Said Mr. Babcock, a Separate Baptist Teacher: till most of them took Offense at his Conduct, in Ordaining an Indian over them, that was not Agreable to the Body of the Tribe. Upon Which Some of the Indian Brethren (as Im informed) not in any Office, took and ordained one Samuel Niles their Pastor, And he has been their Minister every Since, for a Number of years: preaching, Administing the Supper, Baptism, and Marriage.50

The Indians took offense at an ordination of a candidate by whites who did not have full

Indian community support. Some of the Narragansetts proceeded to ordain another person, Samuel Niles, on their own authority (an authority not recognized by English clergy). Niles had become a full member of Park’s church, and was baptized there before the 1750 splits. As Fisher explains, Niles possessed traits that made him an obvious choice for the position of minister for the Narragansett church. After affiliating with

Christianity,

49 Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” 262-263; Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., Volume 1, edited by Franklin B. Dexter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 232. 50 Fish recounted this history in a 1765 letter after his first visit to Narragansett. Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 4; Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 246-247; For another account of the split, see Ezra Stiles diary. 149

Niles soon began exercising his obvious natural talents for preaching and exhorting, most likely in informal contexts and primarily among his own Indian neighbors and relatives, but perhaps also in the context of church meetings. For Niles—a former powwow among the Narragansett—such communal religious leadership would have been a natural continuation of his prior role among the Indians, albeit with a distinctive Christian tinge to his message and practices.51

While Niles was not necessarily the driving force behind the separations from Park’s and

Babcock’s churches, since the community worked through consensus decision making, he led the Indian church effectively for many years and was an important part of its founding. Conflicts at Park’s church and then a conflict over leadership at Babcock’s church were central to the rise of the Independent Indian church at Narragansett and suggest some of the disadvantages for Indians of participating in predominantly white churches. Since the Narragansetts had a well-defined community and a leader who could be a minister, they possessed enough resources to maintain a church and they built one when the benefits of affiliation in white churches no longer outweighed the disadvantages.

The Reverend Joseph Fish’s first impression of the Indian church at Narragansett and of its leader was relatively positive, but he objected to some of the features that made it appealing to Indians, namely its autonomy and its mix of Christianity and native culture. The Narragansetts, he reported in September 1765, were “religiously Disposed; and hopefully Retain a good Measure of Serious Impressions of Truth” that were introduced by Park. Fish noted that “they give a Decent and Devout Attention to every

Branch of Worship, Whether at Table, or in public Assembly.” Fish had positive things to say about their minister as well. He wrote that “Niles, (Who I have known Some

Years,) is a Sober Religious Man, of Good Sense and great Fluency of Speech; and know

51 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 246. 150

not but a very honest Man. Has a good deal of the Scriptures by heart, and professes a

Regard for the Bible.” However, Fish complained about the Separatist doctrines, the fact that Niles could not read, and other elements of the Indian beliefs and practices that he found heterodox, and his statements grew more critical of the Narragansett church as he spent more time in Narragansett and was unable to reform their beliefs. Fish wrote to a fellow pastor in July 1766 that the Narragansett Christians were “all of the Separate

Stamp, - Very Ignorant: - Scarce any of them able to read a Word, - Unhappily leavind with, yea full of False Religion, - tenacious of their wild Imaginations and Visionary things.”52 He certainly found much to criticize, but the Narragansetts responded by continuing their own church and by generally ignoring Fish’s monthly lectures. Fish’s preaching offered little benefit to most of the Indians that were not available in Niles’ church.

Some Narragansetts, however, saw economic and political benefits from affiliating with a white church that they could not obtain from participating in Niles’ church. As Simmons writes, “The Sachem and his family did not belong to Niles’s church for they, along with most well-to-do planters of this region, had ties with the

Church of England.” Many of the Narragansetts, particularly many of those in Niles’s church, opposes sachem Thomas Ninigret because he sold tribal land to Englishmen to pay his personal debts. Ninigret had sold such a large portion of their land by 1765 that

“many Narragansett feared they would lose everything.” In fact, Niles and some of the

Narragansett Christians may have initially welcomed Fish’s monthly lectures and an

English schoolteacher named Edward Deake in order to obtain their assistance in the

52 Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, 3-5, 29. 151

dispute with sachem Ninigret and his supporters.53 In the years after the Great

Awakening, Christianity in Narragansett was splintered along theological and political divides. Most Narragansetts preferred the church led by Niles and valued his leadership, but some Narragansetts affiliated with the Church of England or occasionally attended services led by white clergymen in order to obtain various social, political, economic, and spiritual benefits.

While little evidence is available for understanding the day-to-day religious experiences of many Indians in the North, the experiences of Samson Occom and Samuel

Niles do provide insights into the rise of separate Indian churches in Connecticut, Rhode

Island, and Long Island (separate Indian churches, it should be remembered, had existed in Massachusetts since the seventeenth century). Many Indians who had publically affiliated with Christianity in predominantly white churches, such as the First Church of

Lyme, Connecticut or the Congregational church in Stonington, Connecticut, continued to practice Christianity in small groups and churches within Indian communities. Many of these Indian churches operated apart from the supervision or even the knowledge of whites. Dozens of Indian pastors, some of whom rarely appear in the surviving historical records, were a central and important part of the rise of these new churches.54 Separatist theology, physical isolation, traditional Indian autonomy, white condescension, and other factors all influenced Indian separatism, but these forces did not prohibit the existence of churches with both Indians and whites in some particular locations. Indians weighed the benefits of church affiliation against its costs, and by the 1750s, most Indians decided in favor of Indian separation.

53 Simmons, Old Light on Separate Ways, xxxi-xxxvi; Simmons, “Red Yankees: Narragansett Conversion in the Great Awakening,” 264. 54 Fisher, “Traditionary Religion,” 258-361. 152

Almost as quickly and dramatically as many Indians in southern New England had affiliated with Congregational churches during the Great Awakening, so too did their affiliation end. Whites generally treated Indians as second-class church members before, during, and after their affiliation with predominantly white churches, by excluding them from leadership in white churches and by segregating church seating, but when the

Indians had affiliated with white churches they did so in order to obtain spiritual and material benefits that were generally unavailable elsewhere. When gifted Indian ministers, such as Occom and Niles, were available to provide spiritual, leadership, and/or educational benefits, most Indians who lived in autonomous Indian communities decided to leave established churches and maintain their own churches. With the occasional financial and education aid of missionary organization, many of these communities had the resources necessary to maintain their own churches, which could have preaching in native languages, Indian leadership, and traditional religious beliefs or practices selectively incorporated. Indian communal autonomy, Indian leadership, and

Separatist theology were strong factors that pushed Indians away from white churches, especially when the disadvantages of participation in white churches overshadowed the benefits.

Tensions between Whites and Indians in Established Churches

Some of the conflicts between whites and Indians in churches did not immediately lead to a schism or a new church, which suggests that in some cases, some Indians still chose to affiliate with white Christians and, in some communities, Indians lacked the resources necessary to maintain separate churches. In the case of the Indian churches in

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Natick and Sandwich, Massachusetts, Indians and whites attended the same church despite occasional disputes or conflicts. In these towns, whites were gradually joining and taking over what had been predominantly Indian churches, and the churches continued to receive financial support from missionary organizations. The Indians and whites in Natick and Sandwich disagreed over the maintenance and location of the church meetinghouse. In addition, some of these whites expected deference from Indians within these churches. Although the location of a town’s meetinghouse “was the most common occasion of dispute” in many New England towns, the conflicts examined here were intimately tied to white encroachment upon Indian settlements and did not simply represent the sorts of conflicts that occurred within many New England towns.55 The interracial challenges that occurred in Natick and Sandwich, moreover, were similar to displacement of Indians by whites in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.56 Although white encroachment threatened and undermined Indian access to the church in these

Massachusetts towns, these Indians did not generally respond by leaving the church or by trying to start a new Indian-only church.

As discussed in Chapter One, the Indian Church at Natick included a substantial number of whites by the 1740s, and the percentage of the church that was Indian continued to decline in the 1750s and 1760s. Some Indians moved away, but many

Natick Indians died from battles and diseases while fighting for the English in the Seven

Years’ War. Broader tensions between whites and Indians over land and resources in

55 Michael J. Crawford, “Indians, Yankees, and the Meetinghouse Dispute of Natick, Massachusetts, 1743-1800,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 132 (Oct. 1978), 279. 56 Patrick Frazier, The Mohicans of Stockbridge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indian and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 154

Natick were eventually exhibited as conflicts within this church as well. Jean O’Brien summarizes the evolution of white and Indian relations in Natick as follows:

During the 1720s and 1730s, Indians incorporated the newly arrived English landholders into the town meeting and the religious establishment seemingly without severe tensions. Indians recognized at least some English landowners as participants in the community by allowing them to participate in the church, and in permitting their election to town offices beginning in the 1730s. […] These developments constituted recognition that some English settlers had become functional members of the racially mixed community. But in the ensuing decades, community relations deteriorated and cooperation gave way to divisiveness, as Indians became steadily divided from their land.57

The conflicts that developed between whites and Indians in the Natick church reflected the broader conflicts over land, identity, and resources in the 1740s and years following.

By 1746, white residents of Natick had taken complete control of the town government and excluded Indians from political participation, with the help of the

Massachusetts General Court, and disputes arose between different whites who wanted to either move or maintain the location of the meetinghouse. However, two factors protected Indian access to the church and meetinghouse, including the continuous funding from the New England Company (a.k.a. Company for the Propagation of the

Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America) and a law that required the

Massachusetts General Court’s approval to move the meetinghouse. Both factions of whites, those who sought to keep the meetinghouse in the southeastern part of town and those who wished to move it to the center of town, sought Indian support for their side.

Natick residents sent petitions in 1747, 1748, and 1749 with some Indians apparently supporting both sides, but the General Court’s committee determined that moving the

57 Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 125; Daniel Mandell, “‘To Live More Like My Christian English Neighbors’: Natick Indians in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 48, no. 4 (Oct., 1991), 552-579. 155

meetinghouse to the center of town was “against the General Mind of the Indians; & in

Opposition to the Commissioners, who settled, & for more than twenty six years past have almost wholly maintained a learned orthodox minister among said People with very little assistance from English inhabitants.”58 Because the church had been primarily and intentionally built for Indians, the Indians were able to maintain some measure of control over its location, even after whites had excluded Indians from the town government and after whites had become the majority in the church. The conflicts over the meetinghouse’s location continued well into the ministry of Peabody’s successor, the

Reverend Stephen Badger, who noted in 1797 that “the unhappy disagreement and contention, between the English inhabitants, about the placing of the meeting-house, which began in the latter part of my predecessor’s time, has at times been revived ever since, and now rages with no small degree of violence among them.” Despite losing most of their land, control of the town government, and the Indian identity of the church,

Natick Indians did manage to have a say in the location of the meetinghouse during the

1750s and 1760s.59 As the community faced a high death rate and widespread poverty, which caused many Indians to sell their land to whites, they lacked the community unity and resources necessary to form a new, Indian-only church. Some Indians stopped attending the church, but others maintained church affiliation even as the disadvantages of a majority-white church increased.

58 Quoted in O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 190-191. 59 For a more detailed history of this conflict of the Meetinghouse location, see Crawford, “Indians, Yankees, and the Meetinghouse Dispute of Natick, Massachusetts”; O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees, 119-120, 190-192; Mandell, “‘To Live More Like My Christian English Neighbors’” 552-579; Stephen Bagder,“Historical and Characteristic Traits of the American Indians in General and Those of Natick in Particular,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 1st Ser., 5 (1798), 32-45. 156

Even before the conflict over the meetinghouse’s location and the displacement of some Indians from Natick, other conflicts were evident in this church between whites and

Indians about leadership and the identity of the church and some Indians stopped attending the church. Some Natick Indians became discontented with Reverend Peabody and the white majority in the church, and they only practiced Christianity within their own homes. Daniel Mandell notes that “the Indians told the commissioners [from

Boston] that they understood and were ‘all satisfied in Mr. Peabody's preaching,’ but some were more comfortable worshiping privately than with the English.” As occurred among many other Indians in southern New England, some of the Indians in the Natick church withdrew their participation from the established church. For some, but certainly not all in Natick, once the church was an English and Indian church instead of simply an

Indian church, they were no longer satisfied worshipping there.60 Nonetheless, the presence and influence of Indians continued in the Natick church despite the conflicts that developed because an alternative was not necessarily available and because some

Indians continued to find affiliation desirable.

As had been the case in the Natick Church, the participation of whites in the

Indian church at Sandwich caused conflicts, but some Indians continued to attend and seek financial support from missionaries instead of seeking a more autonomous or separate church. In general, this Indian community was too impoverished to support a church on its own. An Indian church had existed near Herring Pond in the northern part of Sandwich (present day Bourne, Massachusetts) since the 1670s, but whites and Indians came into conflict in this church during the 1750s and 1760s. As early as May 1756, the

Reverend Tupper sent requests to the Boston commissioners of the English missionary

60 Mandell, “To Live More Like My Christian English Neighbors,” 562. 157

organization, the New England Company, requesting funds to repair the Indian meetinghouse, which was in poor condition. Tupper was also paid a salary by the New

England Company. The Indian meetinghouse was originally financed by Judge Samuel

Sewall in 1689-1691. In 1757, there were about seventy-five adult Indians and thirty- eight children who lived nearby the Indian meetinghouse, of which at least thirty-one were communing, full members of the church. Tupper noted that other Indians were living in nearby Plymouth, Sandwich, and elsewhere, with some working as servants, and some men were gone in the army or seafaring. These Indians were generally impoverished, and the difficulty of obtaining subsistence was compounded by the absences and frequent deaths of men who were “either to sea or in the army.” The growing number of white settlers on Cape Cod further exacerbated the difficult economic position of many Indians and led to conflicts between whites and Indians in this Indian church. Lacking the resources necessary to support a new church or to keep whites out of their church, these Indians continued to participate in the church with whites and sought further aid to keep the church alive.61

The condition of the Indian meetinghouse continued to be a problem for many years because there was no meeting place largest enough for both Indians and whites, but

Indians still worked to have a church with a white minister and some white congregants.

Many of these Indians held a meeting in order to again solicit aid in rebuilding their meetinghouse. On “October 15th 1761 at an Indian Meeting held at the Publick Meeting

61 Letter from Elisha Tupper, Sandwich, Mass., to Andrew Oliver, 20 May 1756, in Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS; List of Indians attending the meeting house in Sandwich, Mass., 7 August 1757, in Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS; Elisha Tupper, Letter to the commissioners of the New England Company, 18 November 1761 in Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS; Harold Field Worthley, An Inventory of the Records of the Particular (Congregational) Churches of Massachusetts Gathered 1620-1805 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 106-109. 158

House in Sandwich,” they voted to petition the New England Company’s Boston

Commissioners for a new meetinghouse because their current meetinghouse had “so gone to decay that it is not fitt to meet in for the worship of God when the weather is wet cold or windy.” The Indian meetinghouse must have been in a terrible condition because these Indians held a gathering in the town of Sandwich’s meetinghouse where a predominantly white church met.62 Without a decent meetinghouse, church services were often held in private homes. The desire of some whites to attend services under Tupper forced Indians into a difficult position, but an Indian-only church was not a practical option for them.

In October 1761, as weather was becoming colder and wetter, a petition apparently signed by three whites and four Indians from Sandwich was sent to the New

England Company expressing the need for a new Indian meetinghouse and revealing the tensions caused by the interracial religious services there. Some whites clearly desired to attend worship with the Indians because of the presence of a white minister who they did not have to support with tax money and because of their proximity to the meetinghouse.

They stated that “all of us attend the Public worship in sd. Meeting house with the

Indians under the ministry of Elisha Tupper which most of us have done for more than ten years past.” These whites, including Thomas Swift, Zacheus Burge, and Jospeh

Lawren, acknowledged that it had been said or reported that “Indians are deprived of convenient Room by the English” at Tupper’s church services, but the writers generally denied this charge. They stated that the Indian population near the meetinghouse included “25 men 40 women and 36 children,” and the petition writers certified “that we

62 Proceedings of a meeting held by a group of Indians in Sandwich, Mass., concerning the possibilities of constructing a new meeting house, Minutes kept by Joseph Lawrence, in Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS. 159

often se the greatest part of them there [at church services] but since the meeting house is so bad there are but between twenty and thirty [Indians] that attend generally from

Sabbath to Sabbath, as near as we are able to judge.” Tupper separately affirmed these numbers by stating in 1761 that “generally not more than twenty or thirty assemble on the

Sabbath tho there are more than an hundred who dwell within six miles.”63 The petitioners made the following arguments for why whites were not crowding the Indians out of the Indian church:

None of us ever saw sd. Meeting house so crowded with people (once only excepted and then the Indians had Room allowed them) but that twenty or more might have had convenient Room in it but as the meeting is held in Cold weather at a small private House where room is more scanty we must declare Truly that at such times there Minister is very carefull that every Indian should have suitable room and the English who meet there are as ready to give room so that one of us ever saw an Indian at sd meeting but what had or might have had convenient Room to fit and had if he pleased to take it.64

In their arguments for the need for a new meetinghouse (at the New England Company’s expense) and the white people’s defense of their behavior suggests that the Indians felt affronted and undermined by the numbers of whites attending their services, especially when they were held in private homes. It seems that some of the Indians felt crowded out of their own church by an increasing white presence at services. As was the case in

Natick, perhaps some Indians chose to not attend church services under Tupper precisely because of the conflicts owning to the number of whites who wanted to attend Tupper’s services and the poor state of the meetinghouse. As other scholars have argued, Indians in New England used Christianity and churches to maintain their communities and

63 “Certificate listing the members of the Indian meeting house in Sandwich, Mass., with an explanation of why a new, larger meeting house is needed, compiled by Zaccheus Burge, Joseph Lawrence, and Thomas Swift,” in Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, MHS; Tupper, Letter to the commissioners of the New England Company, 18 November 1761. 64 “Certificate listing the members of the Indian meeting house in Sandwich, Mass.” 160

traditional practices, so the increased presence of whites in the Indian church in Sandwich likely further undermined the Indians’ ability to maintain a cohesive community and identity in these locations.65 Some of the Indians left Sandwich and moved to Mashpee to be further away from whites, but for the Indians who wanted to continue to participate in a church and remain in Sandwich there was no other option. There were certainly disadvantages for the Indians in the increasing white attendance at their church, but they did not have the community resources, including money or an Indian preacher, necessary to start a new church. They could not even maintain or fix the meetinghouse without financial support from a missionary society, so for the time being, in some of the well- established Indian churches, Indians and whites struggled within the same congregations over the maintenance of and access to a ministry.

Tensions between Blacks and Whites in Churches

Given that a vast majority of the North’s Congregational and Anglicans churches included black congregants and members, it is not surprising that there were instances of conflict between blacks and whites. However, these conflicts did not lead to separate black churches or to a mass exodus of blacks from predominantly white churches. We can infer that many blacks still saw benefits of affiliation that could not be gained elsewhere and black communities did not yet have the resources needed to establish separate churches. Blacks affiliated with churches to gain an education, the status of

65 Daniel Mandell, Behind the Frontier: Indians in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Massachusetts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996); David J. Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life: A View from the Islands and Cape Cod” in Colin G. Galloway & Neal Salisbury, ed., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 265-267, 272, and 284-285; David J Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 161

being a church member, and spiritual sustenance. In rare cases, blacks used churches as venues for asserting their rights. Whites assigned blacks to inferior positions within churches, so blacks rarely voted, held church offices, or sat outside a segregated portion of the sanctuary. Prejudice against blacks, the hierarchical nature of colonial society, and economic exploitation of black people were grounds upon which conflicts or discords occurred within churches, but some of the conflicts in churches, such as disputes over theology, occurred irrespective of the skin color of the people involved. In some cases, whites and blacks both withdrew from an established Congregational church and formed a separate Congregational or Baptist church over a theological dispute. Some individual blacks left predominantly white churches because of conflicts, but none of these types of conflicts led to separate black churches in this period of time because benefits of affiliation were still considerable for many blacks and because no black community in the

North possess enough resources to make an independent church possible.

The evidentiary basis for a discussion of conflicts between whites and blacks in the North’s churches, specifically within the years of 1740 to 1763, is admittedly rather sparse. The lack of firsthand accounts of northern blacks in this period was part and parcel of the systematic oppression of blacks in that society. There are, however, good reasons to make the argument that conflicts between blacks and whites in churches occurred frequently. Most blacks in the North were involuntarily held as slaves, a condition that was maintained through force and fear, but they did not submit to this condition without protest or resistance. The structures and means that whites used to keep black men and women enslaved were present in churches, and churches themselves could be part of the system of control and oppression. As such, some blacks, including a

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few known examples included here, resisted the oppression they faced in and through churches.

Tensions and conflicts between black and white Christians can be seen in records of church discipline, and increased white oversight of black lives was a disadvantage of church affiliation for blacks. Cases of church discipline reflect instances of discord between individuals or an individual and the rest of the church. Church members saw discipline cases in relational terms. As such, a breach of morality caused discord and separation and a sinner’s repentance represented reconciliation of the relationships.

These conflicts often ended with renewed uniformity in behavior or beliefs within the church because sinners or dissenters were either expelled or reformed. Black and Indian

Christians, like many white Christians, were disciplined by the churches in which they had affiliated, but these cases did not necessarily reflect the prejudice of whites against people of color. Blacks and Indians who owned the covenant (a requirement for baptism) or who became full members, submitted themselves to the guidance and discipline of the church. Christians who sinned could be privately admonished, publically censored, suspended from communion, or excommunicated, depending of the severity of the offense and the response of the accused person. The goal of such discipline was to keep the church free from sin and to assist Christians in the pursuit of godly living. In many of the churches that disciplined blacks, the wayward black members were restored to full status in the church, once they confessed their faults.66 Black and Indian Christians did not seemingly receive harsher penalties in church discipline cases than anyone else and

66 For a discussion on church discipline, see James F. Cooper, Jr. and Kenneth P. Minkema, ed., The Colonial Church Records of First Church of Reading (Wakefield) and the First Church of Rumney March (Revere) (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2006), 16-18 and 34-38. For a discussion of church discipline of blacks in church New England churches, see Richard Allan Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 107-109, 126. 163

the number of black discipline cases does not seem to suggest that they were more likely targets of church discipline than white congregants. However, given that many blacks and Indians lived in white households, whites exercised a greater degree of supervision over blacks in their household than was common among their white neighbors. For blacks, affiliation with predominantly white churches did carry the burden of greater white supervision over their moral behavior.67

The First Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts disciplined two black men, who were both slaves and church members, in 1744, but these men were also eventually restored to church membership after they chose to repent of their misdeeds. The records state that: “the Chh Voted that Deacons Atwood & Torrey notify Nero a Negro Man belonging to Mr. John Barnes & Boston a Negro Man belonging to Mr. Thomas Foster that this Chh suspended them from Comunion at Present. They having been convicted of

Scandalous Offenses before the Civil Magistrate.” These two men had been convicted of an unspecified crime by a civil court and were likely punished by civil authorities, but they were also punished by their church which was a common practice even for whites convicted of a civil offense. About a year later, this discipline had the desired effect on one of these men. “Boston a Negro man belonging to Mr. Thomas Foster made Publick confession of his Offense & was Restored,” which meant that Boston was readmitted to full membership and could partake in communion. Another year later, Nero also confessed and was restored to communion. He then transferred his membership to the

67 Richard Bailey states that “When moral responsibility was the issue, whites held New Englanders of color to strict expectations, treating them as other adults within the city on a hill. These expectations are seen more clearly in church records dealing with the discipline of Africans within the covenant community. In such cases, black New Englanders were treated strikingly similar to their white neighbors.” Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, 55. 164

church in Marshfield where he was living by 1746.68 Once these black men confessed and repented, their status within the church was reaffirmed and they were reconciled to the other church members.

At the First Church of Brockton, Massachusetts, on March 24, 1745, Sira (a person of mixed ancestry) was baptized after her parents confessed to the sin of fornication, which indicates that they valued baptism for their daughter enough to undertake a public confession in this church. The records indicate that the minister

“baptized Sira daughter of [name crossed out] Mollato, on he and his wife owning ye

Covenant and his making his acknowledgement for ye sin of fornication.” Sira’s father publically acknowledged that he had “broken ye Seventh Commandment by falling into ye Sin of fornication; whereby I have offended God, wounded religion, and wronged my own soul for which I am heartily sorry, and desire to be deeply humbled before God, and do ask forgiveness of God and his people for ye same.”69 In this case, black (mulatto) congregants were held accountable to the same standards for sexual conduct as white

Christians. Black Christians at this church were expected to refrain from premarital sex and to remain monogamous. Since this couple likely conceived before officially being married, which was also a relatively common occurrence among white Christians, they had to publically confess to the sin of fornication. Their punishment of a public confession and restoration to the church were no different than what happened to white

68 Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume XXII, Collections, Plymouth Church Records 1620-1859, Part 1 (Boston: Published by the Society, 1920), 295, 297. 69 As was the case for all confession of fornication in these church records, the parents’ names were crossed-out (for the sake of privacy in later years). In this case, the names but not the corresponding racial notation were later crossed-out; “Church Covenant, baptisms, marriages, other administrations of 4th Church of Christ in Bridgewater,” Brockton, Massachusetts, Christ Congregational Church United Church of Christ Manuscript Records, 1738-1980, CL, pp. 3 and 6. 165

couples in the same situation.70 As with baptisms and communion, blacks participated in

Congregational church life through official nuptials and through church discipline. The baptism of their children was clearly something that many blacks sought in predominantly white churches, even if it required them to publically confession transgressions in front of the congregation.

In addition to transgressions of public morality, blacks were occasionally disciplined simply because they were repeatedly absent from church. Blacks, who were full church members, were expected to act in a godly manner, regularly attend church services, and participate in communion. Some white church members took these duties very seriously, even in regards to black members. In one instance, a black man named

Primus, who was a slave to David Green and who was a member at the First Church of

Reading (Wakefield), Massachusetts was admonished by his church for missing services.

In 1753 the church scolded him because he had “for a long Time Absented himself from ye Communion of ye Chh [church],” and he did not provide a satisfactory reason or explanation for the long absence.71 It is unclear why this black Christian abstained himself, but his prolonged absence was noticed and found offensive to some of the white

Christians, who admonished him to do better. Primus’ extended absence was unacceptable to the predominantly white church members and they confronted him about it.

70 The church records contain white people who confessed to fornication as well; “Church Covenant, baptisms, marriages, other administrations of 4th Church of Christ in Bridgewater,” CL. Also see “The persons whose names follow having been guilty of the Breach of the Seventh Commandment confessed the same before the Chh to the satisfaction of it,” Church records, 1729-1778, Box 3, Folder 1, First Parish Church in Dorchester Records 1636-1981, Ms. N-258, MHS. 71 Cooper and Minkema, The Colonial Church Records of First Church of Reading (Wakefield) and the First Church of Rumney March (Revere), 196-197. 166

Sometimes individual blacks (like whites too) dealt with disagreements or conflicts with white congregants by separating from their churches, but black communities did not possess the resources necessary to form their own churches.

Hewson, who was identified as a “negro servant to Sarah Christophers,” became a full member of the First Church of New London, Connecticut in 1741. However, the church records indicate that Hewson “separated” from the church in 1757.72 In another case, a woman identified in 1750 as “Negro woman Ann” or “Sister Ann” came into conflict with the First Church of Brewster, Massachusetts because of a difference in theology.

She too separated from the church. Ann had “long absented” herself from the church community, and the church voted to send two deacons to speak to her. She had apparently joined the church years earlier (she may have been the unidentified “negro woman” baptized and admitted to the church in 1742). On November 6, 1750, Ann testified before the members of the church regarding her long absence. She “offered her

Reasons for Absenting wch were that to her understanding the Doctrine of Grace & of

Assurance were not preached in that Chh [church].” Essentially, she did not believe that the minister was accurately teaching foundational doctrines about salvation. Some in the church responded by trying to change her views and “means were used to convince her of her mistake & to Show her that it was her Duty to return to our Communion.” Ann, however, was not convinced, and “She declared her Purpose to continue at a Distance.”73

Like whites and Indians who were influenced by Separatist doctrines, Ann asserted that her understanding of the Bible was justification enough for her withdrawal from the

72 Connecticut Church Records, State Library Index, New London First Congregational Church, 1670-1888 (Hartford: CSL, 1949), 450. 73 Records of the Brewster Congregational Church, Brewster, Massachusetts, 1700-1792 (Privately Printed, 1911), 95-99. 167

church. Her desire to “continue at a Distance” may have indicated that she hoped to return to the church, if correct doctrines were preached. Ann made her theology and criticism of the church clear with her voice and absence from the church, and she thereby came into a public disagreement with the church that was not immediately settled. This black woman chose not to attend the church because she did not agree with all the theology, but no black church option was available for her at that point in time.

While church discipline reflected common forms of disagreement within churches that any wayward believers could face, there were also conflicts in churches related more directly to the racism and forced bondage that blacks faced in the North. Few of the conflicts that occurred between enslaved blacks and their masters, especially conflicts related to church attendance or religious matters, appear in the historic record. However, some examples of these forms of conflict do exist, and it is pretty safe to assume that they occurred more broadly because blacks did not passively accept the status that whites assigned to them in colonial society. Expectations for Christian behavior at times came into conflict with the enslaved status of blacks in the North. Although enslaved blacks in the North legally had access to courts and although religion and public morality prescribed limits on masters’ authority, in practice, northern masters maintained an immense power over their slaves. Slavery in the North was not mild, even if it was different from antebellum planation slavery. Slaves’ freedom of movement, control over their bodies, and protection of family members were all severely limited. So what happened when the will of a master contradicted the slave’s desire? Even in cases when both the slave and the master were members of the same church, the desire by one for productive labor and the desire by the other for personal liberty undoubtedly caused

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conflicts. Some enslaved men and women did act dynamically and at times forcibly in opposition to the control of masters and mistresses, and at least a few slaves sought to use religion to check the oppression that they faced. Although power was overwhelmingly concentrated with whites, blacks did negotiate and contest for the objects of their desires.74 Church affiliation and religious beliefs could be leveraged by blacks in the negotiations that occurred between slaves and masters within the confines of slavery.

The story of the slave who preached and claimed Jesus Christ as his right master in front of his owner’s dinner guests, which opened this chapter, is an examples of the tensions between black and white Christians that arose as a result of the convergence of egalitarian impulses with Christianity and the systems of oppression that affected blacks.

While few white Christians saw any issue with holding dark-skinned Christians as slaves, many blacks saw a contradiction between their religious and social positions, and some blacks began to express their desire for freedom publically. On March 29, 1754, an enslaved black man named Greenwich made a public statement against the type of slavery being practiced by Christians in colonial American, and he did so in the

Canterbury Separate Church where both he and his owner attended. The Congregational church in Canterbury, Connecticut split in 1744 as the result of differences between the

Old Lights who opposed revivalism and the New Lights who favored revivalism and strict church admission policies. “Strict Congregationalists,” such as these New Lights, were labeled by some as “Separatists” because groups of New Lights had left established

74 For histories that address resistance to slavery in New England, see Lawrence W. Towner, A Good Master Well Served: Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620-1750 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), 163-218; Desrochers, “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts”; Lorenzo J. Green, “The New England Negro as Seen in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves,” The Journal of Negro History 29, no. 2 (Apr. 1944); Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 144-167. 169

churches to form separate churches during the Great Awakening.75 Captain Obadiah

Johnson, Jr., a wealthy man who had represented Canterbury at the Connecticut General

Assembly and a church deacon, owned Greenwich and several other slaves. Greenwich’s statements against slavery were undoubtedly directed toward Johnson and other parishioners at the Canterbury Separate Church.76

Although the particular circumstances of Greenwich’s speech were not recorded, a copy of this speech was saved in church records. Greenwich began by invoking direct authority from God, for he began his speech by saying, “As I have ben Instructed by the

Lord” (which is precisely the sort of “enthusiasm” that Old Lights opposed). However,

Greenwich made the rest of his appeal based on analysis of select texts from the Old

Testament (Hebrew Bible), particularly from the books of Genesis, Exodus, First Kings,

Jeremiah, and Proverbs. Greenwich did not condemn all forms of slavery, for he noted some of the “just” forms of slavery described in the Bible. He did, however, critique the international slave trade, the European practice of selling ammunition in Africa, and the ways that Europeans incited and benefited from conflicts in Africa. He condemned how whites “steel as many of them [Africans] and bring them over Into your Contry to make slaves of them their soul and body.” He cited the biblical passages that states that “he that steel A man and seleth [sells] him or if he be found in his hands he shall surely be put to death.” He also reminded the listeners that in ancient Israel, it was prescribed that enslaved Israelites must be set free after seven years of service (many Christians associated their church communities with ancient Israel because both were communities

75 For more about Separatists see Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England. 76 I am relying exclusively upon Erik Seeman’s insightful analysis of this text and his research about Greenwich. The text of Greenwich statement appears in print because of Seeman’s efforts. Erik R. Seeman, “’Justise Must Take Plase’: Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 56, no. 2 (April 1999), 399-402, 411-413. 170

under God’s covenants). Through his careful, and at times creative, reading of Old

Testament scriptures, Greenwich presented a case for why he and other black Christians should be set free. In so doing, he used the same faith that he shared with white church goers to confront the assumptions about race and slavery that white colonists took for granted. If Greenwich had not attended this church, he would not have been able to publically condemn his enslavement in the following way.77

Greenwich stated that “Justise must Take Plase,” but his appeal did not seem to have an effect upon his condition as a slave. While we do not know how his owner and other congregants reacted to his critique of slavery, we know that Greenwich was not immediately freed. Historian Erik Seeman notes that “when Johnson died in 1765, he willed Greenwich – along with Peg, Greenwich’s wife of four years – to his son, Colonel

Obadiah Johnson III.” We also know, however, that his critique of slavery did not disqualify Greenwich from further participation in his church. The church voted in 1766, for example, to send representatives to inquire of Greenwich about his recent absences from church and to encourage him to return back to regular attendance. Soon thereafter,

Greenwich became a full member of the church and even voted in church business along with the other male church members (he is the only known example of a black church member voting in a Congregational church). After being sold to John Johnson, then to

Joseph Easton, and finally to Benjamin Bacon, Greenwich and his wife Peg were permitted in 1776 to buy their freedom for thirty pounds. Beacon, “also a leading member of the Canterbury Separate Church,” may have heard Greenwich speak against slavery in 1754, but he made Greenwich and his wife pay for their freedom on the eve of

77 Seeman, “Justise Must Take Plase,” 399-402, 411-413. 171

American independence.78 Greenwich remained a slave for a long time, but participation in the church had benefits for him, including a place to voice objections to slavery, the status of church membership, and perhaps, finally, a master open to the possibility of freedom.

Of course, blacks did not limit themselves to working within churches to better their lives, and they did not seek freedom through only persuasion and hard work. As black Christians came into conflict with white Christians over the issue of slavery, some blacks chose the same options available to slaves generally in order to secure their liberty. Lorenzo Greene once noted that “nearly every issue of a New England newspaper between 1704 and 1784, carried advertisements for fugitive slaves.” Many enslaved blacks sought to improve their lives by running away, including at least some blacks who participated in the North’s churches.79 An enslaved man named Simon from

Middlesex County, New Jersey ran away in 1740, and was described as “Pretended to be a Doctor and very religious and says he is a Churchman.”80 A runaway advertisement in the Boston Weekly News-Letter dated April 24, 1760 describes “a Negro servant man, belonging to Major Robert Rogers, named Prince” who had fled his Concord, New

Hampshire master. The advertisements describes him as thirty-years old, and mentions that he “was in the Service the last Year,” which indicates that he had perhaps fought against the French and Indians in the Seven Year’s War. After returning from the service, Prince evidentially tried to “present himself to be a free-man” and enlist again in

78 Seeman, “Justise Must Take Plase,” 399-402, 411-413. 79 Green, “The New England Negro as Seen in Advertisements for Runaway Slaves,” 126; for analysis of runaway advertisements also see “Desrochers, “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts” and Antonio T. Bly, “A Prince among Pretending Free Men: Runaway Slaves in Colonial New England Revisited,” Massachusetts Historical Review, 14 (2012), 87-118. 80 Pennsylvania Gazette, September 11, 1740; Hodges, Root & Branch, 127. 172

the militia. Overall, his white master stated that he “looks very serious and grave, and pretends to a great deal of Religion.”81 It seems likely that this unhappy owner dismissed the religious belief of this black man. He may have believed, like many whites, that religion made slaves more dutiful to their masters. Perhaps Prince was serious about his beliefs, and after experiencing life beyond Concord, he had no intention of continuing to serve this master. The religious beliefs of Simon, Prince, and other slaves did not prevent him from absconding and seeking a better life for himself.

Apart from running away, enslaved black Christians engaged in other common practices that undermined or contradicted their owners’ authority, such as stealing food or working slowly. The Reverend James MacSparran, the rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal

Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island, was confronted by disobedience and theft perpetrated by two of his baptized slaves. On Friday August 9, 1751, he wrote, “I have searched everywhere, and can find no Sugar, wch I suspect Maroca stole out of ye Barril last Monday, when we were all from Home. I found a Cheese wch Harry bo’t of Jno.

Gardner’s wife on ye Hill.” Apparently, the cheese (like the sugar) had not been honestly or permissibly gained, because MacSparran prayed, “Gracious God, give my Servants

Grace to live in a holier manner, that my Peace & Property mayn’t be invaded by their evil doings […] reform them, if it be your blessed will, from ye sins of uncleanness, stealing & lying.” Maroca (referenced in Chapter One for her relationship with another slave) and Harry had both been baptized by MacSparran at his Anglican church. Maroca, at least, was baptized upon her own confession of faith. As was the case for black slaves in other contexts, these slaves did not consider taking food items from masters and

81 Boston Weekly News-Letter, April 24, 1760, pp. 2; Bly, “A Prince among Pretending Free Men,” 87-118. 173

mistresses as stealing because so much of their lives and labor were stolen through slavery. Although it is impossible to know Maroca’s feelings toward MacSparran, it is unlikely that she considered her relationship to him as positive. MacSparran had baptized

Maroca’s children, but he had also separated her from at least two of her children in the

1740s by gifting two of her infants to white families in the parish.82 Enslaved blacks often participated in the same church as their owners, but sharing a church or the same faith was not a guaranteed safeguard against the worst injustices and conflicts of slavery, including physical violence and destruction of families. Some Christian slaves did what they could to better their lives under slavery, including taking extra food and other acts of disobedience. Affiliating with a predominantly white church was one of the many ways that enslaved blacks sought improve their lives under slavery, and church affiliation did not necessarily exclude the possibility of more subversive acts of resistance to slavery, such as stealing or running away.

As much as there was conflict and tension between blacks and whites within churches, it would be inaccurate to suggest that discord wholly characterized the story of black and white interactions in churches. Much of the conflict between whites and blacks was unlikely to be recorded and preserved in records, but, that being said, there is surprisingly little evidence of general or broad conflicts between blacks and whites in the specific contexts of churches during this period. Blacks, en masse, did not stop participating in the North’s Anglican and Congregational churches during this period, especially compared to the decline in Indian participation. Church affiliation remained

82 James MacSparran, A letter book and abstract of out services written during the years 1743- 1751, edited by Daniel Goodwin (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1899), 49, 81, and 105; Wilkins Updike, A History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island, including a History of the Other Episcopal Churches in the State, Volume 2, Part 2 (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1907), 482, 509, 529, 532, 541, and 550. 174

appealing to many blacks in the North despite conflicts with whites and proscriptions placed on their involvement. Moreover, some evidence suggests that blacks could be active participants in Protestant churches without being in conflicts or discord with whites. At least some of the blacks who participated in the North’s churches did not disagree with the theology and social practices which were implicit in their own subjugation. The orthodox Calvinism that Jupiter Hammon expressed in his writings, for example, provides evidence of a person who found spiritual fulfillment within a theology that led not to discord but to humble submission.

The enslaved poet Jupiter Hammon, who first published a poem in 1760, did not give any indication of conflict or discontentment toward his white, Anglican owners (the

Lloyd family of Queen’s Village, Long Island), and he highly valued the spiritual aspects of church affiliation. Cedrick May argues that “Hammon was a complex individual living under unusual circumstances with certain ideological beliefs that interacted with the literary and political culture of early America, but resistance was not one of his concerns.”83 Hammon’s theology reflected a Calvinism that was still part of the “mid- eighteen-century orthodox Anglicanism” that he was exposed to on Long Island. Overall,

May argues, that Hammon was “concerned only with the spiritual well-being of the

Christian masters and slaves, not their social status.” Hammon was willing to leave politics and the condition of slaves to God’s providence, since both were earthly concerns that would, in his view, eventually pass away. “God was sovereign, omniscient, and infallible and humans were depraved, limited in knowledge, and perfectly fallible,”

83 Cedrick May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2008), 24, 26, 29, 30. 175

according to Hammon’s theological understanding.84 It was his duty, he believed, to comply with all earthly authority, including that of his master and mistress, and eternal salvation was at stake in terms of whether or not people participated in churches.

In his 1760 poem, “An Evening Thought, Salvation by Christ, with Penetential

Cries,” Hammon showed concern for blacks and for all people, but his penitent cry was for freedom from sin and hell, not freedom from earthly bondage. Hammon stated that salvation is available to “every Nation” and “all the people” at several points in the poem, and he implied that every person must be made free from sin by God’s power:

Thou [Lord] hast the Word Salvation too The only Son of God. Ho! every one that hunger hath, Or pineth after me, Salvation by thy leading Staff, To set the Sinner free. Dear Jesus unto Thee we fly; Depart, depart from Sin, Salvation doth at length supply, The Glory of our King.85

The purpose of the freedom from sin (again, not freedom from bondage) was in order to glorify God. In fact, the only person who is identified as a “captive slave” in the poem is

“Dear Jesus,” whose “previous blood” brings salvation and freedom from sin. The poem stresses again and again that “Salvation comes by Jesus Christ alone,” and the honor of

God is thereby the only correct purpose for one’s life. All this is to say that Hammon’s poem’s reflected widely held opinions about the sinfulness of men, the gracious sovereignty of God, and the need for humble submission. Hammon’s beliefs made

84 May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 30. 85 Jupiter Hammon, “An Evening Thought, Salvation by Christ, with Penetential Cries,” 25 December 1760, in Dorothy Porter, ed., Early Negro Writing 1760-1837 (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1995), 529-531. 176

theological or social disputes with whites at his church unlikely, and his life exhibits how one black person engaged with and adopted Protestant Christianity in the North.

Black men’s and women’s affiliation with the North’s Protestant churches led to conflict with earthly masters, peaceful co-existence with masters, and/or outright support

(in the case of Jupiter Hammon) for the social system that maintained slavery, but those who participated all found some compelling advantages to their participation. In the cases of the slave mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and the runaway slave from

Concord, black Christians challenged and clashed with their owners. In the case of

Jupiter Hammon, nothing in his writings suggests that his faith caused conflicts with the

Lloyd family who owned him or with the churches he attended, and he was at best indifferent to political attempts by blacks after the Revolution to bring about an end to slavery. Although blacks were not forming independent churches in this period, they were beginning to express their religious views publically, as Greenwich and Rose both did. In reality, many of the black men and women who participated in the North’s churches did not fit into any simple explanatory category. Like people of faith generally, and as complex individuals, they made choices on a case by case basis. They sought to improve their lives and navigate relationships with both faith and pragmatism. Black men and women should not be over-simplified, and thereby demeaned, by being pigeonholed into a resister /collaborator dichotomy. It was not easy for many blacks to be enslaved Christians, for they did experience tensions between the egalitarian promises in Christianity and the social inequalities in British America. But many kept the faith nonetheless, and, for the time being, they kept it in predominantly white churches. The education and spiritual sustenance derived from participation in predominantly white

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churches outweighed the disadvantages of conflicts and prejudices for many blacks in the

North, especially in the periods before black communities possessed the resources needed to sustain separate churches.

* * * *

In a considerable portion of the Congregational churches of southern New

England and the Church of England parishes throughout the North, blacks continued to affiliate publically with Christianity between 1750 and 1763 because the benefits of participation outweighed the negative experiences they endured in churches. Free and enslaved blacks became members, owned the covenant, had their children baptized, were married, and were disciplined by the church authorities in Congregational and Anglican churches. As a consequence, a considerable portion of people in the North continued to experience formal religion in interracial contexts.

As much as the 1750s and 1760s continued to be a period when many experienced religion in interracial contexts, it was also a period when black and Indian participation in the North’s churches changed. At many of the Anglican churches in the North, blacks were baptized at higher rates and in greater numbers during the 1750s and into the 1760s as many Anglican churches provided educational, material, and spiritual benefits targeted toward blacks. While black participation did increase in some Congregational churches, in a large portion of the Congregational churches in southern New England, the rate of black baptisms was lower between 1750 and 1763 than it had been between 1730 and

1749. Support for revivalism had declined, and so did the active and specific white engagement with blacks that had brought many to Congregational churches in the 1730s

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and 1740s. Some churches may have become less welcoming or appealing to blacks and

Indians. In addition, black access to the sacrament of baptism was normalized and stabilized in some churches, whereby fewer black adult converts were baptized and more blacks were baptized as children upon their parents’ authority. Indian participation in

Congregational churches also declined, but it declined much more dramatically and uniformly as Indians formed new churches in Connecticut, Long Island, and Rhode

Island.

The rise of new Indian churches in the late 1740s and 1750s reflected community- wide conclusions that the benefits of affiliation in predominantly white churches could be obtained elsewhere without many of the disadvantageous that they experienced in white churches. They did not face segregated seating or exclusion from leadership positions in

Indian churches. Indian communities at Narragansett and Montauk had leadership, educational, theological, and community resources that could support churches, with the occasional help of missionary financial aid. Conversely, many Indians at Sandwich and

Natick, Massachusetts continued to attend churches with white pastors and white fellow- congregants despite conflicts and the trend toward Indian displacement, because they found parts of these churches to beneficial and because they lacked the resources necessary to form new, separate churches.

Blacks came into discord with whites through church discipline and theological differences, but the desires of slaves competing against the desires of masters also caused conflicts between white and black Christians before 1763. Tensions existed as a result of the purported universality of Christianity and the inequality of British colonial society.

However, many blacks still continued to participate in the North’s Congregational and

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Anglican churches because of the benefits that these churches could and did provide.

Some individual blacks left the churches where they had previously affiliated, but many more still decided that church affiliation was worthwhile irrespective of limitations placed on their involvement and the ways that churches reinforced the marginalized status of blacks in colonial society. In these churches, hundreds and perhaps even thousands of blacks received education and a narrative of history with a God that acted in history, which provided hope and strength. They could receive the baptism for their children, and perhaps even allies who would help them to keep their families together.

At least a small number of blacks used Christianity to protest against slavery, and their protests foreshadow the more prominent use of religious protests during the revolutionary era and later generations. Religious participation, moreover, did not prevent blacks from seeking to improve their lives or subverting the authority of their owners in other ways as well. The era of the American Revolution, however, changed some of these calculations for blacks in the North and entailed a remarkable diversification of interracial worship in the North. After the beginning of the American Revolution, Christianity would increasingly be used as a means of protesting against slavery.

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Chapter Three: Revolution, Antislavery, and the Diversification of Interracial Religious Worship, 1763 to 1790

On August 8, 1776, a group of Continental soldiers in the First Battalion of

Pennsylvania Militia “Heard a sermon from an Indian.” These Pennsylvania soldiers were likely stationed in Elizabeth, New Jersey at the time, just weeks before the British

Army’s assault on New York. As John Pitman noted in his journal, this unnamed Indian preached from Hebrews 2:3 – “how shall we escape if [we] neglect so great [a] salvation.” Pitman commented that it was an “Arminion Sermon,” by which he meant that it implied that all people, and not simply the predestined, had the ability to accept

God’s offer of salvation. Without additional comment, Pitman switched topics and noted that “About 20 of Parmer & Leils Company deserted.”1

On Sunday August 5, 1785, an entirely or mostly white congregation in Rutland,

Vermont heard the young black Congregational minister and revolutionary war veteran

Lemuel Haynes preach from Second Peter 1:10 and Numbers 23:10. Haynes noted that

“the people gave remarkable attention.” The next day Haynes moved onto Pawlet, near the border with New York, where he continued his Vermont preaching tour to predominantly white churches.2

In early September 1786, a black man, probably Harry Hosier, preached at the

John Street Methodist Church in New York City to an audience that included whites and blacks. Benjamin Rush, Thomas Coke, and others praised Hosier for his preaching

1 John Pitman diary, Rev. John Pitman Papers, Mss 622, RIHS. 2 Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, for many years pastor of a church in Rutland, VT, and late in Granville, NY (New-York: Harper & Brothers, 1837), 75. 181

abilities at one time or another during his preaching career.3 The New York Packet on

September 11, 1786 reported the following about the service:

Lately came to this city, a very singular black man, who, it is said is quite ignorant of letters, yet he has preached in the Methodist church several times, to the acceptance of several well disposed judicious people, – He delivers his discourse with great zeal and pathos, and his language and connection is by no means contemptible. – It is the wish of several of our correspondents, that this same black man may be so far successful, as to rouse the dormant zeal of numbers of our slothful white people, who seem very little affected about the concerns of another world.4

Apparently, this black man’s preaching in New York was well received by the whites who heard him, and some whites believed that he could even arouse a religious conversion among whites who were indifferent to Christianity.

As these three examples suggest, between 1764 and 1790, whites in the North occasionally heard black and Indian preachers and interracial religious worship occurred in a greater variety of settings. In these and other cases, blacks and Indians were remarkably bold in preaching the gospel to whites, and at least some whites were receptive to their preaching. In particular, the 1776 Indian preacher must have had great confidence in himself since he preached a relatively controversial theology to a group of armed white men. Indians and other people of color asserted their independent Christian judgment during the revolutionary era and used Christianity to argue in favor of their liberation, and they often did so in interracial contexts. Through the year 1790, most black Christians in the North were still associated with predominantly white congregations because separate black churches had not yet been founded.

3 William B. McClain, Black People in the Methodist Church: Whither Thou Goest? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984), 41-46. 4 The New York Packet, September 11, 1786, page 3, column 3. 182

The era of the American Revolution was a period of transformation in northern religious life. Specifically, from 1764 to 1790, there was a remarkable diversification of interracial religious experiences in the North. The war itself changed the religious landscape and at times made public worship impossible, but the revolutionary era also witnessed the opening of new venues for interracial religious meetings. In this period, blacks continued to affiliate with many Congregational and Anglicans churches.

Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian churches attracted more black congregants and members as well. The advent of American Methodism and the expansion of Baptist congregations also made interracial religious worship more common in the North, especially in the mid-Atlantic region, than it had ever been before.

Moreover, the ordination of the first black preachers and ministers meant that there was an increased chance of whites listening to black preachers. While small numbers of

Indians still participated in predominantly white churches, numerous blacks and Afro-

Indians participated in the North’s predominantly Indian churches. Despite the disruptions caused by war, the number of places where interracial worship occurred increased and diversified.

The upsurge in interracial religious experiences resulted from a rise in antislavery sentiment, from practical changes that made baptism more accessible to blacks in some denominations, and, most importantly, from an increase in deliberate outreach to blacks by ministers and preachers. Though, in theory, the growth in whites’ antislavery views and whites’ deliberate outreach to blacks would seem to have been mutually reinforcing, in fact, there is little evidence, except in the case of Methodists, that increasing levels of black participation in churches followed growth in antislavery activism among most

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denominations. Many historians have suggested that increasing numbers of black churchgoers in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was the result of a rise in antislavery advocacy in churches. Speaking specifically about Baptists and Methodists,

Nathan Hatch writes that “what made this witness to slaves credible was the number of white preachers willing to preach against slavery in the face of entrenched opposition.”5

However, the diversification of interracial religion and the increasing number of churches in which blacks affiliated cannot be as easily linked to antislavery Christianity, at least in the North. Blacks continued to affiliate with different theological traditions and pursued the educational, spiritual, and material benefits that even proslavery denominations offered blacks. While it is true that black affiliation with the Methodists grew in the mid-

Atlantic, in part because of the attractiveness of that denomination’s antislavery views, black affiliation among Baptist, Presbyterian, and Reformed churches also increased before these denominations articulated any objections to slavery. Moreover, black participation in Congregational churches declined somewhat during the very same time period as growing numbers of Congregationalists opposed slavery. Blacks certainly attended the churches and denominations that preached antislavery messages, and the presence of blacks in churches likely helped push some white Christians toward antislavery views. However, black men and women also continued to attend churches that did not explicitly promote emancipation. A constellation of factors, not just antislavery theology, affected the religious choices that enslaved and free blacks made.

* * * *

5 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 103. 184

The period 1764 to 1790 witnessed a remarkable development of antislavery attitudes in the North that helped to slowly bring about emancipation, and many of the people who promoted abolition did so for religious reasons. The Society of Friends or

Quakers were the earliest and most vocal opponents of slavery, but some other Christians followed their lead in the 1770s and 1780s.6 The antislavery stances articulated by

Methodists, some Congregationalists, and various other Christians helped reshape public opinion about slavery, even if antislavery advocates remained a minority throughout most of the North. While Quakers and Methodists were the most prominent antislavery

Christians, Gary Nash notes that “smaller numbers of Anglicans, Presbyterians, and

Swedish and German Lutherans” also opposed slavery and supported legislation to ban slave importations and to enable gradual emancipation. Antislavery activity by black men and women, in the form of petitions, lawsuits, and running away, also influenced the emancipation laws enacted across the North between 1777 and 1804.7 The Christian status of blacks was essential to the leverage that blacks applied in seeking abolition.

Most of the antislavery documents written by blacks from this period used Christianity alongside republican ideology in advocating their case.

The Christian faith of many blacks was important in their pursuit of emancipation, and blacks explicitly used Christianity to justify an end of slavery in their petitions. A

6 As mentioned before, the Society of Friends/Quakers are beyond the scope of this dissertation because they did not proselytize in the period covered in this dissertation and because they did not baptized. Although they eventually prohibited slaveholding among their members and opened schools for blacks, Quakers rarely sought or allowed blacks to become members of their societies. Other scholars have thoroughly addressed the Society of Friends and its relationship to abolitions and blacks, including: Ryan P. Jordon, Slavery and the Meetinghouse: The Quakers and the Abolitionist Dilemma, 1820-1865 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Jane R. Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Henry J. Cadbury, “Negro Membership in the Society of Friends,” Journal of Negro History, 21 (1936), 151-213. 7 Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 124. 185

group of blacks petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature in 1773 seeking emancipation.

They testified to the injustice of slavery and referenced their religious beliefs. “We have no property! We have no wives! No children! We have no city! No country!” the slaves’ petition cried out. “But we have a Father in Heaven, and we are determined, as far as his Grace shall enable us, and as far as our degraded contemptuous life will admit, to keep all his Commandments.”8 In 1780 a group of enslaved blacks in Harford, on behalf of Connecticut slaves generally, petitioned for their freedom, and they directly quoted nine biblical passages and referenced several other scriptural texts, including the book of Psalms, Lamentations, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Job, and Ecclesiastes. These slaves possessed a detailed knowledge and understanding of Old Testament/Hebraic texts, and they skillfully interpreted them to show the justice and necessity of emancipation. These petitions flowed from life-long experiences of oppressive bondage and their weekly, if not daily, participation in religious exercises. These slaves’ faith enabled them to “Know that the Lord will maintain the Cause of the afflicted and the Right of the Poor.” These blacks told the legislators that they “pray to god that he would send forth his good Spirit unto your harts and Remind you of your Duty and make you the insterments of Binding up the Brokenharted and of Proclaiming Liberty to the Captives.”9 While many whites still did not believe that Christianity required an end to slavery, black believers made strong connections between Christianity and the reasons in favor of emancipation.

8 Quoted in Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 125, 126-127. 9 “Petition by negro servants of Hartford for their freedom, October 1780,” Trumbull Papers, Volume XIII, document 286a-d, CSA; I am indebted to Jared Hardesty, PhD candidate at Boston College, for his insightful work on the relationship between Christianity and blacks’ pursuit of freedom; Jared Hardesty, “‘Taught my Benighted Soul to Understand’: African Slaves, Protestant Christianity, and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Boston,” paper presented at the Boston College Biennial Conference on the History of Religion, March 30-31, 2012. 186

Antislavery opinion began to grow among whites in the North during the 1760s and early 1770s as whites confronted the hypocrisy of holding slaves while trumpeting their natural right to liberty and while denouncing British attempts to reduce them to

“slavery.” In 1764, James Otis of Boston published The Rights of the British Colonies

Asserted and Proved, and argued that all men, including blacks, were by right born free.

Over the course of the imperial crisis and Revolutionary War, such views built into an audible chorus critical of slavery.10 Blacks in the North easily applied revolutionary rhetoric, like Christianity, to their own lives and used the same language as white Patriots in order to petition for an end to slavery. When whites refused to respond, blacks took action to liberate themselves, particularly after the British offered them freedom in exchange for military service. “Black men and women fled bondage by the thousands” during the war, Ira Berlin notes, often by joining the British in Newport, New York, and elsewhere, and Gary Nash argues that “no part of revolutionary society responded to the call for arms with anywhere near the enthusiasm of those who were black.” Eventually, the Continental Army addressed its manpower shortage by also granting blacks who enlisted their freedom. After the war, self-emancipation continued as slaves passed as free in the nascent black communities that began to develop in cities such as Boston and

Philadelphia after the Revolution.11

10 Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 62-62, 321. 11 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 228, 230; Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 223; For the role of blacks in the revolutionary war, see Nash, The Unknown American Revolution; Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Joyce Lee Malcolm, Peter’s War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Graham R. Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Graham R. Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North: African Americans in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1665-1865 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield 187

As Ira Berlin argues, “the demise of slavery was a slow, tortuous process” across most of the North, taking generations to complete, but the movement toward general emancipation was underway by the 1780s. Vermont and Massachusetts were among the first to take steps to end slavery. Blacks vigorously pursued their own freedom in these states, and increasing numbers of whites opposed the institution or were at least ambivalent about its continuation. In 1777, the new Vermont constitution freed all enslaved blacks who were “of age.” However, as Joanne Melish argues, “the language of the act was sufficiently vague that slaveholders may have persisted without sanction in a few areas for several years.” Blacks petitioned the Massachusetts legislature in 1773 and 1774, but they did not convince the legislators to pass an emancipation bill.12

However, a series of judicial cases in Massachusetts, including the 1783 Quok Walker case, helped to bring about the end of legal slavery in the Commonwealth. Chief Justice

John D. Cushing of Massachusetts gave the opinion that slavery was incompatible with the new state constitution, but his opinion was not widely published. As more churches and ministers spoke against slavery, the willingness of the society to support the institution diminished. Successful freedom suits and changing attitudes about slavery,

Melish writes, “undermined whites’ confidence in their property rights in slaves” and emboldened “enslaved persons of color to demand manumission or wage compensation from their owners – or simply to walk away from them.”13 A combination of black and

Publishers, Inc., 1997); Eric G. Grundset, ed., Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War, A Guide to Service, Sources, and Studies (Washington, D.C.: National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, 2008). 12 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 228, 230; Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 125, 126-127. 13 Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 64, 65. 188

white actions in these states gradually undermined the ability and willingness of whites to hold slaves.

Several states in 1774 prohibited the importation of new slaves, and Pennsylvania became in 1780 the first state to enact a gradual emancipation law. A coalition of politicians from several different Protestant denominations made this law possible.

Pennsylvania’s law stipulated that the male and female children of enslaved women born after the passage of the law were indentured until age twenty-eight. This period of indenture differed little from slavery because whites continued to control the most productive years of black people’s lives and some masters removed blacks from the state in order to sell them into perpetual slavery in the South. But, slavery was on the road to extinction and the number of free blacks in Pennsylvania grew rapidly after the 1790s.

Rhode Island in February 1784 passed a gradual emancipation law that made black children born after March 1, 1784 “apprentices” who would be free at age eighteen for women and age twenty-one for men. Although the Connecticut legislature voted against emancipation bills in 1777, 1779, and 1780, it finally passed an emancipation law in 1784 that freed black and mulatto children born after March 1, 1784 when they reached age twenty-five. The New York legislature voted in 1781 to free blacks who had served in the American army, but a gradual emancipation bill for New York was not successfully passed until 1799. New Jersey failed to follow suit until 1804; all earlier legislative attempts failed and slaves could still be imported into New Jersey until 1786.14

The end of slavery, which was promoted foremost by black men and women but was also encouraged by some religiously and politically inspired whites, slowly changed

14 Melish, Disowning Slavery; Gary B. Nash and Jean B. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 323-325. 189

the legal condition of blacks in the North. However, black freedom did not necessarily mean black equality or economic advancement. As Joanne Melish argues, “gradual emancipation inscribed the ideology and practices of slavery itself in the free society,” whereby whites still felt entitled to labor and deference from blacks and “the state of being free continued to draw its meaning from the state of enslavement that had preceded it.”15 As Table 3-1 indicates, some states had significantly higher percentages of free blacks than others states by 1790, but the census data is also a little deceiving. There were no slaves listed on the 1790 federal census for Massachusetts, but other evidence detailed by Margot Minardi suggests that some whites in Massachusetts still claimed black men and women as slaves into the 1790s.16 Moreover, black men and women who were legally free were not necessary economically free, and some whites continued to curtain the freedom of blacks by using their cultural and economic power to control black employees.

Table 3-1: Number of Slaves and Free Blacks Numerated in the 1790 Federal Census:

State Number of Number of Total black % of black slaves listed free blacks population population listed that was free New Hampshire 158 630 788 80% Vermont 16 255 271 94% Massachusetts 0 6,001 6,001 100% Rhode Island 948 3,407 4,355 78% Connecticut 2,764 2,808 5,572 50% New York 21,324 4,654 25,978 18%

15 Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Winter, 1999), 654; Patrick Wolfe and others have also shown, race and racism among whites became more prominent and necessary to whites’ economic exploitation of blacks once slavery ended as the mechanism of control; Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001), 879-881. 16 Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18-19. 190

New Jersey 11, 423 2,762 14,185 20% Pennsylvania 3,787 6,537 10, 324 63% Total 40,420 27,054 67,474 40%

Source: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 369, 372.

Northern society dramatically changed during the era of the American

Revolution, including a growth in freedom for a sizeable number of blacks and a diversification of interracial churches. The developing free black communities in northern cities formed benevolent associations in the 1780s and after 1790 organized independent black churches. In order to understand these transformations, this chapter examines general denominational trends across the North in the revolutionary period.

Through specific examples and denomination-wide analysis, it is clear that within a greater variety of churches than ever before men and women affiliated and participated in public religious observances. Many Congregational and Anglican (Episcopal) churches continued to have black congregants and members, but rising levels of black participation in Baptist, Methodist, Reformed, and Presbyterian churches exhibited the growing options available to blacks and the increased variety of churches that were interracial.

The presence of antislavery sentiment was an important but not always a determinant factor in this diversification of interracial worship. While Indians did occasionally participate in a variety of Protestant churches, separate Indian churches also experienced an infusion of blacks and Afro-Indians in this period as more free blacks moved to Indian communities and married Indians.

191

Congregational Church Affiliation

Though black men and women continued to participate in many of the

Congregational churches of southern New England between 1764 and 1790, their rate of participation was beginning to decline. Black participation declined despite the fact that numerous Congregational churches began to support an end to slavery. Table 3-2 provides a list of sixty-four Congregational churches in which two or more blacks were identified in the baptismal and/or membership records from 1764 to 1790.

Comparatively, between 1750 and 1763, at least eighty-one congregations included identifiable black baptisms or members, and between 1730 and 1749, at least ninety- seven congregations included black baptisms or members.17 While the rate and extent of black participation was declining in Congregational churches overall, the decline may not have been as dramatic as it first appears because some ministers seem to have stopped using racial notations in church records during this later time period, for reasons that no one explained.18 For example, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins rarely included racial notations in the records of the First Congregational Church of Newport, even though blacks were baptized and admitted to this church (other sources allow for the identification of some of the black congregants). The ministers of Brattle Street Church

Boston did not consistently use racial notations between1760 and 1795; black men and women were often identified as servants but not as “negro servants.”19 Therefore, more black men and women may have been participants in Congregational churches than the

17 See tables in Chapter One and Chapter Two. 18 I have not found any evidence that suggests reasons for why fewer ministers used racial notation in church records during the revolutionary era than had in previous periods. I hypothesize that the pastors, such as Samuel Hopkins, who opposed slavery based on the belief that God was no receptor of persons, may have felt that the use of racial notations implied ideas opposed to this beliefs. 19 “First Congregational Church Marriages Baptisms 1744-1825,” Records of the First Congregational Church Newport, NHS; The Manifesto Church: Records of the Church in Brattle Square Boston, 1699-1872 (Boston: The Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, 1902), 179-198. 192

records indicate. Nonetheless, there seems to have been a decline in black baptisms and church membership in Congregational churches, especially during the years 1776 to 1780 while the Revolution dominated life in the North.

Table 3-2: Congregational churches in which two or more blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership 1764-1776 and 1777-1790:

1764 1777 Church Name Location to to 1776 1790 First Church Boston Boston, Mass X Second Church Boston Boston, Mass. X Old South (Third) Church Boston Boston, Mass. X Brattle Square (Fourth) Church Boston Boston, Mass. X X New North (Fifth) Church Boston Boston, Mass. X X New Brick (Seventh) Church Boston Boston, Mass. X Hollis Street (Eighth) Church Boston Boston, Mass. X West (Ninth) Church Boston Boston, Mass. X First Church Cambridge Cambridge, Mass. X First Church Charlestown Charlestown, Mass. X First Parish Church Dorchester Dorchester, Mass. X X West Roxbury First Congregational West Roxbury, Mass. X South Church (Third) Salem (Peabody) Peabody, Mass. X First Church Lancaster Lancaster, Mass. X Second Church Lancaster (Chocksett Chh) Lancaster, Mass. X Brockton Christ Congregational Church Brockton, Mass. X X Pilgrim Congregational Church Merrimac Merrimac, Mass. X First Parish Hingham Hingham, Mass. X X Groton Congregational Church Groton, Mass. X Lincoln Church of Christ Lincoln, Mass. X First Parish Church Scituate Scituate, Mass X First Church Hanover Hanover, Mass. X Amesbury South Parish Church Amesbury, Mass. X Beverly First Parish Church Beverly, Mass. X X Billerica First Congregational Church Billerica, Mass. X Athol Congregational Church Athol, Mass. X Pembroke Second Church of Christ Pembroke, Mass. X Middleton Congregational Church Middleton, Mass. X Tewksbury Congregational Church Tewksbury, Mass. X Second Church in Rochester (Mattapoisett) Mattapoisett, Mass. X X First Church Marlborough Marlborough, Mass. X First Church Hartford Hartford, Conn. X East Hartford First Congregational Church East Hartford, Conn. X X New Haven First Congregational Church New Haven, Conn. X X East Haven First Congregational Church East Haven, Conn. X Middletown First Congregational Church Middletown, Conn. X X

193

Woodstock Hill First Church Woodstock, Conn. X Hebron Gilead Congregational Church Hebron Gilead, Conn. X Milford First Congregational Church Milford, Conn. X Redding Congregational Church Redding, Conn. X Northford Congregational Church Northford, Conn. X Branford Congregational Church Branford, Conn. X East Haddam First Congregational Church East Haddam, Conn. X Norwich First Congregational Church Norwich, Conn. X Fairfield First Congregational Church Fairfield, Conn. X X Wethersfield First Congregational Church Wethersfield, Conn. X X Lebanon First Congregational Church Lebanon, Conn. X X Colchester First Congregational Church Colchester, Conn. X Old Saybrook Congregational Church Old Saybrook, Conn. X Oxford Congregational Church Oxford, Conn. X Shelton Huntington Congregational Church Shelton Huntington, Conn. X X Groton First Congregational Church Groton, Conn. X Old Lyme First Congregational Church Old Lyme, Conn. X Glastonbury Buckingham-Eastbury Church Glastonbury, Conn. X East Hampton Haddam Neck Church East Hampton, Conn. X Bozrah Congregation Church Bozrah, Conn. X Guilford Second Congregational Church Guilford, Conn. X X Newtown First Congregational Church Newtown, Conn. X Portland First Congregational Church Portland, Conn. X First Congregational Church Newport Newport, R.I. X X Second Congregational Church Newport Newport, R.I. X Tiverton Congregational Church Tiverton, R.I. X Bristol First Congregational Church Bristol, R.I. X Newman Congregational Church East Providence, R.I. X See Bibliography for sources

Blacks participated in significantly fewer Congregational churches between 1777 and 1790, and some of this decline may have been the result of a static birth rate and the absence of significant numbers of black men from New England between 1776 and 1781.

Many blacks from New England enlisted in the Continental Army and a small number of other black New Englanders sought liberty and sanctuary with British Army. A publication edited by Eric Grundset has identified about 1,700 blacks and Indians from

Massachusetts alone who served in the American army. Blacks serving in the army reduced the black population in some communities and perhaps temporarily reduced the birth rate among black New Englanders, thereby reducing the number of potential black 194

baptisms at least until 1781. According to Lorenzo Greene, the black population of New

England “apparently remained relatively static between 1776 and 1790,” but the white population in New England grew by roughly fifty percent. The black population of New

England also generally shifted toward larger cities in this period, so smaller New England towns had fewer blacks and fewer black church attendees. 20 Due to the war, demographic shifts, and possibly because of changing attitudes among whites, blacks participated in fewer Congregational churches between 1776 and 1790 than they had in previous years.

Ironically, this decline of black participation in Congregational churches took place during the same period when an increasing number of Congregationalists began to speak publically against slavery. Some Congregationalist laity and ministers continued to own slaves in this period and even after 1790 in some places, but other

Congregationalists spoke out against the practice. The mixed, contested outlook on slavery is perhaps well exemplified in the case of Benjamin Colman and the Reverend

Moses Parsons of Byfield parish in Newbury, Massachusetts. Around 1774, Colman, a deacon in the church, began to forcefully denounce slavery. According to a town historian, “As early as 1774 and again in 1776 he had published articles calling upon the people, if they would be prospered in their own struggle for freedom, to grant it to those whom they held in bondage .”21 Colman’s antislavery activity accelerated and turned into a conflict with the church’s minister by 1780 because Parson continued to own at least

20 Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 74-77; Grundset, Forgotten Patriots, 79; Ira Berlin, “The Revolution in Black Life,” in Alfred F. Young, ed. The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976), 349-382. 21 John Louis Ewell, The Story of Byfield: A New England Parish (Boston: George E. Littlefield, 1904), 133-135; Theophilus Parsons, Memoir of Theophilus Pasons with Notices of Some of His Contemporaries (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), 16-19; John James Currier, History of Newburyport, Mass: 1764-1905, Volume 1, (Newburyport: Published by the Author, 1906), 69. 195

one slave. Parson was the minister in this parish from 1744 to 1783, and had owned two male slaves and one female slave. If the old story can be trusted, Parson had apparently offered freedom to all three of his slaves, but a female slave named Violet refused to be set free. A descendent of Parson wrote:

When it was generally believed that slavery was unlawful in Massachusetts, he [Reverend Parson] summoned his slaves into his sitting-room, and there, in the presence of his children, declared to them that they were free. The men accepted […] Not so for Violet. “No, no, master,” she said, “if you please, this must not be. You have had the best of me, and you and yours must have the worst. Where am I to go in sickness or old age? No, master; your slave I am, and always will be, and I will belong to your children when you are gone; and by you and them I mean to be cared for.”22

Violet felt that freedom would be a greater burden to her than slavery, given the difficulty that she would have in providing for herself as an elderly woman. Deacon Colman, however, continued to promote abolition and insulted Parsons by questioning his attempt to free his slaves. On December 21, 1780, Parsons and Colman brought charges against each other in front of the church members. Parsons said that Colman had slandered him and complained that “his deacon had charged him with man stealing, called him a thief, and accused him of offering to sell Violet, his negro maid, for a large sum of money.”

On March 12, 1781, the church members voted to suspend Deacon Colman, until he repented for offending the pastor. It was not until 1785, nearly two years after Parsons had died, that Colman stated “that in his treatment of the Reverend Moses Parsons, the late worthy pastor of the church, that he urged his arguments against the slavery of

Africans with excessive vehemence and asperity without showing a due concern for his character and usefulness as an elder, or the peace and edification of the church.” After

22 Parsons, Memoir of Theophilus Pasons, 17. 196

this apology, Colman was restored to the church.23 Some Congregationalists opposed slavery during the 1770s and 1780s with all their might, but other willingly kept slaves and only gradually moved away from slaveholding as the institution was gradually ended in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Some Congregationalists, unlike both

Colman and Parson, continued to feel entitled to own slaves and were unapologetically proslavery.

The impact of a few vocal Congregational pastors, however, did convince some to free their slaves and they pushed New England states to adopt gradual emancipation laws.

The Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport, who will be addressed more specifically in the next chapter, was an influential minister and theologian who publicly opposed the slave trade and slavery in the early 1770s. Other vocal antislavery Congregationalists from this period include the Reverend Nathaniel Niles of Newburyport, Massachusetts and the Reverends Levi Hart and Jonathan Edwards Jr. of Connecticut.24 Their sermons against slavery helped promote antislavery opinions and legislation in New England.

Doubtless their promotion of universal liberty was another appealing factor that attracted some blacks to Congregational churches. Nonetheless, black participation in Boston’s

Congregational churches declined at the same time as these churches became more antislavery and as greater numbers of blacks migrated to Boston and other port towns from the countryside.

23 Quoted in Ewell, The Story of Byfield, 134. 24 Kenneth P. Minkema and Harry S. Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate, 1740-1865,” Journal of American History 92, no. 1 (Jun., 2005), 47-74; Peter Hinks, “Timothy Dwight, Congregationalism, and Early Antislavery,” The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007); James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals Against Slavery, 1770-1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Rupert Charles Loucks, “Let the Oppressed Go Free”: Reformation and Revolution in English Connecticut, 1764-1775 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 197

Even though black involvement in Congregational churches was in decline, the church remained important to those blacks who did choose to affiliate. Take, for example, Cuffee Wright, a slave owned by the Reverend Sylvanus Conan. Wright joined the First Congregational Church of Middleborough (sometimes spelled Middleboro),

Massachusetts and was baptized in 1773 after publically sharing his religious experiences with the predominantly white church; remarkably his testimony has survived. Although

Wright’s relation is the only one written by a black person that appears in these church records, he was by no means the only person of African descent that had joined this church. At least four black men, one black woman, and one Indian man joined this church during the revival of 1742, and several blacks and Indians were baptized there in the 1740s and 1750s.25 The town of Middleborough had an estimated twelve black enslaved residents over the age of sixteen in 1755, and during the 1750s and 1760s, a sizable portion of these blacks seemed to attend the First Church or the other churches in town. Middleborough was also home to a small Wampanoag community in the Lakeville neighborhood. The Separate Congregational Church in North Middleborough baptized fives blacks between 1760 and 1766.26 In 1775, a list of male church members at First

Church was created, and “Cuffey Negro” was listed as one of the sixty-four male

25 “A List of the Male Members of the Chh of Christ in Middleborough as appears from the Records under the hand of the Rev. Peter Thacher,” First Church of Middleboro (Middleboro, Mass.) 1702-1908, RG 4970, CL; “Middleboro, Mass First Church CRII, The Book of Church Records: 1707-1821,” First Church (Middleboro, Mass.) 1707-1821, RG 4919, Microfilm, CL; Book of the First Church of Christ, in Middleborough, Plymouth County, MA with Notices of Other Church in that Town (Boston: C.C.P. Moody, 1852), 90-100; Thomas Prince and Peter Thatcher, An Account of the Great Revival: in Middleborough, Mass. A. D. 1741, 1742, during the ministry of Rev. Peter Thacher; with a notice of his character (Boston: Re-printed by T.R. Marvin, 1842). 26 “Records of Rev. Isaac Backus from 1747/8 -1754 being Book I. & Records of the Rev. Solomon Reed from 1756 to 1785 being Book II of the Congregational Church North Middleborough, Mass.,” Middleboro North Church (Church of Christ) records, 1747-1927, CL; Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume III of the Second Series (Boston, 1815), 95-97. 198

members of the church.27 In 1796, Anna Wright, “a black” and possibly the wife of

Cuffee Wright, became a full member of the church also.28 Perhaps Cuffee became free and adopted the last name Wright after Conant’s death in 1777, but it is more likely that he became free when slavery was slowly ended in Massachusetts after 1780.

Though whites widely believed in innate black inferiority, the Reverend Conant believed that God was not a respecter of persons and that all people were equal before

God. In a published sermon given on the occasion of the execution of a black man named Bristol for the crime of murder, and Conant argued that blacks and whites were made “of the same Kind of Flesh and Blood” because God “made of one Blood, all

Nations of Men.”29 Even though Conant profited from the enslavement of blacks and did not seem to promote abolition, he felt a duty to open the way of salvation for the black men and women in his household and congregation. As was common with many slave- owning clergymen, Conant likely taught Cuffee to read and perhaps how to write.

Conant regularly led his whole household in prayer, singing, and other devotional activities and such activities formed the basis for Cuffee Wright’s religious knowledge.

From the 1760s to the 1780s, pastors such as Conant expressly indicated that

Congregational churches and the way of salvation were open to blacks, and some black men and women continued to participate in these churches.

27 “Middleboro, Mass First Church CRII, The Book of Church Records: 1707-1821”; Cuffee Wright did not seem to use the last name until years later, perhaps when he became free. 28 “A List of ye Male Members of the First Chh in Middleboro Taken Feb. 1775,” First Church of Middleboro (Middleboro, Mass.) 1702-1908, RG 4970, CL; “The Book of Church Records: 1707-1821,” “Middleboro, Mass First Church CRII, CL. 29 Sylvanus Conant, The Blood of Abel, and the Blood of Jesus Considered and Improved, in a sermon delivered at Taunton, December the first, 1763 ; upon the day of the execution of Bristol, a Negro boy of about sixteen years old, for the murder of Miss Elizabeth McKinstry (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1764), 20. 199

Wright’s testimony reflected many of the dominant themes and conventions of

Congregational confessions from the eighteenth century, but it also subtly revealed his experience as an enslaved black man in New England and why affiliation with this church was meaningful to him. The dominant theme in the document was his change from a life of sin to submission to God. This Christian theme is established in the first lines with the imagery of being brought by God’s mercy “out of Land of Darkness unto the Land of gloryous gospel Light.” This phrase contrasts life before and after salvation, but it also reflects a Protestant geography of the Atlantic world which viewed Africa as a land without true religion and America as a land of “gloryous gospel Light.” The phrase is also reminiscent of enslaved poetess Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On being brought from

Africa to America,” which was published in 1773. Wheatley stated that “‘Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land.”30 Wright also seemed to make a reference to the hardships of slavery and the comfort that Christianity afforded him with one of the biblical passages that he highlighted: Psalm 119:71, “it is good for me that I have been afflicted That I might Learn thy Statutes.” While whites used Christianization as a justification for slavery, Wright was simply speaking about his personal experience whereby his afflictions were mediated by being “Comforted with things of nather [nether] world.” Wright believed that he was “unwordy the lest of all gods marcys” [unworthy of the least of all god’s mercies], but he believed that God had made payment for his sins and brought him to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. Highlighting his transformation,

Wright indicated that now “Sin is greff [grief] to me – Christ is presus [precious] to my

Soule.” Overall, Wright expressed his religious experiences in terms that would have

30 Phillis Wheatley, Poems of Phillis Wheatley: A Native African and a Slave (Bedford, Mass: Applewood Books, 1995), 12. 200

resonated with the predominantly white audience but also in terms specific to his own experiences. For at least some blacks, such as Wright, Congregational churches remained appealing during the period of 1764 to 1790 because they provided comfort and spiritual fulfillment, and numerous Congregational churches remained sites of interracial religious worship.

Moreover, Lemuel Haynes became the first black man ever ordained as a

Congregational minister during the same period that black participation in

Congregational churches was in decline. Haynes was born in West Hartford, Connecticut on July 18, 1753. An 1837 biography written by a fellow-minister states that Haynes was a “coloured man, his father being of unmingled African extraction, and his mother a white woman of respectable ancestry in New-England.”31 At five months old, one or both of his parents took him to Granville, Massachusetts. As was common for blacks in

New England, white authorities bound Haynes as a servant until age twenty-one and placed him in the house of David Rose, a deacon at the local Congregational church.

Like many blacks in white colonial households, Haynes participated in family religious devotions and attended church. He was also educated, but much of his early life was occupied by farm work and household labors. As a servant, he was “obliged to labour hard through the day.”32 As a young adult, perhaps after the death of Mrs. Rose, Haynes experienced a sense of conviction for his sins and a hope for salvation from God. Soon

31 Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, 28. 32 Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, 37; John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thoughts of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xi, 3-12. 201

thereafter, he was baptized by the Reverend Jonathan Huntington, and he joined the East

(First) Granville Congregational Church.33

The revolutionary period for Haynes was characterized by his active and vocal pursuit of freedom and his development as a Congregational minister, including his preaching to whites. At the close of his indenture, in 1774The revolutionary period for

Haynes was characterized by his active and vocal pursuit of freedom and his development as a Congregational minister, including his preaching to whites. At the close of his indenture, in 1774, Haynes enlisted as a local minuteman, and after the outbreak of fighting in 1775, he joined the army in Roxbury for the siege of Boston. He traveled with General Henry Knox’s expedition to Ticonderoga to bring the artillery pieces that eventually drove the British from Boston. After this time of military service,

Haynes returned to Granville, worked in farming, and began to show an inclination toward the ministry. Based on his own study of theology, he gave a sermon to the Rose family, and their reception of his sermon encouraged his pursuit of the ministry. Haynes also wrote an essay in the mid-1770s titled “Liberty Further Extended: Or free thoughts on the illegality of Slave-keeping.” As John Saillant notes, this essay criticizes the slave trade and slaveholding on both religious and political grounds, in a similar fashion to the antislavery critiques written by contemporaries such as Samuel Hopkins.34 His early biography states that “It became known that he possessed uncommon gifts in prayer and exhortation; and, the parish being destitute of a minister, he was frequently called upon to

33 The First Church Granville, also known as East Church, was gathered in 1747. Jedidiah Smith was pastor from 1756 to 1776. Timothy Mather Cooley was pastor from 1796 to 1859. Cooley knew Haynes personally and wrote the 1837 biography which includes lengthy quotations from Haynes writings. There are no surviving records from First Church Granville antedating 1791. 34 Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican, 15-46. 202

read approved sermons, and to lead in the devotional exercises of the house of God.” 35

Already, even before his formal training, Haynes was taking a leadership role in his predominantly white church.36

In 1779, Haynes was

invited to study Latin and

theology with the Reverend

Daniel Farrand in Canaan,

Connecticut. This marked the

beginning of his professional

education and his long career

ministering to predominantly

white congregations. After

mastering Latin with Farrand,

all along paying his way with Figure 3-1: The Reverend Lemuel Haynes. This engraving appeared in the 1837 biography of Haynes. farm labor, he began studying Source: Timothy Mather Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, for many years pastor of a church in Rutland, VT, and late in Granville, Greek with the Reverend NY (New-York: Harper & Brothers, 1837). William Bradford in

Wintonbury, Connecticut, while working as a school teacher. On “Nov. 29th, 1780, several ministers of high respectability ‘having examined him in the languages and sciences, and with respect to his knowledge of the doctrines of the gospel, and practical and experiential religion, recommended him as qualified to preach the gospel.’” In the

35 Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, 59. 36 Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, 28-59; Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican, xi, 3-5, 9; Grundset, Forgotten Patriots,115.

203

following year, a new church was organized in Granville (Middle Granville),

Massachusetts, and Haynes was invited to supply their pulpit. According to Cooley, “all classes and ages were carried away with the sweet, animated eloquence” of Haynes preaching. He continued as their preacher for five years, and within that period married

Elizabeth Babbit. Haynes was formally ordained as a minister on November 9, 1785, with the wholehearted support of the Granville congregation. He then served as a minister – preaching and administering the sacraments – in Torrington, Connecticut for about two years, and he also went on preaching tours of Vermont, where many other

“white” congregations listened to him. On March 28, 1788, Haynes received an invitation to become the pastor of the west church in Rutland, Vermont, and he accepted.

He served this “white” congregational for three decades.37 Haynes, as an ordained

Congregational minister, was a part of the diversification of interracial religious worship that occurred between 1764 and 1790 in the North. While many Congregational churches had included black congregants before the revolutionary era and whites had occasionally heard black men and women exhort in Congregational churches during the

1740s and 1750s, it was a new experience for white Congregationalists to hear an ordained black man preach. The diversification of interracial worship entailed not only a greater number of churches in which whites and blacks were both members, but also a greater number of instances of blacks preaching to white or mixed audiences.

Many Congregational churches continued to be sites of interracial religious worship between 1764 and 1790 in New England. Black men and women continued to be baptized, married, and admitted as members, but the rate of black affiliation declined, especially after 1776 even though some Congregationalists promoted emancipation.

37 Cooley, Sketches of the Life and Character of the Rev. Lemuel Haynes, 60-81. 204

Numerous Congregational churches, however, remained appealing to some blacks because of the spiritual and material benefits they could confer. For Cuffee Wright,

Lemuel Haynes, and hundreds of others, the Congregational tradition brought spiritual comfort and other benefits. While many Congregational churches had included blacks since at least the 1730s, it was only after the Revolution that some whites began to hear preaching from a black Congregationalist minister.

Anglican/Episcopal Church Affiliation

Blacks continued to participate in most of the Anglican churches of the North between 1764 and 1790, even though these churches were not on the frontline of antislavery advocacy. Church of England priests continued to routinely baptize and catechize more free and enslaved blacks than any other Protestant denomination in cities across the North, as shown in Table 3-3. These churches continued to include many blacks despite disruptions of war that disproportionately affected Anglicans and despite the church’s lack of a denomination-wide antislavery stance. New parishes and old ones alike included blacks, thereby making the Church of England/Protestant Episcopal

Church among the most popular denominations among blacks.

Table 3-3: Episcopal churches in which two or more blacks were baptized 1764-1776 and 1777-1790

1764 1777 Church Name Location to to 1776 1790 Queen's Chapel Portsmouth Portsmouth, N.H. X King's Chapel Boston Boston, Mass. X Christ Episcopal Church Boston Boston, Mass. X X Trinity Church Boston Boston, Mass. X X St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Salem Salem, Mass. X X St. Paul's Episcopal Church Newburyport Newburyport, Mass. X X Trinity Church New Haven New Haven, Conn. X X

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Holy Trinity Episcopal Church Middletown Middletown, Conn. X X Christ Church Norwark Norwalk, Conn. X X Christ Episcopal Church Stratford Stratford, Conn. X X Trinity Episcopal Church Newport Newport, R.I. X X St. Michael's Episcopal Church Bristol, R.I. X St. Paul's Church Narragansett Narragansett, R.I. X X Trinity Church New York & its chapels New York, N.Y. X X St. John’s Episcopal Church Johnstown, N.Y. X Christ Episcopal Church Shrewsbury Shrewsbury, N.J. X St. Mary’s Episcopal Burlington Burlington, N.J. X Christ Episcopal Church Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. X X Robert Ayres’ Episcopal ministry Brownsville, Pa. X See Bibliography for Sources 38

Between 1764 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Anglican clergy and churches continued their missions as they generally had in previous decades. Anglicans were certainly aware of brewing hostilities and troubles, but the imperial crisis had not so far affected catechizing, baptizing, marrying, and worshipping. Catechism classes continued in many cities, especially for enslaved and free blacks, often founded by the

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel or the Bray Associates in London. Black men, women, and children were baptized in significant numbers, and some black people were admitted to communion. For example, the Royal Governor William Franklin (the son of

Benjamin Franklin and a staunch loyalist during the war) in 1774 presented Anthony

Harley, “child of Knowlton a negro man,” for baptism at St. Mary’s Church, Burlington,

New Jersey. Both blacks were owned by Governor Franklin.39 When Godfrey Malbone established an Anglican church in Brooklyn, Connecticut, the enslaved blacks that he owned did much of the construction work on the 1771 edifice and were likely among the

38 For Trinity Church New York, see Frank J. Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church VIII, no. 4 (December 1939), 365. 39 John E. Stillwell, ed., Historical and Genealogical Miscellany: Data Relating to the Settlement and Settlers of New York and New Jersey, Volume 2 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1970), 88. 206

early attendees of this church.40 In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the rector recorded four black baptisms in 1767 and 1768, and the marriage of “Thomas a negro to Dinah a negroe” in 1769. In Albany, New York, as Frank Klingberg notes, the Reverend Harry

Munro baptized over fifty blacks and admitted six of them to the rite of communion in the pre-revolutionary years.41 At Huntington, Long Island, Reverend James Greaton wrote that between thirty and forty blacks attended services at his church and that “many of them are really Patterns of Goodness.” In addition, Greaton wrote that “some of them read well, and accurately perform the responses of the Church.” He also noted that some of these black Anglicans belonged to “Dissenters” who possessed enough “charity” as to allow their slaves to attend Anglican services.42 Most Anglican parishes, especially the parishes with assistant ministers or catechists, continued to baptize many blacks in the period before independence.

The Revolution was a difficult period for the Church of England, and many of the

North’s parishes closed their doors and ceased holding services, but some blacks continued to participate in churches that remained open. After the Declaration of

Independence, several northern states forbade prayers for the king. As Richard Pointer describes, “even the most apolitical Anglican minister either had to stop praying for the king as the Prayer Book required, or risk being considered enemies of the American cause by continuing to do so or by suspending all church services.” Many Anglican priests, who felt that their ordination vows required that they pray for the king, stopped

40 Marilyn J. Chiat, America’s Religious Architecture: Sacred Places for Every Community (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), 55. 41 The baptismal records examined at the New England Historical Genealogical Society ended in 1770. “Vital Records from the Paris Register of Queen’s Chapel Portsmouth, New Hampshire,” [Copied and Indexed by] Prscilla Hammon 1943, NEHGS, pp 26-27, 47; Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 362. 42 Quoted in Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 364-5. 207

holding services all together. Anglican parishes faced particularly difficult challenges in

New York, which had areas controlled by the Continental Army and the British Army continuously between 1776 and 1783. Richard W. Pointer, in his study of New York churches in their period, states that “American rebels seemed to take particular delight in harassing the loyalist Anglican clergy,” and that all New York’s Anglican clergy except

Samuel Provoost became Tories. Moreover, “All four of the Anglican parishes in upper

New York – Albany, Schenectady, Johnstown, and Fort Hunter – virtually disappeared, and their priests fled from the territory” during the war.43 In territory controlled by

Patriots, such as upstate New York, it became nearly impossible for Anglican churches to function.

In cities and towns controlled by the British Army during the war, Anglican services usually continued and some blacks affiliated with Church of England parishes during the war years. Anglicans did not widely or vocally promote an end to slavery, but when the British Army offered freedom to enslaved blacks owned by Patriots, some blacks freed themselves and attended the Anglican churches in British controlled territories. At Hempstead, Long Island, the Anglican parish stopped holding services after the Declaration of Independence, but services resumed when the area came under the control of the British Army. The Reverend Leonard Cutting reported baptizing twenty-five whites and two blacks in this period. In New York City, which was held by the British for most of the war, Anglican services continued (detailed in the next chapter) and some blacks attended and were baptized.44

43 Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of Eighteenth- Century Religious Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 79-80, 91-92; Also see Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 365-368. 44 Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 367. 208

After the end of the war, Anglican parishes began the task of rebuilding the church as a new independent denomination. Many blacks continued to participate and be baptized in these parishes between 1777 and 1790, especially after the Protestant

Episcopal Church of the United States of America was organized as the new Anglican denomination in America. Blacks continued to participate in these churches regardless of the fact that Anglicans, in general, were reluctant abolitionists, because many blacks had long participated in Anglicans churches, because these churches often educated blacks, and because Episcopal priests remained dedicated to ministering to blacks. In New York,

“loyalty to Britain and deaths had meanwhile reduced the sixteen Anglican clergymen in the colony in 1774 to six in 1785.” Dee Andrews writes that, “by the end of the war, only nine of fifty Anglican ministers who had tended parishes in Pennsylvania, New York, and

New England remained in the United States.” However, Anglican churches made quick progress in forming a denomination with a representative national assembly, the General

Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United Stated, which could prosper under American independence. By 1790 the Episcopal churches in New York State, which was “perhaps the most destitute sect in 1783,” had regained much of what was lost in the war. They had eighteen pastors in the state and twenty-six active parishes, many of which included blacks.45

As the Episcopal Church expanded, so did black participation. In 1789, Robert

Ayres, who had been a Methodist itinerant, was ordained by Pennsylvania’s Episcopal

Bishop William White. After his ordination, Ayres traveled to western Pennsylvania

45 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 106, 108, 110; Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 63. 209

where he served the scattered Episcopal settlers. In August and September 1789 alone,

Ayres baptized seventeen blacks in and around Brownsville, Pennsylvania.46

The war took a heavy toll on Anglican churches in the North, but

Anglican/Episcopal churches nevertheless commonly remained places of interracial worship. Anglicans in each state between Pennsylvania and New Hampshire baptized black men, women, and children between 1764 and 1790. These churches remained appealing to many blacks, including those who sided with the Patriots and those who sided with the Tories. These churches had been and remained appealing on spiritual grounds but also because of the opportunities for education and perhaps even freedom from slavery that could occasionally be obtained in these religious communities. Some

Episcopalians, like other Christians, moved away from slaveholding by freeing some slaves, and many Episcopalian priests retained their longstanding desire to include blacks within their churches.

Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian Church Affiliation:

Blacks participated in a greater number of Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, and

Presbyterian churches during the revolutionary era than in previous periods, thereby increasing the number of interracial churches in the mid-Atlantic. Blacks chose to affiliate in these churches for a variety of reasons, but political antislavery was not one of them. While some individuals in these churches were antislavery, these denominations did not promote abolitionism. The number of black baptisms in Presbyterian and Dutch

Reformed churches remained very small compared to the black population of the mid-

46 “Ayres baptismal registry,” Papers of Robert Ayres, 1785-1837, Box 1, Folder 1, Heinz History Center. 210

Atlantic and compared to the number of churches that did not baptize blacks, but an increase in black baptisms nonetheless occurred in these churches. As Table 3-4 indicates, at least five Presbyterian churches baptized two or more blacks between 1764 and 1790; by contrast, only the Old Tennent Presbyterian Church was identified as a place where blacks were baptized and admitted between 1750 and 1763. At least seven

Dutch Reformed churches and one German Reformed church baptized black people in the revolutionary era; whereas just two German Reformed churches and two Dutch

Reformed churches were identified for the period of 1750 to 1763. Likewise, after 1764 at least nine Lutheran Churches and three Moravian churches baptized blacks. Overall, a small but evident diversification of interracial religious experiences occurred in the

Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian churches of the mid-Atlantic. Table 3-

4 also indicates that the black baptisms were slightly more likely to occur between 1777 and 1790 than between 1764 and 1776, which is the inverse of the pattern that existed among Congregational churches.

Table 3-4: Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in which two or more blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership 1764-1776 and 1777- 1790

1764 1777 Church Name Location Denomination to to 1776 1790 First Presbyterian Church New York New York, N.Y. Presbyterian X X Trinity Lutheran Church New York New York, N.Y. Lutheran X X First New York Moravian Church New York, N.Y. Moravian X Dutch Reformed Church New York New York, N.Y. Dutch Ref. X First Lutheran Church Albany Albany, N.Y. Lutheran X Gilead Evangelical Lutheran Church Brunswick, N.Y. Lutheran X Schenectady Dutch Church Schenectady, N.Y. Dutch Ref. X X Dutch Reformed Church of Fonda Fonda, N.Y. Dutch Ref. X X Zion Lutheran Church Athens Athens, N.Y. Lutheran X X St. Thomas’s Lutheran Chh Claverack Claverack, N.Y. Lutheran X Dutch Church of Greenbush East Greenbush, N.Y. Dutch Ref. X First Dutch Church Poughkeepsie Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Dutch Ref. X

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Dutch Reformed Church at Schoharie Schoharie, N.Y. Dutch Ref. X Reformed Dutch Church of Schodack Schodack, N.Y Dutch Ref. X Old Tennent Scotch Presbyterian Chh Manalapan (Freeport), N.J Presbyterian X X First Presbyterian Church Hanover Hanover, N.J. Presbyterian X Moravian Church West Jersey Gloucester County, N.J. Moravian X Swedish Lutheran Church Raccoon/Penn’s Neck, N.J. Lutheran X Second Presbyterian Chh Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. Presbyterian X X St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church Philadelphia, Pa. Lutheran X First Moravian Church Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. Moravian X X Trinity Lutheran Church Lancaster Lancaster, Pa. Lutheran X X Christ Lutheran Church Stouchsburg Stouchsburg, Pa. Lutheran X X Big Spring Presbyterian Church Newville, Pa. Presbyterian X Goshenhoppen Reformed Church Woxall, Pa. German Ref. X See Bibliography for Sources

Despite the slight rise in the number of Dutch Reformed churches in which blacks were baptized, there were still many factors among Dutch churches that were prohibitive to formal black participation, including denominational infighting and a desire to maintain Dutch cultural and ethnic identity. Many Dutch churches in New York and

New Jersey faced years of internal bickering over whether or not to form an American denomination that could ordain clergy or whether they should remain part of the Church of the Netherlands. The coetus faction advocated for a denomination independent of and equal in authority to the Classis of Amsterdam. The conferentie group would recognize no authority other than the Classis of Amsterdam. Congregations also fought over whether services should be conducted in Dutch, German, or English. John Beardslee writes that “the church, when the war came, was in the process of trying to reunite after a destructive controversy. Its energies were turned inward.” Many in the Dutch churches were intent on preserving the Dutch linguistic and cultural aspects of their church culture.

Beardslee continues that “what energy the Dutch churches had not expended in controversy, they had devoted to an aim common to both coetus and conferentie – the

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preservation of ethnic identity.”47 Both the denominational infighting and the common desire to remain Dutch under British and then American rule discouraged Dutch and some German Christians from actively and vigorously seeking the inclusion of many blacks into their churches through baptism or communion.48

Many Presbyterian and Reformed churches, like other types of churches, were affected by the Revolution and were unable to continue their ministries for a time, whether among whites or blacks. These churches were disproportionally affected, however, in locations controlled or attached by the British because the majority of pastors and laity in these churches were Patriots, and some Dutch Christians were enthusiastic supporter of the Patriot cause. Pointer and others have stated that “only four of forty-one

Dutch Reformed ministers in New York and New Jersey declared themselves Tories.”

However, John Beardslee III has argued that other Dutch Reformed clergymen were quiet

Tories or were ambivalent toward the Revolution, and Randall Balmer identifies six clergymen who were Tories (all from the conferentie faction). It is sometimes difficult to specifically discern political stances from men who sought, above all else, to minister to their politically-divided congregants, but at least a portion of Dutch congregants and in a few churches a majority of congregants were Tories. Pointer also argues that, among

Presbyterians “all but one of their pastors in New York became rebels.” As a result, many of the Presbyterians and Dutch churches in areas controlled by the British, suffered during the war. For Lutherans and Moravians, the war also brought divided congregations and difficult circumstances. Pointer has calculated that immediately

47 John W. Beardslee III, “The American Revolution,” in James W. Van Hoeven, ed., Piety and Patriotism: Bicentennial Studies of the Reformed Church in America, 1776-1976 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976), 28-29. 48 For more on Dutch infighting, see Randall H. Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 141-156. 213

following the war there were only seven Lutheran pastors left to ministers to New York’s twenty Lutheran congregations.49 The war made worship impossible or difficult for some congregations in the mid-Atlantic, but, nonetheless, there was a growth in black participation in these churches between 1764 and 1790.

The slight rise in black participation in Dutch Reformed churches was not apparently tied to any changes in white attitudes toward slavery. Historian Gerald

Francis De Jong argues that, “the attitude of the Dutch Reformed Church toward slavery did not change appreciably during the eighteenth century.” Denominational and congregational organs did not speak out against slavery or the slave trade. De Jong has also identified a number of lay leaders and ministers who continued to own enslaved blacks in the period of 1764 to 1808, including “several members of the Consistory of the

First Reformed Church of Jamaica, Long Island,” the Reverend Simeon Van Arsdale, and the Reverend Peter Studdiford. De Jong recognizes that “as late as 1770, the Consistory of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York City accepted a young Negro valued at 45 pounds sterling, as payment for back-rent that a John Van Zandt owed the church for using some of its land.”50 Dutch Reformed Christians continued to own slaves and were certainly not on the vanguard of the budding northern antislavery movement.

Nevertheless, some Dutch Reformed churches did become more open or began to become more open to black congregants, and this trend only accelerated after 1790.

Historian Noel Leo Erskine argues that “toward the end of the eighteenth century,

49 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 80, 81, and 106; Beardslee, “The American Revolution,” 17-33; Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion, 150-152. 50 Gerald Francis De Jong, “The Dutch Reformed Church and Negro Slavery in Colonial America,” Church History 40, no. 4 (Dec., 1971), 426-427; John De Jong, “Social Concerns,” in James W. Van Hoeven, ed., Piety and Patriotism: Bicentennial Studies of the Reformed Church in America, 1776- 1976 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1976), 116-117. 214

however, there was an indication of a new mood in the Dutch Reformed Church’s attitude toward black people.” In 1783, a question was raised at the Reformed Synod regarding the admission of slaves to church membership. The digest of records states the questions was asked “whether the consent of masters and mistresses is necessary to slave’s uniting with the church.” The answer indicated that consent was not biblically required, but the ministers believed it would be prudent to discuss a slave’s application for membership with their master. They stated that, “the Scriptures make no such condition; yet it is proper to consult masters as to the character of the slave, and seek to preserve the peace of the household.” The ministers also agreed that marriage recognized by enslaved men and women (but not officially conducted by clergy) should not be a barrier to church admittance.51 These decisions indicate that Dutch churches had begun addressing how enslaved men and women should be included in their churches, not whether they should be included.

With a similar resolution, mid-Atlantic Presbyterians moved in 1786 toward making access to baptism and church admittance more routine and possible for enslaved black children. Before the church’s governing body, it was asked, “Whether Christian masters, or mistresses, ought in duty, to have such children baptized as are under their care, though born of parents not in the communion of any Christian church?” The question was clearly directed to the conditions of enslaved blacks. The Synod came to the conclusion “that Christian masters and mistresses, whose religious professions and conduct are such as to give them a right to the ordinance of baptism for their own

51 Edward Tanjore Corwin, ed., A Digest of Constitutional and Synodical Legislation of the Reformed Church in American (New York: The Board of Publication of the Reformed Church in America, 1906), 4, 679-680; Noel Leo Erskine, Black People and the Reformed Church in America (Reformed Church Press, 1978), 39-40, 42. 215

children, may and ought to dedicate the children of their household to God, in that ordinance, when they have no scruple of conscience to the contrary.”52 This decision made black baptism easier, for now black children could be baptized on the authority of owners, even if the black parents were not church members. Congregationalists and

Anglicans had come to this same conclusion many, many years earlier. Presbyterians were in the 1780s making changes to how baptisms were administered in order to make access to this rite slightly more accessible to blacks.

The Presbyterians, much like the Dutch Reformed churches, were not on the vanguard of antislavery. A few Presbyterian ministers had adopted antislavery positions in the 1770s, including New Jersey Presbyterian minister Jacob Green who in 1776 denounced slavery on both religious and political grounds.53 However, it seems that most

Presbyterians did not speak out against slavery and the denomination was slow and conservative in taking a stand against this injustice. In 1787, the Synod of New York and

Philadelphia resolved that they did “highly approve of the general principles in favour of universal liberty that prevail in America and the interest which many of the states have taken in promoting the abolition of slavery,” but they also expressed worries that moving people “from a servile state to a participation of all the privileges of civil society without education and without previous habits of industry may be in many respects dangerous to the community.” They therefore suggested that masters “give those persons who are at present held in servitude such good education as to prepare them for the better enjoyment

52 Records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: Embracing the Minutes of the Presbytery of Philadelphia, from A.D. 1706 to 1716, Minutes of the Syond of Philadelphia, from A.D. 1717 to 1758, Minutes of the Synod of New York, from A.D. 1745 to 1758, Minutes of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia, from A.D. 1758 to 1788 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1841), 527. 53 Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate,” 58. 216

of freedom” and to allow some slaves opportunity to earn money to procure “their own liberty at a moderate rate that thereby they may be brought into society with those habits of industry that may render them useful citizens.”54 In essence, they believed that blacks were not prepared to liberty and were not accustomed to “industry.” They suggested measures that were even more conservative than the general emancipation laws in effect in Pennsylvania. As a denomination, Presbyterians were certainly not advocates of universal and immediate emancipation, but they began to make access to the sacraments easier for blacks and some blacks participated in a greater number of Presbyterian churches than they had in previous years.

In addition to the increase in black baptisms at Reformed and Presbyterian churches, more Lutheran and Moravian churches recorded black baptisms in this period.

These churches had generally been theologically and practically open to baptize blacks, but more churches actually included black baptisms during the revolutionary era, including church in New York City, Albany, Brunswick, and Athens, New York, church in Gloucester County and Penn’s Neck, New Jersey, and churches in Philadelphia,

Lancaster, and Stouchsburg, Pennsylvania. The New York City and Philadelphia churches are covered in detail in the next chapter. The increase in black baptisms in these churches helped diversify the number of places of interracial worship in the mid-

Atlantic.

Despite ignoring progressive calls for abolition, a growing number of Reformed,

Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian churches in the North included blacks. Enslaved and free black men and women chose to affiliate with these churches, which were open or were becoming more open to at least some level of black participation. There still

54 Records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 540. 217

remained barriers to black affiliation, including difficult requirements for baptism and conservative stances regarding slavery, but the increase in black affiliation with

Reformed and Presbyterian churches which clearly began in the revolutionary era continued and accelerated in the period of the Early Republic.

Baptist Church Affiliation

The revolutionary era also saw a rise in the black participation in the North’s

Baptist churches, particularly in Rhode Island where Baptist churches were more numerous. The increased participation of blacks in Baptist churches was a part of the diversification of venues in which interracial religion occurred, but increased black participation was not caused by Baptist antislavery politics. Table 3-5 indicates some of the Baptist churches in which blacks were baptized or admitted to membership from 1764 to 1776 and from 1777 to 1790. These churches did not perform infant baptisms. In the words of Bill J. Leonard, “baptism was a public profession of faith, administered only to believers,” so all the blacks baptized in these churches were consenting adults.55 By

1790, a significant and growing number of Baptist churches included black members.

Table 3-5: Baptist churches in which two or more blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership 1764-1776 and 1777-1790:

1764 1777 Church Name Location Denomination to to 1776 1790 First Baptist Church Boston Boston, Mass. Baptist X X Second Baptist Church Boston Boston, Mass. Baptist X Seventh Day Baptist Newport Newport, R.I. 7th Day Baptist X X First Baptist Church Providence Providence, R.I. Baptist X X Tiverton Baptist Church Tiverton, R.I. Baptist X First Sabbatarian Church of Hopkinton Hopkinton, R.I. 7th Day Baptist X

55 Bill J. Leonard, “Baptist Revivals and the Turn toward Baptist Evangelism: 1755/1770,” in Michael E. William, Sr. and Walter B. Shurden, ed., Turning Points in Baptist History: A Festschrift in Honor of Harry Leon McBeth (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2008), 91. 218

First General Baptist Church Richmond Richmond, R.I. Baptist X North Kingstown, X First Baptist Church North Kingstown R.I. Baptist Exeter Baptist Church Exeter, R.I. Baptist X Mount Moriah Bapist Church Smithfield, Pa. Baptist X See Bibliography for Sources

The era of the American Revolution was a period of growth and stabilization among New England Baptists, as more churches were organized, as an association was formed, and as some separatist Congregational churches became Baptist churches. New

England Baptists held a great diversity of beliefs and practices, in part because of different origins and competing theological perspectives. Baptist churches could lean toward Calvinist or Arminian theology, and they could worship on Sundays (most

Baptists) or Saturdays (Seventh Day Baptists). Six Principle Baptists “required that a person undergo the ritual laying on of hands before being admitting to church membership,” but other Baptists found the laying on of hands to be optional. Baptist churches always maintained congregational forms of governance, whereby no authority outside the members of each local church could decide policy, but New England Baptists began to organize loosely into associations beginning in the 1760s. In 1767, the

Reverend James Manning helped form the Warren Baptist Association, which many

Baptist churches in New England joined in order to facilitate cooperation and greater uniformity between independent congregations.56

As new Baptist churches were formed in Rhode Island and elsewhere in the 1770s and 1780s, blacks were being admitted as members. The Second Baptist Church of

Richmond, Rhode Island was founded in November 1774, and nearly two years later,

56 William G. McLoughlin, “Introduction,” in William G. McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, Volume 1: 1741-1764 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1979), xv-xxxvii; C.C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740-1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 208-295. 219

"Frank, a negro” was received as a member. Frank, like other blacks during the

Revolution, saw an opportunity to achieve his own freedom after the commencement of hostilities. He ran away from slavery in 1778, and the church record states that he was

“suspended for leaving his master and joining the British troops in Newport, our enemy,

July 11, 1778.” The majority of white Baptists in New England supported the

Revolution, but this black Baptist saw greater hope for his own liberty with the British.57

The First Baptist Church of North Kingstown, Rhode Island was founded in November

1782, and at least a couple of black men were included among the founding members.

Although the list of the twelve men and twenty women who were original members of the First Baptist Church of North Kingstown does not include racial notations, the names of two members Cuffee Congdon and Cudjo Selvis, suggest African ancestry. The

Mount Moriah Baptist Church of Smithfield, Pennsylvania was constituted in October

1784, and at least three blacks were members in its early years.58 As new Baptist churches were formed in the North during this period of rapid expansion, many of them admitted blacks.

Older and well-established Baptist churches also began to admit blacks during the revolutionary period. The rise in black participation in the First Baptist Church of

Providence, Rhode Island (the only Baptist church in town at that time) was linked to the pastorate of the Reverend James Manning and a shift in the church’s theology and

57 James N. Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island 1636-1850, First Series, Birth, Marriages and Deaths, A Family Register for the People, Volume XI, Church Records (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1900), 249; William G. McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, Volume 1: 1741-1764 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1979), xxx. 58 James N. Arnold, Vital Records of Rhode Island 1636-1850, First Series, Birth, Marriages and Deaths, A Family Register for the People, Volume VIII, Episcopal and Congregational (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1896), 598-611; Although the Mount Moriah Baptist Church members lists do not have racial notations, three blacks were referenced as members in the business meeting minutes between 1785 and 1790; “Combined Church Record Books, 1784-1871,” Moriah Baptist Church, Smithfield (Fayette County) Pa., Micofilm, Reel 1. 220

practices. Before 1771, this church was “mostly uninvolved in revivalism” and was a

General Six Principle Baptist Church. When Manning became pastor, however, the church became a Regular (Calvinist) Baptist Church and became more deliberate in promoting revival and conversion of the town’s white and black inhabitants. Twenty-one blacks joined this church between 1770 and 1775, during a period of revival that brought many people to this church, and most of these black men and women were baptized in the process of becoming members. Although an Indian woman had been baptized and admitted in 1762, the blacks who joined after 1770 appear to be the first black members of this church. Other blacks joined First Baptist between 1779 and 1790, thereby making this church more racially diverse.59

Baptist views on slavery seemed to be congruent with the general antislavery opinions that developed in the North during the revolutionary era and, in most cases, antislavery views were not a determinant factor in causing the rise in black affiliation with Baptist churches. They did not articulate a trailblazing stance against slavery, but blacks within various Baptist churches may have helped push Baptists into antislavery views. The increase in black participation in the First Baptist Church of Providence may have eventually influenced the Reverend Manning’s adoption of antislavery principles.

Some members of this church, including Manning, were early members of the Providence

Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade, founded in part by Moses Brown who had been a

59 Stan Lemons, Emeritus Professor of History, Rhode Island College, and Historian of the First Baptist Church in America, e-mails to Richard Boles, April 10, 2012; “A List of the Members belonging to the Baptized Church in Providence under the Care of the Elders Samuel Winsor and Thomas Burlinggame Junr,” First Baptist Church Records, Providence, R.I.; I would like to extend my deep gratitude to Stan Lemons for sharing with me his detailed lists that includes all black participation at the First Baptist Church and for his permission for me to include some of his research and knowledge of this church in my dissertation. The earliest surviving records for First Baptist Providence date from 1755. Also the information is not complete, but some blacks are also identified in Henry M. King, ed., Historical Catalogue of the Members of the First Baptist Church in Providence, Rhode Island (Providence: F.H. Townsend, 1908). 221

Baptist but joined the Society of Friends in 1774. Other Baptists, however, did not openly oppose slavery.

By 1790 Baptists in the North had begun to take anti-slavery positions, but it does not appear that the rise in black participation in Baptist churches during the 1770s and

1780s can be tied to white pronouncements against slavery. Rather, along with the broader impact that the Revolution had, the growing presence of blacks in Baptist churches may have been a significant factor in moving these churches toward anti-slavery stances. The Baptist preacher Ebenezer Smith from Ashfield, Massachusetts made strong statements against slavery by 1773 and lay Baptist exhorter James Allen urged abolition, but few other Baptists spoke out against slavery until the late 1780s. William H.

McLoughlin writes that “Ebenezer Smith was one of the few New England Baptists of his day to come out strongly against slavery,” for even the prominent Baptist leader Isaac

Backus did not “show any particular concern over slavery until late in his life.”60 In a

1773 letter from Ebenezer Smith to Isaac Backus, Smith argued that “one thing that I verily believe Ought to be Razed out of the Church of Christ – and that is makeing slaves of the poor Negroes.” Smith continued that, “We complain of Bondage, and shall we at the same time keep our fellow men in bondage –tho I know of but few in our Churches that have Negroe Slaves, yet the thing is allowed and not Witnessed against as I think it ought to be.”61 Smith linked his opposition to slavery to the revolutionary calls for freedom from British oppression, but it took longer for greater numbers of Baptists to oppose slavery and the slave trade.

60 McLoughlin, The Diary of Isaac Backus, Volume 1, 118; William G. McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, Volume 2: 1765-1785 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1979), 720; Minkema and Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the Antislavery Debate,” 55. 61 Quoted in McLoughlin, The Diary of Isaac Backus, Volume 2, pp. 720. 222

Near the end of the 1780s, after many Baptist churches included black members,

Baptist Associations and a growing number of individual Baptists took stands against slavery.62 It was not until 1787 that the Warren Association, which was the general organization among New England Baptists, took a stand against the slave trade. The

Association, however, never took a stand against slavery itself in this period. The

Association in 1787 approved the following:

Notwithstanding the great expense of blood and treasure during the late war, to ward off slavery from ourselves, we are informed, that in various parts of this country many have recurred to the horrid practice of sending our shipping to Africa, to bring from thence the natives and to sell them as slaves in the West- Indies: And as man stealing is a capital crime by the law of God –see Deut. Xxiv.7—I Tim. i.10 –we, therefore, earnestly desire all our brethren to guard against giving the least countenance to that heaven-daring wickedness.63

Like Ebenezer Smith’s 1773 statement, the Warren Association recognized the inconsistency of slavery with the principles of the American Revolution. They also called slave trading a sin based on biblical passages from the books of Deuteronomy and

First Timothy. The Philadelphia Baptist Association (the First Baptist Association in

America) in 1789 voted in favor of gradual abolition. They stated:

their high approbation of the several societies formed in the United States and Europe, for the gradual abolition of the slavery of the Africans, and for guarding against their being detained or sent off as slaves, after having obtained liberty; and do hereby recommend to the churches we represent to form similar societies, to become members thereof, and exert themselves to obtain this important object.64

62 In addition to the examples cited below, the German Baptists (predecessor to German Baptist Brethren, The Church of the Brethren, and the Old German Baptist Brethren denominations) denounced the slave trade and slavery at their annual meeting of 1782. They order “Brother John Van L.” to free his five slaves in 1782. In 1797, their annual meeting prohibited slaveholding by members and ordered that slave children be set free when they reached the age 25; Willis A. Hess, Ray B. Hess, and David G. Benedict, ed., Minutes of the Annual Meetings of the Old German Baptist Brethren from 1778 to 1955 (Winona Lake, Ind.: BMH Printing, 1981), 8, 24-25. 63 Quoted in William G. McLoughlin, ed., The Diary of Isaac Backus, Volume III: 1786-1806 (Providence: Brown University Press, 1979), 1205. 64 A.D. Gillette, ed., “Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, Held in Philadelphia, October 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th, 1789” in Minutes of the Philadelphia Baptist Association, from 1707 to 1807 (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1851), 247. 223

This mild statement against slavery dates from after gradual emancipation bills had been passed in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Given the mildness of these statements and the late dates of their approval, it does not seem that antislavery stances were the cause of increased black participation in Baptist churches during the 1770s and 1780s. However, it is clear that blacks began to participate and join Baptist churches in the North in growing numbers during the revolutionary period, and Baptist churches were a visible part of the diversification of interracial worship in the North.

Methodist Church Affiliation

The beginnings of Methodism in America influenced the levels of black participation in the North’s Protestant churches and made interracial worship more common in the mid-Atlantic region. Blacks were early and regular participants in

Methodist meetings, societies, and churches as congregants and even as preachers.

Methodists spoke to all who would listen, and their message proved especially attractive to women, the poor, and blacks. Early Methodists held a radical stance against slaveholding, which certainly appealed to enslaved blacks. The first Methodists in the

North were migrants from Ireland and Britain who followed Wesleyan piety during the

1760s. As Cynthia Lyerly explains, it was lay women and men who “‘founded’

Methodism in the colonies. Wesley decided to send missionaries to America largely because colonists wrote urging him to do so.” Moreover, she argues, “Methodism was born in America as a biracial lay movement.” The first Methodist Society in New York

City, contained free and enslaved blacks, including Peter Williams Sr. who would eventually help found the first African American Methodist congregation in that city.

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The earliest Methodist Society on Long Island, founded in 1768, contained twenty four members, about half white and half black.65 In 1773, the first year when a convention of

Methodist preachers was held in America, there were approximately 180 members of the

Methodist circuit in New York, 180 members of the Methodist society in Philadelphia, and 200 members of the circuit in New Jersey. There were only four Methodist preachers assigned to these three northern states. The reports did not distinguish between races, but there were certainly black men and women among these early northern Methodists.

Early Methodists considered themselves a part of the Church of England, and continued to rely on Anglican clergy for the sacraments of baptisms and communion until after 1784. Since the Methodist preachers sought to promote greater piety among faithful

Anglicans and since most Anglican churches included black members and attendees, it is not surprising that some of the early black Methodists, like the white Methodists, affiliated with both Methodism meetings and Anglican churches. Since Methodists did not baptize anyone before 1785, first-hand accounts and official membership numbers are the sole means of determining rates of black participation in early Methodist societies.66

The Reverend Francis Asbury, among the earliest Methodist preachers sent by

John Wesley from England to the colonies, commented on the black Methodists in New

York within a month of arriving in America. On Sunday November 1771, Asbury

65 Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1770-1810 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11-14. Also see Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America; and Hodges, Root & Branch, 126. 66 In 1773, Methodist preachers were instructed to “strictly to avoid administering the ordinances of baptisms and the Lord’s supper,” and Francis Asbury referenced taking communion at Anglican churches through 1782; Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, Annually Held in America from 1773 to 1813, inclusive, Volume the First (New York: John C. Totten, 1813), 2, 6, and 25; Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, In Three Volumes, Volume 1, From August 7, 1771 to December 31, 1786 (New York: Land & Scott, 1852), 42, 76, and 451. 225

expressed a respect for the Americans who had been attending his preaching, and he acknowledged the equality of blacks and whites before God. He wrote in his diary that:

I feel a regard for the people: and I think the Americans are more ready to receive the word than the English; and to see the poor negroes so affected is pleasing; to see their sable countenances in our solemn assemblies, and to hear them sing with cheerful melody their dear Redeemer’s praise, affected me much, and made me ready to say, “Of a truth I perceive God is no respecter of persons.”67

Asbury’s willingness to preach to all people made early Methodists into interracial religious societies in the mid-Atlantic during the era of the American Revolution. The growth of Methodist societies, even before the Methodist Church was organized as a distinct denomination, increased the diversification of interracial religious settings in the

North.

Early Methodist societies were often interracial, whites heard black Methodists preach, and early Methodist disavowed slavery. However, racial prejudice affected relations between white and black Methodists. Francis Asbury and other white preacher at times traveled with a black man named Harry Hosier (often known as “black Harry”), who also served as a coachman for Asbury. Hosier’s preaching extended from upstate

New York down through the South and he drew large crowds of listeners, but he was ordained only to the level of deacon. Asbury and Hosier first preached together in the

South in 1781, and they traveled together to Philadelphia in September 1781. But as

Asbury began to head back south, Hosier expressed an unwillingness to return to

Virginia. Asbury wrote that, “Harry seems to be unwilling to go with me: I fear his speaking so much to white people in the city has been, or will be, injurious; he has been

67 Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Volume 1, pp. 17. 226

flattered, and may be ruined.”68 Although Methodists promoted interracial religious life and would listen to the preaching of black men, they also expressed the sort of paternalistic racism common among antislavery advocates and other “friends” of black men and women. In the same year that the Methodists took stances against slavery, they also suggested that “proper white persons” ought to oversee “coloured” Methodists and that blacks should not “stay late and meet by themselves.”69 Even relatively egalitarian and progressive whites still expected a level of deference and subservience from blacks within their churches.

Methodists were second only to Quakers in their vocal and official stances against slavery, and their stand against slavery was obviously one factor that made Methodism appealing to blacks. Unlike most Quakers, however, Methodists regularly sought after and accepted blacks into their religious meetings and societies. In April 1780, the conference of Methodist preachers acknowledged “that slavery is contrary to the laws of

God, man, and nature, and hurtful to society, contrary to the dictates of conscience and pure religion, and doing that which we would not others should do to us and ours.” They also advised that all their “friends who keep slaves” should free them, and they required all traveling preachers who owned slaves to make promises to free them. In 1784, the annual conference took further steps to end slaveholding among its members and ministers by suspended ministers who would not emancipate their slaves (in states where emancipation was allowed by law) and by allowing for the possibility that Methodist

68 Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Volume 1, pp. 424, 433-434; Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 139; Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realties of the First Years (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman Publishing Company, 2004), 50. 69 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 26. 227

members who purchased slaves could be expelled from the society.70 Apart from the

Society of Friends (Quakers), these policies put the Methodists on the visible vanguard of religious opposition to slavery, although some Methodists continued to own slaves in the mid-Atlantic.

The societies’ membership growth slowed during the American Revolution because the disputations of war, the return of many British preachers to England, and the identification of Methodism as British, but membership began to pick up rapidly again after 1780. When it did, many blacks made Methodist societies and worship services into interracial events. Methodist society members in New Jersey jumped to 512 and in

Pennsylvania to 271 by 1781.71 New Methodist societies and classes were organized across the mid-Atlantic during the 1780s, and both blacks and whites affiliated in growing numbers. The Methodist Episcopal Church was organized as a distinct denomination in 1785, and Francis Asbury was made bishop. In 1786, for the first time, the annual convention reports listed numbers of black and white Methodist separately.

New York listed 178 white and 25 black Methodists. Long Island listed 146 white and 8 black Methodists. Philadelphia, West-Jersey, Trenton, and East-Jersey did not identify black attendees, but it seems likely that blacks were among their congregants.72 In 1787, the Methodist conference officially stated what had been its practice since its beginning regarding the inclusion of blacks. Regarding the “spiritual welfare of the coloured people,” the conference required:

70 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 25-26, 46-47; Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 125-132. 71 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 12, 14, 22, 31; Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 20-21; For more on Methodist during the Revolutionary War, see Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 47-62. 72 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 49-51, 60-61. 228

all our Ministers and Preachers […] to leave nothing undone for the spiritual benefit and salvation of then, within their respective circuits, or district; and for this purpose to embrace every opportunity of inquiring into the state of their souls, and to unite in society those who appear to have a real desire of fleeing from the wrath to come, to meet such in class, and to exercise the whole Methodist discipline among them.73

This admonition was followed by most preachers, and by 1790, as shown below in Table

3-6, most northern Methodist societies included black members. The New York

Methodists listed a remarkable one hundred and two “coloured” members, which was nearly one-fifth of the total membership. Formal church membership, of course, was not the full extent of black participation within the Methodist movement. Many more blacks heard Methodist preachers and attended Methodist meeting without officially joining.

Since Methodist itinerants preached not only in cities and churches but also on rural farms and in many private households, blacks across the mid-Atlantic had amble opportunities to hear the Methodist gospel.74 Even the official members’ lists show that

Methodism was an interracial religious movement that greatly expanded the number of mixed-race religious settings during the era of the Revolution.75

Table 3-6: Examples of Methodist Societies and number of white and black members, 1790:

Methodist society circuit Number of white Number of black locations members members Philadelphia, Pa. 214 24 Chester, Pa. 317 9 Bristol, Pa. 53 7 Huntingdon, Pa. 190 4 Pittsburgh, Pa. 97 0 Burlington, N.J. 353 12 Trenton, N.J. 429 33 Salem, N.J. 933 21

73 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 68. 74 Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 133. 75 For analysis of the reliability of the membership numbers reported in the Minutes, see Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 259-261. 229

Elizabeth, N.J. 237 16 Flanders, N.J. 322 7 Long Island, N.Y. 268 9 New York, N.Y. 522 102 Newburgh, N.Y 324 8 Dutchess, N.Y. 405 5 Columbia, N.Y. 379 3 Albany, N.Y. 264 3 Litchfield, Conn. 66 1 New Haven, Conn. 9 0 Totals 5,382 264

Source: Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 94-95.

Included in these early Methodists was Richard Allen, who for a time preached to interracial religious meetings and eventually founded the African Methodist Episcopal

Church in Philadelphia. Born enslaved on February 14, 1760 in either Philadelphia or nearby Delaware, he experienced many of the privations of slavery, including unrequited labor and separation from family members. He wrote little of his early life, but said

“slavery is a bitter pill.” Around 1768, Allen’s masters, the Chews, sold him and his family to a new master in Delaware, Stokeley Sturgis. At age seventeen, in 1777, Allen heard a Methodist preacher near the Delaware home of his owner, and he was quickly converted. As he wrote many years later, he “was awakened and brought to see myself, poor, wretched and undone, and without the mercy of God must be lost.” After wavering between bouts of joy and despair, fluctuating from a hope of salvation to a dread of condemnation, he experienced a spiritual rebirth. He wrote, “Now my confidence was strengthened that the Lord, for Christ’s sake, had heard my prayers and pardoned all my sins.” His reaction was to join the Methodist class and “go from house to house, exhorting my old companions, and telling all around what a dear dear Saviour I had found.” Allen and his brother began to take part in Methodist meetings and classes.

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They also utilized Methodism to convince their owner to allow them to purchase their freedom, by gradually convincing Sturgis of the benefits of religion, the need for his own salvation, and the immorality of slavery. During the summer of 1779, Allen had convinced Sturgis to allow Methodist meeting in his home, and preachers including

Francis Asbury delivered the gospel message there. By January 1780, Allen and his brother had an agreement that allowed them to work and buy their freedom. The agreement allowed five years for Allen to pay two thousand dollars or sixty pounds.

Allen actually paid off his bill within three and a half years by 1783. In the words of historian Richard Newman, “Allen worked like hell to gain his freedom” through hauling bricks, chopping wood, and other labors. After securing his freedom and a letter of introduction from Sturgis, Allen set out to preach the gospel.76

On September 3, 1783, Allen left Wilmington, Delaware and headed into the New

Jersey countryside to preach. Over the next three years he partially worked to support himself and spent available time preaching to all who would listen as he traveled across mid-Atlantic and upper-South states. As Gary Nash explains, “At age twenty, only a few months released from slavery, he was preaching to mostly white audiences and converting many of his hearers to Methodism.”77 As exemplified by a letter of introduction or recommendation signed October 20th, 1785 in Baltimore, Maryland by

76 Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the A.M.E. Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 27-45; Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen: To Which Is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793 . . . with an Introduction of George A. Singleton (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 15-19; Gary B. Nash, “New Light on Richard Allen: The Early Years of Freedom,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 46, no. 2 (Apr. 1989), 332-338. 77 Nash, “New Light on Richard Allen,” 332, 337; Allen, Life Experience and Gospel Labors, 19; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 45-47. 231

three white Methodists, he traveled widely and was well received by whites and blacks alike:

After the War he Believed it to be his Duty to Travel abroad as a Preacher of Righteousness, and for the first six Months Traveled at his own Cost, and the Remainder of his Religious Journeys his expences was for the most Part defrayed by the Religious Society of which he was a Member; he Traveled into various parts of New York, New Jersey, Pensilva. [Pennsylvania], Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina; and also spent about two Months in visiting the Indian Natives. […] This is to Certify to all Persons whom it may concern, that the Bearer hereof Richard Allen has been received on this Circuit as a Member of Society […] he likewise Traveled on this Circuit with several of the Preachers and was generally approved of.78

Allen followed a preaching trajectory similar to other Methodist preachers, for he traveled widely to address large and small groups alike. In many of these locations, he joined white Methodist preachers, such as Benjamin Abbott and Joseph Budd, and together they would lead meetings. Regarding his time in Radnor, Pennsylvania in 1784,

Allen wrote that he preached “to a large congregation of different persuasions” and that

“there were many souls cut to the heart, and were added to the ministry.” Here as in other parts Pennsylvania, his message was successful among whites and blacks, for he wrote, “there were but few colored people in the neighborhood – the most of my congregation was white.” Near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Allen also “had comfortable meetings with the Germans.”79 Allen and other black Methodist preachers increased interracial religious worship throughout the mid-Atlantic by preaching to all who would listen.

In 1786, after having been a circuit preacher for over two years, Allen received an invitation from a Methodist elder in Philadelphia to come and to preach among the small

78 Nash, “New Light on Richard Allen,” 339; Character references for blacks, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Collection, microfilm, HSP. 79 Allen, Life Experience and Gospel Labors, 19-21; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 47-49. 232

number of blacks attending St. George’s Methodist Church. Allen began holding a 5:00 am service every day, he often preached in the afternoon and evenings, and the number of black Methodists in Philadelphia grew. As Allen later wrote, he “preached in the common, in Southwark, Northern Liberties, and wherever [he] could find an opening.”80

A request to come to Philadelphia to minister to blacks began a shift in Allen’s work away from promoting Methodism generally to promoting black Methodism, and this shift eventually led to a racially separate church and denomination. Sometimes Methodist classes, which functioned as the most intimate level of religious affiliation, were organized by demographic groupings, such as single women or single men. Methodists recognized that people could be effectively encouraged and exhorted by people similar to themselves, and Allen began organizing classes and prayer meetings solely for blacks within St. George’s Church. Already by 1787, Allen had put forward the idea of encouraging greater black conversion to Methodism by extending his religious meetings with blacks into a black church. However, other “blacks resisted Allen’s overtures about a separate church” and Allen’s idea was emphatically disapproved by the white leaders at

St. George’s Church. For the meantime, instead of a black church, Allen, Absalom Jones and six other men formed the Free African Society, which was “a quasi-religious but nondenominational organization” that promoted the financial and educational development of black Philadelphians.81 Separate black churches were still a few years away, but their time was coming.

The rise of Methodism and the expansion of Baptist congregations in the North were the most significant and dramatic aspects of the diversification of interracial

80 Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 50, 54, 59; Nash, “New Light on Richard Allen,” 337; Allen, Life Experience and Gospel Labors, 23-24. 81 Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 59-62; Allen, Life Experience and Gospel Labors, 24-25. 233

worship that occurred between 1764 and 1790. Never before had so many locations across the North had worship services in which both blacks and whites attended and in which blacks sometimes preached. Above all else, blacks affiliated with these churches because they were open to receiving them and because these churched offered appealing spiritual and temporal benefits. Among the Methodists, one of the benefits was a clear antislavery message. The presence of many blacks in these churches made them common places of interracial worship.

During the revolutionary era some Christians, especially Quakers and Methodists, helped connect the revolutionary struggle against British tyranny to the issue of slavery.

Without the support of principled individual Christians and some denominations, it is unlikely that the North would have ended slavery (albeit ever so slowly). Methodists,

Quakers, and a minority of Christians in other denominations argued that slaveholding and slave trading were sins that also contradicted the liberty and equality that were sought by Patriots in the Revolution. As much as antislavery activism was part of the revolutionary era, however, it cannot be attributed as the determinant cause of the diversification of interracial worship. The increase in black baptism in Baptist, Lutheran,

Anglican, Reformed, and Presbyterian churches cannot be tied to denominational antislavery stances. If these groups articulated an antislavery stances, which they did not all do, it was late in this period and after black participation levels had already risen.

Mid-Atlantic Presbyterians and Baptists articulated antislavery stances that were more conservative than the gradual emancipation law previously enacted in Pennsylvania.

Other factors besides antislavery politics proved critical for convincing blacks to participate in these predominantly white churches. Reformed and Presbyterian churches

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began to make changes to their practices that made these churches slightly more accessible to blacks. In particular, Presbyterians began to baptize unfree children in households of white Christians, such as was commonly done by Anglicans,

Congregationalists, and Lutherans. In many of these denominations, ministers more attentive to the spiritual needs of colored people in their communities, even if they did not advocate for their freedom. As such, older and new congregations in many locations began to include blacks, and this trend continued well into the Early Republic.

Indian Church Affiliations:

As had been the case since the 1750s, only small numbers of Indians affiliated with predominantly white churches between 1764 and 1790. Some Indians residing or working in towns at a distance from Indian churches and Indian communities attended and sought baptism for themselves or their children in predominantly white churches.

Likewise, some individuals who moved back and forth between Indian communities and northern cities participated in both white and Indian churches depending on which was most convenient. Table 3-7 includes churches in which one or more Indians were identified in the baptismal or membership records of predominantly white churches.

Table 3-7: Select list of churches in which one or more Indians were baptized or admitted and approximate numbers, 1750 to 1763:

Church Name Church Location Number Years Notes of Indians

Congregational Churches: Children of Samuel & 1765- First Church Yarmouth Yarmouth, Mass. 3 Mehetable Whitney 1776 (Indians) Indian woman Second Church in Rochester Mattapoisett Mass. 1 1779 baptized & admitted to (First Church Mattapoisett) membership

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Indian woman Barnstable East Parish Church Barnstable, Mass. 1 1769 baptized & admitted to membership Indian woman Olive Old Saybrook Congregational Old Saybrook, 2 1768 owned covenant & Church Conn. child baptized Carelot “a squaw” New Haven First Church New Haven, Conn. 1 1769 baptized

Episcopal Churches An Indian child and an 1764- St. Michael’s Episcopal Bristol Bristol, R.I. 2 Indian adult baptized 1780 (no relation) Patience and Oliver, of St. Paul’s Church Narragansett Narragansett, R.I. 2 1787 Sara Indian, baptized “Mulat or Indian” Trinity Church Newport Newport, R.I. 1 1787 daughter of Jane Thurstin baptized Christ Episcopal Church Indians baptized by Philadelphia records (baptisms Fort Stanwix, N.Y. 24 1768 Christ Church Rector occurred at Fort Stanwix, N.Y.) at Fort Stanwix, N.Y. Baptist Churches Phear Slocum (Indian) Tiverton Baptist Church Tiverton, R.I. 1 1788 baptized James Warmsley First Sabbatarian Church Hopkinton, R.I. 1 1786 (Indian) “Indian woman from Third Baptist Church Middleboro, Mass. 1 1774 between Sandwich & Middleborough Plymouth” Reformed, Lutheran, and Moravian Churches Indian father and New Bethel or Corner Church Albany, Pa. 1 1767 white mother “John, sen Indiaan van Schenectady Dutch Church Schenectady, N.Y. 1 1785 de Cayugas” 1767- Reformed Church Schoharie Schoharie, N.Y. 23 Mostly Indian children 1778 Reformed Dutch Chh, German German Flats, 1786- Children of 2 different 4 Flats N.Y. 1790 Indian couples Jacob son of Renalius First Moravian Church Philadelphia, Pa. 1 1764 & Cash, “Christian Philadelphia Indians” See Bibliography for Sources

As this table indicates, a small number of Indians and persons of partial Indian ancestry were baptized in predominantly white churches in this period. However, it was more common for blacks to attend Indian churches than for Indians to participate in white churches. It is likely that some Afro-Indians, who might have identified themselves as

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Indians were labeled in church records as blacks, so the number of Indians in white churches was perhaps higher than suggested by the available data. Whites had difficulty categorizing and describing people of mixed ancestry. For example, at Trinity Episcopal

Church Newport, a daughter of Jane Thurstin, baptized in 1787, was identified as “Mulat

[mulatto] or Indian.” In addition, one person who was half European and half Indian was baptized in Pennsylvania. Records from the Corner Church in the Albany Township,

Berks County, Pennsylvania state that “Maria Sarah Buss, born in wild heathenism by her mother Maria Sarah and an Indian father on __15, 1762” was baptized on October 4,

1767.82 The child’s mother may have been a captive during the French and Indian War and the father an Indian. Clearly, being a member of an Indian tribe involves more than

Indian ancestry and these German Christians likely sought to incorporate Maria as a non-

Indian, but she was nonetheless the daughter of an Indian man and is included within this tabulation to suggest that attempts to categorize and label people by a small number of

“races” is often problematic.

Although only a small number of Indian affiliated with predominantly white churches, Indian churches became more diverse during the revolutionary era. During this period, an increasing number of blacks and Afro-Indians participated in predominately

Indian churches, thereby making Indian churches into sites of interracial religious worship. This period also saw a rise in the occurrences of Indians preaching to white and mixed audiences throughout the North following the trend established by Mohegan minister Samson Occom in the 1750s.

82 “Church Record – Rosenthal, New Bethel or Corner Church Albany Township, Berks County, Pa, Translated by William J Hinke, 1933,” Adams County Historical Society, pp. 6. 237

As indicated in Chapter Two, some whites attended predominately Indian churches, such as those at Natick, Sandwich, and Stockbridge. Beginning in the 1760s and increasing during the Revolutionary War, free blacks participated in Indian churches in growing numbers in large part because the presence of blacks in Indian communities grew substantially. As Daniel Mandell shows, “Intermarriage became prominent in many

Indian communities in southern New England in the wake of the Revolution. The high rate of Indian-African American intermarriage and the growing number of racially mixed children were featured in many Anglo-Americans’ descriptions of Indian communities.”

The autonomous Indian communities in New England were attractive to free blacks, especially free black men, for a variety of reasons. Indian women usually outnumbered

Indian men, because the high deaths rates for men who served in the military and seafaring. Free black men were often attracted to the relative distance from whites and the availability of land on Indian reserves.83

The Reverend Gideon Hawley, who was a missionary to the Wampanoags at

Mashpee, Massachusetts, revealed just how racially diverse that community and his church became in this period. Hawley stated that the Mashpees were “Christianized and in a measure civilized and perhaps this tribe more than any other,” and during the revolutionary era, he began to note more frequently the number of non-Indians (some welcome and some not) who were also residing at Mashpee and attending church with the

Indians. The relative availability of land at Mashpee, and its isolation and distance from

83 Daniel Mandell’s argument that “Examining relations between Indians and blacks in southern New England illuminates the fundamental flaws of a bichromatic view of racial relations in American history, and it offers new insight into the complexity and uncertainty of ethnic identity and assimilation,” was partially responsible for the focus on both Indians and blacks in this dissertation; Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760- 1880,” Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (Sep. 1998), 470, 466. 238

the war, were appealing to Indians, blacks, and whites. In a 1782 petition by Indian leaders, they stated their neutrality in the conflict: “we cannot, neither we nor our minister, be said in any sense to have taken part in the War between Great Britain & this

Country.”84 Already by 1782, the Indian stated, “the Indian & melatoe [mulatto]

Inhabitants of Mashpee have increased and are now more numerous than they were 78 yrs ago.”85 In 1787, Hawley provided a detailed description of how ethnically diverse the

Wampanoags at Mashpee were becoming:

In the late & present distressing day this Mashpee has been an Asylum for the poor Natives & their connections, which are becoming exceedingly various & mixed; for we have had an East Indian, a native of Bombay married to one of our females and another from Mexico, besides several Dutchmen from Gen. Bourgoyne’s Army, who have formed connections with our women and comform’d to the Indian manners. From Mohegan and other places in Connecticut, from Narragansett & other places in Rhode Island, as well as from various towns in the Massachusetts where Indians have been of that precious plant which they have planted manured & watered in this church & congregation for so long a term.86

Hawley describes Mashpee, including his church, as a refuge for many people during the

American Revolution. Europeans, an East Indian, a Mexican, blacks, and Indians from other New England tribes all began to live in Mashpee. In 1791, Hawley also noted that the female Wampanoags at Mashpee had “mixed with negroes, English, Germans

{Burgoyne’s men} &c &c.”87 These new inhabitants worried at least some Wampanoags and, at times, Hawley too. Together they petitioned to have some of the white and blacks squatters removed from Mashpee, arguing “the coming of Negroes & English who have unhappily planted themselves here has wronged us and it is to be feard that they & their

84 Gideon Hawley, journals, Volume 4, eleventh transcribed binder, CL, pp, 150. 85 Gideon Hawley, journals, Mashpee 1 July 1782, Volume 4, twelfth transcribed binder, CL, pp. 202. 86 Gideon Hawley, journals, Volume 3, eighth transcribed binder, CL, pp. 3-5. 87 Gideon Hawley, journals, July 8. 1791, Volume 2, sixth transcribed binder, CL, pp. 246; Gideon Hawley, journals, Volume 3, eighth transcribed binder, CL, pp. 3-5. 239

children unless they are removed will get away our Land & all our Privileges in a Short time.”88 In 1795, Hawley wrote “in the year 1788 we had on the Marshpee Lands 25 families of poor Whites, who had located themselves without any legal title to the land

[…] altho all were poor, some of them are virtuous. After the present regulations took place seven families of these whites removed – the other have paid a quit rent.”89 In numerous letters and petitions, Hawley provides details about how extensively mixed the inhabitants at Mashpee had become.

Later evidence suggests that Indians, Afro-Indians, blacks, and whites attended services at Hawley’s church and probably attended services led by the Indian ministers who came and went from Mashpee. In December 1805, Hawley described that, “The

Indians occupy the pews & fore seats in my meeting, and the whites set back – At my meeting the Indians or Blacks are the principals or chiefs; as they ought to be – mixing whites & Indians is bad for the latter.”90 Hawley stated explicitly that, in a striking reversal of the normal church hierarchical seating arrangement, whites at his church services sat in the back and Indians, Afro-Indians, and blacks sat in the church’s better seats. The church at Mashpee, like the community more broadly, became racially diverse in the period of 1764 to 1790.

Elsewhere too, blacks increased their presence in Indian communities and churches. Hawley wrote in May 1770 that he had “kept ye last Lords Day in Apl [April] with the Indians above Sandwich and had between thirty & forty black hearers who attended with grt [great] seriousness.”91 The Indian church in Sandwich therefore had a

88 Gideon Hawley, journals, Volume 3, eighth transcribed binder, CL, pp. 17-19. 89 Gideon Hawley, journals, Volume 3, eighth transcribed binder, CL, pp. 68-69. 90 Gideon Hawley, December 1805, journals, Volume 3, eighth transcribed binder, CL, pp. 121. 91 Gideon Hawley, journals, Volume 4, eleventh transcribed binder, CL, pp. 133. 240

significant black presence as well. In the 1760s and 1770s, Joseph Fish went monthly to western Rhode Island to preach to the Narragansetts (covered in Chapter Two), among whom he likewise noted the presence of blacks, Afro-Indians, and whites. He noted in

February 1769 that he “Preachd at John Shadducks to Sixty Indians, Including Negros.”

While most of the Narragansett Christians stopped attending Fish’s lectures, there were still a small and diverse group who occasionally attended his preaching. In July 1771, he preached to “16 Indians and Mustees; and about a Dozn. Whites” and in August he

“Preachd at the School-House to about 9 or 10 Indians and negroes.”92 In Indian communities and churches, including Mashpee, Sandwich, and Narragansett, Indian churches were sites of interracial religious worship during the revolutionary era and beyond.

Between 1787 and October 1791, Samuel Kirkland ministered to the Oneida

Indians and others of the Six Nations in upstate New York, and occasionally his services were interracial as well. Kirkland preached in both English and Indian languages, and traveled between Indians towns including occasional preaching visits to the Indian settlement of Brothertown. In 1788 or 1789, an English man, who had been captured as a youth from New Jersey and now had an Indian wife and family requested Kirkland to spend a little time instructing his mix-race children.93 Kirkland recalled an interracial worship service that took place at a 1790 treaty signing between New York State and the

Onondaga and Cayugaat Nations. He wrote that “There were Indians from near ten

92 William S. Simmons and Cheryl L. Simmons, ed., Old Light on Separate Ways: The Narragansett Diary of Joseph Fish, 1765-1776 (Hanover: University of New England Press, 1982), 55, 59- 60, 69, 79. 93 “Journal of Samuel Kirkland, Missionary from the Society of Scotland and Corporation of Harvard College, to the Oneida Indians & Other tribes of the Six Nations; from August 1788 to Jan 13, 1789,” Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America Records 1752- 1948, box 1, folder 6-7, MHS, pp. 13-14. 241

different nations & of different languages (& whose usual place of residence are several hundred miles distant from one another) with some white people, all visibly worshiping the same God together.” He also noted that at one service in the American town of

Clinton, that he preached to “Several hundreds of whites & some Indians were collected from various parts of this wilderness on this solemn & mournful occasion.” In addition, when whites traveled through Oneida territory, some of them attended Indian church services led by Kirkland and were apparently touched by the “much seriousness & decorum, and the harmony of their music.”94

At the same time that blacks and some whites were a growing proportion of

Indian churches at Mashpee, Sandwich, and elsewhere, there were other Indian communities which made the conscience decision to exclude blacks, whites, and mix- raced people from their communities and churches. In 1772, a group of Mohegans in

Connecticut, including Samson Occom, resolved that women who married “strangers” had to leave the tribe and that the children born of Indian and black relationships would have no customary rights in the tribe. These Indians at least partially adopted the racial biases of whites. Daniel Mandell and David Silverman also indicate, however, that the

Mohegans were engaged in legal efforts to secure their remaining ancestral lands, and that their land rights would have been further eroded if whites saw “blacks” or “people of color” instead of “Indians” seeking to maintain claims to Indian lands. Likewise, the

Oneida Indians of upstate New York told missionary Samuel Kirkland that they “firmly resolved never to admit any white People to settle amongst us or near us except a

Minister & schoolmaster who are as one of us.” The Oneidas said that they have “seen the fate of Stockbridge,” a Christian Indian community that was displaced by whites, and

94 “Journal of Samuel Kirkland,” MHS, box 1, folder 6-7, pp. 8, 15, 16-17, and 20. 242

they did not want the same fate even though they were open to having a white minister and schoolteacher. Exclusionary policies that sought to prevent the diversification of

Indian communities, in these cases, were driven by attempts to maintain community sources and identity.95

During the revolutionary era, the Reverend Samson Occom helped spearhead a migration of Christians Indians from New England and Long Island to Oneida country in what is now upstate New York. The intention of this move was to create a multitribal

Indian community, named Brothertown, centered around an Indian church, that would remain free and far away from the corrupting influences of white “Christian” settlers who sold Indian alcohol and stole their land. The Brothertowns and eventually the Christian

Stockbridge Indians, gained a grant of land from the Oneidas of the Iroquois

Confederation in order to establish their own, and hopefully prosperous, community under God’s provision. This Indian community and church was intended to be free from people of African and European ancestry, unlike many of the Indian churches that remained in New England. 96 Nonetheless, whites and blacks, who pushed further west in the boom of colonization that occurred after the Revolutionary War, did not leave

Brothertown and New Stockbridge undisturbed for long.97

With the exception of some locations, the overall trend among New England

Indians between 1764 and 1790 was a movement toward greater diversity and racially- mixed families, communities, and churches. Numerous free blacks moved into Indian

95 Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity,” 475; David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indian and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 101-105; Samuel Kirkland, Letter to Ebenezer Pemberton, 25 March 1771, Misc. Bd. 1771 March 25, MHS. 96 Silverman, Red Brethren, 105. 97 For a complete history of the Brothertown and Stockbridge migrations, see Silverman, Red Brethren. 243

communities and married Indians, thereby changing the contours of the Indian communities, many of which had had their own churches since the 1750s or earlier. The story of Indian Christianity, although mostly distinct from white denominations and churches between 1764 and 1790, still exhibits the growing diversification of interracial religious worship that occurred in the revolutionary North.

* * * *

In large portions of the North between 1764 and 1790, it became more and more common for blacks to affiliate with predominantly white Protestant churches. Despite the disruption caused by war, churches of the mid-Atlantic and New England became more racially diverse in this period. Many Congregational and most Anglican/Episcopal churches continued to baptize blacks and admit some of them to communion. Growing numbers of Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Moravian churches included blacks as well. The most dramatic rises in black church affiliation, however, occurred among the

Methodists in mid-Atlantic and Baptists in Rhode Island. As these religious groups formed new congregations, they usually contained black attendees and members. A number of Indian churches in New England also experienced a diversification of worship as more blacks, whites, and Afro-Indians participated in Indian churches. In addition to the diversification of congregations, whites more often heard black and Indian preachers, including Congregational minister Lemuel Haynes, Methodist preachers Richard Allen and Harry Hosier, Presbyterian minister Samson Occom, and others.

The diversification of interracial churches had a complicated relationship to the growth of antislavery sentiment and the slow decline of slavery in the North. A

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remarkable number of white Christians who had never before expressed qualms about slavery began to call for emancipation and an end to the slave trade. While most churches and denominations had at least some people who held antislavery opinions, including Anglican and Presbyterian churches, the loudest calls for abolition came from

Quakers, Methodists, a vocal minority of Congregationalists, and a few Baptists after

1780. One reason why many blacks were attracted to Methodism was the antislavery policies, but antislavery opinions or the lack thereof was only one of several factors that blacks considered when making religious choices. Many blacks continued to affiliate with the churches that offered education and contained church policies that made sacraments accessible to blacks. Nevertheless, antislavery opinions among many

Christians and the diversification of interracial worship between 1764 and 1790 were intrinsically linked, and blacks chose a greater variety of types of Protestant churches as their places of worship in the revolutionary era.

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Chapter Four: City Churches and the Revolution: The Diversification of Interracial Religious Worship, 1763 to 1790:

On Thursday August 1, 1771, the New York City Methodists held one of their quarterly “Love-feasts,” which was a special religious service only for members. At these services, Methodists ate together and shared testimonies of their religious experiences in order to further unite and encourage their love for one another. This summer’s Love Feast was special because it included both black and white members.

Itinerant preacher Joseph Pilmore recorded that the people “spoke freely of the goodness of God, while a profound awe and divine reverence seemed to sit upon every countenance. One of the poor Negroes declared, her heart was so full of divine love that she could not express it, and many more of them were exceedingly happy in their minds.”1 This black woman and the other black members talked about how God had touched and changed their lives even though they were among the oppressed and the downtrodden. Blacks had spoken about their religious experiences to some racially mixed churches since the early eighteenth century, but blacks testimonies began to occur more frequently between 1764 and 1790, especially in the mid-Atlantic. The black female Methodist in New York who professed that her heart was full of divine love was a part of something new and unprecedented in New York City and other large northern cities during this era. Whether these New Yorkers realized it or not, they were a part of a much broader religious transformation that can be generally described as a diversification

1 Frederick E. Maser and Howard T. Maag, ed., The Journal of Joseph Pilmore Methodist Itinerant: For the Years August 1, 1769 to January 2, 1774, With a Biographical Sketch of Joseph Pilmore by Dr. Frank B. Stanger (Philadelphia: Message Publishing Co., 1969). 96; Dee Andrews notes that love feasts did not always remain integrated, and some churches eventually moved to have separate love feasts for blacks and for whites; Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 133-134.

of interracial religious worship. An interracial “love-feast” would not have occurred before the 1760s both because Methodism had yet to be established in the colonies and because fewer denominations in the mid-Atlantic included blacks before the revolutionary era. Between 1764 and 1790, however, interracial religious worship occurred in a greater variety of the mid-Atlantic and New England churches in Boston,

Newport, New York, and Philadelphia than during any previous era.

This chapter examines religious life in the North’s four largest cities between

1764 and 1790 as a window into how the Revolutionary War and white antislavery activism influenced northern interracial religious life. These major cities had more substantial black populations than rural locations and several different kinds of interracial denominations. Comparing different denominations in these cities helps to show how the

Revolution and the rise of abolitionism affected each denomination and the religious choices made by blacks. With the beginning of the end of slavery in the North, growing numbers of black men and women engaged in a greater variety of Protestant churches than at any time previous to 1764. The records of these urban churches, however, are almost entirely without references to Indians, but some Afro-Indians, identified by whites as blacks or mulattos, may have participated in these churches too.

The imperial crisis, Revolutionary War, and establishment of the United States did not generally hinder black participation in the North’s churches. The war made the normal practices of church life impossible in these cities because each was occupied by the British Army during the war, large numbers of the people fled the occupation, and church buildings were destroyed. Furthermore, the recovery was slow and difficult for many churches. But many blacks participated in the North’s Protestant churches during

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this period and interracial religious worship actually expanded in the North’s largest cities. Examining the participation rates by blacks in the churches of Boston, Newport,

New York, and Philadelphia during the revolutionary era enables a detailed picture of the changes that occurred in this era and further refines the arguments made in the preceding chapter. These cities exhibit the diversification of interracial religious worship that occurred in the North between 1764 and 1790 with the expansion of black affiliation in

Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and other churches. This section also establishes that, in most cases, there was no clear evidence that black church affiliation increased as a result of churches adopting an antislavery position. Despite major obstacles and the disruptions of war, churches in the North’s cities became more diverse during the revolutionary era.

The examination of specific cities also provides opportunities to further explore the connection between church baptism/affiliation and antislavery advocacy. One sees that there was not a simple relationship between a church’s stance on slavery and the number of its black baptisms or members. Black men and women affiliated with churches for a variety of reasons, and antislavery sentiments was only one of the factors that influenced their religious choices. In New York City, an antislavery church seemed to have a greater proportion of black adherents than other churches, but in the other cities, blacks affiliated in higher numbers with churches that were not explicitly antislavery. In

Newport, Rhode Island, one of the Congregational churches had a pastor who was on the forefront of antislavery advocacy, but his church did not have an appreciably greater portion of black members than other Newport churches. Rather, it had significantly fewer black baptisms than the Anglican Church that did not explicitly promote

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emancipation. Likewise, in Philadelphia, more blacks participated in the Anglican

Church during the revolutionary era than participated in the explicitly antislavery

Methodist Society. Since the New York City Methodist Society had the highest percentage of black members of any church in the city by 1790, its antislavery stance likely helped increase black affiliation. The examination of each of these cities shows that black men and women chose to affiliate with a variety of churches, and that their religious choices were made with more than antislavery advocacy on their minds and in their hearts.

Churches of Boston, Massachusetts

Boston, one of the most important centers of protest during the imperial crisis and early revolutionary years, experienced a slight diversification of interracial religious worship in the period of the Revolution as two Baptist churches admitted and baptized some black Bostonians. In addition to black affiliation in these Baptist churches, some blacks continued to participate in all the Congregational and Anglican churches in the city. However, there was a sharp decline in black affiliation with Boston’s

Congregational churches, especially after 1776, which paralleled the decline in black affiliation with Congregational churches throughout New England. Following the

Revolution and during the early development of a free black community in Boston, many black Bostonians chose an Episcopal church as their spiritual home instead of a

Congregational or Baptist church. Some of the Boston churches in which blacks had previously participated were severely weakened by the Revolution, but the changes in black church affiliation also reflected the deliberate choices by free blacks in Boston.

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Furthermore, there is little evidence that blacks chose churches based primarily on the extent to which congregations embraced the antislavery cause.

As Table 4-1 shows, between 1764 and 1776, small numbers of black men and women continued to participate in and affiliate with all of Boston’s Congregational and

Anglican churches. Two blacks also joined the First Baptist Church, which did not previously have black members. Almost half of all black baptisms in Boston during this period occurred at the three Anglican churches, where forty-one blacks were baptized.

The Anglican churches remained centers of interracial religious life in Boston.

Table 4-1: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to Boston’s Churches, 1764- 1776 and 1777-1790:

Number of Number of black black Church Name Denomination baptisms baptisms 1764 to 1776 1777 to 1790 First (Old Brick) Church Congregational 3 1 Second (Old North) Church Congregational 2 0 Old South (Third) Church Congregational 13 2 Brattle Square (Fourth) Church Congregational 13 2 New North (Fifth) Church Congregational 3 2 New South (Sixth) Church Congregational 1 0 New Brick (Seventh) Church Congregational 2 0 Hollis Street (Eighth) Church Congregational 3 0 West (Ninth) Church Congregational 1 3 King’s Chapel Episcopal 8 1 Christ Church Episcopal 12 5 Trinity Church Episcopal 21 46 First Baptist Church Baptist 2 3 Second Baptist Church Baptist 0 3 Total 84 68 See Bibliography for Sources

Although some of the record keepers did not uniformly include racial notations in baptismal and membership records, it does seem evident that blacks were participating in

Congregational churches at lower rates and in smaller number than in previous time periods. In most of Boston’s Congregational churches, only between one and three

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blacks were baptized from 1764 to 1776. As had been the case in earlier periods, the two

Congregational churches with the highest numbers of black participants were Brattle

Street Church and Old South Church. Included among the blacks baptized at Brattle

Street were slaves owned by John and Dorothy Hancock. “Cato (adult) servant to Mrs.

Hancock” and “Frank (servant to Mrs. Hancock)” were baptized in 1768, and Cato’s children were baptized in 1769, 1770, and 1773.2 In this period, at least thirteen blacks were baptized at Old South, seven males and six females. Also, four black men and one black woman were admitted to full membership. The one woman admitted to membership at Old South Church was black poetess Phillis Wheatley, and her life, though exceptional, reveals that some blacks continued to affiliate with predominantly white churches.3

Phillis Wheatley, the most famous black New Englander from the period, was stolen from her family in Senegambia and, in 1761, transported to the Americas as a slave. She was purchased by John Wheatley of Boston as a servant for his wife, Susanna

Wheatley, and they estimated that Phillis was about seven years old at the time. She was educated by the Wheatleys and spent much of her time reading and studying. While it was relatively common for Congregationalists in New England to teach slaves to read,

Phillis Wheatley was given an unparalleled education for women and especially for blacks that included studying Latin. Vincent Carretta writes that “Ample evidence indicates that Phillis was raised above her station, that is, that she was treated more like a member of the Wheatley family than as a servant, let alone a slave.” In one letter to black Newporter Obour Tanner, Phillis even stated that she “was treated by her [Susann

2 The Manifesto Church: Records of the Church in Brattle Square Boston, 1699-1872 (Boston: The Benevolent Fraternity of Churches, 1902), 184-189, 408. 3 “C VS B I – Baptisms 1669-1875,” Old South (Third) Church Boston Records, CL. 251

Wheatley] more like her child than her servant.” But Carretta also cautions against romanticizing Phillis Wheatley’s life: “comparatively gilded though her cage may have been, her enslavement was a cage nevertheless.”4 Wheatley’s experiences and her observations regarding the condition of black in Boston stimulated her religious outlook of evangelical Congregationalism and her political ideals that favored universal liberation.

Phillis Wheatly received religious instruction from the Wheatleys and attended church with them, and her faith became central to her life and her poetry. On July 19,

1772, Phillis wrote that she had been ill and was staying in the country to recover, but that she “came to town this morning to spend the Sabbath with my master and mistress.”5

Phillis began writing poetry by 1765, much of which was religious in content. In 1773, some of her poetry was published in London as a book titled Poems on Various Subjects,

Religious and Moral. Susanna and John Wheatley had been married at New South

Church in 1741 and all their children were baptized there, but Phillis became a member of the Old South Church and the Wheatley family seems to have attended Old South also.6 “Phillis Servant to Mr. Wheatly” was baptized at Old South by the Reverend

Samuel Cooper of Brattle Street Church (Old South lacked a settled minister at the time) and was admitted to membership at Old South on August 18, 1771.7

4 Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of A Genius in Bondage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 22-23; Cedrick May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 1760-1835 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 49-63; Poems of Phillis Wheatley: A Native African and a Slave (Bedford, Mass: Applewood Books, 1995); Phillis Wheatley, Letter to Obour Tanner, 19 July 1772, Misc. Bd. 1774 March 21, MHS. 5 Phillis Wheatley, Letter to Obour Tanner, 19 July 1772, Misc. Bd. 1772 July 19, MHS. 6 Carretta, Phillis Wheatley, 24. 7 “C VS A I - Admission of Old South, Membership 1669-1855, owners of the baptismal covenant 1669-1814,” Old South (Third) Church Boston Records, CL; The Manifesto Church: Records of the Church in Brattle Square Boston, 187; An Historical Catalogue of the Old South Church (Third Church) Boston 1669-1882 (Boston: Printed for Private Distribution, 1883), 50; It is interesting to note that the 252

Not only was Phillis Wheatley’s faith expressed in public poetry, but it was also often the focus of her private correspondence. From at least 1772 to 1779, Phillis

Wheatley corresponded with a Christian enslaved black woman in Newport, Rhode

Island, and they often encouraged one another’s faith. Wheatley asked Obour Tanner for prayer, and Tanner requested books to be sent to her from Boston. Responding to a religious reflection that Tanner wrote, Wheatley stated that “Your Reflections on the

Suffering of the Son of God, & the inestimable price of our immortal souls Plainly demonstrate the sensation of a Soul united to Jesus.” As Wheatley struggled with illness and poor health, she was encouraged by “him who declar’d from heaven that his strength was made perfect in weakness!” For her, religion brought comfort and meaning, but, as

Cedrick May argues, “Wheatley’s principal concern was spreading a philosophy of universal equality and human rights through Christian evangelism, which she saw as the means to freedom for the oppressed.”8 In a 1773 letter to Englishman John Thornton, she commented that God was no respecter of persons, being the maker of all. God, she wrote, “therefor disdains not to be called the Father of Humble Africans and Indians; though despisd on earth on account of our colour, we have this Consolation.”9 In a 1774 letter to Samson Occom (who had stayed for two weeks at the Wheatley home in 1773 while preaching in Boston), Wheatley discussed the enslavement of blacks and argued that in every person “God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is

1883 published church records from Old South do not include racial notations or the word “servant” for black members. The book only includes “Phillis” for Phillis Wheatley. 8 Phillis Wheatley, Letter to Obour Tanner, 19 July 1772, Misc. Bd. 1772 July 19, MHS; Phillis Wheatley, Letter to Obour Tanner, 30 October 1773, Misc. Bd. 1773 October 30, MHS; Phillis Wheatley, Letter to Obour Tanner, 10 May 1779, Misc. Bd. 1779 May 10, MHS; May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 50. 9 Kenneth Silverman, “Four New Letters by Phillis Wheatley,” Early American Literature 8, no. 3 (Winter 1974), 265. 253

impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.”10 While most of Phillis Wheatley life experiences were extraordinary and exceptional, she was far from alone in her embrace of evangelical Christianity and her affiliation with a predominantly white church during the revolutionary era.

Antislavery sentiment was clearly a minority opinion among whites in Boston during the 1760s and 1770s, but there is not a strong or direct correlation between black church affiliation and churches with antislavery commitments. James Otis published statements against slavery in 1764 and the Boston town meeting voted in 1766 to have their delegates at the Massachusetts legislature support a measure outlawing the importation and purchase of slaves in the colony.11 Gary Nash notes that between 1766 and 1774, “in the Boston area, second only to Newport as a center of New England slave trading and slaveholding, abolitionist ministers – still in the minority – dogged their parishioners and used published version of their sermons to reach beyond the walls of their own churches.” The Reverend Samuel Cooke of Cambridge’s Second Church, on

Mary 30, 1770, delivered an antislavery sermon before the legislature in the annual election sermon. Other ministers who spoke out against slavery, especially in the context of the Revolution, included the Reverend Charles Chauncy of First Church. 12 However,

Chauncy’s stance against slavery did not draw many blacks to affiliate with his church.

Conversely, the Reverend Samuel Cooper, pastor of Brattle Street Church and a grandchild of Samuel Sewall who published an antislavery tract in 1700, did not

10 Quoted in Charles W. Akers, “‘Our Modern Egyptians’: Phillis Wheatley and the Whig Campaign Against Slavery in Revolutionary Boston,” The Journal of Negro History 60, no. 3 (Jul. 1975), 406; Silverman, “Four New Letters by Phillis Wheatley,” 259. 11 Gary B. Nash, Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 62-62. 12 Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 119-120; May, Evangelism and Resistance in the Black Atlantic, 61; Akers, “‘Our Modern Egyptians’: Phillis Wheatley and the Whig Campaign Against Slavery in Revolutionary Boston,” 403. 254

apparently speak out against slavery. Charles W. Akers writes that, “There is not the slightest record that this influential preacher-politician, a major leader of resistance to

England, ever raised his voice against the nefarious institution his grandfather had fought so vigorously.”13 Despite the failure of Cooper’s church to voice opposition to slavery, a comparatively high number of blacks were affiliated with it. In Boston, antislavery sermons were not the deciding factor that convinced blacks to affiliate with a given church.

Once armed conflict began, and Boston was occupied with British troops, from

April 1775 to March 1776, most churches closed and baptisms ceased. At its lowest point in 1775, the population of Boston shrank from its 1771 level of 16,000 inhabitants to below 3,000 people. Jacqueline Barbara Carr writes that, “by June 1775, the number of inhabitants plummeted to an estimated 2,719 as people fled the British-occupied town.”14 The massive dislocation of people effectively closed the churches as pastors and congregants, merchants and slaves, all fled Boston for the surrounding countryside.

Some people had left during the period before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but the siege of Boston by the Continental Army made the city an undesirable location for most people who could leave, excepting the small portion of the Massachusetts population still loyal to the king. While Anglican church services were held during this period, and perhaps some blacks were baptized, many of the churches were used for non- religious purposes by British troops and normal church functions ceased.

13 Akers, “‘Our Modern Egyptians’: Phillis Wheatley and the Whig Campaign Against Slavery in Revolutionary Boston,” 409-410. 14 Jacqueline Barbara Carr, “A Change ‘As Remarkable as the Revolution Itself’: Boston's Demographics, 1780-1800,” New England Quarterly 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2000), 583-584; Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 225; For a history of the British occupation, see Jacqueline Barbara Carr, After the Siege: A Social History of Boston 1775-1800 (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 13-42. 255

Following the British evacuation from Boston on March 17, 1776, it remained difficult for many churches to resume normal activities, so the baptismal rates for whites and blacks alike remained low for years. Some of the blacks who had fled to the British in Boston during the siege removed with other loyalists to Canada or elsewhere, while other blacks remained away fighting with the American army. It has been estimated that roughly five hundred free blacks from Massachusetts, which was about “one half of all free black men of military age in the state,” served during the war.15 Boston’s population grew slowly following the British evacuation, and in 1780 the population had only reached about 10,000 (about 6,000 less than the 1771 population).

Old South Church, where a significant concentration of blacks had worshiped and participated in church life, was in such as poor state after 1776 that few blacks continued their affiliation with this church. In the Old South Church in Boston, there were no baptisms recorded from 1776 to 1782. From 1783 until 1790, there were only nineteen baptisms, including the baptism of one black person, recorded in the church records. In addition, only one black woman was admitted to membership at Old South between 1777 and 1790.16 The records include the following remarks: “Owing to the possession of the town by the British Troops in 1775 & 1776, to the demolition of the internal part of the house of worship, with the death of one of the Ministers, and dismission of the other, the members of the Old South Church were dispersed, & did not assemble again in a church state by themselves until 1777.”17 Old South’s large meetinghouse had been turned into a horse stable, and the war devastated the infrastructure and size of the church. If baptisms

15 Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 228. 16 “C VS B I - Baptisms 1669-1875,” Old South (Third) Church Records, CL. 17 “Admission of Old South 1669-1855, Membership 1669-1815, owners of the baptismal covenant,” Old South (Third) Church Records, CL; Carr, “A Change ‘As Remarkable as the Revolution Itself’: Boston’s Demographics, 1780-1800,” 583-584; Carp, Rebels Rising, 225. 256

are suggestive of the size and health of a congregation, then it is apparent that Old South was barely surviving from the beginning of the Revolution until 1790. Few people, including few blacks, were present in the much weakened church after the war.

Other churches were likewise unavailable to the blacks who remained in Boston after 1776. The meetinghouse of the Second Church of Boston was completely destroyed during the British occupation of the city, and Second Church merged with the New Brick

(Seventh) Church in June 1779.18 The occupation of Boston prevented the use of church buildings, scattered the population, led to the destruction of the meetinghouse, and decreased the number of churches needed for the town. Second Church and the New

Brick (Seventh) Church had each baptized two blacks between 1764 and 1776, but it appears that the newly united church baptized no blacks between 1777 and 1790.19 The

Anglican churches were also relatively empty and struggling immediately following the

British evacuation because of the loss of loyalist members and clergy. Eighteen

Episcopal clergymen, including all but one of Boston’s Anglican priests, evacuated with the British troops in March 1776, leaving the town and other parts of Massachusetts temporarily desolate of Anglican priests.20

The process of rebuilding churches in Boston was slow and uneven, and many churches faced continued difficulties in the years between 1777 and 1785 as the economy and city remained in shambles. Included among the poor who died in these years were

Phillis Wheatley and her children. Her former owners had not survived the revolutionary

18 Record book, 1741-1816, Vol 6, Second Church Boston Records, MHS; Record book, 1775- 1833, Vol. 9, Second Church Boston Records, MHS. 19 Record book, 1775-1833, Vol. 9, Second Church Boston Records, MHS. 20 George Frances Marlowe, Churches of Old New England: Their Architecture and Their Architects, Their Pastors and Their People (New York: Macmillan Company, 1947), 32; Jeffrey Richardson Brackett, “The Beginnings,” in Trinity Church in the City of Boston Massachusetts 1733-1933 (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1933), 11. 257

years either. Susanna Wheatly died in 1773 and John Wheatly died in 1778. Phillis had been set free and married a free black man, but they descended into poverty, and her always frail health did not allow her to survive the ordeal of poverty. In the latter 1780s, however, Boston’s population rebounded and, according to Jacqueline Carr, “by 1790, the town reached an all-time high for the century of slightly over 18,000 persons.”21

Many of these people were again attending healthy churches, and black Bostonians were still participating in a variety of them.

The closing of some of the churches in which blacks had previously participated was only part of the story of change in this era because many black Bostonians decided to affiliate with Trinity Episcopal Church over other churches after 1776. While Christ

Church and King’s Chapel were closed temporarily after the British evacuation, Trinity remained open because the Reverend Samuel Parker did not leave with the British and was willing to omit prayers to the king. Trinity had by far the greatest number of black baptisms of any Boston church both before and after the British occupation of the city, but its share of the city’s black baptisms grew substantially after the occupation. Of fourteen Boston churches, nearly sixty-eight percent of all black baptisms between 1777 and 1790 occurred at Trinity Church. Although the records do not always or consistently include racial notations, it is clear that at least twenty-one blacks (ten male and eleven female) were baptized there between 1764 and 1776 and at least forty-six (twenty-one females and twenty-five males) were baptized there between 1777 and 1790. Jacqueline

Carr accurately describes Trinity Church in this period as a congregation of “white and black Bostonians: artisans, tradesmen, laborers, and some of Boston’s leading citizens.”

21 Carr, “A Change ‘As Remarkable as the Revolution Itself’: Boston's Demographics, 1780- 1800,” 585; for a history of the rebuilding of Boston, see Carr, After the Siege. 258

Included among the participants at Trinity Church between 1777 and 1790 were some of the leaders of Boston’s early black community, including Prince Watts who owned a soap-making business and revolutionary war veterans Prince Hall and George

Middleton.22

Prince Hall fought in the Revolution and was one of the blacks who sent petitions to the legislature demanding an end to slavery. He was the founder and the first Grand

Master of the African Masonic Lodge, which was organized in 1787 as the first black organization in Boston (later renamed Prince Hall Masons). According to oral tradition,

George Middleton was a commander of a unit of black soldiers known as the Bucks of

America that functioned like a home guard during the Revolution. John Hancock presented this group with a flag sometime during his governorship (1780-1785).

Middleton was also a black Mason, and he was the third Grand Master of Boston’s

African Lodge. Hall and Middleton both petitioned for a school to be opened for black children in Boston at the turn of the century and advocated for equal rights for blacks.23

These leaders were among the blacks who chose to affiliate with and attend Trinity

Episcopal Church between 1777 and 1790. George Middleton married Elsey Marsh on

22 Carr, After the Siege, 3-6, 171, 173, 233; Brackett, “The Beginnings,” in Trinity Church in the City of Boston, 11-12; Phillips Brooks, “Historic Sermon,” in Trinity Church in the City of Boston Massachusetts 1733-1933 (Boston: Merrymount Press, 1933), 36-38; Andrew Oliver and James B. Peabody, ed., Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 56, Collections: The Records of Trinity Church, Boston, 1728-1830, II (Boston: Published by the Society, 1982); William B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, Volume 5 (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1861), 296-298. 23 The Bucks of America flag is owned today by the Massachusetts Historical Society; Eric G. Grundset, ed., Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War, A Guide to Service, Sources, and Studies (Washington, D.C.: National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, 2008), 114 and 153; James O. and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999), 30-31, 76; William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution with Sketches of Several Distinguished Persons: To Which is Added a Brief Survey of the Conditions and Prospects of Colored Americans (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855), 25, 29, and 48; Daniel Mandell, “‘A Natural & Unalienable Right’: The 1777 Prince Hall Petition and African American Emancipation in New England,” paper presented to the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, February 26, 2009. 259

March 11, 1781 at Trinity Church. He was baptized there in November 30, 1781 and his wife Elsey (aka Alice) was baptized March 28, 1782. Their three children were baptized in 1783, 1784, and 1786. Prince Hall may have attended Trinity Church in the 1780s because his name appeared as the sponsor or godparent at four baptisms of black adults or children between 1782 and 1788.24 The role of godparent would have been consistent with the other ways that Hall was a leader in the black community of Boston. The church with by far the greatest number of black congregants after the war in Boston was Trinity

Church.

In contrast to the participation at Trinity, only small numbers of blacks affiliated with the other churches of Boston between 1777 and 1790, but a slight diversification of religious practices can be observed in the increased number of black Baptists. Four of the nine historic Congregational churches recorded no black baptisms in these years, and the other Congregational churches, as show in Table 4-1, baptized only one to three blacks each. King’s Chapel baptized one black person and Christ Episcopal Church baptized five between 1777 and 1790. Blacks, however, also participated in both the First and

Second Baptist churches for the first time, thereby increasing the types of interracial churches in Boston. Three blacks were baptized and admitted as members to each of the

Baptist churches. First Baptist Church had admitted two blacks between 1772 and 1773, and it admitted another three by 1790. Second Baptist Church did not appear to admit

24 Oliver and Peabody, The Records of Trinity Church, Boston, 1728-1830, II, pp. 597, 598, 600, 603, 607, 617, 624, 626, and 740; Gary Nash states that Prince Hall worshiped at the Eleventh Congregational Church (School Street or Reverend. Andrew Croswell's Church) since 1762, but the church disbanded soon after Croswell’s death in 1785 and no church records are extent from this congregation; Gary Nash, Race and Revolution (Madison: Madison House, 1990), 65. 260

any blacks between 1764 and 1776, but three appear in the membership lists for the period of 1777 to 1790, including a black woman named Chloe Spear.25

Chloe Spear was born in Africa and, like Phillis Wheatley, was kidnapped and made a slave while still a child. Spear was bought to Boston via Philadelphia, and likely became the slave of Captain John Bradford (her memoir only calls him Mr. B.). As related years later by a fellow members of the Second Baptist Church, Chloe’s master took her to the Congregational church on Sundays, but Chloe “did not understand the preaching” and she engaged in “playing, eating nuts, &c.” with other blacks during the service. Unlike Phillis Wheatley, Chloe Spear did not have an owner who sincerely endeavored to educate her, but she slowly learned to read. During the Revolution,

Chloe’s master moved his whole household out of Boston to the town of Andover, and it was during this time that she received some religious instruction from a Mr. Adams and first considered herself a Christian. When the family returned to Boston, Chloe joined the New North (Fifth) Congregational Church, whose records state that “Chloe negro servant to Capt. John Bradford” became a member on February 2, 1777. Sometime after

1780, Chloe was apparently considered free, but she continued as a servant in the

Bradford household and married a man named Caesar Spear. She continued to attend the

New North Church, but some nights she also attended the evening services at Second

Baptist Church. Chloe eventually became convinced of “the doctrine of believers’ baptism by immersion” and she was baptized by the Reverend Gair and admitted as a member to the Second Baptist Church in November 1788. She remained a member there

25 “First Baptist Church Boston, Massachusetts Church Records 1665-1797,” microfilm, Pub. No. 461, Andover Newton Theological Library; “Boston 2nd Baptist Church Records 1743-1787, 1 Vol.” microfilm, Andover Newton Theological Library; “Boston Second Baptist Church Records 1789-1793,” microfilm, Andover Newton Theological Library. 261

until her death in 1815, and along with other blacks, she made Second Baptist Church a place of interracial worship after the Revolution.26

Boston churches faced many challenges during the Revolution as the city’s population was dispersed and as physical infrastructure was destroyed. Nonetheless, blacks affiliated with and attended all of Boston’s Congregational, Anglican, and Baptist churches between 1764 and 1790. After the war, black participation in Congregational churches was at the lowest levels of the century, but some blacks continued to affiliate with Congregational churches. Many more blacks affiliated with Trinity Episcopal

Church, including some black community leaders. A small number of blacks affiliated with Baptist churches, which diversified interracial worship in Boston, but black Baptists remained for the time being only a minority among black Christians in Boston.

Churches of Newport, Rhode Island

Blacks participated in more of Newport’s churches between 1764 and 1776 than they had in any earlier period. Blacks affiliated with Newport’s two Congregational churches, with the one Anglican Church, and with at least one of the Baptist churches

(see Table 4-2).27 Conversely, between 1750 and 1763, only one black woman was baptized at First Congregational Church, no blacks were baptized at the Second

Congregational Church or the Seventh Day Baptist Church, and fifty-one blacks were baptized at Trinity Church. Clearly, the rate and number of interracial churches was

26 Memoir of Mrs. Chloe Spear, a Native of Africa, Who was Enslaved in Childhood, and Died in Boston, January 3, 1815… Aged 65 Years by A Lady of Boston [Rebecca Warren Brown] (Boston: James Loring, 1832), 21, 27-28, 34, 35-37, 41, 48-50, 86-89; “New North Church Records, 1714-1797,” MS f. Bos. z2 v.1, BPL; “Boston Second Baptist Church Records 1789-1793,” microfilm. 27 I have not been able to find or get access to records from Newport’s other Baptist churches, particularly First and Second Baptist churches. This dissertation does not include Society of Friends congregations. 262

growing in Newport during the beginning of the revolutionary era. After the British occupied Newport, blacks still affiliated with Anglican, Congregation, and Baptist churches but in smaller numbers due to the effects of the war. Blacks chose to participate in these churches for a variety of reasons, and only a minority of these churches took a public stand against slavery and the slave trade.

Table 4-2: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to Select Newport Churches, 1764-1776 and 1777-1790:

Number of Number of Church Name Denomination blacks 1764 blacks 1777 to 1776 to 1790 First Congregational Church Newport Congregational 12 9 Second Congregational Church Newport Congregational 11 0 Trinity Episcopal Church Newport Episcopal 51 26 Seventh Day Baptist Newport 7th Day Baptist 2 3 Total 77 38 See Bibliography for Sources.

Trinity Anglican Church had always been the Newport congregation with the highest number of black baptism and congregants, and more blacks were baptized there between 1764 and 1776 than at all the other Newport churches combined. Fifty-one people were identified on the baptismal list as “negroes” during this period, and at least twenty-one of them were adults. Most of these baptisms occurred between 1772 and

1774; fifteen in 1773, thirteen in 1773, and nine black baptisms in 1774. Baptism of white persons between 1772 and 1774 were also higher than in other years, so the spike in baptism seems related to factors that affected everyone in the congregation.28 The

Reverend Marmaduke Browne was rector from 1760 until his death in 1771, and the

Reverend George Bisset became rector in 1771.

28 “Book of Record Trinity Church Rhode Island 1709,” Trinity Church Newport Records, NHS. 263

Both Browne and Bisset were sympathetic to blacks and sought to include them within the church. Browne recognized that some of his Anglican parishioners regarded blacks as inferior beings and neglected their spiritual (not to mention their material) wellbeing. He speculated that “Could people be brought to consider their slaves as of the same species with themselves they would pay more regard to their temporal & eternal welfare than the planters in America general do.” Browne, remarkably, even expressed the opinion that blacks would be better left free in Africa than enslaved and without religion in America. He wrote in 1768, “I shudder when I reflect on the load of guilt… I would wish they would either leave them in a state of liberty or at least make them some sort of amends for the loss of it by teaching them with humility & instructing them in the truth of Christianity.”29 Browne felt a duty to minister to the enslaved blacks in Newport.

A likely reason that Trinity Church was appealing to blacks was the education opportunities that the church offered. A school for educating blacks, funded by the Bray

Associates in London, opened in the early 1760s. Mrs. Brett operated the school, while the rectors occasionally visited. Browne worked to increase enrollment in this school, and even requested the Bray Associates to write to the Trinity Church vestry in order to encourage greater diligence in the educational efforts. In 1765, the vestry appointed a committee to oversee the school and enrollment was brought up to twenty-six black children. By 1771, when the Reverend Bisset visited Mrs. Brett’s school, enrollment was at “thirty pupils, negro children, who were to be taught reading, writing, sewing, etc.”

While Mrs. Brett was ill in 1772, the school nearly closed, but by the spring of 1774, there were thirty-eight black students in the school. The last names of masters who sent

29 Quoted in John B. Hattendorf, Semper Eadem: A History of Trinity Church in Newport, 1698- 2000 (Newport, RI: Trinity Church, 2001), 109-110. 264

slaves to the school match many of the last names of blacks baptized at Trinity Church, so there was likely a strong correlation between being educated at this school and affiliation with this church. 30

It is plausible that some blacks were attracted to Trinity Church because they saw church affiliation as a means of obtaining practical benefits as well as religious ones. In one remarkable instance, a slave received his freedom because of this church. In 1765, the vestry voted to have “the Church Wardens hire a room for Markadore, formerly a slave of Nathaniel Kay, Esq., deceased, set him free and pay his rent for one year.”31 It appears that the Church received this enslaved man as an estate bequest, but instead of selling him or using his services, it freed him and gave him a place to live for at least a year. Such generosity from churches was uncommon, but blacks still knew that church affiliation could bring other tangible benefits such as education, access to white patronage, and a place to socialize with other people.

As much as Trinity Church was a center of black religious affiliation, there were hindrances that prevented the participation of some enslaved blacks and black Anglicans were not treated as equals. Many blacks attended this church and affiliated with it, even though they experienced the exclusionary practices common in most churches, such as segregated seating at worship services. Seating was held at a high premium at Trinity

Church, and some of the city’s wealthiest citizens paid large sums of money to secure ground floor seating.32 Their black slaves were required to sit in part of the gallery

(whites purchased pews in other parts of the gallery). In 1772, the church voted to move

30 Hattendorf, Semper Eadem: A History of Trinity Church in Newport, 109-110, 120; George Champlin Mason, Annals of Trinity Church Newport RI, 1698-1821 (Newport, 1890), 225; Carp, Rebels Rising, 230. 31 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church Newport, 132. 32 Hattendorf, Semper Eadem: A History of Trinity Church in Newport, 100-102. 265

the black seating area in the gallery and exchange it for another section, thereby

“removing the negroes to the west end of the Church, provided it be agreeable to the proprietors of the pews behind the organ to exchange their pews for those to be built at the south side of the gallery, where the negroes now sit.” They believed that “the negroes can be as well accommodated” since whites had sat where the blacks would henceforth sit.33 Despite discriminatory practices in the church, significant numbers of blacks affiliated with Trinity Church.

In the two Congregational churches of Newport, blacks also affiliated during the

1760s and early 1770s. Contrary to the trend in Boston’s Congregational churches, black baptisms at Congregational churches in Newport were on the rise between 1764 and

1776. More blacks were baptized in this time period than had been baptized in any previous period, and a major cause of this rise was the ministry of Sarah Osborn. Despite the objections of some men, including the Reverend Joseph Fish of North Stonington,

Connecticut, Osborn facilitated a spiritual revival through house-meetings among women and blacks in Newport. Sarah was born in London in 1714, and migrated as a child to

Boston and moved to Newport in 1729. She married Samuel Wheaten, who he died at sea two years later. Sarah began providing for herself and baby son by operating a school in her house. She joined the First Congregational Church in 1737, and began holding weekly religious meeting for women in her home in the early 1740s. She married Henry

Osborn, who was a widower with three sons, in 1741, and continued to operate a school.34 In the late 1760s, however, her home became the center of a city-wide religious

33 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church Newport, 155. 34 Mary Beth Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities, 1767,” Signs 2 (Winter 1976), 516-517; Barbara E. Lacey, “The Bonds of Friendship: Sarah Osborn of Newport and the Reverend Joseph Fish of Stonington, 1743-1779,” Rhode 266

revival that included many blacks and her home became a new site of interracial religious activities.

The revival began in 1765, when blacks began to meet in her home. She wrote to

Joseph Fish that “there is several Ethiopians thotful who Having their Liberty to go where they like on Lords day Evening have ask’d Liberty to repair to our House for the benefit of family prayer reading etc. and I Have thot it a duty to Encourage them.” This group met for prayer, singing, and religious exhortations, and the group continued to grow in size for more than a year. In 1766, another group of blacks, who may have been free blacks, began meeting at Osborn’s house on Tuesday nights in addition to the Sunday meetings. Some whites attended the Sunday meetings as well and other groups of mostly whites organized meeting for different weeknights. By July 1766, as many as 300 people were meeting weekly at her home, and the attendance rose to approximately 525 people by January 1767. While most people had stopped attended by April 1768, there were still around sixty blacks who met there. Osborn indicated that some whites disapproved of her meetings and work among blacks and young women, but she was determined to continue the work that she believed God had initiated.35 Mary Beth Norton argues that,

“Again and again in the letters to [Joseph] Fish, she subtly but unmistakably responded to the charge that she was engaging in activities outside a woman’s prescribed sphere.”36

She continued her ministry among blacks and among women regardless of whether some thought that her actions crossed the boundary of acceptable behavior for women, and her

Island History 45, no. 4 (November 1986), 136-137; Catherine Brekus, Sarah Osborn's World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 35 Quoted in Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities, 1767,” 519-520. 36 Norton, “‘My Resting Reaping Times’: Sarah Osborn’s Defense of Her ‘Unfeminine’ Activities, 1767,” 519. 267

openness to facilitate religious meeting or classes among blacks certainly was a major factor in increasing the number of blacks who affiliated with churches in Newport.37

Sarah Osborn’s revival helped promote black participation in churches, but the ministers of First and Second Congregational churches were also active in seeking black adherence and participation. Osborn promoted religion in her home, but access to

Christian sacraments in church was still under the direct control of men. The Reverend

William Vinal was pastor of First Church from 1746 to 1768 and the Reverend Samuel

Hopkins was pastor of First Church from 1770 to 1803. The Reverend Ezra Stiles was pastor of Second Congregational Church from 1755 to 1778. All three men baptized blacks at their churches and admitted some blacks to full membership.

At First Congregational Church, at least twelve blacks were baptized between

1764 and 1776. Between 1764 and 1768, William Vinal baptized and admitted to communion at least three blacks, including Obour Tanner who was baptized and admitted to full communion on July 10, 1768. Obour was a slave of James Tanner, who was also a member of First Church. Obour Tanner corresponded with Phillis Wheatley for years and was married to a man named Barra Collins by Samuel Hopkins in 1790.38 Hopkins became pastor of First Church in 1770, in large part because of the lobbying of Sarah

Osborn and members of her female religious society. Between 1770 and 1776, at least nine blacks, including “Jenny Folgier, a free negro” and “Cato Coggeshall, servant of

Deacon Coggeshall,” were baptized by Hopkins. The five black adults who were

37 Also see Lacey, “The Bonds of Friendship: Sarah Osborn of Newport and the Reverend Joseph Fish of Stonington,” 127-136; Sheryl A. Kujawa, “The Great Awakening of Sarah Osborn and the Female Society of the First Congregational Church in Newport,” Newport History 65, no. 4 (Spring 1994), 133- 153; Carp, Rebels Rising, 135-137; William Patten, Reminiscences of the late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D.D. of Newport, R.I., illustrative of his character and doctrines, with incidental subjects (Providence: Isaac H. Cady, 1843), 62-64. 38 “Obour Tanner,” unpublished research notes provided by Bert Lippincott III, Newport Historical Society. 268

baptized were also admitted to full membership. In fact, it appears that adults were only baptized at First Church if they became full church members, which made baptisms less accessible to black congregants in this church than at the Anglican Church. Both

Congregational churches showed, in Benjamin Carp’s words, a “disinclination to baptism,” which may have stemmed from the strong influence that Baptists and Quakers had in Newport.39 Nonetheless, some blacks publically affiliated with First

Congregational Church in this period and others attended services at this church.

Blacks chose to affiliate with this church for many reasons, but the antislavery message that Samuel Hopkins began to preach in the early 1770s certainly did not discourage black affiliation with this church. Samuel Hopkins, according to Joseph

Conforti, “was one of the leading antislavery reformers in revolutionary America,” but his reforming spirit was at odds with the largest industries of Newport. “Newport participated in the slave trade more than any other port in North America,” states

Benjamin Carp. However, due to the Quaker’s turn against slavery and the preaching of

Congregationalists like Hopkins, “during the Revolutionary era a number of Newporters advocated the abolition of the entire institution of slavery.”40 Writing in 1843, William

Patten remembered that “there were more than thirty distillers in operation, and more than one hundred and fifty vessels engaged in prosecuting the [slave] trade,” and it was precisely his exposure to the workings of the international slave trade and to slavery in

Newport that began to turn Hopkins away from indifference and toward abolitionism.

Conforti argues that Hopkins’ “transformation into a dedicated antislavery reformer occurred between 1770 and 1773, the period during which he developed his doctrine of

39 Carp, Rebels Rising, 111. 40 Joseph Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the Revolutionary Antislavery Movement,” Rhode Island History 38, no. 2 (May 1979), 39; Carp, Rebels Rising, 116, 139. 269

disinterested benevolence.” Once he had decided that slavery was injurious to Africans, to Americans, and to the spread of the gospel, Hopkins determined to speak against it.

He preached against the slave trade to his congregation perhaps as early as 1771, and he preached against slaveholding by 1773. Although his congregation did not include the city’s wealthiest slave traders, some of his congregants owned one or more slaves.

Hopkins spread his antislavery message beyond his congregation by publishing A

Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans in 1776, which Gary Nash has characterized as “one of the most muscular attacks on slavery issued in the revolutionary era.”41

At the Second Congregational

Church, Ezra Stiles catechized,

baptized, married, and admitted a

number of blacks between 1764 and

1776. According to Benjamin Carp,

“Ezra Stiles sincerely ministered to his

black parishioners,” but he was not a

dedicated abolitionist like Hopkins. At

least three blacks were admitted to full

Figure 4-1: Ezra Stiles, minister of Second communion, six more blacks were Congregational Church, Newport, R.I. Source: Abiel Holmes, The Life of Ezra Stiles, baptized and admitted to full D.D. LL.D. (Boston: Thomas & Andrews, 1798). communion, and two blacks owned the covenant and were baptized at this church. These blacks included a slave owned by

41 Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the Revolutionary Antislavery Movement,” 39-41; Patten, Reminiscences of the late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, 80-83; Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 137.

270

Stiles and a slave owned by the Governor. The records state that on “March 12, 1775

Newport my Negro Servant admitted into full communion,” and on “April 24, [1771]

Phyllis Negro Servant of Gov. Lyndon & wife of Brother Zingo was baptized & admitted into full communion in the public congregation.” Stiles held weekly catechism classes between 1768 and 1775, and blacks almost always attended his classes with whites. For example, there were twenty white boys, thirty white girls, and four blacks in his class on

Thursday April 26, 1770, and on Monday May 8, 1775, there were thirteen white boys, thirty-three white girls, and nine blacks. Stiles married thirteen black couples in this

42 period.

In 1770, Stiles calculated the size of his congregation and found “six hundred & eight souls, Men Woman & Children Whites inclusive of infants; besides about seventy souls Negroes.” He also noted that the “congregation consists of 608 souls whites & upward of which 364 whites are baptized, & about a dozen negroes baptized.” Of the

678 people (blacks and whites) who Stiles counted, only about 70 were members in full communion, six of whom were blacks. The many blacks who attended church at Second

Church generally sat in a specially designated portion of the gallery. Wealthy slave- owner Caleb Gardner rented a pew on the ground floor of the church and also one in the gallery. The gallery pew was likely reserved for the use of his slaves who also attended church there. In his records, Stiles recorded how often members received communion, which occurred at most six times a year. The black church members were regular partakers of communion at this church, including “Brother Caesar Negro” and “Sister

Betty Negro” who were present at every communion serviced from 1773 to 1775. Carp

42 “Society Record Second Congregational Church 1733-1834,” Records of the Second Congregational Church, Newport, Rhode Island, NHS, pp. 58-62, 75-76, 202, 122-123; Carp, Rebels Rising, 137. 271

argues that “Stiles included blacks in the equality of souls before God. […] In this urban setting many blacks and whites prayed, studied the Bible, and took communion together.”

Blacks publically affiliated with this church because the pastor sincerely welcomed them into the church and because of the benefits of affiliation, but it does not appear that antislavery advocacy was a determinant factor in their decisions to join Second Church.43

Finally, between 1764 and 1776, blacks also affiliated with Newport’s Seventh

Day Baptist Church. This Baptist church, one of the smaller ones in Newport, had admitted a black member in 1719 but it does not appear to have admitted any other blacks until 1771. As occurred with other Baptist churches in Rhode Island, this church diversified in the revolutionary era by adding black members. Scipio Tanner “Negro servant of Widow Flaggs” and Arthur Flaggs “young negro servant of Dea. Tanner” were baptized and admitted as members to this church in 1771 by minister Elder John Maxson.

Although it has not been possible to verify at this point, it is probable that blacks were also admitted to the First Baptist, Second Baptist, and the Separate Baptist churches during this period of time because so many other Baptist churches in Rhode Island admitted blacks in the 1770s.44

In 1770 at least fifty-three percent of Protestant churchgoers in Newport attended an interracial church. Stiles calculated the number of families that attended each congregation in Newport, including the Society of Friends and the Jewish Synagogue, and he calculated that 950 families were connected to a Protestant congregation. At least

43 “Society Record Second Congregational Church 1733-1834,” NHS, pp. 58-62, 75-76, 202, 122- 123; Carp, Rebels Rising, 137, 138; In 1770, Caleb Gardner paid £30 for half a year’s rent on his ground floor pew and over £4 for half a year’s rent for the gallery pew. Jonathan Otis also rented a ground floor pew and a gallery pew; “Records Second Congregational Church Newport,” MS108, Folders 1-6 and volume 1, Pew payment records from 1769-1772, RIHS. 44 Ilou M. and Don A. Sanford, ed., Newport Seventh Day Baptist Trilogy: Entering Into Covenant, Membership Records, Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard (Bowie, Md.: Heritage Books Inc., 1998), 78-81. 272

505 families, or fifty-three percent, attended First Congregational Church, Second

Congregational Church, Trinity Church, or the Seventh Day Baptist Church. If blacks were also part of the other Baptist churches, which seems likely, then perhaps as many as

765 families, or roughly eighty percent of all Protestant churchgoers in Newport attended an interracial church.45 If all the Baptist churches included blacks, then only Newport’s

Quaker, Moravian, and Jewish congregations were not interracial religious organizations.

The beginning of the Revolution made normal church life impossible at Trinity

Church, but its doors were not closed for long. Politics affected every congregation between 1774 and 1776, as each church contained both Whig and Tory leaning congregants, but most churches continued to function normally until July 1776. After the

Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, the Rhode Island General Assembly outlawed praying for King George or any preaching that acknowledge him as sovereign.

Instead of facing a hundred pound fine or imprisonment, the Anglican Church ceased services and removed the Prayer Books that included prayers for the king from the sanctuary.46

The British Army’s occupation of Newport, like its occupation of other towns, made normal church life difficult or impossible for patriot-dominated churches but allowed for Anglicans to meet again. The British took Newport without meeting much resistance in December 1776. Many Newporters fled as rumors of a British attack circulated and more fled when the British troops arrived. The population of Newport dropped to an estimated 2,300 in 1776 down from a 1774 high of 9,209.47 A combination

45 “Second Congregation Church Records 838B,” Second Congregational Church Records, Newport, Rhode Island, NHS, pp. 122-123; Carp, Rebels Rising, 228. 46 Carp, Rebels Rising, 131. 47 Carp, Rebels Rising, 225. 273

of Continental and French forces attempted to expel the British in August 1778, but to no avail. During the occupation, services continued at Trinity Church, but some of its members had also fled. Benjamin Carp notes that “the minister and congregation of

Trinity Church would overwhelmingly support the government during the imperial crisis,” so it is not surprising that they operated during the British occupation. In 1777, twenty people were baptized at Trinity, including one black man. Fourteen people were baptized in 1778 and twelve were baptized in 1779, but none of them were blacks.48 In contrast, the Congregational churches closed because, as Carp suggests,

Congregationalists formed the “backbone of resistance to Great Britain in Newport.” The record book of First Congregational Church contains no church votes between 1777 and

1781. The British Army withdrew from Newport in October 1779, and the Reverend

George Bisset of Trinity left with them. A new chapter for Trinity Church and Newport’s other churches had begun. After years without any baptisms, the First Congregational church baptismal list states that on November 14, 1779, Hopkins “Baptized Joseph son of

John and Sarah Anthony soon after the British left the town.”

After the British left Newport, “there were but remnants of the two

Congregational churches, and both their houses of worship had been occupied as barracks and hospitals, and were in a desolate condition.” As bad as these church buildings were, however, they remained standing unlike the hundreds of other buildings that did not survive the occupation. The two Congregational churches, including some black congregants, met together under the ministry of Samuel Hopkins, and they pooled their resources in order to repair the meetinghouse of First Church. Stiles had become

48 “Book of Record Trinity Church Rhode Island 1709,” Trinity Church Records, NHS; Carp, Rebels Rising, 104, 123. 274

President of Yale College in 1778, so without a pastor and without a repaired building,

Second Church did not function for several more years. It took until 1785 for the Second

Congregational Church’s meetinghouse to be repaired and reopened.49 By 1782, the population had rebounded to only about 5,530 people, which included eighteen Indians, fifty-one “mulattos,” and 549 blacks.50 As nearly ten percent of the population, persons of African descent continued to participate in Newport’s churches, including the

Congregational, Anglican, and Baptist churches.

At least eight blacks, and in all likelihood more, were baptized at First

Congregational Church between 1781 and 1790. At least one enslaved black man,

Newport Gardner, was admitted to membership. Samuel Hopkins did not include racial notations on the baptismal and membership lists from this period and blacks were listed with last names, so it is difficult to determine the exact number of blacks who affiliated with First Church between 1777 and 1790. The eight baptisms that were definitely black baptisms were all children of Newport and Limas Gardner. On August 26, 1781, the church “received Newport Gardner” as a member. On the same day, Hopkins “baptized

Prince and Dinah, children of Newport Gardner. Prince was born Feb. 26, 1778, being 3 years and six months old. Dinah was born Oct. 28, 1779, aged 1 year and 10 months.”

Solomon Gardner, when nearly nine month old, was baptized in 1782, and Silva Gardner was baptized in 1783. Elizabeth Gardner was baptized in 1784, Jacob Gardner in 1786,

Ahema Gardner in 1787, and Amy Gardner was baptized in 1789. Five more children of

49 Patten, Reminiscences of the late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, 91; Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the Revolutionary Antislavery Movement,” 41. 50 Jay Mack Hollbrook, ed, Rhode Island 1782 Census (Oxford, Mass.: Holbrook Research Institute, 1979). 275

Newport Gardner were baptized between 1792 and 1800, after he had gained freedom for himself and most of his family.51

Newport Gardner’s given name was Occramer Marycoo, and he was brought as a slave from Africa to Newport at about age fourteen. He was purchased by Caleb

Gardner, who gave him the name Newport. He was educated and became so proficient in music that he was permitted, while still a slave, to operate a music school in Newport.

William Piersen writes that “Gardner became known for his abilities as a composer and as a director of a popular singing school in Newport; he could also cipher, write passable poetry, and speak French, and was highly regarded for his devotion to the Christian faith.” He may have attended Second Congregational Church before the Revolution, where Caleb Gardner attended, but he became friends with Samuel Hopkins in the 1780s.

Even while still enslaved, he became part of the first black organization in Newport, the

Free African Union Society, which was founded in or around 1780. In August 1789, the

Free African Union voted that “Mr. Ocrmar Mirycoo, or Newport Gardner be, and he is hereby admitted with the Privileges of having a Voice in the said Union Society […] and that whenever he shall be free, he shall be admitted and received into the said Union

Society.” Even though the African Union Society only admitted free blacks, Gardner was already highly regarded enough by other black Newporters that he was granted special privileges and a promise of membership for when he became free. In the decades after 1790, Newport Gardner would be one of the leaders and founders of the first black

51 “Admissions into Full Communion,” “First Congregational Church Marriages Baptisms 1744- 1825,” and “First Congregational Church. Records 1743-1831,” First Congregational Church Newport, NHS. 276

church in Newport, but during the 1780s, he affiliated with the predominantly white First

Congregational Church.52

Following upon their pastor’s earlier commitment to antislavery, the First

Congregational Church voted in March 1784 “that the slave trade and the slavery of

Africans, as it has taken place among us, is a gross violation of the righteousness and benevolence which are so much inculcated in the gospel; and therefore we will not tolerate it in this church.” Meanwhile, Hopkins continued to print antislavery articles and widely promote emancipation in the young United Stated. He felt the need to continue the antislavery crusade in Rhode Island, even after the first gradual emancipation law was passed, because Rhode Island citizens were still engaged in the slave trade with Africa between 1780 and 1807.53 It seems apparent that Newport Gardner and other enslaved blacks appreciated Hopkins’ antislavery advocacy, but the church’s position on this issue did not grant this church a monopoly on black congregants.

After it was reorganized, Trinity Episcopal Church continued to baptize more blacks than any other congregation, but it took years for the church to rebound. In the early 1780s, the Second Baptist Church and the Reverend Gardiner Thurston shared

Trinity Church’s building with the remaining Anglicans and Thurston led services.

Between 1780 and 1785, there were relatively few baptisms at Trinity Church as the congregation slowly recovered from the loss of many members. There were only three

52 I use “Newport Gardner” instead of “Occramer Marycoo” because in his role as secretary of two African American organizations, he seemed to always use the name Newport Gardner; William D. Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,1988), 42, 46, 59- 60, and 104; Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 278, 294, and 306; George C. Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport: Charles Hammett Jr., 1884), 154-159; William H. Robinson, ed., The Proceedings of the Free African Union Society and the African Benevolent Society, Newport, Rhode Island, 1780-1824 (Providence: Urban League of Rhode Island, 1976), viii, ix, and 58. 53 Quoted in Conforti, “Samuel Hopkins and the Revolutionary Antislavery Movement,” 43, 44- 47. 277

black baptisms between 1780 and 1785, but the church lacked a settled pastor until 1786 when the Reverend James Sayre was installed. Between 1786 and 1790, however, twenty-two blacks were baptized at Trinity. Also, Phoebe a “Mulat or Indian, Daughter of Jane Thurstin” was baptized at Trinity. With a settled minister again, blacks continued to affiliate with Trinity Church, thereby continuing the longstanding allegiance that many blacks felt toward the Anglican/Episcopal denomination in that city.54

The meeting house of the Seventh Day Baptist Church was “not disturbed” during the British occupation of Newport, so the congregation was already in a better situation than some of the other churches. William Bliss became minister in 1779, and between 1783 and 1786, three black women were baptized and admitted to membership.

The 1784 list of members included five blacks, and as Benjamin Carp recognizes, “by

1784, 11% of communicants at the Sabbatarian Baptist Church were black.” These black members and other black attendees occupied the seats in the east portion of the gallery during services.55

In the 1780s, Newport’s churches continued to baptize and admit blacks, and they continued to be more racially diverse than they had been during the period of 1730 to

1760. By the late 1780s, Newport and its churches had generally recovered from the effects of the war, but Newport would never again reach the level of economic prosperity and power of its pre-war years. The 1790 United States census recorded 223 slaves, 417 free persons of color, and 6,076 whites in Newport. This was not a substantial increase

54 Mason, Annals of Trinity Church Newport RI, 161. 55 Sanford, ed., Newport Seventh Day Baptist Trilogy, 35, 81-82; Carp, Rebels Rising, 138-139. 278

from the 1782 population.56 The black population actually decreased further after 1790, but many of Newport’s churches remained racially inclusive for several more decades.

Churches of New York, New York

Black New Yorkers participated in a greater variety of churches during the revolutionary era than they had at any previous time period, and Table 4-3 shows the available black baptism or membership numbers from seven Manhattan churches. From the 1760s to 1776, the First Presbyterian Church of New York City began baptizing and admitting blacks and the early Methodist Society included black members. After the

Revolution, several blacks were also baptized at the Reformed Dutch Church and blacks still participated in the Presbyterian and Methodist churches. These three churches were parts of the diversification of interracial worship. Blacks also continued to participate in the Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches where they had previously affiliated.

Despite the long occupation of New York by the British troops, which disrupted church services at several congregations, the diversification of interracial churches that began in the 1760s continued in the 1780s, and blacks still affiliated even with the congregations that were not explicitly in favor of emancipation.

Table 4-3: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to Select New York City Churches, 1764-1776 and 1777-1790:

Number of Number of Church Name Denomination blacks 1764 blacks 1777 to 1776 to 1790 Trinity Church and its chapels Episcopal Missing > 40 First Presbyterian Church Presbyterian 14 5 Trinity Lutheran Church Lutheran 7 6 Christ German Lutheran Church Lutheran 1 1

56 Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1790: Rhode Island (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1966), 9. 279

First Moravian Church Moravian 5 0 Reformed Dutch Church Dutch Reformed 1 6 Wesley Chapel (John Street Church) Methodist >3 102 Total >31 >160

The first racial notation within the First Presbyterian Church Register of Baptisms occurs in 1767. It states that “Phenix son of Phenix a Negro (belonging to Geo. Shaw) &

Peggy his wife, belonging to the Widow Rickers” was baptized. Between 1767 and the outbreak of war, eight black men and six black women were baptized at this church. All but two of these people were enslaved.57 Blacks had not previously been baptized in this

Presbyterian church, and the reason for their inclusion after 1767 is not fully apparent. It seems that the Reverend John Rodgers, who began his time at First Presbyterian in 1765, may have been a factor in the church’s move to start baptizing blacks. The diversification of this Presbyterian church corresponds to a growing number of

Presbyterian churches in the revolutionary era that admitted and baptized blacks.

Methodist meetings were a new site of interracial worship in New York City in the 1760s. Although the exact number of early black members has not been identified, it is clear that blacks participated within the earliest Methodist meetings in New York City and that blacks affiliated with this church between the 1760s and 1776. Lewis R. Streeter stated that a “colored servant” named Betty attended the Methodist meetings with the five

Irish migrants who first brought Methodism to New York during the 1760s. Peter

Williams Sr., an enslaved black man, and his wife Mary Durham (a.k.a. Molly) were attendees and perhaps members of this Methodist society before the Revolutionary War.

Williams converted to Methodism under the preaching of Philip Embury and Thomas

57 “Register of Baptism, 1728-1790,” First Presbyterian Church (New York, N.Y.) Records, 1717- 1961, RG 413, Box 3, Folder 11, Presbyterian Historical Society, pp. 96-191. 280

Webb, when the Methodists met in a rigging loft between 1767 or 1768. The Methodist meetings were growing so rapidly in the late 1760s that they were able to build their own chapel, which opened in October 1768. James W. Hood stated in 1895 that when this church was first built, “there were no Negro pews nor back seats nor gallery especially provided for the dark-skinned members. They [blacks] were welcomed in common with other members to all the privileges of God's house and worship.” Francis Asbury noted the presence of blacks in the New York Methodist society as early as 1771, on his first trip to New York. Preacher Joseph Pilmore also mentioned blacks at the New York City

Methodist meeting. In January 1771, “After preaching, [Pilmore] met the Negroes apart” from the rest of the congregation, and he wrote that “God has wrought a most glorious work on many of their souls, and made them witnesses that he is no respecter of persons.”

There were no baptisms at the Methodist society during these years because Methodist preachers were prohibited from administering the sacraments prior to 1784. In these early years, both white and black Methodists who needed to be baptized were baptized at one of the town’s Anglican or other churches, and Methodists attended Anglican churches to receive communion.58 Before the Revolution, the Methodists, like the

Presbyterians, were a place of interracial religious worship in New York City.

The Dutch Reformed Church remained reluctant to baptize or admit blacks before

1776, but one black child was baptized there in 1765. Willem, the son of “Petrús

58 Maser and Maag, ed., The Journal of Joseph Pilmore Methodist Itinerant, 74; Lewis R. Streeter, Past and Present of the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church (First Methodist Society in America) New York (New York, 1913), 7, 14-18, 17, 19, and 22-23; Francis Ashbury, Journal of Rev. Francis Ashbury, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, In Three Volumes, Volume 1, From August 7, 1771 to December 31, 1786 (New York: Land & Scott, 1852), 17; Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 133; Craig D. Townsend, Faith in their Own Color: Black Episcopalians in Antebellum New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 11; James W. Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church; or, The Centennial of African Methodism (New York: A. M. E. Zion Book Concern, 1895), 1. 281

Boffeler, Neger, [and] Marÿtje Dee, Negerin” was baptized on August 5, 1765, and

Anthonÿ Jakes and the mother were witnesses. Presumably, the mother was a member of this church, but she was seemingly the only black member of this large congregation that included plenty of slave-owning New Yorkers.59 As mentioned in Chapter Three, these and other Dutch Christians remained resistant to black baptisms because their energy was focused on divisions within the denomination and on maintaining the Dutch language and culture under English rule.

The New York churches with longer records of baptizing blacks continued to do so between 1764 and 1776. Trinity Lutheran Church baptized five black men and two black women in these years. These baptisms included a child of “free negroes,” a child of enslaved blacks, “a free negro woman,” and the child of “a white servant belonging to

Mr. George Rappelje and a mulatto woman.” Although Trinity Anglican Church’s records were destroyed and other sources do not provided a reliable numeration of black baptisms from 1764 to 1776, it seems likely that Trinity Anglican Church and its chapels continued to far outstrip any other church in black baptisms. Given the substantial number of blacks who were educated, catechized, baptized, and admitted to communion at Trinity Anglican Church between 1730 and 1763, it is all but certain that many more blacks affiliated with this church between 1764 and 1776. Mr. Joseph Hildreth, schoolmaster of the Trinity Episcopal Charity School, continued to educate more than a hundred blacks under the support of the church until 1776, and at least some of his catechumens were probably baptized and admitted to communion at Trinity in these

59 Tobias Alexander Wright, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam and New York: baptisms from 1 January 1731 to 29 December 1800, Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Volume III (New York: Printed for the Society, 1902), 284. 282

years.60 Also, the First Moravian Church, which had baptized some blacks between 1750 and 1763, baptized at least three black men and two black women between 1764 and

1776. These three churches, Trinity Lutheran, Trinity Anglican, and First Moravian, continued to be interracial churches in the period preceding the Revolution.61

As exhibited by the black baptisms at these six churches, leading up to the military hostilities, a growing number of churches of New York City continued to minister to their flocks, including black and white congregants, without taking sides in the imperial crisis during the 1760s and early 1770s. According to Richard Pointer,

“most provincial clergymen refrained from clearly expressing their political sentiments when preaching, at least until late 1774 or early 1775.” All types of churches participated in the fasts and days of prayer, which were, according to Pointer, “fundamentally spiritual responses to the colonial crisis and did not represent an endorsement of any specific course of political action.”62 After 1774, religious life in New York started to be affected by politics, and 1776 brought substantial changes to the churches. “As conflict intensified and imperial tensions rose,” Pointer explains, “both the clergy and the laity found it more difficult to avoid expressing political opinions through ecclesiastical channels.” Within each denomination and congregation, ministers and laity experienced divisions and conflicts.63 This complicated situation was at least as difficult for black

60 Frank J. Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” in Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church VIII, no. 4 (December 1939), 337-338. 61 “Lutheran church records, 1703-1802 New York, Albany, and other places,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection, NYPL, pp 215-231; “New York Moravian Church records: baptisms 1744-1890, with an index compiled by Thelma E. Smith, 1991,” NYPL, pp 19-27; Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1793, Volume 1, Pastors and Congregations (Breinigsville, Pa.: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1980), 219. 62 Richard W. Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience: A Study of Eighteenth- Century Religious Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 76 63 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 76-77. 283

New Yorkers as it was for whites, and blacks saw both opportunities and challenges on the horizon. Like white church members, black men and women were members of congregations, and they were spouses, parents, and siblings. However, many of the black

Christians were also held as property and all blacks faced discrimination and racism. The choices these people made regarding who to support in the Revolution were contemplated within the context of these interconnected webs of relationships. Desires for freedom and for the protection of loved ones were at the forefront of their concerns, and the majority of blacks in the New York either took a wait-and-see approach or concluded that supporting the British was the best option available for them and their families.

By the summer of 1776, much of the Continental Army was entrenched in and around New York City and General Howe began landing British troops on Staten Island and Long Island. In battles on Long Island and Manhattan, the patriot forces were routed and the British captured large numbers of troops while the remaining Continental forces retreated south through New Jersey. As Pointer writes, “The British attack forced thousands of uncommitted New Yorkers to decide quickly which army to support,” and laity and clergy were forced to stay or flee.64 Bernard Houseal, the minister of Trinity

Lutheran Church, sided with the British, as did the Moravan minister Oswald Shewkirk, who had arrived from England in 1774.65 Fredrick Mühlenberg, pastor of the German

Lutheran Church, was a Patriot who fled to Pennsylvania when New York was captured.

Mühlenberg went on to serve in the Continental Congress, Pennsylvania Legislature, and first United States House of Representatives. Pointer explains that “Initially, the British

64 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 79. 65 Houseal was also spelled as Hausihl at times; Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 81; George U. Wenner, The Lutherans of New York: Their Story and Their Problems (New York: The Petersfield Press, 1918), 14. 284

occupation of lower New York greatly disturbed religious life. […] At the height of the takeover in 1776, Moravian pastor Oswald Shewkirk attested that on Sunday, September

15, he conducted the only worship service in the entire city.” The population of New

York City declined from roughly 25,000 in 1775 to about 5,000 in 1776.66 Since most of the population had fled, especially the patriot ministers and congregants, some of the churches fell silent, but the loyalist dominated churches soon resumed normal services and function under the seven-year occupation of New York. The churches that remained open were actually much more politically unified than any church had been in 1774 and

1775.67

During the British occupation of New York, blacks continued to be baptized at some churches, and they participated in church life at Trinity Lutheran Church and

Trinity Anglican Church, despite both churches losing their buildings to fire in 1776.

Although the baptismal records do not uniformly include racial notations, it appears that at least fourteen (but perhaps more) blacks were baptized at Trinity Anglican Church between 1776 and the British evacuation in November 1783. Some of the blacks who sought freedom for themselves and their families among the British in New York attended Trinity Anglican Church, which continued to educate and catechize some blacks.68 Similarly, Trinity Lutheran Church, which had Dutch roots and was predominantly loyalist, continued to baptized blacks during the occupation. After their church burned, its parishioners worshiped in the Scotch Presbyterian Church building.

66 Carp, Rebels Rising, 225. 67 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 93; Wenner, The Lutherans of New York, 12, 14-16. 68 Trinity Church Baptism, Trinity Church New York Archive; Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 147. 285

Between 1778 and 1783, three black men and three black women were baptized at Trinity

Lutheran. The blacks who participated in this congregation were likely all loyalists, but they reflected a diversity of background. Jack Genette, who was “a negro man working in Col. Grouts artillery,” had a son baptized in 1778. Richard Bratison, who was “guinea born,” and Jenny, his wife, were the sponsors for the baptism of Charlotte, the daughter of “John Midler and Diana, his wife, Mulatto.” Finally, the daughter of John Mosson and

Sarah his wife, who were “Mulattos from Virginia,” was baptized in 1783. John Mosson may have been part of the three hundred blacks, members of the Ethiopian Regiment, sent to New York from Virginia by Lord Dunmore.69

During the occupation years, blacks also continued to participate in the Methodist society and perhaps some of the other congregations. The Methodists’ building was one of the few church buildings not commandeered by the British Army, and religious services for Hessian troops were held at the chapel along with regular Methodist meetings. Apparently, “not a single service was cut out of the regular schedule” of meetings.70 The German Lutheran Church, whose pastor had fled before the British occupation, continued to have services during the war, but the church was led by chaplains associated with Hessian troops, who increased the war-time size of this congregation. It is unclear whether any blacks participated at this church during the

British control of the city, but in general, the churches that functioned in New York between 1776 and 1783 still included some black congregants.71

69 “Lutheran church records, 1703-1802, New York, Albany, and other places,” pp. 236-263; Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1793, Volume 1, 219. 70 Streeter, Past and Present of the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church, 21. 71 Wenner, The Lutherans of New York, 14; Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 163; “Lutheran church records, 1703-1802, New York, Albany, and other places.” 286

With the British evacuation in 1783, some loyalists now left the city, and several of the churches that had remained open during British rule now suffered as the patriot- dominated churches started rebuilding after a long exile. The interracial religious community of Trinity Lutheran Church faced near destruction after 1783, even though it had persisted through the war. The church records indicate that in 1783, “Pastor Houseal being a strong Tory went to Nova Scotia soon after the Revolutionary War and many of his congregation went with him. The church was destroyed and the [two] Lutheran

Congregations finally united under the pastorate of Johann Christoph Kinze.” With their building destroyed and most of the congregation (including black congregants) leaving with the British, Trinity Lutheran Church essentially dissolved and no more blacks were baptized there.72 It appears that the Moravian Church also lost some black and whites members, including the loyalist minister. This church also did not record any black baptisms from 1783 to 1790.73

As had been the case in other cities, the physical and material cost of the war had devastating effects on many New York City congregations. Pointer explains that “In

New York City alone, Anglican, Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, French Protestant,

Lutheran, Baptist, Quaker, and Moravian buildings were either destroyed or converted by the British troops into barracks, prisons, hospitals, or stables. Because of their patriotic reputation, Presbyterian churches were special targets of violence.” There were nineteen church buildings in New York City in 1776, but “only nine were fit for use when the

British left” the city in November 1783. In addition to the loss of property however, most

72 “Lutheran church records, 1703-1802, New York, Albany, and other places”; Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1793, Volume 1, 219. 73 “New York Moravian Church records: baptisms 1744-1890,” NYPL, pp. 27-49. 287

churches had significantly fewer congregants left due to loyalist migration and death from war, which also “made the financial burden even greater” on the remaining congregants. Pointer concludes that various impacts of the war, including loss of property, people, and clergy, meant that “never before had so many of the state’s religious fellowships simultaneously faced such formidable barriers to fulfilling their missions.”74

Despite the destruction and losses of the war, many churches quickly began to minister again to both whites and blacks, and the diversification of worship in New York

City continued. Several of New York’s church included blacks between 1783 and 1790, even though 3,000 black loyalists left New York City with the British.75 Pointer argues that “religious leaders seemed eager to undertake the tasks of reconstruction” once the war was finally over and a number of the churches began slowly rebuilding with some black congregants included.76 The remaining Lutherans from both Trinity Dutch

Lutheran and Christ German Lutheran churches united in 1784 under the pastorate of

Johann Christophe Kunze and met in the Christ German Lutheran Church building, which had survived the war. In this reorganized Lutheran church, at least one black was baptized between 1784 and 1790.77 On November 26, 1783, as their records state, “the first Presbyterian Church of this city was collected, by return of the Rev. Dr. Rodgers and the exiled people, after a dispersion of seven years two months and twelve days, during the late war.” Since their own building could not be occupied, First Presbyterian temporarily used one of the Anglican chapels for worship. Between 1785 and 1790, two

74 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 90-91, 105, 107. 75 Hodges, Root & Branch, 156. 76 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 104-105. 77 Wenner, The Lutherans of New York, 14-15. 288

black males and three black females were baptized at the First Presbyterian church.78

The inclusion of blacks in this Presbyterian church, which began before the war, continued in the late 1780s.

Between 1784 and 1790, dozens of blacks participated in the reorganized Trinity

Episcopal Church. After the British evacuation, a power struggle occurred within the vestry between Whig and Tory factions, but Samuel Provoost, a supporter of the

Revolution, became rector. Under Provoost’s leadership at least twenty-six (but likely more) blacks were baptized at Trinity Church or its chapels.79 According to Frank

Klingberg, “the war, with its destructive effects, produced merely temporary interruptions in Negro Christianization and education” at this and other Episcopal churches.80 Graham

Hodges states that “the reorganized Episcopal church remained the vanguard of black conversion,” and that, after being closed for several years because of the war, “Trinity

Church reopened its charity school for blacks in 1787.”81 Trinity Episcopal Church remained one of the central places of interracial worship in New York City.

At the John Street Methodist Church, blacks continued to participate in the

Methodist Society, and after the Methodist Episcopal denomination was founded, this congregation included significant numbers of black members. Weekly class meetings were usually segregated, including classes solely for black women, but black and white

Methodists attended services in the same sanctuary on Sundays. Peter Williams continued his affiliation with the Methodists and became their church sexton. The man

78 “Register of Baptism, 1728-1790,” First Presbyterian Church (New York, N.Y.) Records, pp. 193-261. 79 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 107. 80 Klingberg, “The S.P.G. Program for Negroes in Colonial New York,” 338. 81 Graham Russell Hodges, ed., Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993), 3. 289

who owned him, Mr. Aymar, was a loyalist who planned to leave New York with the

British. As a result of Williams’ initiation, the trustees of John Street Methodist Church purchased Williams on June 10, 1783 for forty pounds, and they immediately employed him as church sexton. Williams began making payments to the trustees in order to gain his freedom, which he finally obtained on November 4, 1785. Williams also worked as a tobacconist and his wife Mary worked as a cook in the church parsonage. They lived in the basement of the parsonage, and he and his wife continued to attend John Street

Methodist Church.82 However, they were hardly the only black members of this

Methodist church.

In 1786, the church’s preacher reported that the New York City Methodist Church included 178 whites and 25 blacks. By the next year, the society had grown to 235 whites and 40 blacks, and it continued to grow each year. By 1790, New York’s

Methodists included 522 white members and 102 black members, most of whom were women. According to Dee Andrews, the black Methodist members in New York were roughly seventy percent female in 1786 and around seventy-eight percent female by

1791.83 Clearly, the Methodist church in New York offered a spiritual environment that was especially appealing to black women. In 1790, the Methodist Church of New York

City contained by far the highest percentage of black members of any church in the city and one of the highest percentages of black members of any church in the North.

Although not to an extent that paralleled the Methodists, the Reformed Dutch

Church of New York City also became more diverse after the British evacuation. At least

82 Streeter, Past and Present of the John Street Methodist Episcopal Church, 22-23; Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 136; Townsend, Faith in their Own Color, 11. 83 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, Annually Held in America from 1773 to 1813, inclusive, Volume the First (New York: John C. Totten, 1813), 61, 67, 95; Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 135, 248-250. 290

five and perhaps six or seven blacks were baptized there between 1783 and 1790. No baptism records exist for this church between October 1776 and July 1780 because either no one was baptized in the dispersed congregation or the baptismal lists from that time were lost. In September 1783, Catharina, daughter of “Abraham & Nell, Servant” was baptized. It seems highly probable that they were blacks. Between 1785 and 1790, at least five black adults were baptized and presumably admitted to this church, including

Ponetta, “an adult negro woman” who was baptized “upon the confession of her faith.”84

The Dutch Reformed Church of New York City, similar to some of the other Reformed churches of this period, began to include blacks and was part of the diversification of interracial worship in the mid-Atlantic.

Pointer makes the argument that in the 1780s, New York’s Protestant churches

“responded energetically” to the challenges that they faced as congregations and denominations after the war through “attempts to reorganize or form new denominational structures, the creation of schools and extensive support of home missionary projects, and the establishment of cooperative relationships with other religious persuasions.”85

Overall, the congregations in New York City and New York State made impressive progress in these regards, especially as the city regained its population and prosperity in the late 1780s. By 1790, New York City’s population had reached its prewar level, which included about 1,036 free blacks and 2,056 enslaved blacks.86 Many of the city’s congregations repaired or reconstructed their buildings and congregations increased in size as both blacks and whites affiliated with several of the Protestant denominations. As

84 Wright, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in New Amsterdam and New York, 358, 373, 374, 384, 394, and 409. 85 Pointer, Protestant Pluralism and the New York Experience, 108, 119. 86 Hodges, Root & Branch, 163. 291

a result of energetic rebuilding efforts, the churches of New York City continued to become more racially diverse despite the challenged that the war entailed for them.

Churches of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Between 1764 and 1776, Christ Episcopal Church continued to baptize more blacks than any other Philadelphia church, but this city also experienced a diversification of interracial religious experiences because blacks began to participate in Methodist and

Presbyterians churches too. The Moravian and Lutheran churches in Philadelphia also continued to baptize a small number of blacks before the Revolution. Between 1777 and

1790, the number of blacks affiliated with Presbyterian churches and the Methodist church continued to rise even as many blacks still affiliated with the Episcopal Church.

Table 4-4 shows the number of known black baptisms and church members for seven

Philadelphian congregations from 1764 to 1776 and from 1777 to 1790. Given that none of these churches, except the Methodists, were explicitly antislavery during this period, it is evident that black affiliation was influenced by factors beyond the promotion of abolitionism.

Table 4-4: Number of blacks baptized and/or admitted to select Philadelphia churches, 1764-1776 and 1777-1790:

Number of Number of Church Name Denomination blacks 1764 blacks 1777 to 1776 to 1790 Christ Church and St. Peter’s Church Episcopal 128 70 First Presbyterian Church Presbyterian 0 2 Second Presbyterian Church Presbyterian 2 5 Scots Presbyterian Church Presbyterian 0 2 St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church Lutheran 7 0 First Moravian Church Moravian 5 2 St. George’s Methodist Church Methodist unknown 24 Total 143 105 See Bibliography for Sources.

292

The St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church of Philadelphia included a small number of blacks within their religious community between 1764 and 1776, and seven blacks were baptized at this church from 1767 to 1771. In 1767, Mary Amelia Accident, daughter of John, “a negro,” and Judith Accident was baptized. The sponsor was

“Benjamin Thomas a negro from Barbados.” In 1770, Quem and Dolly, “neger & negerin age about 25 years,” slaves of silversmith Mr. Dowig were baptized “after sufficient instruction.”87 In 1768, the Reverend Henry Muhlenburg, as indicated by

Charles Glatfelter, “baptized and confirmed a twenty-three year old mulatto who was learning German and wanted to join the Philadelphia congregation.” Muhlenburg examined this man in both English and German and found him to have an adequate religious knowledge.88 As had been the case in earlier periods, small numbers of blacks affiliated with this Lutheran church before the Revolution.

First Moravian Church baptized five blacks and one Indian between 1764 and

1776. The records note that Jacob, son of “Renalius & Cash, Christian Indians” was baptized in 1764. These Indians were likely taking refuge in the city away from the

Paxton Boys, who had murdered Christian Indians on the Pennsylvania frontier. The five blacks who were baptized appear to have been mostly children. For example, Sara

“negro” daughter of Elizabeth, owned by Bradford Roberts, was baptized in 1766, and

Flora the daughter of Ann Johanna, a “negress born in Ibo Guinia,” was baptized in

87 “St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, PA Baptisms 1759-71 Part 1.” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. XXXI (Philadelphia, 1898), 426-566; For background on the Lutheran and German churches of Philadelphia, see Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1793, Volume 1, 411-420. 88 Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1793, Volume 1, 289. 293

1772.89 In the period before independence, Moravians continued to promote a form of

Christianity that welcomed some blacks and Indians into their churches.

The Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia became another site of interracial religious worship in the revolutionary era by baptizing a few blacks. This church had its origins during the First Great Awakening among people who were awakened by the preaching of George Whitefield. In 1743, a New Side Presbyterian

Church was organized and the Reverend Gilbert Tennent became pastor. Unlike the other Tennent brother in New Jersey, there is no evidence that Gilbert Tennent baptized or admitted blacks to this church during the 1740s. Although Gilbert Tennent had been among the radical revivalists in the early years of the Great Awakening, by 1744 when he joined Second Presbyterian, he had moderated his revivalism and took on an air of respectability.90 One black child, Elizabeth daughter of “Elizabeth (negro)” was baptized at Second Presbyterian in June 1755, and under the ministry of the Reverend James

Sproat, two blacks, both slaves of Mr. Stamper, were baptized at this church between

1769 and 1772. Sproat was a Congregational minister from Connecticut and became pastor of this church in 1769. Thus, in the years before the Revolution, this church was just beginning to formally include blacks.91

Although the specific number of black members is unavailable, it is clear that some blacks participated with and joined the early Methodist meetings in Philadelphia as well, thereby adding to the number of interracial religious communities in Philadelphia.

89 “First Moravian Church Phila, PA Baptism, Marriages,” HSP. 90 Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 65-67, 147. 91 “Records of Second Presbyterian Church Philadelphia Baptism, Marriages, Burials, 1745- 1833,” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. 32 (Philadelphia, 1898), HSP; E. R. Beadle, The Old and the New: The Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, 1743-1870, Its Beginning and Increase (Philadelphia: James D. Chandler, 1876), 48, 87-88. 294

Preacher Joseph Pilmore noted black congregants in Philadelphia’s Methodist meetings between 1769 and 1771. In November 1769, he noted that “many of the poor Affricans are obedient to the faith,” and at a September 1770 meeting in which “people spoke freely of what he had done for their souls,” Pilmore wrote that “even the poor Negroes came forth and bore a noble testimony for God our Saviour.”92 Blacks were attending

Methodist meetings and were publically sharing their faith in interracial worship services.

On Sunday November 10, 1771, after the morning service, Pilmore received a note from

“a poor Negro Slave,” who attended at least some Methodist meetings in Philadelphia, and he recorded a portion of the letter in his diary:

Dear Sir, These are to acquaint you, that my bondage is such I cannot possibly attend with the rest of the Class to receive my Ticket therefore beg you will send it. I wanted much to come to the Church at the Watch-night, but could not get leave; but, I bless God that night, I was greatly favoured with the spirit of prayer, and enjoyed much of his divine presence. I find the enemy of my soul continually striving to throw me off the foundation, but I have that within me which bids defiance that may be enabled to bear up under all my difficulties with patient resignation to the will of God.93

This slave’s owner restricted the movement and church attendance of this enslaved person, but he or she could not control the slave’s desire to be a good Methodist, his/her secret prayers, and his/her communion with God. Since the slave seemed to know

Pilmore and since he/she requested the member’s ticket that would grant access to future member’s only services, this slave likely attended classes and services regularly and intended to continue doing so. The Methodist meetings, along with Second Presbyterian

Church, became a new site of interracial worship between 1764 and 1776, but the

Anglican churches continued to far outpace other churches in Philadelphia in terms of black affiliation.

92 Maser and Maag, ed., Journal of Joseph Pilmore Methodist Itinerant, 26 and 58. 93 Maser and Maag, ed., Journal of Joseph Pilmore Methodist Itinerant, 107. 295

The united Church of England congregations in Philadelphia, Christ Church and

St. Peter’s Church, baptized far more blacks between 1764 and 1776 than any other church in the city. At least one hundred and twenty-eight blacks were baptized during these years, including adults and children, “free negroes” and enslaved blacks. John Penn and James Hamilton, both who served as governor, each had at least one slave baptized at

Christ Church in 1766. Twenty-five, almost twenty percent of all the black baptisms, were clearly identified as free persons. Many of the free blacks in Philadelphia, as well as many enslaved blacks, chose to affiliate publically with and attend Christ Church.

In addition to the many blacks who were baptized by the Christ Church ministers, roughly twenty-four Indians were baptized by the Revered Richard Peters in 1768. The governor requested that Peters attend a treaty conference that was scheduled to be held at

Fort Stanwix in 1768, which was intended to permanently delineate the boundaries of

Indian and British territory in New York and western Pennsylvania. A summary of vestry minutes states that “the governor and council had desired he would attend it, from a belief that his long experience in Indian affairs would enable him to be a great service” at the treaty conference.94 In addition to the political work that Peters conducted, he took the opportunity to baptize many of the Iroquois and other Indians who desired baptism, which the Indians may have seen as a sign of friendship with the British. The Indians hoped that by forming strong ties with the British officials, and by ceding vast territory, that the British would prevent further white settlement on Indian lands. These Indians, baptized “at Fort Stanwix, in the months of September, October 1768,” included adults and children from the Tuscarora, Oneida, Delaware, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Shawnee

94 Benjamin Dorr, A Historical account of Christ Church, Philadelphia, from its Foundation A.D. 1695 to A.D. 1841, and of St. Peter’s and St. James, until the Separation of the Churches (Philadelphia: R.S.H. George, 1841), 160. 296

tribes. Peter’s baptism of these Indians demonstrates the continued Anglican willingness to include the diverse peoples in America within the Church of England.95

In describing the state of the two united Anglican churches on the eve of the

Revolution, Deborah M. Gough states that, “if Richard Peters and the other leaders of the

United Churches had assessed the situation of their churches in 1770, they could have been rightfully pleased and proud. They had two large churches that houses prosperous congregations. These congregations could boast of four well like ministers […and] peace reigned within the churches and within the Anglican community in Philadelphia.”96 The churches included not only some of the wealthiest members of Philadelphia society but also hundreds of black Philadelphians. As with all Anglican churches, however, the imperial crisis and Revolution caused divisions and disruptions that temporarily disrupted church life and the addition of more baptized and communing blacks.

In Philadelphia, the Anglican Church included both Patriots and Tories, but the church managed to stay generally united until 1773 or 1774. Gough shows that

“Anglicans joined members of all other denominations in supporting a boycott of all

British goods” after the 1765 Stamp Act, and several prominent members of Christ

Church played roles in protesting and organizing opposition to the new taxes installed during the imperial crisis.97 In September 1774 the Continental Congress made Anglican minister Jacob Duché its chaplain, and “the Christ Church congregation was honored by having the Continental Congress as a group worship in their church” on a July 20, 1775

95 Fort Hunter in Mohawk country had long been the site of Anglican missionary work. See Daniel K. Richter, “‘Some of Them... Would Always Have a Minister with Them’: Mohawk Protestantism, 1683-1719,” American Indian Quarterly 16, no. 4, (Autumn, 1992), 471-484. 96 Deborah Mathias Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia: The Nation’s Church in a Changing City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 127. 97 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 128, 130-133. 297

fast day. The Anglican clergy, like many Philadelphians, believed that the rights of colonists were being infringed upon, and they supported at least moderate measures of seeking redress. However, independence was a question that split the pastors and congregation, including its black members and attendees. Gough writes that, in terms of the laity, “an important plurality favoring independence,” but Tories at Christ Church comprised “a substantial minority” and many others sought to remain neutral.98

Since Anglican clergy had sworn allegiance to the king and were required to pray for him at each service, the Declaration of Independence made neutrality or even conservative protest impossible. Christ Church rector Jacob Duché asked his vestry whether or not they thought it best to close the church or omit prayers for the king. As

Gough describes it, the vestry opted to skip prayers for the king, and “Duché agreed to preside at service that omitted the prayers for the king and even agreed to continue as chaplain to the Continental Congress after independence.” However, his views on independence grew negative, and by October 1776, Duché resigned his positions with both Christ Church and Congress.99

The Reverend Thomas Coombe decided that he could not consciously support independence, and he was arrested by Patriots, despite protests from the Christ Church’s vestry. During the British occupation of Philadelphia, Coombe kept both Christ Church and St. Peter’s Church open with the assistance of a British chaplain, but in July 1778, he left for England.100 The Reverend William White, however, took a different course than

Duché and Coombe, and he swore allegiance to the new government after independence.

98 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 131, 134, 136; Dorr, A Historical account of Christ Church, Philadelphia, 142, 176. 99 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 138; Dorr, A Historical account of Christ Church, Philadelphia, 181. 100 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 140. 298

White took over as a chaplain of the Continental Congress and reopened Christ Church after the British Army had come and gone from Philadelphia.101

When the British Army occupied Philadelphia from September 1777 to June

1778, many inhabitants fled the city. On the eve of the Revolution, in 1775, Philadelphia included at least 728 slaves and 114 free blacks of a total population of approximately

32,000 to 33,000. At its wartime lows, the city’s population dropped to around 16,000 in

1776 and around 24,000 in 1778.102 The leaders of Christ Church cooperated with the

British Army and reinstated prayers for the king during the occupation. Gough even indicated that “General Howe, who sat in Washington’s pew at the church, made attendance at Christ Church mandatory for the officer corps.”103 As had been the case with New York City, many Presbyterians supported the Revolution and fled the city when British troops approached. Services ceased at the Second Presbyterian Church during the British occupation, and their building was extensively gutted and used as a hospital. Two out of three Lutheran pastors left the city before the British arrived, and both the Lutheran buildings (St. Michael’s and Zion) were appropriated by the British.

The St. George’s Methodist Chapel was also taken-over by British troops.104 Unlike the

British occupation of New York, however, the troops did not even stay a whole year in

Philadelphia, and the population, including members of Congress, was able to quickly return.

101 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 141. 102 Gary B. Nash and Jean B. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 18; Carp, Rebels Rising, 225. 103 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 143. 104 Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, Volume II, The History (Breinigsville, Pa.: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1981), 400-416; Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 61. 299

After the British evacuation, the Christ Episcopal Church was able to reorganize, and it continued to be the church with the highest number of black baptisms in

Philadelphia. The first vestry election at Christ Church after the British evacuation allowed the Whigs or Patriot-leaning members to take control of the church for the first time since the Revolution began, and they made William White, the only Anglican minister left in the city, the rector in April 1779. Unlike some of the Anglican churches elsewhere in the North, Christ Church’s building was largely intact after the war.

According to Gough, Christ Church and St. Peter’s Church “emerged from the war far stronger than most Anglican churches throughout the colonies.”105 As a result, the

Reverend White and Christ Church also played important roles in the creation of the

Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States between 1782 and 1789.106 Apart from the denominational work, however, White continued to minister to black Philadelphians.

At least seventy blacks, forty-three females and twenty-seven males, were baptized at the

Episcopal churches of Philadelphia between 1777 and 1790.107 The Episcopal Church, as had been the case in all previous periods, baptized more blacks than any other denomination in Philadelphia. Even the number of black members in St. George’s

Methodist Church did not rival the total number of black baptisms at Christ Church and

St. Peter’s.

After the British withdrew from Philadelphia, fewer blacks participated in the St.

Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church and the Moravian Church. There is no recorded evidence of black baptisms after 1770 at St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church; no

105 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 144, 146, 152. 106 Gough, Christ Church, Philadelphia, 151-161. 107 “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Baptisms 1769-1794,” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia 1906), HSP. 300

baptismal records are available between 1771 and 1777 and no racial notations appear on the lists from 1777 to 1789. At the First Moravian Church, from 1782 to 1783, a

“mulatto” and a “negro” were baptized by the Reverend Daniel Sydrich, but these two baptisms represented a decline in black baptisms compared to the 1764 to 1776 period.108

In the late 1770s and 1780s, conversely, the number of blacks baptized in

Philadelphia’s Presbyterians churches began to rise. After the congregation’s return to

Philadelphia following the British retreat, the Reverend Sproat baptized five more blacks at the Second Presbyterian Church, which made this church a growing center of interracial worship. In August 1779, Sproat baptized Edward “an adult Molatto living in my own House.” In 1782, he baptized a black child and in 1785, Sproat baptized John

Hemminger, “an adult Molatto,” and Ishmael, “an adult Negroe.” John Hemminger’s wife, Hannah Hemminger, a mulatto woman, was baptized in 1787. 109 At the First

Presbyterian Church, which apparently did not baptize any blacks in the colonial period, two blacks were baptized between 1780 and 1781. In 1780, “Neptune Turell a mulatto man about 23 years old” was baptized, and in 1781, “George, a negro child, son of Robert and Phillis Boardley” was baptized.110 It is likely that these black adults became church members in order for these baptisms to occur. At the Scots Presbyterian Church, founded in 1766, at least one black child was baptized between 1777 and 1790. The pastor wrote:

“Isaaec Worley Till son to Hannah a fre Nigroe woman in full Communion with the

108 “First Moravian Church Phila, PA Baptism, Marriages,” HSP; “St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, PA Baptisms 1759-71,” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Vol. XXXI, (Philadelphia, 1898), HSP; “St. Michael’s & Zion Evangelical Lutheran Congregation of Philadelphia, PA Baptisms 1777-1789,” Copied by Rev. A. S. Leiby, Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, HSP. 109 “Records of Second Presbyterian Church Philadelphia Baptism, Marriages, Burials, 1745- 1833,” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. 32 (Philadelphia, 1898), HSP. 110 “Records of First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Baptisms 1701-1856,” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Vol. XXVII (Philadelphia, 1896), HSP, 258, 368. 301

Church was born in Gen: Washington’s Camp Valey Forge nineteen months ago & baptized on this 4th Sabbath of Augt 1779.” Hannah, a free black woman and a member of the Scots Presbyterian Church, likely fled Philadelphia during the British occupation and sought employment with the Continental Troops at Valley Forge, where her son was born. They returned with others to Philadelphia after the British left, and her child was baptized in the reopened church. As described in Chapter Three, in the late 1780s,

Presbyterian churches moved toward making access to baptism and church membership more accessible for blacks, and slowly more blacks affiliated with Presbyterian churches.

Finally, the diversification of interracial worship continued among Philadelphia’s

Methodists, although there were apparently fewer black Methodists in Philadelphia than there were in New York City. In 1788, Philadelphia reported to the Annual Conference that their church included 270 whites and 17 black members and in 1789, they reported

256 whites and 17 blacks. By 1790, the members had changed to 215 whites and 24 blacks, so blacks accounted for roughly eleven percent of the membership.111 These black Methodists members included Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, William White,

Dorus Jennings, and others.112 As described in Chapter Three, Richard Allen was requested by St. George’s leadership in 1786 to preach to Philadelphia’s blacks and bring more of them into the Methodist fold. According to Allen’s account, a class or society of blacks at St. George included forty-two members in 1786, and in these years “many souls

111 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 61, 67, 95; Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 76, 85, and 95. 112 Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 144. 302

were awakened.”113 The Methodist church was a site of interracial worship between

1777 and 1790.

In regards to antislavery advocacy, most of Philadelphia’s churches contained both whites who opposed abolition and whites who supported emancipation. Because most congregations included both pro- and antislavery whites, it does not appear that antislavery sentiment was a determinant factor in black affiliation with the Episcopal,

Presbyterian, or Lutheran churches in Philadelphia. Gary Nash and Jean Soderlund summarize the religious affiliation of the Pennsylvanian legislators and their votes on the gradual abolition act of 1780. Nineteen Presbyterians supported emancipation while eleven opposed the bill; one German Lutheran supported it while four opposed it; one

German Reformed legislator supported emancipation while three opposed it; three

Episcopalians supported gradual emancipation while two opposed it; and finally two

Baptists and a French Huguenot supported the emancipation bill. Nash and Soderlund also calculated the slaveholding rates among congregants of various denominations.

Quakers had entirely rid themselves of slaves (or excommunicated slaveholders), but the number of slaveholding members of other denominations also decreased between 1775 and 1790. The Philadelphia Presbyterians dropped from 55 slave-owners to 21 by 1790, and the Episcopalians dropped from 118 slave-owners to 75 by 1790. Nash and

Soderlund argue that, “while Episcopalians were only about 14 percent of Philadelphia’s population in 1790, they comprised 43 percent of slaveholders […]. For Episcopalians, to free slaves or hold on to them remained an individual decision. The church made no

113 Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen: To Which Is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793 . . . with an Introduction of George A. Singleton (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 24-25. 303

effort to encourage manumission.” Nonetheless, more free and enslaved blacks were baptized at the Anglican churches than at any other denomination. As mentioned in the last chapter, the Presbyterian denomination passed a conservative statement that favored gradual emancipation in 1787, but they did not require members to free slaves.114

Despite not uniformly or thoroughly opposing slavery, black participation in Presbyterian churches rose in this period. The German churches were among the most proslavery churches of the mid-Atlantic, and Glatfelter writes that “By 1775, some Philadelphians were advancing beyond advocating humane treatment of blacks toward opposing the institution of slavery. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was not one of them. There is no known evidence that any German church pastor was.”115 The fact that German pastors and members of the legislature lagged behind other Philadelphians might account for the lower numbers of black Lutherans and Moravians and lack of black baptisms at the

German Reformed Church in Philadelphia, but not enough sources are available to definitively confirm this hypothesis. No denomination or church in Philadelphia in which blacks affiliated or attended, except for the Methodists, had a strong antislavery message, so the blacks who affiliated with the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Lutheran churches did so irrespective of the official stances on slavery. Some individual blacks found a benefit of church affiliate could be their individual liberty, but the connection between abolitionism and church affiliation remains tenuous. Methodists clearly held antislavery views and the church included a number of blacks, but some blacks chose to affiliate with other churches over the Methodists in this period.

114 Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees, 106-107 and 154-157. 115 Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1793, Volume 1, 290. 304

By 1780, the number of slaves in Philadelphia had dropped to approximately 539 and the number of free blacks rose to 241. By 1790, according to the U.S. Census, the number of slaves dropped to 301 and the number of free blacks in Philadelphia rose to

1,849, as many free blacks moved into Philadelphia from the broad nearby region.116 The black population was changing between 1777 and 1790, and part of the changes that occurred in this community was a growth in black affiliation with Methodist and

Presbyterian churches. But the religious landscape changed even more dramatically among black Philadelphians during the 1790s and 1800s.

Throughout the revolutionary era, the Anglican/Episcopal Church remained the denomination with the greatest number of black congregants and participants, including a substantial number of free blacks in Philadelphia. The church included some antislavery members and Episcopal slaveholders decreased by 1790, but the denomination as a whole was not abolitionist. The Episcopal churches of Philadelphia emerged from the

Revolution in better condition than many of the Episcopal churches of the North, and as a result they were in a better position to continue to provide benefits and a place of worship to many black Philadelphians between 1777 and 1790. The Methodist Church after the war became the denomination with the second highest number of black members in

Philadelphia. Many blacks heard Methodist preachers and a growing number of blacks became members in part because of the antislavery position of the church but also because of the preaching and religious work of Richard Allen. Lutheran and Moravian churches continued to have small numbers of black affiliates, especially before the war, but they did not rival the Anglicans and Methodists. Likewise, the Presbyterian churches clearly became more open to black members and black baptisms, especially after the war,

116 Nash and Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees, 18. 305

but the Presbyterians were a distant third in terms of the number of black baptisms and members. Like the Episcopalians, the Presbyterians included some antislavery members and a decreasing number of slaveholders, but Presbyterians did not make sacraments and education as accessible to blacks as the Episcopalians had done and they did not have a long-standing record of deliberate ministry to blacks. While the number of interracial churches in Philadelphia grew in the revolutionary era and increasing numbers of blacks were becoming free, most of the diversification was not due to a rise of antislavery advocacy.

* * * *

The largest cities of the North experienced the same sort of diversification of interracial religious worship that was evident across the entire North between 1764 and

1790. The introduction of Methodists and increases in the number of Baptist churches that admitted blacks were a large part of the diversification, but increasing numbers of

Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, and other churches also began baptizing and admitting blacks. In each of these four cities, more churches and denominations baptized and/or admitted blacks than at any previous time period. This diversification of worship occurred despite the major disruptions caused by British Army’s occupation of these cities. Whether the occupations lasted nine month or more than seven years, church buildings were destroyed, populations dispersed, and loyalist blacks and whites fled with the British Army. Despite losing many clergy members, being disestablished in New

York, and being targeted by Patriots, Anglican/Episcopal churches continued to baptize more blacks in northern cities than any other denomination. In Boston, many blacks

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made Trinity Episcopal Church, in particular, a center of black religious affiliation between 1777 and 1790. The education offered by Anglicans and the sincere desire of many Anglican minister to include blacks in their churches were likely the primary draws for many blacks, despite lukewarm support among Episcopalians of the growing antislavery sentiment. The sincere outreach of Methodists to blacks, and their promotion of universal emancipation and empowerment through the power of the Gospel, made the new Methodist societies and churches also among the most interracial of revolutionary era churches. Blacks found this denomination appealing because it encouraged blacks to speak, even in racially mixed setting, about their religious experiences. Whether they heard the unnamed black Methodist woman mentioned at the beginning of this chapter or

Richard Allen, blacks affiliated with Methodism because they saw churches that often took their experiences and their needs seriously. Finally, although blacks were choosing to participate in fewer Congregational churches in Boston, there was an increase in the number of black baptisms and black members in the Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and

Congregational churches of Newport, New York, and Philadelphia. Because most of these churches were slow or resistant to taking a stand against slavery, the increased black presence was not caused by antislavery activism. However, these churches were becoming more accessible and interested in including blacks, and as blacks chose to participate in these churches, it is likely that the black congregants encouraged these churches to moderate or eliminate their proslavery stances or their ambivalence to this issue. Viewed from the perspective of the 1750s, this diversification of interracial churches in quite remarkable, since only the Congregationalists and Anglicans uniformly included blacks and only some Lutheran and Moravians included blacks during the 1740s

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and 1750s. Precisely because the number of interracial churches rose in the revolutionary era, the rise of independent and separate black churches in the Early Republic was also a diverse process that included several denominations and different forms of Christianity.

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Chapter Five: “To Restore Our Long Lost Race”: The Rise of Separate Black Churches in the North, 1791-1820

On July 17th, 1794, a group of white ministers dedicated the “African Church of the City of Philadelphia,” also known as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.

Samuel Magaw, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and James Abercrombie, one of the minsters of Christ Church and St. Peter’s, officiated. In proud attendance were many black Philadelphians, including the church trustees who founded the church and built its edifice: Absalom Jones, William White, William Gray, William Gardner, William

Welcher, and Henry Stewart. Also present were “venerable clergy of almost every denomination, and a number of other very respectable citizens.” Perhaps the crowd nodded in approval when Magaw stated that “slavery is a hard allotment” and that this church had a duty to show “compassionate love to your brethren, who are yet in darkness, or bondage, in other parts of the world.”1 Black men and women founded this church, where Absalom Jones would soon become the minister, and dozens of other separate black churches in the North between 1790 and 1820. White leaders often, but not always, assisted black leaders in the establishment of these churches. However, at the very same time as this predominantly black church was ministering to the North’s black communities, some black men, women, and children were still being baptized in the predominantly white Episcopal churches of Philadelphia. In the same era that blacks were leaving predominantly white churches and founding separate churches, such as St.

Thomas’ Church and Bethel African Methodist Church, some of the North’s predominantly white churches were actually becoming more racially diverse than ever

1 William Douglass, Annals of the First African Church, in the United States of America, now styled the African Episcopal church of St. Thomas, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: King & Baird Printers, 1862), 58, 66, 79, and 85-92.

before. The formation of separate black churches after 1790 is often described as the end of interracial worship in the North, but, in fact, black religious activity increased not only in separate churches but also in a significant portion of the North’s predominantly white churches between 1791 and 1820.

The formation of numerous separate black churches in this era was hardly the end of interracial churches in the North. While Indian participation in predominantly white churches dropped to minute levels after a wave of separate Indian churches were founded in the 1750s, black participation in some churches and denominations actually rose in the same period that the first black churches were founded. There was a remarkable rise in the number of Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches that began to baptize and/or admit blacks from 1791 to 1820. In addition, numerous Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal,

Congregational, and Lutheran churches continued to baptize and admit some blacks to membership. The continued participation of blacks in predominantly white churches occurred because many blacks in the North, especially those who lived away from major cities, still lacked the resources necessary to found and support independent churches. In numerous communities, predominantly white churches remained the only options for blacks. Moreover, black men and women, sometimes even in the cities that had black churches, continued to affiliate with predominantly white churches presumably because of longstanding attachments to those congregations, preferences for certain theological traditions, and educational opportunities. Blacks remained affiliated with these churches despite usually being excluded from leadership positions and the best seats.

The first independent black churches were founded in northern cities between

1790 and 1820 as black communities acquired the resources necessary to maintain

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churches and the advantages of affiliating with a predominantly white church ceased to outweigh the disadvantages. As some white Presbyterians in Philadelphia stated, blacks sought their own churches because it had become “inconvenient and unpleasant” for them to remain in white churches. Segregated seating, white paternalism, and proscriptions against black voting and leadership, however, were not the only reasons that blacks sought to form independent churches. Black churches appealed to many people because they provided benefits that white churches would not or could not provide. In particular, black churches became centers for the development of black leaders, antislavery activism, cultural activities, and other pursuits. One of the greatest advantages of independent black churches, like the advantage of separate churches for Indians, was that these churches could be platforms where black leaders could freely use Christianity to critique the racism and exploitation that people of color experienced in the North.

Finally, these churches provided satisfying spiritual communities and essential support structures that met the education, political, and occasionally economic needs of free blacks and Afro-Indians in many cities.

The development of black churches and the increase in black participation in some predominantly white churches were both products of a remarkable movement of church planting, denominational strengthening, and religious revivalism that Nathan

Hatch has termed the “democratization of American Christianity.” This period of time was an era of itinerant and revivalist preachers, new religious groups, missionary societies, proliferating religious publications, ecclesiastical controversies, and widespread, popular engagement with diverse religious traditions. One of the common elements of the religious culture of this time was that many of the new religious

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movements “challenged common people to take religious destiny into their own hands, to think for themselves, to oppose centralized authority and the elevation of the clergy as a separate order of men.” As Hatch further notes, from the 1780s to the 1830s, this

“sudden growth indicated a profound religious upsurge and resulted in a vastly altered religious landscape,” which included the development of the black churches and other new religious organizations in the United States.2 Northern blacks increasingly had options in choosing where to worship, and nothing could have been more democratic.

However, Hatch and other scholars have missed the fact that black participation increased in a number of predominantly white churches at the same times as black churches were developing and expanding. The rise of independent black churches and black affiliation with some predominantly white churches were simultaneous occurrences. In other words, black Christianity, in all of its forms, was on the rise between 1791 and 1820. As much as the rise of separate black churches and denominations was a central part of the religious history of this period, interracial religious worship still remained common in many parts of the North.

Rise of Racially Separate Black Churches

The period of 1791 to 1820 witnessed the rise of a significant number of separate black churches in the North. Many black northerners found that separate churches provided social, political, and leadership benefits to them that very few, if any, predominantly white churches could provide. Graham Hodges argues that “independent, black churches softened the pain of socially-imposed segregation among the

2 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Have: Yale University Press, 1989), 4, 58. 312

economically disadvantaged and anchored the construction of benevolence societies, literary and political forums, and occupational structures with the communities. A final and very important reason for independence was that the black ministry was engaged in the struggle to end slavery.”3 There is little evidence that blacks left predominantly white churches over theological disputes, although distinct black theological traditions developed over time. Most blacks withdrew because independent black churches allowed for the greater development of black leaders, the support of other cultural institutions, and the regular worship of God without segregated seating. Black leaders also believed that more black men and women would hear the gospel message and would be converted within separate churches than could be reached in integrated churches.

As had been the case with the founding of new Indian churches in the 1750s, talented and compelling leaders were necessary for the founding of separate black churches. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones of Philadelphia, Peter Williams Jr. of New

York, Thomas Paul of Boston, and dozens of other black men, many of whom became renowned for their preaching and their dedication to parishioners, were crucial in the formation of black churches after 1790. Albert Raboteau cautions against viewing “white racism as the reason for the development of the black church” because “black religious independence arose from black initiative and not simply in reaction to white discrimination.”4 That being said, the limited avenues available for blacks to develop as leaders in predominantly white churches made those congregations less appealing to blacks in the Early Republic. While some people, such as Lemuel Haynes of Rutland,

3 Graham Russell Hodges, Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White (New York: Madison Books, 1993), 8. 4 Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on Africa-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 80-81. 313

Vermont and Charles Bowles of New Hampshire and Vermont, were able to carve-out spaces as ministers in predominantly white churches in parts of the country that lacked an abundance of clergy, the vast majority of northern Protestant churches would not accept a black man as minister or even as a deacon or vestryman.

Religious conviction was also a powerful motivation for these separate churches.

Black leaders believed that more black northerners would be reached by the gospel message and would convert through black churches than through interracial churches.

African American Presbyterian minister William Catto wrote in 1857 about the motives behind the founding of the African Presbyterian Church and stated that “there was a conviction in their minds that what they were doing was for the advancement of God’s glory among men of unborn generations, and conceiving it to be conducive to God’s glory, they saw it was their duty to enter upon the work with all their hearts, and soul, and strength.”5 Historian Nathan Hatch notes that black churches facilitated and enabled blacks to “nurture their own leaders, sustain networks of communication, express racial strength, and reach out to enfold other sisters and brothers into the fellowship of Christian community.”6 Hatch’s statement connects the pursuit of leadership positions to the issue of reaching greater numbers of blacks as the reasons behind independent black churches.

Blacks in the cities of the mid-Atlantic founded a greater number and variety of churches between 1791 and 1820 than blacks in New England because of their superior numbers and resources. New York City and Philadelphia had five and seven black churches respectively by 1820. These two cities became magnets for blacks after the

5 William T. Catto, A Semi-Centenary Discourse, Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia with a History of the Church from its First Organization (first published 1857; reprinted Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 66-67. 6 Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 113. 314

Revolution, especially with the rise of black freedom after 1800. New York City’s free black population increased by 600 percent between 1790 and 1810. Already, by 1800,

New York and Philadelphia were over ten percent black, with 6,367 blacks in New York

City and 4,265 blacks in Philadelphia. New York City, unlike Boston or Philadelphia, however, still contained over 2,800 slaves in 1800. Philadelphia, between 1791 and

1820, had among the largest free black communities in the North. Although most blacks occupied the lowest laboring positions in the economy, Philadelphia’s community also included some wealthy black artisans and a few black professionals. Because of its size and relative affluence, this black community, more than most in the North, had the resources necessary to form and maintain separate churches. By contrast, Boston in 1800 had about 1,174 black residents, who made up 4.71 percent of the city’s population. The relatively small size of Boston’s black community delayed the development of a diversity of separate black churches.7 Methodist (including African Methodist) churches were overwhelmingly the most common form of independent black churches in the North, but by 1820 there were also at least two black Baptist churches, two black Episcopal churches, and at least one black Presbyterian churches in New York City and

Philadelphia. Table 5-10 lists many of the known black churches founded in the North between 1791 and 1820.

7 James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 83-84. 315

Table 5-1: Black churches by location founded 1791 to 1820:

Name Location Denomination Year Est.

Massachusetts African Baptist Church (Third Baptist) Boston, Mass. Baptist 1805 May /Revere Street Methodist Church Boston, Mass. Methodist 1818

Rhode Island Bethel Church Providence, R.I. A.M.E. 1795 Pond Street Baptist Church Providence, R.I. Baptist 1819 Congdon Street Baptist Church Providence, R.I. Baptist 1819

Connecticut John Wesley Church New Haven, Conn. A.M.E. Zion 1818

New York African Methodist Episcopal Zion New York, N.Y. A.M.E. Zion 1796 Church Abyssinian Baptist Church New York, N.Y. Baptist 1808 Macedonia Church Flushing, N.Y. Methodist 1811 African Asbury A.M.E. Zion Church New York, N.Y. A.M.E. Zion 1814 St. Philips (African) Episcopal Church New York, N.Y. Episcopal 1816 African Methodist Church (out of the Brooklyn, N.Y. Methodist 1817 Sands Street Meth. Ch) African Methodist Society Brooklyn, N.Y. A.M.E. Zion 1818 Williamsburgh Bethel A.M.E. New York, N.Y. A.M.E. 1819 Second Baptist Church Geneva, N.Y. Baptist 1820

New Jersey Mt. Zion Church Kesson, N.J. Later A.M.E. 1800 Bethel Church Pennsauken, N.J. Later A.M.E. 1800 Mt. Pisgah Church Salem, N.J. A.M.E. 1802 First Colored Church (Mt. Zion) Trenton, N.J. Bapt or A.M.E. 1811 Bethel A.M.E. Church Woodbury, N.J. A.M.E. 1817 Trinity Church (later A.M.E.) Gouldtown, N.J. A.M.E. 1818

Pennsylvania St. Thomas African Episcopal Church Philadelphia, Pa. Episcopal 1792 Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Philadelphia, Pa. A.M.E. 1792 Chh First African Presbyterian Church Philadelphia, Pa. Presbyterian 1807 Campbell A.M.E. Church Philadelphia, Pa. A.M.E. 1807 Bethel A.M.E. Church Pittsburg, Pa. A.M.E. 1808 First African Baptist Church Philadelphia, Pa. Baptist 1809 Philadelphia Bethlehem Church Langhorne, Pa. Later A.M.E. 1809

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A.M.E. Union Church Philadelphia, Pa. A.M.E. 1809 Union (A.M.E.) Church of Allentown Allentown, Pa. A.M.E. 1809 Black Methodist Church Deer Creek, Pa. Methodist 1815 Bethel Methodist Church York, Pa. Methodist 1816 Bethel A.M.E.Church Lancaster, Pa. A.M.E. 1817 A.M.E. Church or African Church Harrisburg, Pa. A.M.E. 1817 Bethel A.M.E. Church Westchester, Pa. A.M.E. 1818 St. Paul A.M.E. Church Washington, Pa. A.M.E. 1818 Wesley A.M.E. Zion Church Philadelphia, Pa. A.M.E. Zion 1820 Bethel A.M.E. Church Carlisle, Pa, A.M.E. 1820

Sources: Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realties of the First Years (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman Publishing Company, 2004), 66-70, 82-88, 182-184; Robert C. Hayden, Faith Culture, and Leadership: A History of the Black Church in Boston (Boston: Boston Branch NAACP, 1983), 3-17; Robert L. Carter, Jr., A History of the Black Churches of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire Volume 1 (Worcester: United Baptist Convention of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, 2003), 43, 65, 82, and 83; Marilyn J. Chiat, America’s Religious Architecture: Sacred Places for Every Community (John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 84; Richard G, Johnson, They All Stand Fair: A Social History of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Reading, Pa, 1834-1859 (Pennsylvania : s.n., 1980).

Although all black northerners did not share the same denominational preferences, black Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians each followed a common pattern when they formed separate churches. The histories of St. Thomas

African Episcopal Church Philadelphia, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church

Philadelphia, First African Presbyterian Church Philadelphia, the African Methodist

Episcopal Zion Church New York, St. Philips African Episcopal Church New York, and the African Baptist Church of Boston have been detailed by other historians.8 Examining

8 Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen: To Which Is Annexed the Rise and Progress of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, Containing a Narrative of the Yellow Fever in the Year of Our Lord 1793 . . . with an Introduction of George A. Singleton (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 24, 26, 27; Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the A.M.E. Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Douglass, Annals of the First African Church; Dee Andrews and Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, “Notes and Documents: The African Methodists of Philadelphia, 1794-1802,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108, No. 4 (Oct., 1984); Carol V.R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Rise of Independent Black Churches 1760-1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Craig D. Townsend, Faith in their Own Color: Black Episcopalians in Antebellum New York City (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); John Jamison Moore, History of the A. M. E. Zion Church in America, Founded in 1796, In the City of New York (York, Pa.: Teachers' Journal Office, 1884); Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realties of the First Years (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman Publishing Company, 2004); James O. and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: 317

these churches together, however, highlights several common experiences. Black northerners began organizing informal religious services before separate churches were formed. Black leaders often confronted segregation and restrictions on their leadership as they developed churches. They justified separate and independent churches by arguing that they could more effectively evangelize unchristian blacks. Black churches did receive support from sympathetic whites, but paternalism and attempts to control black churches convinced some black Christians, particularly black Methodists, that separate denominations were a necessary safeguard to the independence of their church congregations.

Independent black churches often grew out of informal religious meetings held in homes and public spaces by black preachers and exhorters. The Free African Society of

Philadelphia, founded in 1787 as a mutual aid association by Absalom Jones, Richard

Allen, and others, began holding occasional interdenominational religious services in a rented room on January 1, 1791 before the members of this organization took the steps necessary to form a separate congregation.9 Eventually the majority of the Free Society members formed the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church and a minority of the members formed Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. The first religious services held by black Bostonians, perhaps as early as 1789, were also interdenominational meetings at Franklin Hall and/or Faneuil Hall on Tuesday or Friday

Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999), 42; George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750-1860 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994), 82, 88, 133, 266-271; Robert C. Hayden, Faith, Culture, and Leadership: A History of the Black Churches in Boston (Boston: Boston Branch NAACP, 1983), 3-4; John H. Hewitt, Jr., Protest and Progress: New York’s First Black Episcopal Church Fights Racism (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000); Catto, A Semi-Centenary Discourse, Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia. 9 Andrews and Derounian, “Notes and Documents: The African Methodists of Philadelphia,” 474- 475; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 62-63; Douglass, Annals of the First African Church, 18, 42, 43, 46-51; Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, 84-85. 318

afternoons. Thomas Paul, a black Baptist from New Hampshire, began leading these meetings before a separate black Baptist church was officially organized in 1806. Many of the attendees at these services remained members of predominantly white churches, including roughly thirty to thirty-five black Baptists who were members of predominantly white churches.10

The first black Episcopal congregation in New York City also began informally as an outgrowth of an educational organization. Around 1807 some blacks at Trinity

Episcopal Church organized the African Episcopal Catechetical Institution, and Trinity

Church provided twenty-five dollars for hiring an instructor. This organization took over the work of teaching blacks about Christianity and basic literacy, which had been supported by Trinity Church since the early eighteenth century. This group eventually developed into an African Episcopal congregation. Sometime around 1809 or 1810, the

African Episcopal Catechetical Institution began using a rented room at the African Free

School to hold classes and perhaps religious services, but no sacraments were administered at the school because apparently no ordained clergy participated. This group soon began to seek the ordination of a black man so that they could function fully as a distinct Episcopal congregation. Peter Williams Jr. was licensed as a lay reader sometime between 1810 and 1812, and he was later ordained as a deacon and then as a priest. He led the St. Philip’s Episcopal Church from its founding to his death.11 In the

North’s major cities, free blacks typically organized schools and mutual aid associations

10 Horton, Black Bostonians, 42-43; Levesque, Black Boston, 82, 88, 133, 266-271; James O. Horton, “Generations of Protest: Black Families and Social Reform in Ante-Bellum Boston,” New England Quarterly 49, no. 2 (Jun., 1976), 245-246; Hayden, Faith, Culture, and Leadership, 3-4. 11 Townsend, Faith in Their Own Color, 27. 319

before they organized churches. However, these organizations often began holding informal religious services and formed the basis for developing separate black churches.

The creation of many separate churches involved blacks confronting segregation in predominantly white churches and restrictions on their leadership roles. The desire to serve in leadership capacities, including the position of pastor, motivated the formation of black churches. The founding of Philadelphia’s St. Thomas African Episcopal Church and the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, led respectively by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, developed at least partially as a result of white proscriptions against black religious leadership at the predominantly white St. George’s Methodist Church.

Allen wrote that “we established prayer meetings and meetings of exhortation [at St.

George’s], and the Lord blessed our endeavors […] but the elder soon forbid us holding any such meetings […] and when the colored people began to get numerous in attending the church [St. George’s], they moved us from seats we usually sat on, and placed us around the wall.”12 The white leadership began to restrict Allen’s ministerial work among blacks and it began to enforce greater segregation in church seating. At roughly the same time as the Free African Society had begun holding some separate services, conflicts between white and black Methodists increased the incentives for creating a separate church.

After work on forming a separate church had begun, tensions between whites and blacks at St. George’s caused a disruption at a public worship service, and the event hastened the departure of many blacks from this predominantly white church. One

Sunday morning in 1792 or 1793, as black worshippers arrived for the service, the sexton

12 Richard Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 25; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 59-60. 320

instructed them to sit in the newly constructed gallery, instead of on the benches on the first floor that they previously occupied. As Allen recalled it, the black Methodists, including himself and Jones, found seats near the front of the gallery, “over the ones we formerly occupied below.” As the congregation kneeled to pray, however, one of the trustees interrupted Jones’ silent prayers. Allen wrote,

We had not been long upon out knees before I heard considerable scuffing and low talking. I raised my head up and saw one of the trustees, H___ M____, having hold of the Rev. Absalom Jones, pulling him up off of his knees, and saying, “You must get up – you must not kneel here.” Mr. Jones replied, “Wait until prayer is over.” Mr. H___ M____ said “No, you must get up now, or I will call for aid and force you away.” Mr. Jones said, “Wait until prayer is over, and I will get up and trouble you no more.” With that he beckoned to one of the trustees, Mr. L___ S____ to come to his assistance. He came, and went to William White to pull him up. By this time prayer was over, and we all went out of the church in a body, and they were no more plagued with us in the church.13

Years later, Allen cited this white affront against black worshippers as a turning point in the development of independent Methodist churches. In other congregations as well, the tensions between white and black worshippers helped to motivate the development of separate churches. A.M.E. Zion Bishop John Moore in 1885 wrote that “race prejudice, and proscription” were the reasons that caused New York City’s black Methodists to worship separately. Specifically, he stated that the white Methodists “licensed a number of colored men to preach, but prohibited them from preaching even to their own brethren, except occasionally, and never among the whites.”14 These black preachers asserted that they should be allowed to preach the gospel as freely as white ministers.

The first black Presbyterian church in the North was also created in part because blacks were no longer willing to endure the limitation they faced in predominantly white

13 Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 26. 14 Moore, History of the A. M. E. Zion Church in America, 15-16; Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, In Three Volumes, Volume 2, From January 1, 1787 to December 31, 1800 (New York: Land & Scott, 1852), 270. 321

congregations. The Reverend William Catto wrote in 1857 that, “about the beginning of the present century, it became a subject of considerable conversation among the few colored people in Philadelphia whose preferences were Presbyterian, of raising a

Presbyterian Church. The idea seemed to be general among them.”15 The desire to form a separate church was generally supported by the black Presbyterians, and Catto stated that the black Presbyterians wanted “an organization of colored people where church government could be committed to, and governed by them, […] without separating from

Presbyterian bodies, or alienating themselves from their fellow Christians.”16 They desired to remain Presbyterian and continue to have relations with white Presbyterians, but they also wanted to fully participate in the church, which was something that whites prevented in interracial churches. Statements from white Presbyterians reinforce this conclusion. The Reverend Archibald Alexander, pastor of the Pine Street Presbyterian

Church, founded the Evangelical Society of Philadelphia in 1806. In addition to evangelical activities among whites, this group was “charged with the business of assisting in forming an African Presbyterian Congregation in the City & vicinity of

Philadelphia.” In 1809 this white committee published a plea for funds that stated the following about the desire of black Presbyterians to form a separate church:

There are many, who from education or principle, are attached to the Presbyterian church. These find it to be inconvenient and unpleasant, for reasons which need not now be stated, to attend the houses of worship frequented by the white people. They are anxious to form a Presbyterian congregation among themselves; and they ought to be assisted and encouraged.17

15 Catto, A Semi-Centenary Discourse, Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, 18; There are apparently no extent records from the early decades of this church, although some records of the Evangelical Society exist. Catto, when writing the 1857 history, did not even have records from the early years. He relied on information from a few surviving black members and white Presbyterians who helped form the church and some scattered written sources. 16 Catto, A Semi-Centenary Discourse, 19. 17 “To the Pious and Benevolent,” July 31, 1809, Box 1, folder 2, Evangelical Society of Philadelphia, Records, 1809-1815, RG 313, PHS; Catto, A Semi-Centenary Discourse, 50-53. 322

While these whites, including all the pastors of Philadelphia’s Presbyterian churches, avoided acknowledging that second-class status that made churches “inconvenient and unpleasant” to black Presbyterians, they did seek to encourage the formation of a separate church, which was an idea initiated by the black Presbyterians. White obstruction of black preaching and leadership was a major disadvantage of remaining within a white church, and blacks formed separate churches in order to preach, hold leadership positions, and avoid segregated seating. Early black church leaders, however, also articulated specifically religious justifications for separate churches.

Many founders of black churches argued that separate institutions were needed in order to better reach unconverted black northerners. The leaders of Philadelphia’s St.

Thomas Episcopal Church stated in 1810 that the primary “causes and motives” behind the establishment of their church was “for the purpose of advancing our friends in a true knowledge of God, of true religion, and of the ways and means to restore our long lost race, to the dignity of men and of Christians.” For these black Christians, the reasons for starting a separate black church were to facilitate both the Christianization of other blacks and their elevation in American society. They believed that a black church could further the work of Christianization and elevation better than interracial churches could. To safeguard this mission, they decreed that only “men of color, who are Africans, or the descendants of the African race, can elect, or be elected into any office among us, save that of a minister or assistant minister.”18 Richard Allen’s reason for forming an African

18 “Act of Incorporation, Causes and Motives, of the African Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, White-Hall, 1810,” Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, 1673-1949, Collection 227A, Section 6: Miscellaneous Section, Box 32, File 1, HSP; Douglass, Annals of the First African Church, 93-95, 99; Andrews and Derounian, “The African Methodists of Philadelphia,” 474, 475, and 481; Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 29, 30; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 70. 323

American Methodist Church after the St. Thomas Church had been founded followed a similar logic. Allen wrote that, “I was confident that there was no religious sect or denomination would suit the capacity of colored people as well as the Methodist; for the plain and simple gospel suits best for any people.”19 In other words, he chose to remain

Methodist and form a black Methodist congregation because he believed that such a church was better suited for ministering to Philadelphia’s blacks than the Episcopal

Church. The primary purpose of both St. Thomas Episcopal Church and Bethel A.M.E.

Church was the conversion and elevation of black Philadelphians.

The founders of the St. Philip’s church told the vestry of Trinity Church in

November 1817 that a separate black Episcopal church was necessary in order to maintain and grow the number of black Episcopalians in the city. Regarding the meetings and classes already being held among black New Yorkers, these black leaders wrote about the general “disposition which they have manifested to conform in all things to the rites & ceremonies of the church; and of the prospects they have in providing a convenient place, of securing to the Church the attachment of a large number of coloured persons.” Essentially, there were many blacks who appreciated the Episcopal liturgy and the number of black Episcopalians would increase if a separate church could be built.

“On the other hand,” they warned, “it is most evident that if some such arrangement is not soon made there will be a great falling off in that class of Episcopalians.” They furthermore stated that “some hundreds have already left the church, whom they have reason to believe, would not have done so had some such provision been made for their accommodation.” Finally, they felt “anxious” that unless funds could be raised and a

19 Andrews and Derounian, “The African Methodists of Philadelphia,” 476, 483-484; Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 29; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 70-72. 324

separate black Episcopal church formed, then more people would “be led to Depart from that form of worship, and those doctrines, which they believe to be most scriptural and most conducive to the interests of true religion.” A significant number of blacks were attracted, in the words of Peter Williams Jr., to “the doctrines and worship of our holy and apostolic church,” so they sought to maintain Episcopal worship in a black parish where they could avoid the disadvantages of worshipping with whites but still enjoy the spiritual tradition they desired. The leaders of the African Institution, including Peter

Williams Jr., argued that a separate black Episcopal church was necessary not only in order to reach more blacks but also to maintain the adherence of the black

Episcopalians.20

For the black Presbyterians in Philadelphia, the reasons for founding a separate black church were not only the proscriptions against blacks in white churches but also the belief that a separate church could better evangelize other people of color. Even before a church building could be constructed, many people were attending the preaching of black

Presbyterian minister John Gloucester. Catto reported that Gloucester’s congregation soon outgrew meetings in private homes, and he preached outdoors or at a schoolhouse

“to large numbers of serious hearers.” The Evangelical Society and black leaders sought to build a church, and the subscription that the whites and blacks circulated to raise funds listed the “the importance of correct religious instruction to the People of Colour” and the belief that Gloucester’s congregation would “promote the present and future happiness of

20 “The Petition of Peter Williams, Jnr, Lewis Francis, Andrew Rankins, John Kent, Thomas Zabriskie, John Beas, John Marander, and William Pate, managers of the African Episcopal Catechetical Institution, in the City of New York,” November 17th, 1817, Trinity Church Archive, Box 288, VP 3, 1816-1820, Vestry Papers – folder 288-9; “To the Rector, Wardens and Vestrymen of Trinity Church, in the City of New York,” New York, May 6th, 1819, Trinity Church Archive, Box 288, VP 3, 1816-1820, Vestry Papers – folder 288-9; Townsend, Faith in Their Own Color. 325

the Africans” as reasons for supporting this work. Both the black Presbyterian leaders and their white allies believed that a separate church would better serve the interests of

Philadelphia’s black citizens than a predominantly white church would.

The formation of separate black churches in the North usually proceeded with the support of influential white clergymen and laypersons. Many of the founders of black churches found some whites who supported them, but in some cases the white support eventually became overbearing. Methodist Bishop Asbury met with the black Methodist classes in New York City in July 1795 and discussed the possibility of forming a separate black church. In response to their request, he granted permission in October 1796 for these blacks to form a separate Methodist church or society in New York. Initially, in

New York, the separate black church was supported by some white ministers. Early church historian John Moore described the initial years of this church:

They held prayer meetings on Sunday afternoons, in the intervals of the divine service held by the white brethren, between the afternoon and evening service, and also preaching and exhorting meetings. Wednesday nights, the meetings were conducted by those of the colored brethren, that were licensed to exhort and to preach. At this time, there were in the city of New York, three licensed preachers, viz: Abraham Thompson, June Scott, Thomas Miller, and William Miller, an exhorter, who officiated as they had opportunity.21

Bishop Asbury continued to visit and provide some support to the African Methodist

Episcopal Church in the City of New York or “Zion Church” between 1802 and 1815. In

June 1815, the year before his death, Asbury wrote that, “I spoke a few words at the

African chapel, both colours being present.”22 Other white clergy also routinely preached

21 Moore, History of the A. M. E. Zion Church in America, 17. 22 Moore, History of the A. M. E. Zion Church in America, 16-17, 19-20, 28, and 29; Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, In Three Volumes, Volume 3, From January 1, 1801 to December 7, 1815 (New York: Land & Scott, 1852), 67, 78, 224, 279, 337, 363, 385, and 453. 326

and administered sacraments during the early years of this church because no black leaders had yet to be ordained as a minister.

Support for separate churches often came in the forms of white ordination of black minister and financial aid. In October 1794, the Church of St. Thomas officially proposed Absalom Jones to Bishop William White as a candidate for ordination.

Absalom Jones was ordained a deacon in 1795 and a priest in 1804 by Bishop William

White, thereby making him the first black Episcopal priest in America.23 White

Methodists and Baptists also ordained black pastors. Methodist Bishop Asbury, for example, ordained African Americans James Varick, Abraham Thomas, and June Scott as deacons in 1806.24

Whites assisted in the creation of black church buildings by contributing financially and by consecrating or dedicating the churches. White Methodists Francis

Asbury and John Dickins helped dedicate Bethel African Methodist Church on July 29,

1794.25 In July 1805, the predominantly white Baptist churches of Boston received letters from Scipio Dalton and Cato Gardner requesting their help in establishing a separate black Baptist church. Eventually, the white Baptist ministers led the service that dedicated the black church building (shown in Figure 5-1) and this black church joined the same Baptist Association as Boston’s other Baptist churches and remained apparently on reasonably good terms with white Baptist churches.26

23 Douglass, Annals of the First African Church, 101-106, 107-110, 123; Townsend, Faith in their Own Color, 30-31; Absalom Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon, Preached January 1, 1808, In St. Thomas’s or the African Episcopal, Church, Philadelphia: on Account of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, on That Day, By the Congress of the United States (Philadelphia: 1808). 24 Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Volume 3, pp. 67, 78, 224, 279, 337, 363, 385, and 453. 25 Andrews and Derounian, “The African Methodists of Philadelphia,” 476, 483-484; Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 31; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 70-72. 26 Horton, Black Bostonians, 42; Levesque, Black Boston, 82, 88, 133, 266-271; Hayden, Faith, Culture, and Leadership, 3-4. 327

Financial support from the predominantly white Trinity Episcopal Church was

essential to the formation of St.

Philip’s Church, even though black

New Yorkers sacrificially worked to

support their church too. St. Philip's

Episcopal Church in New York City

was founded with a great deal of

support and corporation from Trinity

Episcopal Church, but Craig

Townsend shows how these black

leaders had to carry the “burden of Figure 5-1: The African Meetinghouse, built by the First African Baptist Church in 1806. overcoming racial stigmas at each Source: S.N. Dickinson, The Boston Almanac for the Year 1843 (Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 1843), pp. 88. incremental movement” in order to create a black Episcopal congregation.27 On November 17th, 1817, eight men, the managers of the African Episcopal Catechetical Institution, petitioned the vestry of

Trinity Church for financial aid, and the vestry voted in June 1818 to provide three thousand dollars for “school House & place of worship” for the African Institution, as long as the Intuition would remain “under the ecclesiastical authority of the Protestant

Episcopal Church in this State.” Upon Peter Williams Jr.’s request, the vestry also agreed in 1819 that Trinity Church would pay the rent for the new church’s property for

27 Townsend, Faith in Their Own Color, 42. 328

seven years and would provide the loan guarantee that was needed in order to finance construction of the church building.28

The First African Presbyterian Church was established cooperatively by white and black leaders and the black Presbyterians found support for their plan among white

Presbyterians, especially through the Evangelical Society of Philadelphia.29 The

Evangelical Society found a temporary meeting place for the black Presbyterian congregation and paid the Reverend Gloucester’s salary for at least three months while the congregation began. In July 1809, Gloucester’s congregation sent a committee to meet with the Evangelical Society regarding the need for a permanent church building.

By October 1809, $1,400 had been raised for purchasing a lot and building a church, and the white committee sought a suitable piece of land at the corner of Seventh and Shippen

(now Bainbridge) Streets, “after consulting with the people of colour.” The whites also expressed that the people of color would “take the Deed therefor in their own names in

Trust for the African Presbyterian Congregation, to be conveyed to Trustees of said

Congregation as soon as they shall have been incorporated.” With the money raised, the congregation built “a substantial brick church.”30 White financial support and ordinations were important for the creation of the first black churches in the North, but some black congregations soon found white support overbearing or even obstructionist.

28 Copy of Minutes of the Vestry, 1791-1826, Corporation of Trinity Church, Volume 2, June 8, 1818, pp 328 and March 15, 1819, pp. 335 and May 10, 1819 pp. 338; “The Petition of Peter Williams, Jnr, Lewis Francis, Andrew Rankins, John Kent, Thomas Zabriskie, John Beas, John Marander, and William Pate, managers of the African Episcopal Catechetical Institution, in the City of New York,” November 17th, 1817 and “To the Rector, Wardens and Vestrymen of Trinity Church, in the City of New York,” New York, May 6th, 1819, Trinity Church Archive, Box 288, VP 3, 1816-1820, Vestry Papers – folder 288-9. 29 “Copy of a Resolution (to purchase a Lot) given to Rev’d John Gloucester, dated Oct 6th, 1809,” MS EV14, Box 1, folder 2, Evangelical Society of Philadelphia, Records, 1809-1815, RG 313, PHS; Catto, A Semi-Centenary Discourse, 43-44. 30 “Copy of a Resolution (to purchase a Lot) given to Rev’d John Gloucester”; Catto, A Semi- Centenary Discourse, 50-53. 329

Bethel Church in Philadelphia and Zion Church in New York originally remained black churches within the predominantly white Methodist denomination. However, these congregations and others eventually formed African American denominations and completely separated from white churches because whites hierarchies became overbearing and obstructionist. When articles of corporation were written for Bethel

Church, white leaders gave themselves certain powers, including the right to preach twice a week at the black church. Dee Andrews and Kathryn Zabelle Derounian argue that, in the charter, “the ‘African’ identity of the church could not have been more explicitly expressed,” but some white Methodists later sought to control Bethel.31 A legal dispute occurred in 1807 when a white Methodist minister tried to use the powers in the incorporation to gain control of Bethel Church, but church members amended the articles of incorporation to grant the trustees more control over their own church. White

Methodists did not relent in their arrogant attempts to control Bethel, and they even confiscated the church’s building and put it up for auction. Allen and the congregation were forced to purchase their building a second time for a staggering price. White

Methodists filed lawsuits against Bethel, but the leaders of Bethel persevered and maintained control of their church. After these lawsuits, these black Methodists knew that complete independence from white Methodists was the only way to guarantee the control of their own church. At a meeting in Philadelphia in 1816, African Methodists from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey formed the African Methodist Episcopal

(A.M.E.) denomination and made Richard Allen the first bishop. It is clear that white

31 Andrews and Derounian, “The African Methodists of Philadelphia,” 477; Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 31; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 72-73. 330

attempts to undermine this church helped convince Allen and others of the need for a separate black denomination.32

By 1820, members of Zion Church in New York City were contemplating a separation from the predominantly white Methodist denomination as well. As some white Methodists sought to change the powers that ministers had over church property in the denomination, the Zion Church leaders feared that their property could be taken out of their control. Some of the members of this congregation, however, disagreed over whether to remain as an independent congregation within the Methodist Church or to form a new denomination. Peter William Sr., who preferred remaining with the

Methodist denomination, was outvoted, and the church moved to separate from the

Methodist Episcopal Church. Williams, according to historian Craig Townsend,

“returned to John Street Church along with those who did not see a black denomination as the most useful direction to go.” The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was incorporated as a separate denomination in 1820. It sent a message to the white

Methodist conferences of New York and Philadelphia and explained “that when the

Methodist Society in America was small, the Africans enjoyed comfortable privileges among their white brethren, but as the white element increased, the Africans were pressed back; therefore, it was thought necessary for them to have separate places of worship, giving the Africans a better opportunity of full religious enjoyment and privileges.” They further explained that within the white Methodist denomination “they have been too limited in their ministerial privileges” because black preachers were not encouraged or

32 An interesting counterfactual possibility is that Bethel would have possibly remained within a white denomination, similar to how black Episcopal, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches remained in white denominations, if the white Methodists had not done so much to undermine and disrupt Allen’s work. Allen, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen, 32-35; Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, 90-92; Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 131-135, 159-170, 173-181. 331

even allowed to do the itinerant work of dispensing “the Word of life among our own race.” Thus, the separate denomination was necessary, like the separate congregation, in order “to promote the spiritual interest of our people generally” and so that “our preachers would receive new encouragement in their ministerial labors.”33 Black

Methodists in the North completed their separation from white Methodists in response to the limitations that white denominations placed on black churches. Most black

Presbyterian, Baptist, and Episcopal congregations, conversely, remained in denominations or associations with white churches, despite the limitations that whites placed on their participation in the denominational bodies.34

Between 1791 and 1820, numerous blacks in the North had participated in founding separate churches and, in the process, many left the predominantly white churches to which they had previously affiliated. By 1820, many of these churches were flourishing. The First African Baptist Church of Boston was constituted on August 8,

1805 and their meetinghouse opened in December 1806. The original members consisted of nine men and fifteen women. By 1819, this church included over 100 members, which was about six percent of Boston’s black population.35

Blacks in Philadelphia and New York City, in particular, could choose between several independent and thriving congregations of differing denominations by 1820.

33 Townsend, Faith in their Own Color, 12-14; Moore, History of the A. M. E. Zion Church in America, 37-54, 61-64; Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, 69; Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Volume 2, 270; Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Volume 3, 67, 78, 224, 385, 474. 34 Black Episcopal churches were denied the right to attend the Episcopal Conventions well into the 1850s. 35 Horton, Black Bostonians, 42-43; Levesque, Black Boston, 82, 88, 133, 266-271; Horton, “Generations of Protest,” 245-246; Hayden, Faith, Culture, and Leadership, 3-4; John Pitman, diary, 1805, Rev. John Pitman Papers, Mss 622, RIHS; Boston’s black population was 848 in 1781 (8 percent of the total population) and it had grown to 1,174 by 1800 (only 4.7 percent of the total population) and to 1740 by 1820 (4 percent of the city’s population); Jacqueline Barbara Carr, After the Siege: A Social History of Boston 1775-1800 (Boston: Northeastern Press, 2005), pp. 257, note 114; Horton, In Hope of Liberty, 83. 332

Already by 1813, approximately 1,426 people were members of the two black Methodist churches in Philadelphia, 560 people were members of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church,

300 people were members of the African Presbyterian Church, and 89 people were members of the black Baptist church. Gary Nash has calculated that at this time “some

2,366 black congregants, composing nearly half of the [black] adults in the city, belonged to these five churches.”36 Between 1796 and his death in 1818, the Reverend Jones baptized 268 adults and 927 infants at St. Thomas Episcopal Church. They succeeded in their goal of reaching many of their black brethren in the city.37 By 1816, Bethel Church included roughly fourteen hundred congregants, making it the largest black congregation in the North. It was also one of the principle congregations in the new African Methodist

Episcopal denomination, and a center for black activism on issues ranging from the abolition of slavery to African colonization movements. Bethel used its size and strength to send preachers across the mid-Atlantic and upper South to create other new black churches.38 Peter Williams wrote in 1816, before his Episcopal Church was organized, that New York City’s blacks “have three African churches: 2 Methodist, 1 Baptist. Two of which will contain more than 1000 persons […] Besides these churches, the Episcopal

Church have established a lecture room for the coloured people belonging to that denomination, that is usually attended by a decent & orderly congregation of about 300

36 Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Foundation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720- 1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 260; Catto, A Semi-Centenary Discourse, 40-41. 37 Douglass, Annals of the First African Church, 101-106, 107-110, 123; Townsend, Faith in their Own Color, 30-31. 38 Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 170-171. 333

persons.”39 By 1820, several thousand blacks worshiped in the independent or quasi- independent African American churches of New York and Philadelphia.

In New York City and in Philadelphia, along with smaller towns and cities, blacks founded numerous independent churches between 1791 and 1820. The leaders of these churches identified several reasons for leaving predominantly white churches and founding new ones. They identified proscriptions that kept them out of leadership positions and kept them from being ordained, and they implied a rejection of segregated seats in churches and white expectation for humble deference. Blacks also articulated, however, that they believed separate churches would reach more blacks in the North and would facilitate the uplift of future generations of free blacks. Although they found different theological traditions appealing, many black Methodists, Baptists,

Episcopalians, and Presbyterians agreed that separate black churches benefited their communities both materially and spiritually. The distancing of white and blacks in the

North’s churches, however, contributed to changes in racial categorization and the beginnings of Jim Crow type segregation across society.

Blacks and Indians within Predominantly White Churches

Between 1791 and 1820, during the very same period when black churches were formed in many major cities, blacks participated in a significant number of predominantly white Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches in the mid-Atlantic.

Never before had so many Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches baptized and admitted blacks to membership. This remarkable increase in the number of Reformed

39 Peter Williams, Letter to NY Manumission Society giving statistics on land ownership and religious and literary societies among New York’s black people, Jan. 10, 1816, LCP in HSP, Grellet Mss. Vol. I, 1701-1818, pp. 219, HSP. 334

and Presbyterian churches was a continuation of the trend toward greater diversity in these churches that began in the revolutionary era. Blacks participated in more of these churches because these denominations enacted official rules that made baptism and membership more accessible. White leaders and pastors also put the new policies into practice by reaching out to blacks, asking them about their spiritual state, and encouraging their participation in sacraments and devotional activities. For some enslaved and free blacks, affiliation with these Calvinistic denominations remained appealing, perhaps especially in the smaller towns of the North where black churches were slower to form, in towns where many blacks were still enslaved, and in places where black communities lacked the resources necessary to form independent churches.

As indicated in Table 5-2, more Dutch Reformed churches in New York baptized and/or admitted blacks to membership between 1791 and 1820 than during any previous period of time. At least twenty-six Reformed churches included two or more blacks between 1791 and 1820, compared to the eight documented examples from 1764 to

1790.40 Several of these churches were founded in the seventeenth century, but few of them had baptized blacks during the hundred years preceding 1791.41 In towns along the

Hudson River Valley, from the New York City harbor all the way to Albany, and in towns west of Albany, Reformed churches began baptizing black men, woman, and children during the Early Republic. Graham Hodges also notes this development and states that, “officially segregated since the 1660s, the church began accepting black

40 Dutch Church records, which often still included Latin and Dutch words in this period, did not use racial notations as uniformly as some other denomination. I have assumed that people identified as servants or as belonging to a person and without last names were blacks. I used the same search methods for earlier time periods as well as the period of 1791 to 1820. 41 For black baptism in Dutch Reformed churched between 1730 and 1790, see Chapter One and Chapter Three of this dissertation. For founding dates of colonial Reformed churches, see Randall H. Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 157-159. 335

communicants soon after the Revolution.” Hodges argues that black membership in

Dutch Reformed churches still “remained small compared with the number of African

Americans owned by the Dutch,” but increasing numbers of enslaved and free blacks affiliated in Dutch Reformed churches through baptisms and membership. Some blacks were also married by Dutch clergymen or buried in Dutch church cemeteries.42

Table 5-2: Reformed churches in which two or more blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820:

Church Location First Reformed Dutch Church of New York City New York, N.Y. Madison Avenue Reformed Church New York City New York, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church at Greenwich Village New York, N.Y. Dutch Reformed Church on Staten Island Staten Island, N.Y. Reformed Church at Machackemeck (Deerpark) Machackemeck (Deerpark), N.Y. First Dutch Reformed Church Albany Albany, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church of Kingston Kingston, N.Y. First Reformed Dutch Church Poughkeepsie Poughkeepsie, N.Y. First Reformed Church of Coxsackie Coxsackie, N.Y. Schenectady Dutch Reformed Church Schenectady, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church Middleburgh Middleburgh, N.Y. Dutch Reformed Church of Fonda (Caughnawaga) Fonda (Caughnawaga), N.Y. Dutch Reformed Church at New Paltz New Paltz, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church of Catskill Catskill, N.Y. German Reformed Church New Rhinebeck Cobleskill, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church of German Flatts German Flatts, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church of Schodack Schodack, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church of Mayfield Mayfield, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church at Fort Plain (Minden) Minden, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church of Greenbush East Greenbush, N.Y. Reformed Congregation at Schoharie Schoharie, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church of Stone Arabia Palatine, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church Owasco Outle (Fleming) Fleming, N.Y. Marbletown Reformed Dutch Church Marbletown, N.Y. Reformed Dutch Church in the Town of Nassau Nassau, N.Y. Pompton Plains Reformed Dutch Church Pompton Plains, N.J. See Bibliography for Sources.

42 Graham R. Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613- 1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 181. 336

In some of the Reformed churches, only a few blacks were baptized, but in other churches, dozens of blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership. In all these cases black adults chose to affiliate with Reformed churches and were allowed, if not encouraged, by whites to do so. At the Reformed Dutch Church of Middleburgh, located in Schoharie County, New York, approximately nineteen blacks were baptized between

1798 and 1803. Many of the black people listed in these records were enslaved since master’s names were included in the records before the slave’s names, such as “Lowrense

Lawyer’s Caesar Cobuskill” and “Stas Vrooman’s Scipio.”43 Seven blacks, five women and two men, joined the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church on Staten Island from 1804 to 1818, including “Silvah, a black woman by Certificate from the Presbyterian Church in

Morristown town, N. Jersey,” Fortune “a free coloured man” who was baptized, and

“Sare, a black woman, servant of John Blake, on confession of their faith.”44 The

Reformed Church of Fonda (Caughnawaga), which began regularly baptizing blacks in the 1770s, baptized perhaps as many as ninety-five blacks between 1791 and 1820.45 The

Reformed Church at Machackemeck (Deerpark), baptized eleven or so blacks in these years.46 The Madison Avenue Reformed Church of New York City, founded in 1808, baptized three children whose parents were identified as “people of colour” between 1816 and 1819. These black families could have gone to one or more black churches for the

43 by Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in the town of Middleburgh, Schoharie County, N.Y. transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, NYPL, pp. 7-25, 113-117. 44 Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church on Staten Island, in Richmond County, NY. Volume 2, transcribed, New York City, 1923, LOC, pp. 153-161. 45 Racial notations are scarce in these records, but many people are listed with only first names and “servant of” designators. Most if not all of these people were likely blacks; Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Caughnawaga, now the Reformed Church of Fonda, in the village of Fonda, Montgomery County, N.Y., transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. 1, NYPL, pp. 5-152 and Vol. 2, pp. 1-213. 46 Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. V, Minister Valley Reformed Dutch Church Records, New York: Printed for the Society, 1917, LOC, pp. 207, 215, 219, 254, and 256. 337

baptism of their children, but they went to this new Reformed Church. Larger numbers of blacks also participated at two of New York City’s other Reformed Churches, the First

Reformed Church and the Reformed Church at Greenwich Village.47

The increase in black baptism and members was fundamentally the result of denomination-wide policies that made Dutch churches more accessible and welcoming to blacks. As detailed in Chapter Three, the Reformed Synod in 1783 voted that the consent of a slave’s master or mistress was not required if a slave wished to join a Dutch

Reformed Church. They also stated that marriage recognized by enslaved men and women (but not officially conducted by clergy) should not be a barrier to church admittance.48 The 1792 Constitution of the Reformed Dutch Church in the United States of America went even further in making Reformed churches more accessible to blacks. It stated that:

In the Church there is no difference between bond and free, but all are one in Christ. Whenever therefore, slaves or black people shall be baptized or become members in full communion of the Church, they shall be admitted to equal privileges with all other members of the same standing; and their infant children shall be entitled to baptism, and in every respect be treated with the same attention that the children of white or free parents are in the Church. Any Minister who, upon any pretense, shall refuse to admit slaves or their children to the privileges to which they are entitled, shall, upon complaint being exhibited and proved, be severely reprimanded by the Classis to which he belongs.49

47 Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the Madison Avenue Reformed Church in the City of New York, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Vol. 1, New York City, 1921, LOC, pp. 39, 42, and 57; Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the Reformed Dutch Church at Greenwich in the City of New York, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. 1, New York City, 1920, LOC, 4-21, 115-116, 182-189. 48 Edward Tanjore Corwin, ed., A Digest of Constitutional and Synodical Legislation of the Reformed Church in American (New York: The Board of Publication of the Reformed Church in America, 1906), 4, 679-680; Noel Leo Erskine, Black People and the Reformed Church in America (Reformed Church Press, 1978), 39-40, 42. 49 Corwin, A Digest of Constitutional and Synodical Legislation of the Reformed Church, lxvi; Hodges, Root & Branch, 181. 338

The Dutch Reformed Church repudiated notions that blacks were inferior to whites and stated that black church members were to have equal privileges as white members, but segregating seating by class and race likely continued in these churches and official policy was not necessarily accepted widely among the laity. However, the constitutional demand that blacks be admitted and baptized on equal terms with whites was taken seriously by numerous Reformed pastors during the Early Republic, and blacks were admitted to and baptized at more Dutch churches than ever before. Black men and woman may have been encouraged to participate in these churches after the denomination’s founding American constitution declared the equality of blacks and whites “in Christ.”

The mid-Atlantic’s Presbyterian churches also became more welcoming and accessible to blacks, and a greater number of Presbyterian churches baptized and admitted blacks between 1791 and 1820 than during any previous period. Table 5-3 lists some of the churches that baptized and/or admitted blacks during these years. In church located in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and both lower and upstate New York, black men, women, and children made an increasing number of Presbyterian churches sites of interracial worship.

Table 5-3 Presbyterian churches in which two or more blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820:

Church Location First Presbyterian Church New York New York, N.Y. Presbyterian Church Newtown (Elmhurst) Newtown (Elmhurst), N.Y. First Presbyterian Church Albany Albany, N.Y. First Presbyterian Church Ballston Ballston, N.Y. First Presbyterian Church West Galloway Perth (Galloway), N.Y. First Presbyterian Church Whitesboro Whitesboro, N.Y. Presbyterian Church Pleasant Valley Pleasant Valley, N.Y. First Presbyterian Church Cambridge Cambridge, N.Y. First Presbyterian Church Durham Durham, N.Y.

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Presbyterian Church of Johnstown Johnstown, N.Y. Old Tennent Presbyterian Church Manalapan, N.J. First Presbyterian Church Cranbury Cranbury, N.J. First Presbyterian Church Elizabeth, N.J Elizabeth, N.J. First Presbyterian Church Hanover, N.J. Madison Presbyterian Church Madison, N.J. Second Presbyterian Church Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. Third Presbyterian Church Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. See Bibliography for Sources.

Presbyterians, beginning in 1786, moved toward making access to baptism and church membership more routine and possible for enslaved black children. As had long been the practice of Congregationalists, Anglicans, and Lutherans, mid-Atlantic

Presbyterians began baptizing black children on the authority of owners, even if the black parents were not church members.50 After the Revolution, Presbyterians increasingly thought about how to include blacks within their churches instead of questioning whether they should be included. Presbyterians opened their churches to greater black participation and some blacks responded by choosing to join or to be baptized at

Presbyterian churches between 1791 and 1820.

In a variety of locations, free and enslaved blacks were joining and being baptized in predominantly white Presbyterian churches. At the First Presbyterian Church of New

York, between 1791 and 1802, at least thirteen blacks were baptized and at least thirty- five blacks (all but two of them women) were admitted to membership in the church between 1809 and 1820.51 Approximately thirty-one blacks were baptized at the

50 Records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America: Embracing the Minutes of the Presbytery of Philadelphia, from A.D. 1706 to 1716, Minutes of the Syond of Philadelphia, from A.D. 1717 to 1758, Minutes of the Synod of New York, from A.D. 1745 to 1758, Minutes of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia, from A.D. 1758 to 1788 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1841), 527. 51 RG 413. Box 3, Folder 12,. Register of Baptism, 1791-1802 and RG 413, Box 3, Folder 6, List of Members, 1811-1824, RG 413, and Box 3, Folder 4, List of Members, 1809-1812, First Presbyterian Church (New York, N.Y.) Records, 1717-1961, RG 413, PHS. 340

Presbyterian Church of Newtown (now Elmhurst) on Long Island, New York between

1791 and 1809.52 At the First Presbyterian Church of Ballston, New York (located north of Albany), a few blacks were admitted as members, baptized, and/or married. Maria

Brown, “a black woman,” became a communicant in 1808, but she left this church and

“joined the Baptists” in 1811.53 Even in the rural and relatively isolated upstate New

York community of Whitestown (Oneida County), the First Presbyterian Church admitted two black females to membership between 1808 and 1815.54

The records of the First Presbyterian Church of Elizabeth, New Jersey provide greater details about black Presbyterians between 1791 and 1820. Although the extant records do not seem to be complete, baptismal and membership lists indicate several types of black participation in this church. A congregation-wide households list also helps to put black church participation within the context of the continuation of slavery in

New Jersey. Between 1811 and 1820, at least twenty-six blacks were baptized at this church. Most of them were enslaved, but at least four free blacks were among those baptized. Many of the adults who were baptized were also admitted to communion (the

Lord’s Supper) and membership at the same time. At least twenty-three blacks were admitted to communion between 1806 and 1820, including “York property of Gov.

Aaron Ogden.” In another case, Jude, “a black woman property of Wid. Dayton,” and several whites requested baptism and admittance to communion in May 1808. The

52 Collections of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. VIII, the Presbyterian Church Records, Newtown (now Elmhurst) Queens County, Long Island, NY, New York: Printed for the Society, 1928, LOC, 16-20. 53 Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the First Presbyterian Church at Ballston in Ballston Center, Saratoga County, New York, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Vol. 1, New York City, 1916, LOC, 49-94, 70-81, 108-113. 54 by Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the First Presbyterian Church of Whitesboro in the town of Whitestown, Oneida County, N.Y., transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, New York City, June 1920, LOC, 48-53. 341

church session, “after conversing with them on their knowledge & experimental acquaintance with religion,” admitted Jude and the white candidates. The church admitted “Cyrus (a free black man) [who] applied to be received to the communion of the church on a certificate from South Hanover.” He had been a member of a church in

South Hanover, and brought a certificate from them that facilitated his acceptance into the Elizabeth church. A “List of the families in the Presbyterian congregation of

Elizabeth Town” was created by the Reverend John McDowell in 1818, and he listed 180 blacks and approximately 2,350 whites. The vast majority of the blacks were listed as part of white households, where they lived as slaves or perhaps as free servants.

McDowell listed nine black households that contained a total of 37 individuals, only three of whom were church members.55 The lists of households, baptisms, and members confirm that the First Presbyterian Church of Elizabeth, New Jersey was an interracial church, but they also indicate that most blacks who participated in this church were still enslaved to whites, that only a fraction (probably not more than 13 percent) of all blacks were church members, and that the black community most likely lacked the resources necessary to maintain a separate church before 1820.

The Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches of the mid-Atlantic did much between 1791 and 1820 to reverse their historic reluctance to include blacks within their churches. These churches made sacraments more accessible to blacks, and were welcoming enough to convince some blacks to join. More of these churches included blacks through baptism and membership than ever before, despite the rise of independent

55 “List of the families in the Presbyterian congregation of Elizabeth Town taken by the Rev. John McDowell in his pastoral visits begun Nov. 26th 1818,” RG 68, Box 2, Folder 7, List of Families, 1810-12, 1834-35; RG 68, Box 1, Folder 4, Session Minutes 1817-1824; RG 68, Box 1, Folder 3, Session Minutes 1806-1816; RG 68, Box 1, Folder 9, Infant Baptism and Adult Baptisms 1811-1824, First Presbyterian Church (Elizabeth, N.J.) Records, 1716-1913, RG 68, PHS. 342

black churches in some locations during the same period. In New York and New Jersey, especially, where significant portions of the black population remained enslaved, and in rural communities with small black populations, there was little choice available to black men and women who wished to be part of a church. Nonetheless, whether in upstate

New York or New York City, blacks did make their own religious choices, especially when it came to membership and baptisms, and surprising numbers chose to affiliate with

Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches between 1791 and 1820.

Dozens of Congregational, Episcopal, and Lutheran churches continued to baptize blacks between 1790 and 1820, but the decline in black affiliation with Congregational churches that was evident between 1776 and 1790 continued in the early nineteenth century. Black participation in Episcopal and Lutheran churches, however, remained relatively consistent into these years. Although some blacks still affiliated with

Congregational churches, overall, fewer Congregational churches baptized blacks in this period of time than at any point since 1730. Table 5-4 lists the thirty-six Congregational churches that have been identified with two or more black baptisms or members between

1791 and 1820. This list represents a new low point in the number of Congregational churches that included blacks, but the total number of Congregational churches that baptized two or more blacks still exceeded the number of Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, or Lutherans churches that baptized two or more blacks.

Table 5-4: Congregational churches in which two or more blacks were baptized and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820:

Church Location Second Church Boston Boston, Mass. Old South (Third) Church Boston Boston, Mass. Brattle Square (Fourth) Church Boston, Mass. New North (Fifth) Church Boston Boston, Mass.

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Hollis Street (Eighth) Church Boston Boston, Mass. West (Ninth) Church Boston Boston, Mass. First Church Charlestown Charlestown, Mass. First Parish Church Dorchester Dorchester, Mass. Marblehead Second Congregational Church Marblehead, Mass. Amesbury North Parish Congregational Church Amesbury, Mass. Beverly First Parish Church Beverly, Mass. First Congregational Church Newton Newton, Mass. Northampton First Church Northampton, Mass. Groton Congregational Church Groton, Mass. First Congregational Church Newport Newport, R.I. United Congregational Church Little Compton Little Compton, R.I. Bristol First Congregational Church Bristol, R.I. New London First Congregational Church New London, Conn. Branford Congregational Church Branford, Conn. Fairfield First Congregational Church Fairfield, Conn. Lebanon First Congregational Church Lebanon, Conn. Middletown First Congregational Church Middletown, Conn. Trumbull Congregational Church Trumbull, Conn. Windham Congregational Church Windham, Conn. Old Saybrook Congregational Church Old Saybrook, Conn. Old Lyme First Congregational Church Old Lyme, Conn. Essex Centerbrook Congregational Church Essex, Conn. Glastonbury Buckingham-Eastbury Church Glastonbury, Conn. East Hampton Haddam Neck Church East Hampton, Conn. Lisbon Newent Congregational Church Lisbon, Conn. Madison First Congregational Church Madison, Conn. New Canaan Church New Canaan, Conn. Sharon First Church of Christ Sharon, Conn. United Congregational Church Bridgeport Bridgeport, Conn. Norwalk First Congregational Church Norwalk, Conn. Congregational Church of New Canaan New Canaan, N.Y. See Bibliography for Sources.

Black populations in rural New England decreased as blacks were increasingly concentrated in urban centers, so there were fewer blacks in many New England towns.

This demographic shift decreased the number of Congregational churches in which blacks participated. Blacks were also affiliating with Episcopal and Baptist churches in

New England in significant numbers, perhaps to the growing exclusion of Congregational

344

churches. However, the migration of blacks to cities and the increase in black Baptists can only partially explain the drop in black Congregationalists. It is reasonable to assume that at least some Congregational churches became less accepting of black congregants and members, especially as free blacks sought to assert their rights and seek equality within and outside of churches. The available evidence is inconclusive, but we can speculate that Congregationalists seem to have been more comfortable including enslaved blacks than free blacks within their covenanted communities of faith. Nonetheless, some

Congregational churches remained the spiritual homes of black men and women during the Early Republic.

The First Congregational Church of Newport remained a church with black participants, and some of these black men and women exhibited strong attachments to this church through membership, donations, and pew ownership. At least nine blacks were baptized between 1791 and 1807, including five children of Newport and Limas

Gardner. Eight of Newport and Limas Gardner’s children were baptized at this church between 1777 and 1790 (see Chapter Four). The Reverend William Patten also admitted at least fourteen blacks to full membership in the First Congregational Church between

1804 and 1815. In 1805 “black people” contributed money to help paint and repair the church. Several blacks built and owned pews in the gallery of this church, for the members voted in 1806 “that the pews on the South Gallery which were built by the black people six in number shall be their property.” In 1819, the church further approved that “Abby Stodard coloured woman” and “Henry Clark coloured person” could have

“liberty to build” pews in the gallery “joining the blacks.”56 These records indicate that

56 Racial notations were not uniformly written in these records; “First Congregational Church Marriages Baptisms 1744-1825,” “Admissions into Full Communion,” and “Meeting House Booke of the 345

free blacks in Newport considered this Congregational church their permanent spiritual home.

One of the black church members most invested in this church was Newport

Gardner. He was able to purchase his freedom and the freedom for much of his family in

1791 with his share of a winning $2,000 lottery ticket. In addition to other employments, he worked for the church as sexton from 1807 to 1825, which entailed maintaining the church building and keeping the church keys.57 Gardner and the Reverend Samuel

Hopkins became close associates, if not friends, during the latter years of Hopkins’ life.

Gardner aided the frail pastor in the walk from his home to the church until his death in

1803, and Hopkins wrote that Newport Gardner was “a discerning, judicious, steady, good man, and feels greatly interested in promoting a Christian settlement in Africa.”58

Gardner was an important leader of the black community during this time. He was a leader in the Free African Union Society and the African Benevolent Society, which ran a school for black children. Gardner served as a teacher at the African Free School, run by the African Benevolent Society, and as secretary for black institutions. However, it was not until 1823 that a separate black church was founded in Newport, with the help of

Newport Gardner and others. Until that point, the black community of Newport either lacked the will or the resources to establish an independent church, especially as many blacks moved away from the city. Newport was the only major city in the North whose

Rev. Mr. Clap commencing September 1743”; NHS. Loose paper in “The Union Congregational Church 1790-1796 and 1772-1824 record ledgers,” Union Congregational Church Newport R.I., NHS; Financial records and receipts, First Congregational Church of Newport records 1805-1825, Mss. 418, RIHS. 57“Meeting House Booke of the Rev. Mr. Clap commencing September 1743,” NHS; Financial records and receipts, First Congregational Church of Newport records 1805-1825, Mss. 418, RIHS; Lorenzo J. Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 278 and 294; George C. Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport: Charles Hammett Jr., 1884), 154-159; William H. Robinson, ed., The Proceedings of the Free African Union Society and the African Benevolent Society, Newport, Rhode Island, 1780-1824 (Providence: Urban League of Rhode Island, 1976), viii, ix, and 58. 58 Quoted in Mason, Reminiscences of Newport, 157. 346

black population continued to decline from the Revolution into the 1840s.59 During the years 1791 to 1820, several of the black community’s leaders and families, including the

Gardner family, still worshipped in predominantly white churches such as the First

Congregational Church.

Episcopal churches appealed to enslaved and free blacks across the North, and in many cities, blacks were baptized in Episcopal churches. Roughly the same number of

Episcopal Church records included identifiable black baptisms between 1791 and 1820 as had included black baptisms between 1764 and 1790. As shown in Table 5-5, from

Boston to Philadelphia, Episcopal ministers baptized black men, women, and children at their churches. These priests also performed the rites of marriage, burial, and communion for blacks. The number of black people married by Episcopal priests seems to have been even greater between 1791 and 1820 than during earlier periods. As the number of free blacks continued to rise in the North, it is evident that many blacks still chose Episcopal churches as their places of worship. The longstanding black affiliation with Anglican/Episcopal churches also provided the context of the formation of African

American Episcopal churches in New York City and Philadelphia between 1792 and

1816.

Table 5-5: Predominantly white Episcopal churches in which two or more blacks were baptized, 1791-1820:

Church Location Christ Episcopal Church Boston Boston, Mass. Trinity Church Boston Boston, Mass. St. Peter's Episcopal Church Salem Salem, Mass. Trinity Episcopal Church Newport Newport, R.I.

59 Newport’s black population dropped from roughly 30 percent of the population before the revolution to around 7 percent in 1801; Richard C. Youngken, African Americans in Newport: An Introduction to the Heritage of African Americans in Newport, Rhode Island, 1700-1945 (Rhode Island Historical Preservation and Heritage Commission), 23-24. 347

St. Michael's Episcopal Church Bristol, R.I. Christ Episcopal Church (Holy Trinity) Middletown Middletown, Conn. Trinity Church New Haven New Haven, Conn. St. James Episcopal Church New London New London, Conn. Christ Episcopal Church Stratford Stratford, Conn. St. John's Church Bridgeport Bridgeport, Conn. Trinity Church and St. Paul’s New York City New York, N.Y. Christ Episcopal Church New York City New York, N.Y. Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church Richmond Richmond, Staten Island, N.Y. Grace Episcopal Church Jamaica Jamaica, Long Island, N.Y. St. John’s Episcopal Church Johnstown, N.Y. St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Hobart Hobart, N.Y. St. Mary’s Episcopal Burlington Burlington, N.J. Christ Episcopal Church Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. Trinity Church Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pa. See Bibliography for Sources.

In the North’s largest cities, many blacks continued to affiliate with Episcopalian churches, which reflected the fact that these churches remained appealing to many blacks for spiritual and material benefits, such as a theology they preferred and access to education, even in some cases after separate black churches were available. Episcopal layman Jeremiah Taylor, who attended St. George’s Episcopal Church in New York City, helped organized Sunday Schools in this period, including “Sunday School No. 34 attached to St. George’s church for the instruction of colored men.” In 1817, this

Sunday School included “twenty-six scholars between the ages of 16 and 50 years” and by 1818 it included “74 coloured men, 9 teachers, 5 assistant teachers.”60 The blacks who had longstanding ties to mostly white Episcopal churches were not always quick to leave these churches, and some blacks relied on Episcopal churches for educational opportunities. At least sixty blacks (roughly half male and half female) were baptized at

Trinity Church Boston, which remained a center of black religious life in that city.

60 Jeremiah Taylor, “A Sketch of Religious Experiences in and around New York City, 1811- 1858,” Misc. Mss. 1858, LOC, manuscript department, pp. 7, 35, 37, 41-43. 348

Included in the black baptisms at Trinity Church were the children of Butterfield and

Clarissa Scotland, who had moved from Philadelphia after the Revolution and started attending Trinity Church by 1793. About forty-eight percent of the black baptisms at

Trinity Church Boston occurred between 1806 and 1820, a period of time when these men and women could have chosen to be baptized at the African Baptist Church.61 At

Trinity Church Newport, between 1798 and 1820, twenty-six blacks were baptized.

Eighteen of these people were adults and eight were children. This ratio indicates that a number of blacks in Newport still willingly chose to affiliate with the Episcopal

Church.62 Likewise, approximately forty-one blacks were baptized by the ministers of

Christ Church (now known as Holy Trinity Church) in Middletown, Connecticut between

1809 and 1820.63 In many locations, Episcopal churches persisted in baptizing more black men and women than any other churches.

Many blacks continued to affiliate with and attend the predominantly white

Episcopal churches in New York City, particularly Trinity Church and its St. Paul’s and

St. George’s Chapels. The exact number of black baptisms is difficult to discern because not all priests included racial notations within the records and because overlapping copies of records exist, but it appears that at least two hundred and forty black people and perhaps dozens more were baptized at Trinity Church New York and its chapels from

1791 to 1820. Many of these baptisms occurred after at least one independent black

Methodist church had been founded. Trinity Church provided several other benefits to

61 The Scotlands’ lives are explored in Carr, After the Siege: A Social History of Boston, 3-6, 171, and 233; Andrew Oliver and James B. Peabody, ed., Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 56, Collections: The Records of Trinity Church, Boston, 1728-1830, II (Boston: Published by the Society, 1982), 634-699; The pastor of Trinity Church did not uniformly write racial notations, so more blacks may have been baptized there. For example, “Augustus Caesar son of Caesar Elio by Rosanna Freeborn his wife” may have been blacks, but they were not included in the totals listed above. 62 “Trinity Records 1786-1861”, NHS. 63 “Baptisms of Persons of Colour,” Middletown Holy Trinity, microfilm records, CSL. 349

black New Yorkers as well. The Reverend Benjamin Moore married approximately four hundred black couples between 1791 and 1806 and more black couples were married by other Trinity Church ministers.64 In 1795 “Isaac Fortune and other Free Black persons” requested financial assistance to “enable them to purchase a piece of ground as a Burial place to bury Black persons of Every denomination and description in this city whether

Bond or Free,” and Trinity Church’s vestry provided five hundred pounds for this purpose. The vestry also affirmed that blacks who were communicants or children of communicants could be buried in any of the church’s burial grounds, including Trinity

Church’s burial ground and the St. Paul’s churchyard, and at least some blacks were buried in these locations between 1813 and 1820. In the same period, the church at least periodically provided money for teachers who ran schools or classes for blacks.65

The Reverend (and later Bishop) Benjamin T. Onderdonk was well acquainted with some of the black communicants and attendees at the predominantly white

Episcopal churches of New York, and his personal ministerial efforts among black New

Yorkers was one fact that kept these churches appealing to blacks. In his personal records, Onderdonk noted marrying, visiting the sick, administering communion at homes, and attending funeral of many Episcopalians, including black New Yorkers. He married at least seventeen black couples between 1812 and 1820, and most of these

64 “Register of Christenings and Births Parish of Trinity Church New-York, 1778-1813,” “Baptism Trinity 1809-1832,” ““Baptism Trinity Church 1800-06,” “Baptism St. George’s Chapel 1782-1798,” “Marriages Parish 1746-1816,” Trinity Church Archive; Craig Townsend states that at some point between 1803 and 1816, when Peter Williams Jr. began attending Trinity Church, “there were perhaps two hundred African American, both slave and free, attending services in a small chapel on Sunday afternoons and being taught the fundamentals of the Episcopal faith by an assistant minister of the parish. It was a separate congregation, and it was outgrowing what Trinity was willing to make available to it.” No citation was provided for this information. Townsend, Faith in their Own Color, 14. 65 Minutes of the Vestry, 1791-1826, Corporation of Trinity Church, Volume 2,” Trinity Church Archive, pp. 40-41, 109, 174; ”Records of Funerals attended by the Rev’d Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonk,” Benjamin T. Onderdonk papers, 1812-1832, NYHS. 350

marriage ceremonies occurred at his personal residence. On at least six occasions,

Onderdonk visited James Stevens, “a coloured man,” at his home on Cedar Street between July 1, 1813 and August 12, 1813 and Onderdonk visited Steven’s widow on

August 24, 1813. Stevens was a communing member of St. Paul’s Church, and had fallen seriously ill. Onderdonk spent time praying and conversing with Stevens and sought to comfort him. He noted that Stevens “Expresses his grateful sense of the goodness of Providence towards him, […] Joined heartily in prayer. Being able to read, he is thankful for the blessing & is edified & consoled by the Diligent use he makes of his

Bible & prayer Book.” Onderdonk also described him as a man of “great piety.”66 From

Onderdonk’s records and the church records it is clear that numbers of black New

Yorkers found spiritual satisfaction in the teachings and sacraments of the Episcopal

Church, and ministers like Onderdonk were ready to provide the spiritual sustenance that continued to draw blacks into these churches.

Even though Philadelphia had two of the oldest black churches in the North, at least thirty-eight blacks were baptized at the white Episcopal Churches of Christ Church,

Saint Peter’s, and Saint James’s between 1791 and 1820. Among the “coloured”

Philadelphians baptized by the Reverend Jackson Kemper in 1819 were Mary Forten and

Thomas Francis Forten, two children of wealthy businessman and activist James Forten and Charlotta Forten. James Forten had served as a leader in the St. Thomas African

Episcopal Church since 1796, but Forten had longstanding connections to predominately white Episcopal churches and, on this 1819 occasion, he had two children baptized at a

66 “Record of Pastoral Visitations to the Sick, Afflicted, Prisoners, &c. by the Rev’d Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonk. 1813-1814,” “List of Persons to whom the Holy Communion has been privately administers by the Rev. Benj. T. Onderdonk,” “Record of Marriages performed by the Rev’d Benjamin Tredwell Onderdonk,” Benjamin T. Onderdonk papers, 1812-1832, NYHS. 351

predominantly white Episcopal Church (probably because the Reverend Absalom Jones died in 1818). According to Julie Wench, Forten had worshiped for years at St. Paul’s

Episcopal Church, “where his sister had been married and where Rev. Joseph Pilmore presided. The evangelical Pilmore had proven himself most sympathetic to the needs and concerns of his black parishioners. […] at least in the early 1790s, James Forten saw no reason to abandon Rev. Pilmore and St. Paul’s.”67 Even with the development of separate black churches, some blacks in the North only moved slowly away from participation in predominantly white Episcopal churches because they continued to find benefits from such an affiliation, because they did not agree with the theology of the existing black churches, and because of their longstanding ties to predominantly white churches.

Similar to the Episcopal churches, at least twelve Lutheran churches in the mid-

Atlantic baptized blacks between 1791 and 1820 (see Table 5-6). In urban centers, such as New York City and Philadelphia, as well as in small towns and more remote locations, these churches remained accessible to a small number of blacks who chose to participate in the sacraments and attend worship at these churches.

Table 5-6: Lutheran churches in which two or more blacks were baptized, 1791- 1820:

Church Location United German Lutheran Church New York City New York, N.Y. First Lutheran Church Albany Albany, N.Y. Gilead Evangelical Lutheran Church Brunswick Brunswick, N.Y. First Lutheran Church West Sandlake West Sandlake, N.Y. Zion Lutheran Church Athens Athens, N.Y. St. Peter's Lutheran Church of New Rhinebeck Sharon, N.Y. St. Thomas's Lutheran Church Claverack Claverack, N.Y. St. John’s Lutheran Church at Manorton Livingston, N.Y.

67 Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 140-141, 143. 352

St. John's Lutheran Church, Berrysburg Berrysburg/Mifflin, Pa. Trinity Lutheran Church Lancaster Lancaster, Pa. Christ Lutheran Church, Stouchsburg Stouchsburg, Pa. Trinity Lutheran Church of Reading Reading, Pa. See Bibliography for Sources.

In city and rural locations, small numbers of blacks were baptized in and affiliated with Lutheran churches. The First Lutheran Church of Albany, New York baptized at least nine blacks in this period, including “Dina, Nigro Wench, born in Guinea, belonging to Miss’trs. Lamb.” This church also married eight black couples and “Elisabeth Huth, freie schwarze” (free black) was among the communicants listed in 1795.68 At least fifteen black people, almost all of whom were free, were baptized at Trinity Lutheran

Church in Reading, Pennsylvania. Dinah, who was baptized on December 1, 1805, was identified as a “free negress” about 60 years old.69 At Christ Lutheran Church of

Stouchsburg, Pennsylvania (between Reading and Harrisburg), at least five blacks were baptized between 1791 and 1806, including “Elisabeth, daughter of Joshua and Elisabeth

Johns, negro” and “Elisabeth, illegitimate daughter of Bethy, mulatto.”70 In Somerset,

Pennsylvania (about 135 miles west of Harrisburg), one enslaved black woman named

Rachel joined Samuel's Lutheran Church in 1791. The detailed record indicates the steps she undertook to be baptized in this overwhelmingly white, rural church. The text reads:

On the 17th of April, 1791, a negress who belonged to Peter Angane, and named Rachel having promised to lead her life as much as possible according to God’s Commandments, was received through Holy Baptism into the Covenant of Grace

68 Royden Woodward Vosburgh, Records of the First Lutheran Church in the city of Albany, N.Y., transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. 1, New York City, June 1917, LOC, 77, 80, 90, 96, 101, 115, 129, 136, 209-220, and 261. 69 Trinity Lutheran Church of Reading Berks County Pennsylvania Translated from the Original by Rev. J. W. Early (ca. 1906) Part Two, Baptisms 1790-1812. (Schuylkill Roots Researchers, 1991), 30, 41, 46, 61, 62, 69, 72, 77, 85, and 108. 70 Records of Pastoral Acts at Christ Lutheran Church, Stouchsburg, Berks County, Pennsylvania. Part , Baptisms 1743-1819, Translated and edited by Frederick S. Weise, Sources and Documents of the Pennsylvania Germans: XII (Birdsong, PA: Pennsylvania German Society, 1989), 82, 91, 97, 98, and 114. 353

with God and His Congregation, and in order that she may have some protection and refuge in Christian faith; so have the Elder and Deacon – Messrs. Peter Angane and Henry Stahl take upon themselves the office of God-parents.71

Rachel was accepted into this church after she promised to live according to God’s commands, and two white men, including her owner, were the sponsoring godparents.

She was likely among the very few blacks at this rural church. Similarly, a sketch drawn by Lewis Miller of the Lutheran Church of York, Pennsylvania shows a full and bustling

Lutheran congregation that included at least one black man, who Miller depicted as kneeling in prayer on the steps to the gallery.72 In all these locations and others, Lutheran churches remained accessible to some free and enslaved blacks between 1791 and 1820.

Black participation continued to decline in New England’s Congregational churches between 1791 and 1820 as blacks moved into cities and participated more frequently in the growing number of Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopal churches, but some blacks remained willing members of predominantly white Congregational churches.

A number of Lutheran and Episcopal churches also maintained interracial worship by attracting black congregants, even in the cities that contained independent black churches. Blacks had long been associated with Episcopal and Lutheran churches in the

North, and some blacks continued to seek baptism, education, and fellowship from these churches. The willingness among many Episcopal, Congregational, and Lutheran

71 Charles R. Shultz, ed., Baptismal and other records of the Samuel's Church, Lutheran and Reformed, 1784-1793 (Swissvale, Pa. : Charles R. Shultz, [1945?]) 1 v. (unpaged), Carnegie Free Library, Pittsburg; Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1792, Volume I, Pastors and Congregations (Breinigsville, Pa.: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1980), 433. 72 The church is depicted as being entirely full of worshippers and most of the seating appears to be segregated by gender and age. At appears, at least, that the only space allotted for this black man was sitting on the stairs. Donald A. Shelley, ed., Lewis Miller: Sketches and Chronicles, The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania German Folk Artist (York, Pa.: The Historical Society of York County, 1966), 13 and 105.; Also see Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Updated Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 83. 354

ministers to care for and include black men and women facilitated the inclusion of some blacks within these church communities.

Blacks participated in many of the North’s predominantly white Baptist and

Methodist churches of the North between 1791 and 1820, even as these denominations became the most prevalent types of separate black churches. White Methodists and

Baptists, in many locations, continued to reach out to blacks, and some black men and women still found these churches appealing. Many the of the North’s nascent black communities still lacked the resources necessary to form separate churches, and, as remained the case in other denominations, some blacks still decided that the spiritual benefits of affiliating with a predominantly white Methodist or Baptist church could outweigh the drawbacks. Thus, Table 5-7 includes some examples of predominantly white Baptist churches that baptized or included black members between 1791 and 1820 and Table 5-8 shows the number of black and white Methodist members in northern states for several years.

Table 5-7: Examples of predominantly white Baptist churches in which two or more blacks were baptized or listed as members, 1791-1820

Church Location First Baptist Church Boston Boston, Mass. Second Baptist Church Boston Boston, Mass. Seventh Day Baptist Newport Newport, R.I. First Baptist Church Providence Providence, R.I. First General Baptist Church Richmond Richmond, R.I. Tiverton Baptist Church Tiverton, R.I. Baptist Church in Exeter Exeter, R.I. Hill Church Westerly Westerly, R.I. First Baptist Church of Bedford Bedford, N.Y. First Baptist Church Cape May Cape May, N.J. First Baptist Church Philadelphia Philadelphia, Pa. See Bibliography for Sources.

355

The Hill Church or First Baptist Church of Westerly, which was founded by

Separatists who left Joseph Park’s Congregational Church (discussed in Chapter Two), had at least a few black members in the 1790s and early 1800s. Seventy-six members’ names were inscribed in 1793 to the articles of faith, and these members included Jumbo,

Cloe, Esther, and Phillis. These persons, listed without last names, were likely blacks or

Afro-Indians. A nineteenth-century town history also describes Cuffy Stanton, “a black man” and “an honored member of the ‘Hill Church.’” Stanton had been the slave of Job

Stanton of Stonington, Connecticut and he earned his freedom while fighting in the

Revolution. Stanton was a “famous exhorter,” meaning that he preached but was not ordained. He preached sometimes to the nearby Narragansett Indians in Rhode Island and to the Pequots in North Stonington, Connecticut, and was among the blacks who made Indian communities sites of interracial worship.73 Whether in his predominantly white Baptist church or in Indian communities, Stanton participated in and promoted interracial worship.

A brief account of Susan Wright’s family and church affiliation exhibits both the slow and uneven process of manumissions in New York and circumstances that facilitated one black woman’s membership in a white Baptist church. Susan, the daughter of York Wright, a free black man, and Mary Wright, enslaved woman, was born

April 2, 1791. All members of the Wright family lived in the household of Governor

George Clinton (future Vice President of the United States), and Mary, Susan, and her

73 “Church book for 1796 of Elkanah Babcock,” Westerly, Rhode Island. Church of Christ (Hill Church). Records, 1793, 1893-1963, CL; Frederick Denion, Westerly (Rhode Island) and Its Witnesses, For Two Hundred and Fifty Years, 1626-1876 (Providence: J.A. & R.A. Reid, 1878), 106; Eric G. Grundset, ed., Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War, A Guide to Service, Sources, and Studies (Washington, D.C.: National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution, 2008), 291. 356

sister Celia were all slaves. In 1800, Mary Wright became free and Susan Wright became the property of Elisabeth Clinton Tallmadge, “by whom [she] was taught to read.” Wright described her admission to the Baptist Church of Poughkeepsie, New

York in the following way: “It having pleased God though Grace to call me to repentance & newness of life, I went while our family were at Poughkeepsie before the baptist church at that place, and upon a declaration of faith was unanimously accepted by them, and on the first Sunday in September 1810, baptized by Mr. Wayland their pastor

& admitted a member of the church.”74 Her status as a slave severely curtailed her mobility and she was unable to reside in a location where a black church existed in 1810.

However, Susan Wright did experience a “newness of life,” and she affiliated with a church that appealed to her.

Charles Bowles was also among the blacks in New England who participated in predominantly white Baptist churches, and his experiences parallel the interracial religious experiences and ministry of Congregationalist Lemuel Haynes. Charles Bowles was born in Boston in 1761. Like Lemuel Haynes, Bowles had an “African” father and a white mother, he was indentured as a child, and he served in the Continental forces during the Revolution. Sometime after the Revolution, Bowles was baptized and admitted as a member of the predominantly white Calvinistic Baptist Church in

Wentworth, New Hampshire. An early biographer, John W. Lewis, who was also a black

Baptist, wrote that Bowles began promoting the Baptist faith among other New

Englanders. Years after his baptism, Bowles rejected the Calvinism of his earlier professions, and he became a Free Will Baptist. By 1808, Bowles was preaching the Free

Will theology to mostly white audiences across New England, including areas of

74 Susan Wright biography, Mathias Tallmadge Papers, NYHS. 357

Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. On November 26, 1816, Lewis explained,

“the church in Huntington, of which he was a member, called a council to sit with them, to examine, and ordain brother Bowles to the work of the Gospel Ministry.” As an ordained minister, he continued to preach across Vermont and he began to administer the sacraments. Like Lemuel Haynes, who was the pastor of a predominately white

Congregational Church in Rutland, Vermont and unlike Thomas Paul of Boston, Bowles ministered to predominantly white New Englanders.75

Bowles’ preaching was apparently well received by white churchgoers, but Lewis also noted that Bowles’ dark skin made him subject to “some frigid looks and discouraging words, and some still sterner opposition.” Furthermore, “while laboring in the towns of Huntington and Hinesburg, he met with much opposition.” Nonetheless,

Bowles did not move toward separating himself from predominantly white churches or colleagues, nor did he seek to establish separate black churches. He approached the opposition he faced with a firm and remarkable assuredness and grace that seemed to disarm scoffers and opponents. Whether as an enslaved church member or as an ordained preacher, black men and women continued to participate in some of the North’s predominantly white Baptist churches between 1791 and 1820.

Although divisions between white and black Methodists in the mid-Atlantic developed and grew between 1791 and 1820 – black Methodist churches were the most common form of separate black churches – some Methodist churches in the North

75 John W. Lewis, The life, labors, and travels of elder Charles Bowles, of the Free Will Baptist denomination, Together with an essay on the character and condition of the African race by the same (Watertown: Ingalls & Stowell’s Steam Press, 1852), 5, 8, 10, 14, 15, and 19; William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution with Sketches of Several Distinguished Persons: To Which is Added a Brief Survey of the Conditions and Prospects of Colored Americans (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855), 28- 29; Grundset, ed., Forgotten Patriots, 103; Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115-116. 358

continued to be sites of interracial worship. The official membership numbers of the

Methodist circuits indicate that some predominantly white Methodist churches contained black members between 1791 and 1820, although blacks most often attended segregated class meetings within the interracial churches. For example, in 1801 the Boston circuit reported 65 white members and 10 “colored” members. Boston did not yet have an independent black Methodist church, so this church, like many of the Methodist churches that listed small numbers of black members, remained interracial. Conversely, in the same year, Philadelphia’s membership was listed at 707 whites and 448 blacks.

However, most of these blacks were members of the separate Methodist church and no longer participated in interracial Methodist meetings.76

Table 5-8 presents state-by-state tabulations of white and “colored” members of

Methodist churches between 1796 and 1801. The membership numbers from the Annual

Conferences reveal a couple trends in interracial Methodist churches. First, white leaders still characterized Methodism as a biracial religious movement in much of the North.

Secondly, while white Methodists significantly outnumbered black Methodists, numerous local churches continued to be sites of interracial worship even as separate black

Methodist churches were forming in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York after

1790. Whites joined northern Methodist churches at a faster rate than blacks, but a noteworthy number of Methodist churches still maintained a minority of black members.

In addition, since Methodists only designated people as “white” or “colored,” it is probable that some of the colored Methodists, especially in New England, were Indians or Afro-Indians. For example, William Apess, a Pequot of Afro-Indian descent,

76 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, Annually Held in America from 1773 to 1813, inclusive, Volume the First (New York: John C. Totten, 1813), 257. 359

participated in Methodist meeting at Montville, Connecticut between 1809 and 1813, was baptized by Methodists in Bozrah, Connecticut in December 1818, and began to preach in 1819 or 1820. Apess wrote that “I had a desire to attend Methodist meeting […] This was altogether new to me; but it was interesting to attend them, and so much so that I desired to be a constant attendant of them.” This Pequot man was one of the so-called

“colored” members of the Methodist Church.77

Table 5-8: Numbers of white and colored members in the Methodist churches in northern states, 1796-1801:

Pa. N.J. N.Y. Conn. R.I. Mass. N.H. Vt. Maine Total

White 2,631 2,246 3,826 1,042 220 822 68 0 357 11,212

1796 Col. 380 105 218 8 0 2 0 0 0 713

White 2,900 2,433 4,612 1,186 175 905 92 0 616 12,919

1797 Col. 198 127 238 15 2 8 0 0 0 588

White 2,964 2,663 5,081 1,433 161 1,183 122 285 936 14,828

1798 Col. 224 163 245 22 1 11 0 1 0 667

White 3,000 2,725 5,681 1,4809 195 1,398 131 603 1,117 16,330

1799 Col. 309 167 276 17 1 11 0 1 0 782

White 2,887 2,857 6,140 1,546 224 1,571 171 1,095 1,197 17,688

1800 Col. 300 173 223 25 3 6 0 1 0 731

White 3,321 2,987 6,750 1,543 234 1,653 521 1,601 1,386 19,996

1801 Col. 507 172 284 24 3 12 3 6 0 1,011

Source: Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, Annually Held in America from 1773 to 1813, inclusive, Volume the First (New York: John C. Totten, 1813).

77 Barry O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), xxxi and xxxiii, lxxix, lxxx, 125. 360

In 1795, two of the churches that continued to have a minority of black members were the New York City Methodists and the Elizabeth New Jersey Methodists. The New

York City church reported 600 white members and 155 “colored” members, and

Elizabeth, New Jersey listed 270 white and 10 black members (neither city had a separate black church yet).78 Francis Asbury noted that when preaching at White Plains, New

York in 1810, that he added a word of special exhortation to the “Africans.” The 1803 list of members from the Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church at New Springville, Staten

Island, New York includes fifty white members and five black members (two male and three female). The Methodist Episcopal Church at Woodrow, Staten Island baptized three black children and one black adult between 1810 and 1812: “Anthony, an African

Child,” Cincher, a colored adult; and Squire and Henry, colored infants.79 Especially before separate black Methodist churches were formed, some blacks continued to participate in and join predominantly white Methodist churches between 1791 and 1820.

The number that did so, however, declined as more and more black Methodist churches were formed after 1810.

The Smithfield Street Methodist Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania included some black congregants during these years. On various years between 1794 and 1820, the Annual Conference reports indicated that small numbers of blacks were members of the predominantly white Pittsburg Methodist Church, but some years listed no black members. In 1800, there were 470 white and 8 black members listed, and in 1810, 412

78 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 94-95. 79 Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church at New Springville, Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y., transcribed, New York City, June 1922, LOC, pp. 37; Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the Woodrow Methodist Episcopal Church at Woodrow, Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y., transcribed, New York City, 1922, LOC, pp. 5-6; Journal of Rev. Francis Asbury, Volume 3, pp. 337. 361

whites and 16 blacks were listed.80 Between 1818 and 1820, the Smithfield Street

Station Church records (the earliest extent records are from 1818), some blacks were listed as members of predominantly white Methodist classes and there was at least one all-black Methodist class at this church. The 1819 Methodist class lists included a

“colored class” with twenty-three members that met Monday evenings and a “colored class” with thirty two members that met Sunday afternoons. In addition, a “country” class included twenty-seven white members and three “colored” members. At least a few blacks continued to participate in this predominantly white Methodist church and

Methodist classes until at least 1823.81

Between 1791 and 1820, Methodist and Baptist churches expanded significantly throughout the North. Nathan Hatch notes that in the whole United States, “By 1820,

Methodist membership numbered a quarter million […] Baptist membership multiplied tenfold in the three decades after the Revolution; the number of churches increased from five hundred to over twenty-five hundred.”82 As these churches added members and founded new congregations, numerous Baptist and Methodist churches included black members. Many of the separate black churches founded after 1790 in the North were

Methodist, but other Methodist churches remained interracial for the time being, especially in locations where there were too few black Methodists to facilitate a separate church. Blacks also founded separate Baptist churches, but some enslaved blacks and some free blacks still chose to participate and affiliate in predominantly white churches.

80 Minutes of the Methodist Conferences, First Volume (1813), 146, 175, 241, 257, 273, 291, 314, 392, 449, 482, 517, 552, and 596. 81 “General Register of Official Members 1818-1832 Smithfield Street Station Church,” “Methodist Episcopal Church in the City of Pittsburgh 1818-1832, Smithfield Street Church,” Book # 1, 1818-1832, Heinz History Center, pp 13, 14-15, 30. 82 Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 3. 362

Very few people identified as Indians participated in predominantly white churches between 1791 and 1820, but Indian communities in New England remained sites of interracial religious worship. Table 5-9 lists six predominantly white churches in which one or more Indians were identified in the baptismal or membership records. At least two of the Indians who participated in these white churches were apparently servants in white households. Several of these churches were located in relatively close proximity to Indian communities. In another case, the Dutch Reformed pastor of

Herkimer seems to have baptized several Oneida adults at the Oneida Indian settlement and not at his church building.

Table 5-9: White churches in which one or more Indians were baptized and/or admitted to membership, 1791-1820:

Church Location Year Notes W. First Congregational Church Roxbury, Cynthia Indian girl residing in West Roxbury Mass. 1797 Luke Troots baptized First Congregational Church Orleans, Ruth Ned (an Indian) admitted to Orleans Mass. 1803 membership Tiverton, Naoma (Indian) baptized Tiverton Baptist Church R.I. 1792 Tiverton, Debora Suconish (Indian) baptized Tiverton Baptist Church R.I. 1806 New Baptized at house of Jared Starr, London, Phillis a black adult & Betty an St. James Episcopal Church Conn. 1802 Indian child Canaan Congregational Stillwater, “Mary a Squaw” baptized, owned Church N.Y. 1814 covenant, and admitted to church Baptized Janette of “Dojattacagh83 Reformed Dutch Church of Oneida ex Tribu Onondagua et Catharinae Herkimer Castle, N.Y. 1808 Knellis ex Oneida” Baptized Elisabetha of “Willhelmi Reformed Dutch Church of Oneida & Catharinae,” of the “Tribe Herkimer Castle, N.Y. 1808 Oneida” Reformed Dutch Church of Oneida Baptized Molle of “Sabathes et Herkimer Castle, N.Y. 1808 Elisabethae” of the “Oneida tribe” See Bibliography for Sources

83 Possibly the Doxtater family. 363

Indian participation in predominantly white churches was so low because most

Indians saw little benefit in affiliation with white churches and because Indians no longer resided in large portions of the North. Many of the Indian communities that remained in

New England and New York had their own churches, most of them Baptist or ecumenical. Missionary societies sometimes supported these Indian churches financially and provided school teachers. There was little that a white church could provide to

Indians that they did not obtain elsewhere, and predominantly white churches usually carried the extra burden of white prejudice and racism. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey, moreover, the systematic violence that white men inflicted upon Indians during the revolutionary era either killed or drove away nearly all remaining Indians.84 By 1790, there were precious few Indians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and, consequently, no churches in these states that explicitly included Indians.

Indian churches in New England, conversely, were sites of interracial worship as some whites, blacks, and Afro-Indians attended these churches as both congregants and preachers. Gideon Hawley continued to minister to the Mashpee community until his death in 1807, and other people occasionally ministered there as well. Hawley, in May

1806, described a remarkable interracial communion service led by himself and “a man of colour.” Hawley wrote:

On the last Lords Day, I met about 70 Indians and persons of Colour; all Clad in a decent manner, and with a serious & devout Countenance; when I celebrated the Lords supper of which a goodly, but Small number, partook – […] After they were consecrated, by the pastor a man of Colour served in carrying the Bread and wine to the Communicants. The occasion was solemn – The meeting house was crowded I was faint, with the heat & by the means of the crowd about me – At meeting besides the black people, we had about an hundred others.85

84 Nash, Unknown American Revolution, 378. 85 Journal of Gideon Hawley, transcribed, Volume 3 [Ninth Binder, pages 81-161], CL, pp. 144. 364

Hawley’s use of racial categories was fluid by this date. At times he used the terms

Indians, blacks, and people of color almost interchangeably to describe Mashpee resident, but at other moments he distinguished between blacks, whites, and Indians. On several occasions, Hawley noted that the whites attended his services along with Indians, Afro-

Indians, and blacks. The whites, according to Hawley, were relegated to the seats at the back of the meetinghouse.86

John Freeman also led a short-lived Baptist church in Mashpee between the 1790s and 1806, and at least two of the attendees at this church were mixed race. Hawley identified an Indian woman named Sarah and “two young Indians of mixed blood” as people who preferred Baptist preaching in 1795.87 White ministers, along with black and

Indian ministers, continued to preach to Indians at several other Indian communities in the North as well. During this period, the Society for Propagating the Gospel among the

Indians and Others in North America employed the Reverend Curtis Coe to minister to

Indians in Rhode Island, the Reverend John Sergeant for the New Stockbridge Indians in

New York, and other ministers and teachers in Maine and elsewhere.88 Baptist and

Congregational churches in Indian communities of New England often included people of partial Indian and African ancestry between 1791 and 1820 and sometimes white attendees or white preachers.

As the Wampanoags on Martha’s Vineyard began to mix with blacks after the

Revolution, at least one of their churches also became more racially diverse. An Indian

Congregational church had existed on the Vineyard since the seventeenth century, but

86 Journal of Gideon Hawley, transcribed, Volume 3. [Ninth Binder, pages 81-161], CL, pp. 121 and 141. 87 Journal of Gideon Hawley, transcribed, Volume 3.[Eighth Binder, pages 1-80], CL, pp. 34 and 84; Journal of Gideon Hawley, Volume 3. [Ninth Binder, pages 81-161], CL, pp. 141. 88 MHS, Box 2, “Feb 6, 1810 – July, 21, 1810 folder,” “May 6, 1811 – June 6, 1811 folder.” 365

their Wampanoag Congregational minister, Zachariah Howwoswee Jr., betrayed the trust of his community and further alienated some church members by refusing to preach in

English at a time when the Wampanoag language was falling out of use. The

Wampanoag Baptist minister Thomas Jeffers, who arrived on the Vineyard in 1801, appealed to the increasingly diverse Wampanoag community of Indians, Afro-Indians, and blacks disaffected with Howwoswee. Certainly English-language sermons were one part of his appeal. Another part might have been that he resembled his diverse parishioners.89 Hawley wrote that Jeffers was “half blooded, and came from Middlebury and is half Negroes mixt with Indians.” Jeffers was also married to one of the “mixt- blooded females” from Mashpee. Hawley, who evidently knew them both, wrote that

Sarah Jeffers had “a Sprinkling of white blood in her veins, mixt with both Indian & negroe: her mother was all Indian, and her father half White, who immigrated from Fall

River, and was a good Farmer.”90 Thomas and Sarah Jeffers identified themselves as

Wampanoag Indians and were important members of the Aquinnah community, but their diverse ancestry reminds us that the racial categories constructed in America did not neatly square with the complexity of real life and these categories tended to support white domination of non-European peoples. Most people at Gay Head by 1811 had some

African and/or white ancestors, as well as Indian ancestors.91 Consequently the churches, like the community overall, reflected a diverse human tapestry. The commonness of

89 David J. Silverman, Faith and Boundaries: Colonists, Christianity, and Community among the Wampanoag Indians of Martha’s Vineyard, 1600-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 181-183, 223-225, 238-240; David J. Silverman, “The Church in New England Indian Community Life: A View from the Islands and Cape Cod” in Colin G. Galloway & Neal Salisbury, ed., Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003), 280. 90 Journal of Gideon Hawley, transcribed, Volume 4 [Tenth Binder, pages 1-80], CL, pp. 40-41. 91 Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 231. 366

black and Afro-Indian participation in Indian churches and communities was also a factor that influenced the changes in how whites perceived race in this period.

Changing Notions of Race and Christian Equality

Terminology used by whites to describe and categorize people of African descent shifted significantly between 1790 and 1820. So did the words used by blacks to describe themselves. These changes reflected the changes in how blacks related to whites in the

Early Republic, as many blacks left predominantly white churches and as fewer northern blacks were enslaved to whites. Throughout the colonial period, most English-speaking whites used the word “negro” to describe blacks, and this term was the primary racial identifier in northern church records from 1730 to around 1790. Whites also sometimes used terms such as “mulatto” or “mustee” for mixed raced persons and Indian to describe people from many different tribes. However, in churches across denominational and regional divides, many whites began using “black” and occasionally “African” to denote persons of African descent, and this shift occurred around 1790. Racial terminology again shifted between 1810 and 1820, as whites began to write “coloured” or “people of colour” in the records instead of “black” or “blacks.” Although the use of the term Indian still occurred occasionally in church records, “coloured” was increasingly used to describe a wide range of people with at least partial African and/or Indian ancestry, including Afro-Indians, Indians, and blacks. The ways blacks and Indian described themselves influenced how whites conceived of minorities, but these changes were also a result of increasing racism and exclusionary practices in the North that followed the end of legal slavery. Whites used more obstinate forms of racism to control the labor of free

367

blacks and to imagine the disappearance of Indians from the North. Even the most sympathetic whites in the North envisioned political and increasingly civil society in the

United States as exclusively white.92

While the timing varied slightly from congregation to congregation, the vast majority of Protestant church records reveal similar trends in how white peoples’ terminology of race shifted. For examples, at Christ Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, the term “negro” was uniformly used in the records from 1730 to 1786. The term

“blacks” began to appear in 1786, but “negro” was still used some. By 1789, “black” was overwhelming used in the records, but “negro,” “mulatto,” and “coloured” also appeared occasionally. By 1818, “colored” was the only racial identifier in these church records.93 At Old South Congregational Church Boston, the shift from “negro” to

“black” occurred after 1787 and the shift to “colored” happened by the 1820s. Christ

Church Boston switched to “blacks” by 1794 and to “adult of color” by 1809. The

Reformed Protestant Dutch Church on Staten Island used the term “black” from at least

1808 to 1811 and the term “coloured” by 1818. In the records of the First Presbyterian

Church in Ballston, New York, “negro” was used in 1792, “blacks” was used at least between 1807 and 1809, and “colored” was used after 1817.94 At the First Lutheran

Church of Albany, whose records were partly in German and partly in English, included

92 Nicholas Guyatt, “‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (2009), 986-1011. 93 “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Baptisms 1794-1819” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Vol. 167, Philadelphia, 1906,” “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Baptisms 1769-1794” Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia 1906, “Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Vol. 1, Bap. 1709-1768,” Red. 10, Exp. 6.5, Microfilm XCH114. 94 “C VS B I – Baptisms 1669-1875,” and “Admission of Old South, Membership,” Records of the Old South Church and Congregation 1669-1766, CL ; “Clark's register, 1723-1851, ” Old North Church (Christ Church in the City of Boston) Records 1569-1997, MHS; Royden Woodward Vosburg, Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church on Staten Island, in Richmond County, NY, Volume 2, transcribed, New York City, 1923, LOC; Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the First Presbyterian Church at Ballston in Ballston Center, Saratoga County, New York, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. 1., New York City, 1916, LOC. 368

the racial identifier “Negroes” and “ein sclave” or “Sclaven” before 1790. In 1789 and other years, “aine schwarze,” (a black) was used. In 1809 and 1814, “blacks” was written. Finally, after 1817, “colored people” was used in these records.95 While local factors affected the words and categories used, most churches shifted from “negro,” to

“black,” and to “colored” between 1790 and 1820.

In addition to the changes in words used to describe persons of African descent, there was a tendency among whites, especially in New England, to lump Indians and blacks together starting in the 1790s. In the racially diverse community of Mashpee, white minister Gideon Hawley reflected some of the broader changes in racial categorization. However, since Hawley had a detailed knowledge of peoples’ lineages and because people do not always easily fit into narrow categories of race, his use of racial identifier was more fluid and inconsistent. In an 1803 piece of writing, Hawley talked about “the Indians & people of Colour at Marshpee” and “white people” as three distinct groups of people, and he describes himself as “missionary to the Indians.” While he distinguished between people of color and Indians here, undoubtedly some of the

“people of colour” had at least partial Indian ancestry. In an 1803 piece of writing,

Hawley described himself as the missionary to “the people of Colour.” In this case, he described the whole community of Mashpee as “people of colour,” suggesting that all

Indians, whether of mixed ancestry or not, fit into the category of people of color.96 For

Hawley, and more so for people less knowledgeable of New England Indians, it became common to categorize blacks, Afro-Indian, and Indians all as “people of color.” This

95 Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the First Lutheran Church in the city of Albany, N.Y., transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Vol. 1, New York City, June 1917, LOC. 96 Volume 3. Hawley [Ninth Binder, pages 81-161], pp. 95 and 97. 369

phrase also commonly superseded the use of “mustee” and “mulatto.” Moreover, these changes in the terminology of church records and in the correspondence of church officials like Hawley reflected the changes in society in general. Historian Daniel

Mandell, addressing white perceptions of Indians in the Early Republic, writes that “a new perception of New England Indians as ‘blacks’ emerged in New England after the

American Revolution, […] from the growing trend of marriage between Indians and

African descendants in the region.”97 By identifying Indians in New England as “blacks” or “colored people,” whites were remaking racial identities and simplifying racial categories in a way that benefited white employers and landowners.98

The causes of these changes are not fully evident, but whites, blacks, Afro-

Indians, and Indians all influenced these changes. Whites were the ones who physically wrote the racial designations in church records, but these minorities also affected and contributed to this rhetorical shift by how they addressed themselves.99 Free blacks leaders in the North were very deliberate in including “African” in the names of their early fraternal organization, benevolent societies, and churches. For example, the Free

97 Daniel R. Mandell, “‘The Indian's Pedigree’ (1794): Indians, Folklore, and Race in Southern New England,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 61, no. 3 (Jul. 2004), 534; Also see Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880,” Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (Sep. 1998), 466-501. 98 Whites outside of New England did not usually identify Indians as blacks or colored people. Whites and Indians had tended to apply the term “red” to Indians in the South since the early eighteenth century, which was where this term originated. Whites and some Indians also applied the term “red men” to Great Lakes and plains Indians in the nineteenth century. See Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to be Red,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (Jun. 1997), 625-644; For how eastern whites conceived of and categories Miamis, Potawatomis, Delawares, Wyandots, Senecas, Oneidas and other Indians who lived further away from the east coast, see Daniel K. Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4, (Winter 1999), 601-628. 99 As Melish argues, “any notion that African Americans stood somehow outside the realm of ideological production-that they were not themselves producers of ideology-would be an inherently racist idea. Instead, it is clear that, at all levels of the economic scale, people of color were active participants in the evolving discourse of race”; Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Winter 1999), 659. 370

African Society in Philadelphia founded in 1787 by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen and the Boston African Baptist Church founded in 1805 both used “African” instead of other labels. Historian Richard Newman writes that “nearly every major free black institution created in the urban North following the American Revolution had the word

‘African’ affixed to it,” and Joanne Melish states that the preference for the designator

“African” probably reflected “African cultural influence, the common usage of the surrounding community, and a desire among a largely enslaved people to define themselves by a point of origin at which they or their ancestors all had been free persons.”100 This name choice reflects a conscientious effort to build a group identity which was necessary for the founding and growth of these institutions, but newly freed men and women also sought to distance themselves from the term “negro,” which had clear ties to the colonial enslavement of blacks. Blacks clearly preferred the label

“African” in this period, but that does not necessarily explain why whites more often used “black” or “Africans” instead of “negro” in most church records.101

During the years 1815 to 1820, blacks began to more often identify themselves as

“colored Americans,” so the shift in church records from “blacks” to “colored people” is more clearly the result of blacks pushing for the use of one label over another. The rise of white colonization societies in 1816 and afterward, which sought to promote migration of blacks out of the United States and stabilize southern slavery by removing free blacks, caused free blacks to re-evaluate the use of the term “African,” even though many blacks continued to view Africa as an important part of their identity and historic origins.

100 Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 61; Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” 667. 101 For more on the development and use of “African” by black Americans, see James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 371

Blacks in the North began to insist that they were colored Americans who had every right to be treated as equal citizens of the United States and should not be expected to leave the country. Many pastors acquiesced to the preference of blacks and overwhelmingly used the term “people of color” after the eighteen-teens.

The primary identity for most Indians in this period was their specific tribe, but

Native Americans also identified themselves collectively as Indians by the early nineteenth century. As Joanna Brooks writes, Samson Occom “thought of himself first as a Mohegan with profound responsibilities to his own tribal community and to American

Indian people in general.” Writing in the late 1820s and early 1830s, William Apess identified himself as a Pequot specifically but also as part of the collective group of

“Indians” or “Natives.” Afro-Indians in the North sometimes chose to identify as black people and sometimes as Indians. As explained by Daniel Mandell, the Massachusetts

Cuffee family had Indian and African ancestors and members of this family identified themselves to whites sometimes as blacks and sometimes as Indians, and they maintained ties to both black and Indian communities.102

At least one white Philadelphian indicated that it was blacks who had pressed whites to use the term “colored people” instead of other designators. In 1830, John

Watson published a history of Philadelphia that included a reflection of the changing terminology used to describe blacks, and the connection between separate churches and what he calls “little vanities.” Watson stated that, “in the olden times, dressy blacks and dandy colour’d beaux and belles, as we now see them issuing from their proper churches,

102 Joanna Brooks, ed. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in the Eighteenth-Century Native America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4; li-liii, O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 5, 31, 119, and 124; Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity,” 486. 372

were quite unknown. Their aspirings and little vanities have been growing ever since they got those separate churches. Once they submitted to the appellation of servants, blacks, or Negroes, but now they require to be called coloured people, and among themselves, their common call of salutation is – gentlemen and ladies.”103 Apparently,

Watson could not understand why blacks did not want to be called “servants, blacks, or

Negroes” and he ascribed this change to a supposed “vanity” and their separate institution. However, most northern clergymen did not object with using “coloured” instead of the other terms by 1820 in church records.

As much as blacks, Indians, and Afro-Indians sought to influence how they were treated by emphasizing and promoting the use of some words and not others, white

Americans also promoted these changes for different reasons and whites benefited from the words used. In the context of the continued exploitation of black labor and Indian lands, whites gained from identifying both groups as “people of color.” Describing how

Afro-Indians and Indians came to be identified as colored people, David Silverman writes that according to dominant American ways of reckoning race, “Blackness trumped

Indianness, and racial identity trumped community or tribal identity – a racial construction that conveniently enlarged the servile black labor pool while shrinking the number of Indians on the land.”104 By claiming that no “pure” Indians or even any Indian existed in communities across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and elsewhere, early nineteenth-century whites nearly completed their appropriation of Indian lands in the

103 John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia: Being a Collection of Memoirs, Anecdotes, and Incidents of the City and Its Inhabitants (Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1830), 479; Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-American and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia” in Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith, ed., African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 100, 107. 104 Silverman, Faith and Boundaries, 225. 373

Northeast. If they categorized remaining Indians as “people of color,” then the Indians lacked legal claim to ancestral lands and could be forced into the menial forms of labor that blacks were being generally restricted to in the “free” North.

It was not coincidental that the terms used to describe blacks and Indians changed in the period when slavery was ending in the North and when independent black churches were forming. Mandell argues that as many blacks and Afro-Indians, especially newly freed slaves, moved to port cities, “issues of race and class entered a period of flux and were therefore particularly sensitive in the region.”105 Lois Horton, who has written about the interplay of class and race in the Early Republic, argues that “the social deference that was the organizing principle of colonial society, and that often had operated to bring together blacks and whites at the bottom, gave way to stratification based more clearly on race as well as class.” As all white men were increasingly treated as equals in the political sphere that was closed off to blacks, race became a more significant identifier of difference than class in northern society and differences between the economic conditions of whites and blacks were increasingly ascribed to “innate inferiority” of black and not to the legacy of hundreds of years of enslavement.106 These changes in how whites thought about race and how they categorized people of color in churches contributed to the rise of separate black churches and a broader range of racial segregation in northern society.

105 Mandell, “‘The Indian's Pedigree,’” 535. 106 Lois E. Horton, “From Class to Race in Early America: Northern Post-Emancipation Racial Reconstruction,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Winter, 1999), 643, 648-649. 374

* * * *

Significant numbers of blacks who had affiliated with predominantly white churches formed separate black churches between 1791 and 1820. This was especially the case in the mid-Atlantic states and the North’s largest cities. Blacks founded many

Methodist and Baptist churches, but they also founded a couple Episcopal churches and a

Presbyterian church. Black leaders believed that these separate institutions would bring glory to God and would further the spiritual and social uplift of more blacks than could be served in white churches. They also appreciated that separate churches did not have any of the proscriptions common in white churches such as segregated seating and limits placed on the exercise of their leadership abilities. Slowly, many blacks decided to separate from predominantly white churches.

However, not all blacks withdrew from predominantly white churches between

1791 and 1820, and blacks actually participated in more Presbyterian and Dutch

Reformed churches than ever before. Especially in rural locations, blacks did not always have the resources necessary to maintain a separate church. Some blacks, moreover, continued to attend churches where they received education, where they had longstanding relationships, and where their preferred theology and spirituality was practiced.

However, for the blacks who stayed, white conceptions of races were changing, as exhibited by the words used to describe blacks in the church records.

Racism and Jim Crow type segregation began to rise in the North after slavery was ended because racism became more central to maintaining a population of cheap laborers and in order to limit political participation. Churches influenced this rise in segregation and the distancing of blacks and whites through the language they used and

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through the decline in interracial worship. The flexible racism of the colonial era, that did not require separation between whites, blacks, Indians, and others as long as blacks and Indians were minorities in white institutions and remained subordinate, gave way to a more inflexible racism that increasingly stereotyped and degraded blacks and made interracial churches more difficult as the era of the Early Republic transitioned into the antebellum era of the 1830s and 1840s.

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Chapter Six: Black and Indian Christian Radicalism and the Jim Crow North, 1821-1850

In 1833 Methodist minister and Pequot Indian William Apess published a tract in

Boston that included the following challenge to white ministers and church leaders in the

North:

Now, my brethren in the ministry, let me ask you a few sincere questions. Did you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs? [....] If you can find a spirit like Jesus Christ and his Apostles prevailing now in any of the white congregations, I would like to know it. I ask: Is it not the case that everybody that is not white is treated with contempt and counted as barbarians? And I ask if the word of God justifies the white man in so doing.1

As if those questions were not convicting enough, Apess continued, “Why do you, who profess the Gospel and to have his [God’s] spirit, act so contrary to it? Let me ask why the men of a different skin are so despised. Why are not they educated and placed in your pulpits?”2 Apess’s overall point was that whites’ actions towards people of color in the North were blatantly unchristian. Apess was not simply pointing out white hypocrisy or inconsistency. He argued that whites’ actions towards people of color proved that whites were not in fact Christians, and he therefore called on northern whites to convert to the pure religion of Jesus, which would then lead them to treat their colored Christian brothers and sisters as equals. In this, he was joined by black activists and preachers such as David Walker. These black and Indian critiques were unprecedentedly radical. It was no coincidence that they occurred in a period when the number of interracial churches reached a century low-point and when violence and anti-black and anti-Indian racism reached their nineteenth-century peaks in the North.

1 Barry O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 158. 2 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 159. 377

Increasingly in the period of 1821 to 1850, northern whites expressed anti-black and anti-Indian sentiments, instigated race riots, and promoted segregation in churches, schools, public transportation, work, and neighborhoods. Writing in 1835, Englishman

Edward Strutt Abdy saw such actions as constituting an “aristocracy of the skin.” He was shocked that white Americans “should condemn nearly one-fifth of their fellow citizens, without pity, without remorse, and without a trial, to contempt and obloquy, for no reason but that of the strongest, and no crime but that of color.”3 The North had become a society with Jim Crow segregation.

In the early nineteenth century, northern states began to roll back the civil rights they had earlier extended to people of color. New Jersey (1807), Connecticut (1818),

New York (1821), Rhode Island (1822) and Pennsylvania (1838) eliminated laws that had allowed some blacks to vote, made it much more difficult for blacks to vote, or explicitly restricted voting to whites. As Robert Cottrol explains the advent of universal white manhood suffrage in the North generally came with the exclusion of suffrage to blacks. The Connecticut Legislature even made it illegal in 1833 for anyone in the state to educate black children from other states without town permission in order to prevent schoolteacher Prudence Crandall from opening a school for blacks and Indians in

Canterbury. Segregation generally expanded in areas of education, employment, transportation, and entertainment across the North during this period of time.4

3 Edward Strutt Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America From April 1833 to October 1834, Volume 1 (London: John Murray, 1835), 44-45. 4 Rhode Island was an exception to this trend in later years. Blacks with some wealth in Rhode Island were extended the right to vote in 1842 by politicians who sought to prevent universal white male suffrage in that state. Robert J. Cottrol, The Afro-Yankee: Providence’s Black Community in the Antebellum Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 6-9, 68-77. 378

Urban race riots targeting black churches and upwardly mobile blacks became all too common in these years. In October 1824, a white mob attacked a black neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island after a group of blacks refused to yield a sidewalk to some whites, and another anti-black riot occurred in 1831.5 Anti-black race riots and violence also occurred in other cities of the North. A white mob targeted blacks and white abolitionists in a riot lasting over several nights in New York City in 1834. Whites destroyed a St. Phillip’s African Episcopal Church building, a black school, two white churches that had supported abolitionism, and at least a dozen homes owned by blacks.

Likewise, a white mob attacked Philadelphia’s black community in 1834 and destroyed one black church, defaced another black church, and injured many black Philadelphians.

Other white mob violence was directed at Philadelphia’s blacks or their white allies in

1835, 1838, 1842, and 1849.6 Mob violence against people of color was a significant means used by whites to marginalize blacks economically, politically, and socially in the antebellum North.

Increased discrimination and segregation also affected blacks in the North economically. Most antebellum whites were unwilling to work with people of color in any job, and they increasingly took steps to restrict employment options for them.

Theodore Hershberg convincingly argues that discriminatory practices in Philadelphia led to “a remarkable deterioration in the socioeconomic condition of blacks from 1830 to the

Civil War.” He writes:

5 Cottrol, Afro-Yankee, 53-57. 6 Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York & East Jersey, 1613- 1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 227-228; NY Riots, 1834, Misc. Microfilm Reel 34, New-York Historical Society; Emma Jones Lapsansky, ““Since They Got Those Separate Churches”: Afro-American and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” in Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith, ed., African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 93, 101, 114-115. 379

Blacks were excluded from new areas of the economy, uprooted from many of their traditional unskilled jobs, denied apprenticeships for their sons, and prevented from practicing the skills they already possessed. All social indicators – race riots, population decrease, disfranchisement, residential segregation, per capita wealth, ownership of real property, family structure, and occupational opportunities – pointed toward socioeconomic deterioration within Philadelphia’s antebellum black community.7

Julie Winch suggests that the window of opportunity used by James Forten and a few other black Philadelphians to create successful businesses after the Revolution largely shut in the antebellum years. In describing the economic situation of blacks in Boston in the 1830s, Edward Strutt Abdy wrote that one black man “complained to me that he had experienced great difficulty in obtaining an employment in which he could get his bread decently and respectably: with the exception of one or two employed as printers, one blacksmith, and one shoemaker, there are no colored mechanics in the city.” Likewise,

Abdy wrote that “There is not, I believe, one trade in New York, in which its colored inhabitants are allowed to work with the whites.”8 Across the North, whites made work increasingly segregated and difficult to find for black men and women.

During the period of 1820 to 1850, whites became so committed to defending white privilege that many advocated colonization plans that would eventually eliminate people of color from the United States. As historian Nicholas Guyatt has argued, the promotions of Indian removal from the Southeast and Midwest to reservations west of the

Mississippi and black colonization to Africa or the Caribbean were both movements grounded in the same ideology. Even “friends” of blacks and Indians argued that people

7 Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn, and Socioeconomic Decline” in Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith, ed., African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 126, 129, 131. 8 Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States, 121, 358. 380

of color could never rise and prosper in the United States because of white prejudice.

They believed that the best chance for blacks and Indians was their colonization to distant lands.9 Graham Hodges states that, “In the past, white churches had provided some amelioration to blacks for their painful existence. Even this changed for the worse in the antebellum years as white churches spent much of their efforts promoting colonization.”10

Others were even less polite about their distaste for the presence of people of color in the

United States. Charles Carroll Harper of Baltimore, Maryland wrote in 1826 that, “To release them [enslaved blacks] from the restraint of servitude, and turn them loose to prey upon a society which they can never constitute or benefit, would be inconsistent with their happiness and ours. Free blacks are a greater nuisance than even slaves themselves.” J. B. Harrison of Virginia wrote in 1827 about free blacks and argued that,

“There is not a State in the Union not at this moment groaning under the evil of this class of persons, a curse and a contagion wherever they reside.”11 The vast majority of whites in the antebellum United States, North and South, did not want free blacks or free Indians to remain in the United States. Most blacks and Indians opposed colonization plans, but blacks and New England Indians were more successful than southeastern Indians in preventing forced removal from their homes.

Furthermore, most white New Englanders came to believe that Indians were becoming extinct in the North. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 by James

9 Nicholas Guyatt, “‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (2009), 986-1011. 10 Hodges, Root & Branch, 238. 11 Charles Carroll Harper, “Address of C.C. Harper,” in The African Repository and Colonial Journal, Volume 2 (Washington: Way and Gideon, Published by order of the manager of the American Colonization Society, 1827), 188-189; J. B. Harrison, “The Colonization Society Vindicated to Virginia,” in The African Repository and Colonial Journal, Volume 3 (Washington: James C. Dunn, Published by order of the manager of the American Colonization Society, 1828), 202; Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States, 121. 381

Fenimore Cooper, first published in February 1826, is simply the most famous of many stories and town histories that described the last living members of the “dying” or

“vanishing” Indian “races” of New England. As Daniel Mandell shows, “The vanishing

Indian trope that appeared in so many of these [New England’s nineteenth-century] writings rested in large part on the hardening notions of race.”12 The creation of histories and myths arguing that all New England Indians were dead and gone corresponded with growing segregation in public life and colonization movements that sought to create an entirely white North.

The North became the first Jim Crow society in America as whites further disenfranchised, economically marginalized, and segregated blacks, Afro-Indians, and

Indians in all parts of society. Whites even encouraged them to leave the United States.13

Churches played a significant, even if usually passive, role in these developments. If any institutions in the North could have minimized or critiqued the rising segregation and anti-black racism, it was churches because of their moral authority. However, the growing segregation and separation of whites and blacks in churches only gave moral justification to the segregation in other aspects of society. As detailed below, black participation levels decreased in all types of northern, predominantly white churches especially after 1830. Separate black churches were increasingly available across the

North, but growing white discrimination also encouraged blacks to leave white churches.

12 Daniel R. Mandell, Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780– 1880 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 193; Also see Bernd C. Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind: Indian-Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 121-122, 153, 158, 161, 238, and 255; Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 13 The likely origins of the term “Jim Crow” were the 1830s minstrel performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who was popular in the North and the Northwest, but the term did not initially signify legal and cultural segregation. It apparently “became a common adjective by 1838.” J. Richard Lewis, Catherine M. Lewis, and J. Richard Lewis, Jim Crow America: A Documentary History (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009), xi. 382

Only small numbers of black Christians chose to remain part of predominantly white churches, including a group of Christians who believed re-integration of churches was the best hope for combatting racism. The overwhelming majority of colored people favored greater separation. The precipitous decline in black affiliation across all Protestant denominations after 1820 helped create a Jim Crow society, which in turn also provoked militant Christian critiques of white Americans.

Black Participation in Predominantly White Churches

The period of 1821 to 1850 witnessed a substantial decrease in the number of churches baptizing and admitting blacks relative to earlier periods, despite a proliferation of new white churches in the North. Blacks participated in fewer white Protestant churches of all denominations between 1821 and 1850, especially in the latter part of this period. The decline in black baptisms was a direct result of the increased availability of independent black churches of various denominations in northern cities and small towns.

It was also the result of increased white hostility toward blacks in white churches that paralleled and reinforced separation across society as a whole.

Nonetheless, very small numbers of blacks did remain active in white churches.

According to Theodore Hershberg’s analysis of an 1838 census of Philadelphia’s entire black population, roughly five percent of Philadelphia’s black churchgoers (about 150 households) attended one of the twenty-three predominantly white churches in the city.

For the black community as a whole, most church-going blacks attended black churches:

“The churchgoing population of the entire community consisted of 2,776 households distributed among five religious denominations: Methodists (73 percent), Baptists (9

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percent), Presbyterian (7 percent), Episcopalian (7 percent), and Catholic (3 percent).”14

Although a very small number of blacks continued to affiliate with predominantly white churches in the North, the number of white churches that baptized or admitted blacks decreased significantly from earlier periods.

Table 6-1: Congregational churches in southern New England and New York with two or more black, Indian, or Afro-Indian baptisms or members, 1821-1850 Approximate Number of Church Location people of color Old South (Third) Church Boston Boston, Mass. 8 Brattle Square (Fourth) Church (Unitarian) Boston, Mass. 2 West Church (Ninth) Boston (Unitarian) Boston, Mass. 3 Church of Christ in Green Street Boston, Mass. 2 Bowdoin Street Church Boston Boston, Mass. 2 Bristol First Congregational Church Bristol, R.I. 9 Kingston Congregational Church Kingston. R.I. 2 West Woodstock Congregational West Woodstock, Conn. 2 Stonington First Congregational Church Stonington, Conn. 2 Madison First Congregational Church Madison, Conn. 3 Broadway Tabernacle Church New York, N.Y. 5 Total Number 40 See Bibliography for Sources

Black men and women affiliated with a very small number of congregational churches in New England between 1821 and 1850. Although black baptismal and membership rates had been declining since the 1760s in many locations, they plummeted after the 1810s. Whereas thirty-six Congregational churches had two or more black baptisms or members between 1791 and 1820, only eleven of the Congregational churches examined for this study had two or more black baptisms and/or members between 1821 and 1850 (see Table 6-1). During the same period of time, the number of

14 Theodore Hershberg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia: A Study of Ex-Slaves, Freeborn, and Socioeconomic Decline” in Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith, ed., African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical Perspectives (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 134-135. 384

Congregational churches in New England rose substantially, but fewer of these churches included black congregants. Undoubtedly, very few black affiliated with either the

Orthodox or Unitarian Congregational churches between 1821 and 1850.

The case of the Kingston Congregational Church in Kingston, Rhode Island and the Fayerweather family is instructive for why a very small number of blacks and Afro-

Indians remained in predominantly white churches. The Reverend Oliver Brown, associated with the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, began ministry work in Kingston in 1819. The community organized a church a year later, and the church building was finished in 1821. Nancy Rodman Fayerweather and Isabella

Fayerweather were among the thirteen people received as members of the church in the year 1836. The church records state “Nancy wife of George Fayerweather (col’d) rcd

1836.” This George Fayerweather was the son of George Fayerweather Sr., who had been enslaved to the Reverend Samuel Fayerweather, minister of St. Paul’s Episcopal

Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island. George Fayerweather II married Nancy Rodman, an Indian or Afro-Indian, and opened a blacksmith shop in the village of Kingston in

1820. They all attended the predominantly white Congregational church located just down the road from their home and blacksmith shop. No doubt, the relationships with fellow congregants were important to the success of George’s business. Although it is not clear whether or not George Fayerweather II joined the church, his wife and at least one daughter became members. Their son Solomon was employed as the church sexton for many years beginning in 1873.15 In addition, 18 of 169 students in the church’s

15 William D. Metz, The History of the Kingston Congregational Church, 1695-1995 (Kingston, R.I.: Kingston Congregational Church, 1996), 96. 385

Sunday School in 1833 were blacks.16 The Fayerweathers, who can be described as black or Afro-Indian, chose this predominantly white Congregational church as their spiritual home for perhaps both spiritual and commercial reasons.

The presence of the Fayerweather family at the Kingston Congregational Church and the relationships that they had with other congregants may have had a direct impact on the church’s antislavery stance. At a congregational meeting in December 1841, the members of the church adopted a strong antislavery stance grounded in their theology:

Resolved, unanimously, that we deem slavery, or the involuntary holding of human beings in bondage, as a great sin against God, having originated in selfishness, oppression and power and continued and sustained through a long course of years by the same unholy principles, as entirely opposed to the fundamental principles of the gospel of the blessed Savior, which breathe a spirit of love, and as requiring the rebuke of the church must ultimately be visited with God’s avenging judgments. Hence we cannot consistently with the great principles of our holy profession extend the hand of fellowship to any who participate in its guilt or encourage or abet the holding of slaves in any way whatever.17

They declared slavery a moral evil that required a rebuke from Christians and they rejected fellowship with anyone who encouraged slavery. Some churches in the North began directing antislavery positions against southern states in the antebellum era even as blacks disassociated with these same churches.

Boston had five predominantly white Congregational churches with which blacks affiliated during this period despite the existence of separate black Baptist and black

Methodist churches. The records from Hanover Street Congregational Church (name changed to Bowdoin Street Church in 1831), during the pastorate of the Reverend Lyman

Beecher suggests why some blacks chose to affiliate with white churches in this era.

16 Cato Pearce, Jailed for Preaching: The Autobiography of Cato Pearce, a Freed Slave from Washington County. Rhode Island, with an Historical Introduction by Christian M. McBurney (Kingston, R.I.: Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, 2006), 19. 17 Quoted in Metz, History of the Kingston Congregational Church, 73. 386

Beecher’s theology and preaching style were so popular that between March 1826 and

January 1833, one hundred ninety-five men and three hundred thirty women became members.18 At least four African Americans applied for membership at during his period of whom two were admitted and two were not. These three women and one man – Ann

Maria Clary, Mary Stanley, Dorcas Lew, and Phillip Harris – met with church leaders to discuss their religious experiences and beliefs and the reasons for seeking to join this church, and notes from these meetings have survived.19

Ann Maria Clary, who had recently moved to Boston from Milford, was the first black person to seek membership at Hanover Church. She was interviewed at the home of Deacon Daniel Noyes on January 31, 1828. Clary stated that her recent interest in religion was the result of a conversation with a Miss Newell (at least two Miss Newells were members by 1828). Afterwards, she was engaged in prayer and Bible reading, but that had not been enough to keep her from sinning. However, she felt that God had redeemed her about three weeks before her confession, evidenced by her beginning to feel happy, loving other Christians as never before, and sensing a nearness to Jesus

18 The Articles and Covenant of the Bowdoin Street Church (1856), 5, 23-36; Debby Applegate indicates that, “When combined with his fiery preaching style, Beecher’s attempt to modernize and soften the harshness of hyper-Calvinism was a decided hit.” Furthermore, Applegate argues that Beecher “was inspiring for the city’s middling folk, the clerks, journeymen, and workers come to seek their fortunes in the city, who lived in the cheap roominghouses of Hanover and Ann streets.” Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Three Leaves Press, 2006), 57, 58. 19 The church leaders interviewed candidates for membership and made recommendations regarding whether or not they should be admitted. At that time, the church required that “every candidate [for admission to membership] shall be previously examined, & give credible evidence of a change of heart, by the renovating influence of the Holy Spirit, implying repentance for sin, and faith in Jesus Christ the Redeemer. The church’s examining committee asked questions of the candidates such as: Have you been baptized? When did you first feel convicted about your sins? When did you receive a hope that you were saved? And what evidence in your life suggests that God has redeemed and saved you? If the answers to these questions proved satisfactory and convincing, then a candidate could proceed to become a member of the church; “Bowdoin Street Church Documents,” Boston, Massachusetts, Bowdoin Street Church, Records, 1825-1865, RG 0806, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass., Box 2, Folder 36; The Articles and Covenant of the Bowdoin Street Church, Boston with a List of the Members (Boston: T.R. Marvin, 1856), 3-5, 22-23; Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 52-58. 387

Christ. These were all very positive signs, according to the people who interviewed her, but they apparently wanted to confirm the true authenticity of her conversion by allowing more time to pass before her admittance to the church. Yet Clary appears not to have reapplied for membership.20 If the Miss Newell who encouraged her interest in religion had gone to this church, then a personal relationship perhaps explains Clary’s interest in attending a white church.

Mary Stanley, who was a single black woman, was interviewed for membership on March 19, 1828 at Deacon William G. Lambert’s home, and she was admitted to the church. Stanley had been a member since August 31, 1825 of the Green Street

Congregational Church, under the ministry of the Reverend William Jenks. She was one of two black members at the Green Street Church in this period, which was founded in

1823, and the Green Street Church records state that Stanley was dismissed to the

Hanover Church on January 25, 1828.21 Stanley indicated that her attention to religion was initiated by a sermon preached by the Reverend Benjamin Wisner, pastor of the Old

South Church Boston. Although Stanley lived in the household of a man who attended the Reverend Thomas Paul’s African Baptist Church, she evidently felt strong ties to the evangelical Congregational churches of Boston. Stanley was influenced by the preaching of Old South’s pastor and affiliated with first one and then with a second predominantly white Congregational church, even though black churches were available to her.

Stanley’s move to the Hanover Church seems to have been based on a practical concern,

“because her situation is such that she cannot hear” at the Green Street Church. Such a

20 “Examining Committee Membership Records, 1827,” Boston, Massachusetts, Bowdoin Street Church, Records, 1825-1865, RG 0806, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass., Box 1, folder 12. 21 “Records of the Congregational Church of Christ in Green Street Boston III,” Boston, Massachusetts, Green Street Church, Records, 1822-1844, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass. 388

statement suggests that the segregated seating arrangement at Green Street Church, either because of poor acoustics, distance from the pulpit, or a quiet preacher, made sermons difficult for her to hear. Stanley was also acquainted with a person who belonged to

Hanover Church, which may have influenced her move to this church. Stanley was married to a man with the last name of Pierre sometime after she joined Hanover Church.

She was still a member in 1843, when she lived on Holden Place, off of Belknap Street.

Mary Stanley-Pierre died sometime between 1844 and 1849.22

Phillip Harris was the third African American to seek membership at Hanover

Church, and he was admitted in May 1829. He had attended Hanover Church for about a year before seeking membership, and the document suggests that his reason for joining this church was that he “Enjoys the preaching.” Harris indicated that he had been a member of an Episcopal church for four years. The testimony actually states that he was a member of the “African Episc. Chh,” but other records simply state Episcopal Church and there was no African American Episcopal Church in Boston at that time.23 Harris lived on Ann Street (now known as North Street), in close proximity to Hanover Church and the docks where he seemed to work.24 Since Harris stated that he “prays in his family,” he likely brought other family members to the Hanover Church for worship services. Harris’ whereabouts were “unknown” to the church in 1843 and later documents simply indicate that he was a deceased member. For both Harris and Stanley,

22 “Examining Committee Membership Records, 1827.” 23 “Examining Committee Membership Records, 1829,” Boston, Massachusetts, Bowdoin Street Church, Records, 1825-1865, RG 0806, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass., Box 1, folder 14; “Membership Records, ca.1825-1859,” Boston, Massachusetts, Bowdoin Street Church, Records, 1825- 1865, RG 0806, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass., Box 1, folder 8; The Articles and Covenant of the Bowdoin Street Church (1856), 30-31; Robert C. Hayden, Faith Culture, and Leadership: A History of the Black Church in Boston (Boston: Boston Branch NAACP, 1983). 24 The 1828 and 1829 Boston city directories indicate that he lived in a rear or alley dwelling behind 167 Ann Street and was listed as a “labourer.” Boston Directory 1828 (Boston: Hunt and Stimpson, 1828), 304; Boston Directory 1829 (Boston: Charles Stimpson Jr., 1829), 297. 389

early published directories, such as the 1837 list, included a racial notation next to their names. However, the list of members published in 1856 did not include racial notations, even though it listed Harris and Stanley as historic (now deceased) members.25 Since the number of blacks associated with this church declined in the 1840s, the absence of such designations in 1856 probably means that the church had no black members by that date.

It appears that the African American presence was erased from the public memory after their physical presence in the church had ceased.

Lastly, Dorcas Lew was interviewed for church membership in August 1832. She was a member of the African Baptist Church, but she sought membership in the Bowdoin

Street Church that was located a couple blocks away. In addition to knowing Mary

Stanley, she also mentioned that she was acquainted with several white congregants.

These relationships, which could have been personal or business in nature, seemed to influence her decision to seek membership in this church. The African Baptist Church was also in a state of flux and transition between the 1829 resignation of the Reverend

Paul and the 1838 settlement of the Reverend G. H. Black, and the state of this church may have affected Lew’s desire to change churches.26 The committee gave her a

“favorable” recommendation for membership, but other church records indicate that her request for membership was “Deferred.”27 She may have chosen to remain at the African

Baptist Church, or the Bowdoin Street Church’s leadership may have developed other reservations about her application for membership. Lew does not appear elsewhere in the

25 Articles of Faith and Covenant of the Bowdoin Street Church, Boston: with a list of the members (Boston: T.R. Marvin, 1837), 30-32; The Articles and Covenant of the Bowdoin Street Church (1856), 30- 31. 26 Hayden, Faith, Culture, and Leadership, 5. 27 “Membership Records, ca.1825-1859”; “Examining Committee Membership Records, [1831?],” Boston, Massachusetts, Bowdoin Street Church, Records, 1825-1865, RG 0806, Congregational Library, Boston, Mass., Box 1, folder 17. 390

church records, and she was evidently the last African American to seek membership in this predominantly white Congregational church. Although small numbers of blacks affiliated with predominantly white Congregational churches in the North from 1790 to

1850 because of relationship connections to the church or preferences for a particular theology or preaching style, black affiliation was much lower in the nineteenth century than it had been in the eighteenth century.

While a small number of black men and women continued to participate in and affiliate with Congregational Churches in New England for spiritual and other reasons, the number of Congregational churches with black participants became very low. One of the reasons for the drop in black participation in Congregational churches was a noticeable growth in hostility toward black worshippers in these churches. More evidence exists from this era regarding the malicious exclusion of blacks from

Congregational churches than from any earlier period. For example, whites forcibly expelled a black man from the Park Street Congregational Church although he had legal claim to a church pew there. Frederick Brinsley a “colored man” who lived on Elm

Street was given the pew at Park Street Church in payment for a debt. Unable to sell the pew for his desired price, Brinsely and his wife and children occupied the pew one

Sunday in March 1830. After the service he received a note from the church informing him that his pew had been rented to another man without his consent. Another note read as follows:

Boston, March 6, 1830, Mr. Federick Brinsley. Sir, The Prudential committee of Park Street Church, notify you not to occupy any pew on the lower floor of Park Street Meeting-house on any Sabbath, or on any other day, during the time of Divine worship, after this date – and, if

391

you go there, with such intent you, will hazard the consequences. The pews in the upper galleries are at your service. George Odiorne, for the Committee.

When Brinsley returned to the church, he found a constable “at the pew-door,” and he made no more attempts at sitting on the lower level or any other part of this church. A very similar situation occurred in the Baptist church in Randolph, Massachusetts in the same period.28 Many Congregational churches made clear that blacks were not going to be accepted as equal church members or attendees, if they were welcome at all.

At least fourteen northern Episcopal churches continued to include black congregants, members, and baptisms, but black participation in predominantly white

Episcopal churches also declined relative to earlier periods (see Table 6-2). Most of the

Episcopal churches with black baptisms contained fewer black persons than in preceding decades, and the baptisms tended to be concentrated in the 1820s and not the 1830s or

1840s. Even Episcopal churches, which had often included the highest number of blacks of any denomination in northern cities, were becoming increasingly segregated as more blacks joined separate churches and northern society became more segregated overall.

Table 6-2: Predominantly white Episcopal churches with two or more black baptisms, 1821-1850 Approximate number of Church Location black baptism Christ Episcopal Church Boston Boston, Mass. 5 Trinity Church Boston Boston, Mass. 24 Trinity Episcopal Church Newport Newport, R.I. 8 Christ Church Westerly Westerly, R.I. 4 Holy Trinity/Christ Church Middletown Middletown, Conn. 11 St. Paul's Episcopal Church Norwalk, Conn. 6 St. John's Church Bridgeport Bridgeport, Conn. 4 Christ Episcopal Church Stratford Stratford, Conn. 8

28 Letter quoted in Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States, 133-136; Also see Archibald Henry Grimké, William Lloyd Garrison: The Abolitionist (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1891), 160-161. 392

Trinity Church New York & its parishes New York, N.Y. 19 Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church Richmond Staten Island, N.Y. 7 Saint Pauls’ Episcopal Church Tompkinsville Tompkinsville, N.Y. 36 St. John's Episcopal Church Yonkers Yonkers, N.Y. 24 St. John’s Episcopal Church Johnstown, N.Y. 2 St. Mary’s Episcopal Burlington Burlington, N.J. 9 Total 167 See Bibliography for Sources

Several of the North’s Episcopal Churches continued to baptize blacks and admit them to communion, but black participation generally declined in these churches. At least eight blacks were baptized at Trinity Church Newport between 1821 and 1840. The trend away from black participation, however, is suggested by the fact that the number of burials for blacks exceeded the number of black baptisms in these years. At Easter 1840, the church’s communicant list included fifteen black members, and the 1848-1851 communicant lists included sixteen black members. A small number of blacks remained active members of this Episcopal parish through the 1840s, even after a separate black church was founded in Newport in 1824, but there were fewer blacks at Trinity Church than in previous decades.29 At Christ Church (now Holy Trinity) in Middletown,

Connecticut, at least eleven blacks were baptized between 1821 and 1850 and some blacks appeared on communicant lists into the 1840s. A list from 1823 included six

“colored” communicants and another from 1843 included nine “colored” communicants.30 At Trinity Church Boston, which had been a center for black religion between the 1780s and 1820, twenty-four blacks were baptized between 1821 and 1836.

29 “Book of Record Trinity Church Rhode Island 1709,” Trinity Church Records, NHS. 30 Connecticut Church Records. Middletown/Church of the Holy Trinity 1750-1947, Reel #76, Volume III. 393

Seven of the twenty-four were adult baptisms.31 While small numbers of African

Americans in the North continued to affiliate with predominantly white Episcopal churches, their presence in these churches was declining after the 1820s as more black churches were formed in the North. Interracial Episcopal churches became less common.

Some of the African Americans who remained communicants in Episcopal churches into the 1830s and 1840s were older adults who had been Episcopalian since childhood. Ichabod Pease, for example, was a member of St. James Episcopal Church in

New London, Connecticut for more than sixty years. Pease continued to attend this predominantly white church because, in the words of his pastor, “He loved the church and her ways. The words of the liturgy were to him as household words, and were as manna to his mouth.” The burial records note his 1842 death with the following statement: “Mar. 5, 1842. Buried Ichabod Pease, aged 86. A man of colour, who for more than sixty years was a communicant in this parish, and, adorned, as few do, his

Christian professions.” The Reverend Robert Hallam preached a sermon at his burial that was subsequently published, and Hallam could not have possibly been more effuse in eulogizing Pease. He stated that Pease had displayed “naked goodness, without the adventitious aids of wealth, rank, learning, distinguished talents, or brilliant deeds, shines in its simple majesty and loveliness, and secures the regard and homage of all hearts.”

Hallam continued that, “He ‘believed in the Lord with all his heart,’ and served him with a willing and constant mind.” Hallam described how Pease started attending the church while confined by the “miserable system” of slavery and was taught about Christianity by his Episcopalian owner. During the Revolution, he ran away from his loyalist owner,

31 Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vol. 56, Collections, The Records of Trinity Church Boston II (Boston: Published by the Society, 1982), 700-710; H2 N2. Trinity Church Register, 1820-1869, Trinity Church Records, MHS. 394

Robinson Mumford, but Pease was claimed by John Deshon after the war as payment for

Mumford’s debt. Pease received religious instruction from Bishop Seabury, and became a communicant in 1785. While it was relatively common for paternalistic whites to praise a particular African American as a moral example for other blacks, it was unheard of for a white person to hold up an African American as a moral example for whites.

Hallam did tell the “people of color” to honor the memory of Pease by revolving “to be like him; to do as he did,” but he also told all the church’s communicants, who were mostly white, that Pease’s “life and death solemnly admonish them to be steadfast, unmoving, always abounding in the work of the Lord.”32 This black Episcopalian, a longtime member of a Connecticut parish, was held-up as the model Christian for the entire, mostly white community. Needless to say, Pease’s standing in this church was rare for blacks within predominantly white churches, but some people of color remained affiliated with predominantly white churches well into the antebellum era.

Like the North’s Congregational and Episcopal churches, black participation rates declined in predominantly white Presbyterian and Reformed churches after the 1820s.

Although some Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches continued to baptize blacks, the number of churches that did so and the number of blacks who chose to affiliate with these churches declined after the 1820s. At least seventeen Reformed churches (down from twenty-six in the 1791-1820 period) and at least ten Presbyterian churches (down

32 List of Communicants 1816, 1832-1834, 1835-1871, Baptisms, Confirmations, Marriages and Burials 1792-1874, New London Episcopal Church Records, Vol. 2, 1792 to 1874, New London/St. James Church, Reel #305 pp. 108; Robert A. Hallam, The Dignity of Goodness: A Discourse, Delivered at the Funeral of Mr. Ichabod Pease, (A Man of Color,) in St. James’ Church, New London, March 5, 1842 (New London: Bolles & Williams, 1842), 3-4, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15-16; Also see Hagar Merriman, The Autobiography of Aunt Hagar Merriman of New Haven, Conn. (New Haven: Published for the Author, 1861). 395

from seventeen in the 1791-1820 period) included two or more black baptisms, as shown in Table 6-3.

Table 6-3: Reformed and Presbyterian churches with two or more black baptisms and/or black members, 1821-1850

Church Location Church Approx. Type number Reformed Dutch Church at Greenwich New York, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 12 First Presbyterian Church New York New York, N.Y. Presbyterian 14 First Presbyterian Church Albany Albany, N.Y. Presbyterian 3 Second Reformed Church Albany Albany, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 5 Wawarsing Reformed Dutch Church Wawarsing, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 3 Presbyterian Church Elmhurst (Newtown) Elmhurst, N.Y. Presbyterian 18 Staten Island Dutch Reformed Church Staten Island, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 4 Reformed Dutch Church in Tompkinsville Tompkinsville, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 2 First Presbyterian Church Ballston Ballston, N.Y. Presbyterian 2 First United Presbyterian Church Cambridge Cambridge, N.Y. Presbyterian 4 First Reformed Church of Coxsackie Coxsackie, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 65 Reformed Dutch Church Wynantskill Wynantskill, N.Y Dutch Ref. 3 Pompton Plains Reformed Dutch Church Pompton Plains, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 10 Reformed Dutch Church of Catskill Catskill, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 4 Presbyterian Church in Charlton Charlton, N.Y Presbyterian 2 Presbyterian Church of Johnstown Johnstown, N.Y. Presbyterian 2 German Reformed Church New Rhinebeck Cobleskill, N.Y. German Ref 4 Protestant Dutch Church of Greenbush Greenbush, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 11 Reformed Protestant Dutch Chh of Florida Florida, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 2 Dutch Reformed Church Schenectady Schenectady, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 5 Kingsborough Ave Presbyterian Gloversville Gloversville, N.Y Presbyterian 13 Reformed Protestant Dutch Chh of Nassau Nassau, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 8 Reformed Dutch Church of Schodack Schodack, N.Y. Dutch Ref. 18 Saddle River Reformed Dutch Church Saddle River, N.J Dutch Ref. 34 First Presbyterian Church Cranbury Cranbury, N.J. Presbyterian 19 Pascack Dutch Reformed Church Park Ridge, N.J. Dutch Ref. 15 First Presbyterian Church Elizabeth, N.J Elizabeth, N.J. Presbyterian 17 Total 299 See Bibliography for Sources

In at least a couple cases, Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches did baptize a significant number of blacks, but, on the whole, black participation in these churches declined rapidly in the 1830s and 1840s. The First Reformed Church of Coxsackie, New

York (located south of Albany on the Hudson River) baptized and admitted to

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membership a remarkable number of blacks in the 1820s, but few were baptized there in the 1830s and 1840s. Roughly sixty-five blacks, including some who were enslaved and some who were free, both children and adults, were baptized there between 1821 and

1836. Fifty-three blacks were admitted to membership and communion at this church in

1821 alone. Twenty-eight of these people were explicitly labeled as free people of color.

During the year 1821, large numbers of both whites and blacks were baptized and admitted to this church. A few years later, the Reverend Gilbert Livingston explained that so many people joined his church during this religious revival that the church’s building “became too small to accommodate the Worshippers” and it had to be enlarged.

Because of this general revival, many blacks joined the First Reformed Church of

Coxsackie in 1821, and approximately twenty-eight more blacks joined between 1822 and 1843. Some of the black men and women admitted to membership did not remain members for very long, but a couple dozen continued to be “recognized as members” through 1852.33 Coxsackie was exceptional because almost all the other Reformed and

Presbyterians churches included under twenty black participants and many of them had less than five black participants during these years.

Reformed churches’ support for African colonization was likely one cause of the decreasing black affiliation after 1820, and their embrace of greater separatism helped promote segregation in northern society. The General Synod of the Reformed Dutch

Church endorsed the American Colonization Society’s plan to send free blacks to Africa

33 Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the First Reformed Church of Coxsackie in West Coxsackie, Greene County, N.Y., Vol. 2, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, New York City, June 1919, pp. 19-62; Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Records of the First Reformed Church of Coxsackie in West Coxsackie, Greene County, NY, Vol. 3, transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, New York City, June 1919, pp. 9-36, 40, 49, 114. 397

in 1820. Like other northern Christians, Reformed ministers and laity justified colonization and separatism under the guise of benevolence.34

Some Presbyterian churches baptized small numbers of African Americans in this period, but fewer blacks participated in predominantly white Presbyterian churches overall. At least seventeen persons of color were baptized or admitted to members in the

First Presbyterian Church Elizabeth, New Jersey between 1821 and 1850. When the

Reverend Nicholas Murray made a list of “families in the First Presbyterian Church of

Elizabeth Town” in 1834 and 1835 during his visits to congregants’ homes, he included fourteen “colored” families. At that point, nine black persons were members of the First

Presbyterian Church. They represented only two percent of the 445 Presbyterian church members in Elizabeth, New Jersey.35

As was the case with Congregationalists and other Christians, there was a growing disinclination among whites to accept blacks into Presbyterian churches after

1820. Some white Presbyterians displayed an aggressive opposition to including blacks on equal terms in their churches. In 1834, the merchant and antislavery activist Arthur

Tappan brought Samuel Cornish, “an almost-white Presbyterian clergyman,” to sit with him in his ground floor pew at the Laight Street Presbyterian Church in New York City.

In the words of historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “the incident created an uproar; some church members even threatened to resign their membership.”36 A spirit of distinction

34 Firth Haring Fabend, Zion on the Hudson: Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 181-182. 35 Box 1, Folder 9, Infant Baptism and Adult Baptisms 1811-1824; Box 1, Folder 4, Session Minutes 1817-1824; Box 1, Folder 6, Session Minutes 1825-32; Box 2, Folder 7, List of Families, 1810-12, 1834-35; and Box 2, Folder 8, List Suspended Members, 1824-1851, First Presbyterian Church (Elizabeth, N.J.) Records, 1716-1913, RG 68, PHS. 36 Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 176. 398

and separation more and more permeated northern society, and the churches were rarely different from other social institutions in separating blacks from whites.

A tendency toward separation seemed to have been even stronger among

Methodists, Baptists, and Lutherans in the North than among some of the other northern denominations. Methodist and Baptist churches were by far the most common types of independent black churches. If a separate church were available in a given location in the

North, in all likelihood, it was a Baptist or Methodist church. Black Methodists worked tirelessly to found new African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) churches and few predominantly white Methodist churches contained black members by the 1830s. The process for ordaining Baptist and Methodist ministers and preachers was relatively easy and did not require extensive theological training, so black Baptists and Methodists were ordained much more frequently than black Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and

Presbyterians, which helps to explain why the former types became more and more common among black communities.

The process that began in the 1790s of groups of black Methodists removing themselves from predominantly white Methodist churches continued into the antebellum period in locations where blacks had yet to form separate churches. Take for example the

Methodist church in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This predominantly white Methodist church had included at least one class for black Methodists, and the black Methodists sat in a segregated seating area of the church during Sunday worship services. Around 1838, blacks in Gettysburg began forming a separate black Methodist church.37 By 1840, references in the white church’s records indicate that “the Coloured People’s Church”

37 Margaret S. Creighton, The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg's Forgotten History: Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle (Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Books, 2006), 62, 253. 399

had been formed, and notes from a February 3, 1841 leaders’ meeting at the predominantly white church stated that “the colored class was reported withdrawn from the Methodist E. Church and joined with the parties called the Bethelites excepting twenty one who still remain.”38 Some blacks seem to have remained at the predominantly white church for a time, but the trend toward greater and greater separation among Methodists was unmistakable.39

A few of the North’s Baptist and Lutheran churches contained black members and congregants, but these churches too saw a sharp decline in black participation. Table 6-3 includes seven predominantly white Baptist churches and two Lutheran churches that baptized or admitted two or more blacks. Blacks participated in fewer of these churches compared to the previous period; at least twelve Lutheran churches and eleven Baptist churches included two or more blacks between 1791 and 1820.

Table 6-4: Baptist and Lutheran churches with two or more black baptisms and/or black members, 1821-1850

Church Approx. Church Location Type number

First Baptist Church Boston Boston, Mass. Baptist 2 Baldwin Place (Second) Baptist Church Boston, Mass. Baptist 2 First Baptist Church Providence Providence, R.I. Baptist 19 First Baptist Church South Kingstown S. Kingstown, R.I. Baptist 6 Baptist Church in Exeter Exeter, R.I. Baptist 4 First Baptist Church Stonington Stonington, Conn. Baptist 8 Friendship Seventh Day Baptist Church Nile, N.Y. Baptist 3 St. Paul’s Lutheran Church Berne Berne, N.Y. Lutheran 3

38 “The United Methodist Church of Gettysburg, Adams County, Pa. organized 1969 by the merger of The First Methodist Episcopal Church (1815-1969) and the Memorial Evangelical United Brethren Church (1891-1969) both of Gettysburg,” typescript transcription of records, ACHS, pp. 15-16. 39 As another example, the 1840s class lists for the white Methodist church at Tottenville, Staten Island, N.Y., included the names of five “colored” members; by Royden Woodward Vosburg, ed., Records of the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church at Tottenville, Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y., transcribed, New York City, 1922, LOC, pp. 67-73. 400

St. Thomas's Lutheran Church Claverack Claverack, N.Y. Lutheran 3 Total 50 See Bibliography for Sources

Small numbers of blacks were members of white Baptist churches in this era, but the overall trend was toward greater separation. James P. Lewis and Susan James, both

African Americans, joined the predominantly white First Baptist Church of Boston between 1829 and 1830. Lewis transferred his membership from the First Baptist Church in Salem, and James had been a member of the African Baptist Church in Boston. The records indicate that Susan James was “a young lady who was awakened under the ministry of Elder Paul, &, when very young, joined the Chh under his care,” but she left the African Baptist Church following the resignation of the Reverend Thomas Paul as that church faced internal divisions. Benjamin Wigden and his wife Mary Wigden, both

“colored” people, were constituent members of the Friendship Seventh Day Baptist

Church in rural Friendship, New York (located in western New York near the border with

Pennsylvania) when the church was founded in 1824 and one other black woman soon joined this church.40 Especially in some rural locations it was still possible to have interracial Baptist churches. African American Cato Pearce participated in interracial

Baptist services and churches in Connecticut and Rhode Island in this period of time and

40 “Records of the First Baptist Church of Boston, Beginning January 24, 1800, continued from March 28, 1665 when this church was constituted in Charlestown, Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” First Baptist Church Boston, Andover Newton Theological Library; Minutes of the Eighteenth Anniversary of the Boston Baptist Association, Held at the Federal-Street Baptist Meeting-House, in Boston on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept.16 & 17, 1829 (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1829), 4 and 17; Minutes of the Nineteenth Anniversary of the Boston Baptist Association, Held at the Second Baptist Meeting-House, Boston on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept.15 & 16, 1830 (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1830), 4 and 16; Minutes of the Twentieth Anniversary of the Boston Baptist Association, Held at the Baptist Meeting- House, Roxbury on Wednesday and Thursday, Sept.21 & 22, 1831 (Boston: Lincoln and Edmands, 1831), 4 and 7-8; Ilou M. Sanford, ed., Membership Records of Seventh Day Baptist Churches in Western New York and Northwestern Pennsylvania 1800-1900 (Heritage Books, Inc. 1996), 35-36. 401

his life story shows the common ground that was still possible between black and white

Christians in the North, despite growing segregation.

Cato Pearce was born to enslaved parents in Kingston, Rhode Island in 1790. For most of his childhood, he was an unfree laborer, but he ran away in 1808 and again a couple years later. Pearce was not given religious instruction as a youth, but he eventually attended a variety of Protestant churches, including both predominantly black and predominantly white services, before settling into an interracial Baptist community.

Pearce attended services with mainly African Americans in Providence, Rhode Island that were led by white Methodist minister V.R. Osborn, and Osborn significantly influenced his spiritual development. However, after he moved away from Providence, his spiritual journey took a different direction. He attended some Seventh Day Baptist meetings with his white employer, but he did not agree with their practice of Saturday

Sabbaths. Pearce eventually attended other Baptist meetings and churches, and he preached to predominantly white audiences on several occasions. In describing one of the religious gatherings, Pearce “asked my brethren to sing, and I got up and talked, and we had a first rate meeting.”41 Pearce began to identify himself as a Baptist, preferring the more egalitarian and “spirit-led” approach of this tradition.

After another move for work, Pearce was invited to attend a Presbyterian church service, and when he arrived, he was ushered into “the box for the colored people.” He stated that this service did not do him any good because he could hardly hear the minister who preached, unlike Pearce, from prepared notes: “I was so fur [far] off from him, and

41 Cato Pearce, Jailed for Preaching: The Autobiography of Cato Pearce, a Freed Slave from Washington County, Rhode Island, with an Historical Introduction by Christian M. McBurney (Kingston, R.I: Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, 2006), introduction page 13, narrative pages 5-6, 8, 14-15, 17, 19- 20. 402

he preached by note, that I could n’t understand hardly any thing he said – only once in a while, ‘Lord Jesus Christ.’ I thought to myself I wished I had n’t come; for the meetin’ did n’nt do me any good.”42 In contrast, when Pearce went to a the Chestnut Hill Baptist

Church in Killingly, Connecticut on the next Sunday, “many pew doors was opened for me to come in and set down […] and I felt as if I was to home – for them was my people.” He was invited to share his religious testimony, and at his request, the church accepted Pearce as a member at their next covenant meeting. In subsequent gatherings,

Pearce preached to predominantly white audiences with success.43 While one of his employers, Elisha Potter, cursed Pearce, saying that “I wo’ n’t have no nigger preachers,” and temporarily imprisoned him for missing part of a day’s work, Pearce seemed to have maintained good relationships with white Baptists. Pearce ended his narrative by stating that he “had great faith that God’s work would go on,” and he continued to preach and work with the white church deacon Thomas Cole, of Crantson. He wrote, “I have made it my home with him [Deacon Cole] many years. He and his wife have been very kind to me.”44 In some Baptist communities, whites and blacks continued to worship and preach together, but such religious communities were becoming less common in the antebellum

North.

As had occurred among most of the North’s Methodist churches, in many locations, blacks within predominantly white Baptist churches eventually formed separate churches. The First Baptist Church in Stonington, Connecticut had several black church members by 1826 and admitted eight black persons between 1841 and 1843. In 1846, however, many of the black church members wrote to the church requesting permission

42 Pearce, Jailed for Preaching, 27. 43 Pearce, Jailed for Preaching, intro pp. 17, narrative pp. 27-28. 44 Pearce, Jailed for Preaching, 31, 34. 403

to form a black Baptist church. They requested letters of dismissal, “Believing that the time has come when the interests of religion, especially among the people of color in this village and vicinity would be promoted by our organization into a separate body.” These black Baptists argued that their request to form a new church was motived by “Christian charity solely,” and they claimed to “cherish an affectionate remembrance” of the white church members. They felt, however, “that we ought to attempt to do something for the spiritual welfare of our own brethren according to the flesh – something which shall bring them more immediately under the renewing and saving influence of the glorious gospel.”

On September 28, 1846, they received permission to form a new congregation and at least many of the black members were dismissed to the new church.45 While some predominantly white Baptist churches continued to have black members, more and more

Baptist churches in the North separated into racially distinct congregations.

All types of Protestant churches in the North became increasingly homogenous during the antebellum period. A long history of interracial religious worship gave way to increasing segregation. Most blacks, Afro-Indians, and Indians preferred separate churches and they founded many more such institutions in the North during this period.

While small numbers of colored people still remained in Congregational, Episcopalian,

Presbyterian, Reformed, Baptist, and other churches for a variety of their own reasons, the number of black baptisms, communicants, and members decreased across the range of churches, especially in the 1830s and 1840s. While people of color supported their own churches for reasons that benefited their communities and individuals, whites also took actions to expel and discourage black participation in predominantly white churches

45 John V. Hinshaw, ed., The Stonington Baptist Records 1772-1848 (Stonington, Conn.: The Stonington Historical Society, 1992), xv, 58-62, 117-118. 404

during this era. White churches lent their moral authority to segregation and separation across northern society, at least implicitly and sometimes explicitly. However, small bands of white and black Christians challenged this new status quo by explicitly arguing that segregation was unchristian.

Church Integrationists

Some black and white Christians responded to the rise of segregation in northern churches and society by arguing that churches should be re-integrated. These integrationists were a minority in the North, but they identified the increased separation of blacks and whites as a cause of the worsening conditions of blacks in the North. They advocated integration as the best option available for combatting anti-black sentiments and actions. Many of the integrationists were abolitionists and antislavery activists who saw integration as a larger part of their moral crusade to eliminate sin from America, but a few integrationists were not abolitionists. These white and black Christians supported integration based on their reading of scripture, and they included people such as William

C. Nell, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harvey Newcomb.

The most famous of Boston’s integrationists was African American historian and activist William C. Nell. He spearheaded campaigns to integrate Boston’s schools, public transportation, and theatres, but he also stated that churches should be integrated.

Nell opposed all forms of segregation, arguing that separate institutions, even those that sought to elevate blacks, should be phased out because of their implicit support of racist ideology. As scholar Dorothy Wesley describes it, “Nell labored endlessly ‘for a union… not based on complexional considerations.’ He even went so far as to encourage the

405

abolition of black churches.” Nell not only promoted integration through speeches and newspapers, but he also lived out this principles. As an adult, he attended the integrated worship services of the radical Unitarian Theodore Parker, along with self-emancipated slaves William and Ellen Craft, whom Parker described as “sober and industrious people” and “members of my parish.” Nell was also a close friend and associate of William

Lloyd Garrison, who was one of the more vocal white promoters of integration.46

Garrison’s work as an abolitionist organizers and publisher was complimented by his work as an integrationist. He promoted church integration with his paper, The

Liberator, and through antislavery organizations.47 Other abolitionists followed

Garrison’s lead and opposed segregated seating within churches and sometimes racially distinct churches. “God ‘is no respecter of persons;’” insisted Gerrit Smith in 1841, “‘nor regardeth he the rich more than the poor, for they are all the work of his hands;’ – therefore the Abolitionist must refuse to attend worship in those Churches, where a colored skin is made a badge of inferiority, and a justification for contempt and hatred.”

The Broadway Tabernacle of New York City, organized by abolitionists in 1836, included at least five “colored” members in the 1840s. The antislavery activist Lewis

Tappan, who was more conservative than Garrison, was unsuccessfully in his attempt to eliminate the segregation of black worshippers at the Chatham Chapel in New York City.

46 Dorothy Porter Wesley, “Integration versus Separatism: William Cooper Nell’s Role in the Struggle for Equality,” in Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 214-215; James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999), 75; James Oliver Horton, “Generations of Protest: Black Families and Social Reform in Ante- Bellum Boston,” New England Quarterly 49, no. 2 (Jun. 1976), 249-252; Robert P. Smith, “William Cooper Nell: Crusading Black Abolitionist,” The Journal of Negro History 55, no. 3 (Jul. 1970), 182-199; Dean Grodzins, American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 472; Letter from Theodore Parker (Boston) to Reverend J. Martineau, 11 Nov. 1850, Theodore Parker Papers, Vol. 3, Page 324, MHS. 47 Liberator, August 27, 1841. 406

A survey of the minutes from abolitionists meeting in New England in the 1840s reveals that local antislavery organizations listed segregated seating in churches as one of the principle evils in America.48 One antislavery convention after another condemned

“Negro pews” and the ambivalent position of most churches on the issue of slavery.

Radical abolitionists believed that there should be no union with churches that did not condemn slavery, but they also argued that there should be no union with churches that maintained segregated seating.

One of the most articulate condemnations of segregated seating came from writer, journalist, and Congregational minister Harvey Newcomb. He was a pastor in the Boston area in the 1840s, who, earlier in 1837, published a book titled The “Negro pew”: Being an Inquiry Concerning the Propriety of Distinctions in the House of God, on Account of

Color. This work contained a lengthy condemnation of segregated seating in churches and argued that blacks were not intellectually or morally inferior to whites. Newcomb provided a sensitive articulation of how many blacks felt in predominantly white churches and argued that “No man would be willing that his constitutional peculiarities, which God gave him, should exclude him from equal privileges in the house of God.”

While Newcomb was particularly concerned about eliminating white prejudice in churches, he argued that prejudice against skin color in any sphere of life was ignoble and sinful and that blacks were not inferior to whites. He stated that, “there never was a more

48 Smith, Gerrit, “Some of the duties of an abolitionist: (and every whole man is an abolitionist.) Peterboro, August 27, 1841,” Misc. 1841 Sept. 6, MHS; Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery, 177; For examples of abolitionist opposition to segregation, see Bristol County Antislavery Society minutes, Liberator, December 24, 1841; Middlesex County Antislavery Society minutes, Liberator, August 06, 1841; Salem Female Antislavery Society minutes, Liberator, 1844; Strafford County Antislavery Society minutes, Liberator, October 01, 1841; The Condition of the Free People of Colour in the United States of America, Reprinted from no. XII of the Anti-Slavery Examiner, Published in New York, 1839, To which are added Resolutions Passed at the Late Meeting of the Anti- Slavery Convention, Held in London, June, 1840 (London: Thomas Ward and Co., 1841), 16; Broadway Tabernacle Church Journal Book, Broadway Tabernacle Church and Society Papers, NYHS. 407

narrow-minded, ignoble, and despicable sentiment than the prevailing prejudice against color” and that “the church, as such, wherever these practices prevail, is guilty of countenancing, upholding, and perpetuating… A SIN!”49 This sort of condemnation of racism and segregated churches was heard from white and black abolitionists, but even some Christians who were less connected to abolitionism also fought for integration in churches. Additionally, in some of Newcomb’s books written for children, Dewey

Wallace notes, Newcomb “expressed indignation about the way in which native

Americans had been oppressed and deprived of their rights.”50 For Newcomb and others, their Christian faith caused them to oppose racial prejudices.

Two Unitarian ministers of the elite West Church were also among the North’s

Christians who sought to eliminate segregated seating in worship services. The Reverend

Charles Lowell, pastor of this church from 1806 to 1861, and the assistant pastor, the

Reverend Cyrus Bartol, eventually promoted integration. Beginning in about 1837,

Bartol and some parishioners began to seek the elimination of segregated seating at West

Church. Years later Bartol related that “colored men and women were seen every

Sunday” in a segregated portion of the gallery and he found this practice incompatible with the doctrine of the unity in Christ. Although Lowell initially resisted the idea of integrating seating, he soon became a forceful advocate of integration despite the objections of many of his wealthy congregants.51 Nonetheless, Lowell and Bartol did not initially convince a majority in their church that they should be “no respecter of persons,”

49 Harvey Newcomb, The “Negro pew”: Being an Inquiry Concerning the Propriety of Distinctions in the House of God, on Account of Color (Boston: Published by Isaac Knapp, 1837), iv, 101 and 94. 50 Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., “Newcomb, Harvey,” American National Biography Online, February 2000, . 51 The Five Ministers: A Sermon in West Church, by Cyrus Augustine Bartol, on the fortieth Anniversary of His Ordination (Boston: Published by A. Williams & Co., 1877), 10-11 408

and the policy of segregated seating was not quickly changed.52 The black Unitarians at

West Church also protested the continued inequitable treatment by the 1850s, but to no avail. As scholar Gary Collison has described it, in June 1854, Lowell sent a letter to his congregation and “renewed his earlier request for changing the seating policy in gentle but vigorous prose.” This letter also revealed that one of the people who sat in the segregated gallery was an elderly black woman, who Lowell characterized as a

“respectable, modest, humble, sensible, pious woman.”53 When this church had communion, this black women sat in Lowell’s pew, but the church’s seating policy kept her otherwise confined to the gallery. When the black members were finally “invited and descended actually from the roof to the floor” sometime after 1854, one of the older white congregants “in unappeasable wrath wholly withdrew” from the church.54 The efforts of Lowell and Bartol reveal the wide extent of racist feeling among white

Christians in Boston, but they illustrate the variety of people who promoted integration.

The church integrationists, in fact, were not confined to any one denomination or tradition. Examples of integrationists can be found amongst Unitarians,

Congregationalists, Baptists, and other denominations.

Tremont Temple Baptist Church of Boston was organized as a church explicitly opposed to racial and class segregation. Established in 1836 as the First Free Baptist

Church, it did not sell pews, which caused class segregation, and it did not exclude blacks. One of the founders and earliest promoters of the Free Church was Timothy

52 Liberator, October 18, 1850. 53 Gary Collison, “Anti-Slavery, Blacks, and the Boston Elite: Notes on the Reverend Charles Lowell and the West Church,” New England Quarterly 61, no. 3, (Sep. 1988), 426-7; Letter from Charles Lowell (Cambridge, Mass.) to Theodore Parker, 23 June 1854, Theodore Parker Paper, Vol. 11, Page 253, MHS. 54 Bartol, The Five Ministers, 10-11. 409

Gilbert. Gilbert was expelled from the Charles Street Baptist Church in Boston because he attempted to integrate seating at that predominantly white church. He next attended and became a member of the Federal Street Baptist Church, where he also tested the attitude of parishioners regarding racial segregation. His friend and early biographer noted that, “Soon after he united with the [Federal Street Baptist] church, he filled his pew with colored people. [And] no one objected.” This Baptist church, in contrast to the

Charles Street Baptist Church, did not seem opposed to racial integration. Gilbert, however, soon chose to form a new church where there would not be segregation by class or race. He wrote in 1843 that “the rich and poor can meet together; and the black and white are entitled to the same privileges” at Tremont Temple Baptist Church.55 For

Timothy Gilbert, as well as a minority of other white Christians, segregated seating was inconsistent with their faith.

For a small number of blacks and whites in the 1830s to 1850s, segregation was inherently sinful and needed to be avoided. They also felt that the best response to whites’ increasingly anti-black attitudes and actions was re-integration of schools, churches, and other public spaces. Many whites in the North thought that complete separation, in the form of Indian and black removal to settlement colonies, was the only available option for ending conflicts between whites, blacks, and Indians. Conversely, a small group of Christians in the North, especially in Boston, advocated integration instead. These integrationists, keenly aware of how separated black and white Christians had become and how much Jim Crow style segregation had increased across northern society, sought to bring peace and reconciliation through reintegration. Other activists,

55 Justin D. Fulton, Memoir of Timothy Gilbert (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1866), 50, 134; The Declaration of Faith with the Church Covenant, and List of Members, of the Federal Street Baptist Church, Boston, Constituted July 1, 1827, fifth edition (Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1841), 19-20. 410

however, were arguing that reconciliation could only occur through white conversion to true Christianity.

Black and Indian Radical Christian Critiques

While a small number of blacks argued in favor of re-integration, the more common response to increased racial violence and segregation in northern society was a militant and radical Christian critique of whites. Pequot William Apess, African

American David Walker, and others optimized the critiques that people of color leveled against white Christians in this period, but they were not alone in their militancy or critiques of whites. Historian Graham R. Hodges notes that black New Yorker Robert

Alexander Young published his “firebrand pamphlet, the Ethiopian Manifesto,” six months before Walker’s Appeal, and it called for an immediate end of slavery and prophesized about a messiah who would unite and uplift black Americans.56 Maria

Stewart, who knew David Walker, became an outspoken advocate of women’s rights and the need for black Americans to improve themselves as a means of combatting white discrimination. Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass eventually critiqued white Christianity in terms similar to Walker. All these Christian activists and others like them were part of a generation who, according to historian James Horton, “often were much more militant in their approach to civil protest than were their predecessors.”57 In their critiques, the writers argued not that whites needed to live-up to their Christian professions, but rather, they argued that whites had not really been Christians to begin with because their actions did not coincide with the pure religion of Jesus Christ. These

56 Hodges, Root & Branch, 244-245. 57 Horton, “Generations of Protest,” 254. 411

published critiques probably correspond closely to the unrecorded sermons and speeches articulated in many of the North’s black and Indian churches.

Although black and Indian leaders including Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and

Samson Occom critiqued white hypocrisy and injustice actions long before the antebellum era, the writers after 1829 reached a level of radicalism and militancy unseen in earlier published writings.58 Literary scholar Bernd Peyer also notes this militancy and states that Apess’s “books thus seem to follow the chronological trend in abolitionist and

African American literature from a milder moralistic appeal to the American conscience up until the 1820s to a militant protest rhetoric exposing the moral deficit of the

American political ethos at the close of the decade, as represented by the hard-line antislavery statements in Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles.”59 Unlike the previous writers who called whites to live-up to their Christian professions, Walker, Apess, and others suggested that the actions of white Americans proved that they were not Christians at all. In a reversal of the logic of colonialism and white paternalism, these people of color argued that it was whites, not Indians and blacks, who needed to convert to

Christianity and be civilized. If whites embraced true Christianity, then God’s coming wrath against them would be stayed, and colored and white Americans would be able to live in peace.

Indian and African American radical Christian critiques shared similar traits during this period because there was substantial overlap between northern Indian, Afro-

58 For analysis of Richard Allen’s critiques of slavery and racism see Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008); For insightful analysis of eighteenth-century black and Indian published religious literature see Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African- American and Native American Literatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 59 See Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind, 152. 412

Indian, and black communities, especially in New England. The inclusion of blacks and

Afro-Indians into Indian communities, often through marriage, grew substantially from the revolutionary era into the antebellum years.60 Although scholar Russell Barsh focuses on Indian, Afro-Indians, and blacks in the whaling industry, he makes the broader point that in New England, “African American and Indian communities were so extensively intertwined by kinship and employment that they should be considered together as a single antebellum socioeconomic class, defined by their occupation as well as color.” Furthermore, he argues, “African Americans and Indians suffered a common fate in New England – social stigmatization and economic marginalization in the most miserable and insecure trades, such as whaling.” 61 Places such as the Wampanoag community at Mashpee, Massachusetts, noted in earlier chapters as a community with numerous blacks and Afro-Indians, were rural locations in New England with mixed populations.62 Afro-Indians and some Indians were also incorporated into black communities in the North’s towns and cities. Daniel Mandell discusses the formations of some of these communities and suggests that “individuals of mixed ancestry can cross ethnic boundaries without necessarily surrendering kinship or other ties to either group.”63 The experiences of white oppression shared by blacks, Indians, and Afro-

Indians in their overlapping communities fostered similar Christian radicalism in the antebellum North.

60 Daniel R. Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity: Indian-Black Intermarriage in Southern New England, 1760-1880,” Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (Sep. 1998), 470. 61 Russel Lawrence Barsh, “‘Colored’ Seamen in the New England Whaling Industry: An Afro- Indian Consortium” in James F. Brooks, ed., Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 81, 99. 62 Barsh, “‘Colored’ Seamen in the New England Whaling Industry,” 85-86. 63 Mandell, “Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity,” 467, 485, 500; Mandell, Tribe, Race, History, 42-69. 413

David Walker was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina on September 28,

1785 and his firsthand knowledge of southern slavery deeply influenced his writings. His father was enslaved, but his mother was a free woman. Until he was thirty years old, he lived and traveled in the South, worked various jobs, and observed American slavery. In

1826, he moved to Boston and opened a clothing store near the city’s wharfs. By the fall of 1829, he had written the Appeal, which reflected decades of his personal experiences and his extensive readings of history and contemporary writings. The Appeal was a series of articles that Walker also delivered as speeches in Boston and other New England towns. Most of his speeches were likely given at black churches. Walker made minor revisions to the Appeal, and it was published in three editions by his death in 1830.64

Walker argued that “we Colored People of these United States, are, the most wretched, degraded, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, down to the present day, and, that, the white Christians of America, who hold us in slavery, (or, more properly speaking, pretenders to Christianity,) treat us more cruel and barbarous than any Heathen nation did any people whom it had subjected.”65 He could not have been more direct or damning toward white Americans’ exploitation of blacks, and he drew evidence from religious and secular histories to prove his point. Walker maintained that whites not only degraded blacks through slavery but that America’s race-based slavery was also the worst form of slavery in world history. He argued that whites kept

64 David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, In Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Third and Last Edition, Revised and Published by David Walker, 1830, with an introduction by James Turner (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1993), 10-13; Horton, Black Bostonians, 88-89; Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Donald Jacobs, “David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison: Racial Cooperation and the Shaping of Boston Abolition” in Jacobs, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 65 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 20, 27. 414

blacks in their wretched condition in the South, the West, and the North by keeping them ignorant of history and literacy. Walker also showed that whites sought to maintain slavery and their dominance through colonization schemes that would remove free blacks from the land of their birth and strengthen slavery in the South. In response to the systematic oppression, he called on blacks to be united, to educate themselves, and to resist slavery, even by violent means.

Walker was confident that blacks would successfully end the oppression because of his deep and abiding Christian faith in a God of justice who acted in history. The

Appeal reflected the African Methodist tradition that he was a part of and he petitioned for God’s help in reaching the hearts of readers and in bringing an end to injustice.

Walker was a member of the Reverend Samuel Snowden’s African Methodist Episcopal

Church in Boston, and according to James and Lois Horton, Snowden’s “forthright attacks on slavery and his efforts to improve the lives of local blacks, most notably black seamen, attracted many black activists to his church.”66 In many respects, Walker’s writing, especially when presented orally, drew from the Methodist preaching tradition, and he emphasized turning to God away from sin. He, in fact, argued that white

Americans needed to repent and reform before God’s judgment came down hard upon them. Early in the Appeal, Walker showed his dependence on God’s active work be stating that, “these positions I shall endeavor, by the help of the Lord, to demonstrate in the course of this APPEAL, […] and may God Almighty, who is the Father of our Lord

Jesus Christ, open your hearts to understand and believe the truth.” Moreover, he had confidence that an end to white oppression of blacks was imminent. God “being a just

66 Horton, Black Bostonians, 52-53. 415

and holy Being will at one day appear fully in behalf of the oppressed.”67 Because of these beliefs, Walker encouraged blacks to do their part in God’s work of bringing an end to oppression and called whites to repent.

Walker’s critique of white “pretended” Christians is strongest in his third article, entitled “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of the Preachers of the Religion of Jesus

Christ.” Walker forcibly argued that white professors of Christianity were in fact not

Christians because their actions toward blacks were contrary to the teachings of Jesus

Christ, and he bluntly asked “Can any thing be a greater mockery of religion than the way in which it is conducted by the Americans?”68 Walker made sharp distinctions between white “pretended” Christianity and the Christianity taught to him and other blacks by

Jesus, the true “master.” Walker continued, “Indeed, the way in which religion was and is conducted by the Europeans and their descendants, one might believe it was a plan fabricated by themselves and the devils to oppress us. But Hark! My master has taught me better than to believe it – he has taught me that his gospel as it was preached by himself and his apostles remains the same, notwithstanding Europeans have tried to mingle blood and oppression with it.”69 By arguing that blacks possessed true

Christianity, as established by Jesus and the disciples, Walker contended that it was white Americans in need of conversion to Christianity.

In what seems to have been drawn from his experiences in the South, Walker charged that white Christians were worse than “Pagans, Jews, and Mahometans” because these groups, unlike white Christians, protected the people who converted to their

67 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 21, 23. 68 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 63. 69 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 55. 416

faiths.70 He also pointed out how white Christians did not follow the biblical injunction to treat all people equally as beings created in the likeness of God. He wrote:

Can the American preachers appeal unto God, the Maker and Searcher of hearts, and tell him, with the Bible in their hands, that they make no distinction on account of men’s colour? Can they say, O God! thou knowest all things – thou knowest that we make no distinction between thy creatures, to whom we preach they Word? Let them answer the Lord; and if they cannot do it in the affirmative, have they not departed from the Lord Jesus Christ, their master?71

Walker kept reinforcing the point that the behavior of white Americans proved that they had, at the very least, departed from true religious principles, if they had had any in the first place.

Antebellum northerners sponsored missionaries to foreign countries, published many religious periodicals, and promoted various reform movements, so Walker was especially critiquing northerners when he addressed these topics. Walker asked of his readers why “the American ministers send out missionaries to convert the heathen, while they keep us and our children sunk at their feet in the most abject ignorance and wretchedness that ever a people was affiliated with since the world began”? Walker was even more direct in his condemnation of white “pretended” Christians in regards to their opposition to many social sins except for slavery, which was “hardly noticed by

Americans.” “The preachers and people of the United States,” Walker argued, “form societies against Free Masonry and Intemperance, and write against Sabbath breaking,

Sabbath mails, Infidelity, &c. &c.” However, for the most part, the reformers did little against the sin of slavery by 1830, which was an issue when “compared with which, all those other evils are comparatively nothing.” 72 He further contended that:

70 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 56-57. 71 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 62. 72 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 57, 60-61. 417

They have newspapers and monthly periodicals, which they receive in continual succession, but on the pages of which, you will scarcely ever find a paragraph respecting slavery, which is ten thousand times more injurious to this country than all the other evils put together, which will be the final overthrow of its government, unless something is very speedily done; for their cup is nearly full. – Perhaps they will laugh or make light of this; but I tell you Americans! that unless you speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone!!!!!! For God Almighty will tear up the very face of the earth!!!73

Walker was particularly enraged at white reformers, many of whom were in the North, because they put so much energy and money into sending missionaries abroad and into opposing mail delivery on Sundays but yet they did relatively nothing by 1830 to oppose the monstrous sin of slavery in the South and where it still existed in the North.

Walker also criticized “pretended” white Christians in the North, and particularly in his adopted home of Boston, for their unchristian prejudice toward blacks and the practice of segregation. Walker pointed out that, “Even here in Boston, pride and prejudice have got to such a pitch, that in the very houses erected to the Lord, they have built little places for the reception of coloured people, where they must sit during meeting, or keep away from the house of God, and the preachers say nothing about it – much less go into the hedges and highways seeking the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and try to bring them in to their Lord and Maker.” He further noted the treatment of black man at a Congregational church in Boston, which is discussed earlier in this chapter. Walker mentioned “an act of cruelty inflicted a few days since on a black man, by the white Christians in the PARK STREET CHURCH, in this (CITY) which is almost enough to make Demons themselves quake and tremble in, their FIERY

HABITATIONS.”74 For treating blacks as inferior in churches and for not actively

73 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 59. 74 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 60, 73. 418

opposing the sin of slavery, Walker argued that the actions of white northerners proved that they were not Christians.

After completing the third revised edition of his work, Walker was found dead on

June 18, 1830 near his clothing shop on Brattle Street. Tradition in Boston’s black community maintains that he was murdered. Walker himself stated in the Appeal that he would likely be killed for preaching and publishing the truth. His legacy certainly lived on, however, through his only son, Edward G. Walker, who was elected to the

Massachusetts legislature in 1866, and through the influence of his writing on many future generations of black activists.75 The Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, for example, echoed many of Walker’s themes in his 1843 “Address to Slaves in the United

States.” Garnet was the minister of the African American Liberty Street Presbyterian

Church in Troy, New York at the time, and he delivered this address to an African

American convention in Buffalo, New York. Garnet implored American slaves to resist slavery at all cost, and he likewise described whites as pretended Christians from the earliest days of colonialism to the present. Speaking of the first slaves brought to the

Americas, Garnet wrote that “the first dealings they had with men calling themselves

Christians, exhibited to them the worst features of corrupt and sordid hearts; and convinced them that no cruelty is too great, no villainy and no robbery too abhorrent for even enlightened men to perform, when influenced by avarice and lust.”76 Garnet, like

Walker, implied that the behavior of white Christians reveals that they were not actually

75 Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, 17-19; Horton, Black Bostonians, 89. 76 Henry Highland Garnet, “The Slave Must Throw Off the Slaveholder,” in Thomas R. Frazier, ed., Afro-American History: Primary Sources, Shorter Edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), 65; Martin B. Pasternak, Rise Now and Fly to Arms: The Life of Henry Highland Garnet (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995). 419

Christians and that God would bring judgment against whites and an end to slavery unless whites soon repented.

Frederick Douglass’s critique of white Christians’ use of religion to sustain slavery also echoed Walker’s Appeal. In 1845, Douglass wrote “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

While he mostly focused on how slavery corrupted religion in the South, Douglass made clear that his condemnations equally applied to most white Christians in the North as well: “I mean, by the religion of this land, that which is revealed in the words, deeds, and actions, of those bodies, north and south, calling themselves Christian churches, and yet in union with slaveholders. It is against religion, as presented by these bodies, that I have felt it my duty to testify.”77 Douglass believed that any church that did not explicitly oppose slavery and support equality was a corrupted version of Christianity. His 1855 autobiography furthered these points by describing his attendance at the predominantly white Elm Street Methodist Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1838 or 1839. He went with the intention of joining this church, but he was appalled not only by the segregated seating arrangement but also by the way that the six or so colored Methodists were treated during the sacrament of communion. Communion was administered after non-members were dismissed, so Douglass expected that the true believing Christians would treat black Methodist as equals. To his astonishment and sadness, however, the white Christians’ behavior, in keeping blacks apart even at the communion table, showed

77 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, edited with an introduction by Houston A. Baker, Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 153, 157. 420

they were under “the dominion of this wicked prejudice” and not true Christianity.78

Douglass, like other contemporaries, argued that the actions of whites showed that they were not genuine Christians.

The Methodist William Apess, a Pequot Indian from Connecticut whose ancestry may have included European, African, and Indian peoples, also argued that whites needed to convert to Christianity and stop discriminating against people of color.79 He became no less of a forceful and radical critic of whites’ injustices than David Walker.

Apess was born on January 31, 1798 in Colrain, Massachusetts. Through much of his childhood, he was indentured to whites in Connecticut, although he had some contact with his father and other relatives. Apess first began attending Methodist meetings around 1809, and he marked March 13, 1813 as the day he converted to Christianity. He served briefly with American forces in the War of 1812 and was baptized by immersion in 1818. Shortly thereafter, he began to preach and exhort at Methodist meetings and to travel as an itinerant preacher among whites, Indians, blacks, and mixed audiences. He was ordained as a minister by the Protestant Methodist Church (a group that broke away from the Methodist Episcopal Church) in 1829, and in 1833, he went to the Wampanoag community of Mashpee, Massachusetts where he helped led the “Mashpee Revolt,” a peaceful Wampanoag protest against white economic exploitation and white interference in the Indian community. Their protest was especially against white dominance in what was supposed to be a Wampanoag church run on Indian funds from Harvard and by a white minister who the tribe had not selected.80

78 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, edited with an introduction and notes by John David Smith (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 258-260. 79 Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind, 129-130. 80 O’Connell, ed., On Our Own Ground, lxxviii – lxxxi, 3-97; Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind, 129-148. 421

Apess’ texts, The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe and

An Indian’s Looking-Glass, published together in 1833, forcefully asserted that Indians were true Christians because of their love for all people and that white people needed to become like the colored Christians. In literary scholar Joanne Brooks’ words, Apess’s work “exemplifies how American communities of color used religious discourse to negate the racist presumptions directed against them and how literature served as a space for the construction of newly resistant identities and communities.”81 Similarly, scholar

Barry O’Connell writes that the narrative of his life “demonstrates how Christianity became a means for him to develop a powerful identification with his fellow Pequots and, eventually, with all people of color.”82 Apess related the religious narrative of Pequot

Hannah Caleb to show the type of transformation in sensibilities that Christianity would have wrought among whites, if they were truly converted.83 Hannah Caleb (as recorded by Apess) spoke about her beginning perceptions of Christianity and white Christians.

She said,

I saw such a great inconsistency in their precepts and examples that I could not believe them. They openly professed to love one another, as Christians, and every people of all nations whom God hath made – and yet they would backbite each other, and quarrel with one another, and would not so much as eat and drink together, nor worship God together. And not only so, the poor Indians, the poor Indians, the people to whom I was wedded by the common ties of nature, were set at naught by those noble professors of grace, merely because we were Indians.84

The great hindrance for Caleb when contemplating Christianity was that the actions of whites contradicted their professions about the unity of and their love for all people. As

81 Brooks, American Lazarus, 179. 82 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, lv. 83 Regarding the The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe, O'Connell argues that “The power of Christian faith, then, is shown to be manifested not in whites but in each of these converts, who are, with it, able to overcome the enmity they feel toward white people and love them despite the absence of any reciprocation”; O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 117. 84 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 145. 422

the narrative progressed, however, she implied that she became a Christian through the work of God’s spirit, despite white false professors of Christianity. Furthermore, after her conversion, her faith was proved genuine, unlike the faith of white people, because, as she stated, “I could say there was no more enmity in my heart, that I loved white people as well as my own.” She mused that, “I wonder if all white Christians love poor

Indians. If they did, they would never hurt them anymore. And certainly, if they felt as I did, they would not. For I could say, as John said, ‘He that is born of God, has the witness in himself.’”85 Apess likewise related that after his conversion, “My love now embraced the whole human family.”86 Through the consistency of their professions and actions, Caleb and Apess indicated that they were true Christians who loved even those who discriminated against them, unlike white “pretended” Christians. Their religion forged stronger bounds among a community of Indians and Afro-Indians, and critiqued the oppression that their community faced.

Apess believed that American Indians were Jews by ethnicity, as descendants of one of the biblical tribes of Israel, and he confronted white Christians’ prejudice by linking their treatment of Indians to how they would treat Jesus Christ if he were to appear in the nineteenth-century United States.87 In An Indian’s Looking-Glass, according to Barry O'Connell, “Christ as a Jew is recalled as a man of color and whites as the most degraded people of his day. Those in need of conversion become the white

‘civilizers’; the true Christians, by both heritage and practice, become Native

85 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 147. 86 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 129. 87 Mohican Hendrick Aupaumut explored similar ideas and themes; Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 2 (Summer 2005), 187-220; The Church of Latter Days Saints (Mormons), which was founded in this era, also believed that Indians were Jews. 423

Americans.”88 Apess wrote, “Now, if the Lord Jesus Christ, who is counted by all to be a

Jew – and it is well known that they Jews are a colored people, especially those living in the East, where Christ was born – and if he should appear among us, would he not be shut out of doors by many, very quickly? And by those too who profess religion?”89 Christ, like other people of color, Apess argued, would be made to feel unwelcome in the

North’s churches, the places where whites invoked his name but did not follow his example.

Apess further attached whites’ prejudice of blacks and Indians in An Indian’s

Looking-Glass by insisting that God created all peoples in his image and that it was preposterous of whites to believe that God favored the minority of people in the world with light skin to the exclusion of most humans:

If black or red skin or any other skin color is disgraceful to God, it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal – for he has made fifteen colored people to one white and placed them here upon the earth. Now let me ask you, white man, if it is a disgrace for to eat, drink, and sleep with the image of God, or sit, or walk and talk with them? Or have you the folly to think that the white man, being one in fifteen or sixteen, are the only beloved images of God?90

In addition to suggesting that whites disrespected God by their prejudice toward people made in his image, Apess argued that the unjust deeds of whites revealed that they were not real Christians. He asked sarcastically, “Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of their whole continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require of them?”

Apess further connected white theft of Indian lands with the sin of African slavery: “And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds and welter out their days under

88 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 118. 89 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 160. 90 Elsewhere Apess also states that “It is my opinion that our nation retains the original complexion of our common father, Adam”; O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 34, 157. 424

the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun?” Apess made clear in this text that whites, “who profess to have pure principles and who tell us to follow Jesus Christ,” had not matched righteous actions with their professions.91

In another parallel to Walker’s Appeal, Apess argued that whites had made

Indians among the most degraded and oppressed people in history and that God would judge whites for their treatment of Indians. On the reservations in New England, “with but a few exceptions,” Apess explained, you will find that Indians are “the most mean, abject, miserable race of beings in the world.”92 Elsewhere he said, “Oh white man!

How can you account to God for this? Are you not afraid that the children of the forest will rise up in judgment and condemn you?” In other words, “have not the great

American nation reason to fear the swift judgment of heaven on them for nameless cruelties, extortions, and exterminations inflicted upon the poor natives of the forest?”93

In his sermon, The Increase in the Kingdom of Christ, published in 1831, Apess looked forward to “the kingdom of Christ” where justice would finally destroy “every vicious principle and impure motive of the heart is sought out and corrected.” In such a time and place, brought about by God’s work of redemption, “the white man, who has most cruelly oppressed his red brother, under the influence of that Gospel which he has long professed to believe, and just now begins to feel, pours out unavailing tears over the wasted generations of the mighty forest hunters and, now they are almost dead and buries, begins to pity and lament them.”94 Finally, in the Kingdom of Christ, God will correct the hearts

91 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 157. 92 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 155. 93 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 106, 121. 94 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 102, 114. 425

of the wicked and whites will see their actions toward colored people for what they really were.

Throughout his life, Apess remained convinced of the universal nature of

Christianity and God’s equal favor to all people, and these beliefs formed a major part of his critique of white Christians who acted contrary to their professed belief that all people were created in God’s image. Apess stated, “I felt convinced that Christ died for all mankind – that age, sect, color, country, or situation made no different. I felt as assurance that I was included in the plan of redemption with all my brethren.”95

O’Connell writes that Apess “takes confident possession of Christian rhetoric and biblical examples as a primary means to rebuke the pretension and practices of white society.”96

Apess explained that, “We regarded ourselves, in some sort, as a tribe of Israelites suffering under the rod of despotic pharaohs.” Like African American Christians, Apess and other Indian Christians associated themselves with the ancient Israelites who suffered in bondage in Egypt, and white Americans, instead of being God’s chosen people, symbolically became heathens and oppressive Egyptians.97

In his autobiographical A Son of the Forest, written in 1828-1829, Apess again argued that whites were neither civilized nor Christian people. A central part of his autobiography is his own conversion, but he also implied that whites were still in need of true religion. Apess asked, “How much better would it be if the whites would act like a civilized people, and instead of giving my brethren of the woods ‘rum!’ in exchange for their furs, give them food and clothing for themselves and children.”98 He also related a

95 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 19, 127. 96 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, lxviii. 97 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 179. 98 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 33. 426

hypothetical story of Indians reacting to white missionaries which may have been grounded in his own experiences. “If a good missionary goes among them, and preaches the pure doctrine of the Gospel,” Apess explained, “he must necessarily tell them that they must ‘love God and their neighbor as themselves – to love all men, deal justly, and walk humbly.’” The Indian hearers of this doctrine “would naturally reply, ‘Your doctrine is very good, but the whole course of your conduct is decidedly at variance with your profession – we think the whites need fully as much religious instruction as we do.’”99 Once again, it was white who needed civilization and Christianity.

In the Eulogy on King Philip, Apess connected the historic oppression of Indians by Pilgrims with his own experience of injustices at the hand of whites, and he did so in front of predominantly white audiences in Boston on January 8th and 26th, 1836 and through a published version of this sermon. Again, he argued that the actions of whites show that they were not in fact Christians and that Indians, past and present, showed more evidence of Christian goodness than whites. He wrote, “O thou pretended hypocritical Christians, whoever thou art, to say it was the design of God that we should murder and slay one another because we have the power.” In contrast, he argued that

King Philip and the Wampanoags acted more like Christians under persecution than the

Pilgrims did: “for injuries upon injuries, and the most daring robberies and barbarous deeds of death that were ever committed by American Pilgrims, were with patience and resignation borne, in a manner that would do justice to any Christian nation or being in the world” and “Philip treated his prisoners with a great deal more Christian-like spirit than the Pilgrims did.”100

99 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 33. 100 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 278, 279, and 300. 427

Like David Walker, Apess used the term “pretended Christians” to describe whites and he criticized northern Christians for sending missionaries abroad while they oppressed people of color in America. “Let the ministers and people use the colored people they have around them like human beings,” Apess pleaded, “before they go to convert any more” people around the world. Summarizing the history of the Pilgrims’ treatment of the Wampanoags and his own experiences, Apess stated, “I do not hesitate to say that through the prayers, preaching, and examples of those pretended pious has been the foundation of all the slavery and degradation in the American colonies toward colored people. Experience has taught me that this has been a most sorry and wretched doctrine to us poor ignorant Indians.”101

The radical Christian critiques of white Americans leveled by Walker, Douglass,

Apess, and others reveal the extent to which many non-whites in the North were able to build strong communities around separate churches and the growing divide between white and colored Christians. Between 1821 and 1850, very few blacks, Afro-Indians, and Indians affiliated with predominantly white churches, but many built strong community bonds within separate churches. These authors and other ministers whose sermons were not published defended their communities against the rising wave of white racism that sought greater and greater separation between whites and colored people in the North. Not only did their radical critiques create community solidarity and criticize whites, however. These writers reversed the religious ideology and underpinnings of white exploitation by arguing that colored people were the true Christians and chosen people of God and that white people were the ones in need of the civilizing and purifying gospel of Christianity.

101 O’Connell, On Our Own Ground, 287, 301, and 304. 428

* * * *

During the antebellum years, people of color affiliated with few predominantly white Protestant churches. The number of Congregational and Episcopal churches that baptized blacks and the number of black Congregationalists and Episcopalians in predominantly white churches fell to their lowest levels in a century. Predominantly white Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, and Methodist churches also included fewer blacks, especially in the 1830s and 1840s. Only very small numbers of blacks and

Afro-Indians affiliated with predominantly white churches, and they did so for various spiritual and material reasons. Black Unitarians at Boston’s West Church continued to affiliate with that predominantly white congregation perhaps because their theological preferences, and people such as William C. Nell attended a predominantly white church in order to promote the cause of integration. The vast majority of blacks, Afro-Indians, and Indians in the North, however, affiliated with independent black or Indian churches in this era because separate churches better met their needs and because white churches made clear that people of color could not participate in white churches on equal terms.

The growth in segregation between white and colored churches in the North gave moral sanction to the increased segregation in schools, workplaces, transportation, and entertainment. The churches helped create a Jim Crow North. Just as Federick Brinsley was forcibly prevented from occupying a ground floor pew at Park Street Church (part of today’s “Freedom Trail” in Boston), so were blacks forced out of higher-paying jobs and formerly interracial urban spaces. Segregation was enforced with the sanction of laws and through mob violence. The pervasive and sometimes violent segregation in the

429

North was critiques by people of color in at least two ways. Some blacks and a small group of white allies argued in favor of church reintegration. They argued that racial distinction in houses of worship was a sin that needed to be eradicated and that integration was the best means of changing white racist attitudes. The more common response, conversely, were the radial Christian critiques published by Walker, Apess,

Douglass, and others and preached in at least some black and Indian churches. These activists argued that the United States was not a Christian nation and that the actions of whites in oppressing blacks and Indian proved that that they were not Christians. For those whites who were willing to listen, these messages were a powerful call to turn away from prejudice. Unfortunately, few were listening and few appeared to make changes in their own behavior.

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Epilogue

Through much of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century, a significant number of northerners experienced formal religious worship in interracial contexts. While the levels of black and Indian participation in and affiliation with the

North’s churches fluctuated in nearly every decade, interracial churches were largely a memory by 1850. By that date, the North had changed dramatically since colonial times, as had the meaning and categories of race and the extent of interracial religious activity.

During the 1730s and 1740s, most Congregational churches in southern New

England and most Anglican parishes across the North included blacks and Indians within their church communities. Smaller numbers of Lutheran and Moravian churches did so as well. These churches baptized, admitted to membership, and administered communion to many enslaved and free blacks and Indians. While the pastors who promoted revivalism sought black and Indian converts more deliberately than some of their colleagues, blacks and Indians chose to affiliate with not only the revivalist New Light congregations but also the more traditional and hierarchical churches, especially Church of England parishes. The educational opportunities offered for blacks at some of these churches, along with spiritual concerns, most likely made these churches appealing to many blacks and Indians who freely chose to affiliate with them.

From 1730 until the 1780s, conversely, very few Dutch Reformed, German

Reformed, or Presbyterian churches in the mid-Atlantic baptized or admitted to membership blacks or Indians. The standards for baptism and church membership in these denominations made them less accessible to people of color. Moreover, these churches generally lacked the missionary organizations or evangelical zeal of Moravians,

431

Congregationalists, and Anglicans. Germans, in general, were less likely to own slaves than other colonists, and particularities in the culture of Dutch colonists and churches also inclined them to exclude blacks and Indians. These colonists were especially concerned with maintaining Dutch or German culture in their congregations, and some of them still believed that baptizing enslaved blacks required their manumission, a step few were willing to take.

The North’s Protestant churches reflected the hierarchy of colonial society that ranked people by wealth, skin color, gender, and profession, but black and Indian engagement in predominantly white churches did not mean that they acquiesced to their places in this society. In the vast majority of cases, whites did not allow blacks and

Indians to vote in church matters or to hold leadership positions in predominantly white churches. Because churches were a part of the structures that supported the exploitation of blacks and Indians, the participation of these groups in churches at times supported their own marginalization. However, since blacks and Indians also resisted white oppression, often creatively, in general, they also sometimes resisted their marginalized position in white churches. Indians, in a very high proportion, decided to withdraw in the

1750s from the predominantly white churches in which they had earlier affiliated. While largely enslaved, some blacks used Christianity to criticize slavery and empower themselves in other ways. After 1790, many blacks, especially in the North’s urban centers, also created their own churches which led the struggles against northern disenfranchisement and southern slavery from 1790 to 1860 and beyond.

The number of the North’s interracial churches increased in the long revolutionary era despite the challenges posed to religious worship during the war. The

432

presence of blacks in Anglican churches increased during the 1750s to 1770s. After the

1760s, the development of American Methodism and the expansion of Baptist churches created many more interracial churches across the North. Methodists, in particular, were dedicated in this era to the inclusion of all people, and some predominantly white

Methodist societies included remarkably high numbers of black members. This diversification of interracial worship even began to have an effect on the denominations that had been most resistant to the inclusion of blacks within their sacramental communities, particularly mid-Atlantic Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian churches.

Independent Indian churches also became more diverse over time as they included Afro-

Indians, blacks, and occasionally whites.

The antislavery message of early Methodists certainly helped them appeal to blacks, but other factors, including a willingness to license black preachers, contributed to their appeal. Besides the Methodists, however, the connections were tenuous between churches’ approach to the question of abolitionism and black affiliation levels in the revolutionary era. Although a number of Congregationalists pushed for ending slavery in

New England, black affiliation levels decreased in these churches. Presbyterians,

Anglicans, and Baptists generally did not adopt strong or progressive stances against slavery, but the rates of black affiliation in these denominations increased in the revolutionary era.

Following the Revolution and continuing through the 1810s, many of the North’s churches became more racially inclusive. More and more Dutch Reformed and

Presbyterian churches baptized and admitted blacks. Remarkably, the expansion in black participation in these churches occurred during the same period of time as the first black

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churches were formed in the North. While black participation had been declining in most

Congregational churches and in some other denominations, from 1791 to 1820 was a period of widespread interracial public worship. For a time, the expansion of interracial churches and the development of independent black churches proceeded together, and this fact is significant in retrospect because of how extensive segregation became in the coming decades.

Changes in racial attitudes in churches after 1820 halted the increase in interracial churches that had coexisted alongside separate black churches and, as a result, churches were on the frontline of creating a Jim Crow society in the North. Segregation of free blacks and Indians in all parts of northern society was on the rise in the 1820s and 1830s, and sometimes advocates of separation argued for colonization under the guise of benevolence. Increasingly, whites barred people of color from forms of employment, transportation, schools, and churches through both laws and mob violence.

Discriminatory practices in the North’s churches encouraged blacks and Indians to only participate in separate churches, and, as a result, the North’s predominantly white churches gave moral authority to segregation along with functioning as another segregated space. By 1850 the possibility of interracial Christian churches had all but disappeared. Although some white churches in the North protested against the injustice of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which made every person of color liable to being seized and taken as a slave to the South, the North’s churches overall had proven themselves inhospitable and hostile to the interests of colored Christians in the North. Especially after 1850, blacks needed their own churches as organizations to help prevent the return of runaway slaves to the South and as centers for their spiritual lives.

434

White churches played a role in the rise of northern racialism after the Revolution because inclusion and exclusion of people of color in churches was part of how whites delineated the boundaries and meaning of race. As whites felt anxiety over the growing population of free blacks and saw a need to define citizenship for the first time after the break with Britain, their treatment of blacks in churches was part of their approach to the issue of race. Between the 1770s and 1820s, white conceptions and categorizations of blacks, Afro-Indians, and Indians in the North changed, as did black labels for their institutions. Gradual emancipation, increased rates of intermarriage among blacks and

Indians, and near universal white male political participation all contributed to the changing notions and meaning of race in the North. However, the distancing of whites and blacks in the North’s churches also contributed to changes in racial categorizations and to the increase in Jim Crow type segregation across northern society. Churches reflected broader social changes, but black and Indian separatism exacerbated preexisting racial divisions and provided a moral justification for increased segregation in other parts of society.

While a small number of blacks and whites argued for integration across northern society as a practical means of combatting racism and as a necessary step in the moral perfection called for by their religious principles, the vast majority of whites, Indians, and blacks favored separate institutions by the antebellum era. For whites, their racism precluded the possibility of inclusion of black or Indians on equal terms and favored separation. Indians and blacks created greater community cohesion and group identity centered on churches. Moreover, ministers and activists such as David Walker and

William Apess favored separate churches because they argued that most white churches

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did not actually practice real Christianity. They argued that the oppressive actions of whites toward people of color showed that whites needed to be civilized and converted to the peaceable religion of Jesus. For Walker, Apess, and scores of other people of color in the North, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, churches could only be reintegrated when white Americans would repent and treat all people as equal.

436

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State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Griswold First Congregational Church, 1720-1887. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

443

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Groton First Congregational Church, 1727-1769, 1804-1811. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1934.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Guilford Second Congregational Church at North Guilford, 1720-1859. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1955.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Hebron Gilead Congregational Church, 1752-1943. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Kent First Congregational Church, 1741-1859. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1934.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Lebanon First Congregational Church, 1700-1883. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1942.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Lisbon Newent Congregational Church, 1723-1932. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1944.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Madison First Congregational Church, 1707-1917. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1958.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Mansfield First Congregational Church, 1710-1892. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1967.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Middletown Christ Church. P.E. 1750- 1937. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Middletown First Congregational Church, 1668-1871. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Milford First Congregational Church, 1639-1926. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Montville Congregational Church (formerly New London North Parish), 1722-1909. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1962.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, New Canaan Church, 1733-1899. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1931.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, New Hartford First Congregational Church (Old Town Hill Church), 1739-1854. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1967.

444

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, New Haven First Congregational Church, 1639-1932, Part 2. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, New London First Congregational Church, 1670-1888. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1949.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Newtown First Congregational Church, 1715-1946. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1962.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Northford Congregational Church, 1750-1926. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, North Stonington Congregational Church, 1720-1887. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1968.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Norwich First Congregational Church, 1699-1917. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Old Lyme First Congregational Church, 1731- 1874. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1950.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Old Saybrook Congregational Church, 1736-1933. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1961.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Oxford Congregational Church, 1741- 1929. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1967.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Plainfield First Congregational Church, 1747-1832. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1967.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Portland First Congregational Church, 1710-1925. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1957.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Preston First Congregational Church, 1698-1883. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1943.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Redding Congregational Church, 1729-1882. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Roxbury First Congregational Church, 1742-1930. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Sharon First Church of Christ Congregational, 1755-1879. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1966.

445

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Shelton Huntington Congregational Church, 1717-1917. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1955.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Southington First Congregational Church, 1728-1876. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1960.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Sprague-Hanover Congregational Church, 1761-1899. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Stonington First Congregational Church (the Road Church), 1674-1925. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1961.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Stonington Second Congregational Church, 1809-1929. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1957.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Torrington First Congregational Church and Ecclesiastical Society Records, 1741-1901. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1968.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Trumbull Congregational Church (formerly North Stratford), 1730-1931. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1962.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Wallingford First Congregational Church, 1758-1894. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1952.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Wethersfield First Congregational Church, 1694-1908. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Wethersfield First Congregational Church, 1694-1835. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Windham Congregational Church, 1700-1852. Hartford: Connecticut State Library, 1939.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Woodstock-North Woodstock Congregational Church, 1727-1900. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Woodstock (Woodstock Hill) First Congregational Church, 1727-1783. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

State Library Index, Connecticut Church Records, Woodstock-West Woodstock Congregational Church, 1748-1937. Hartford: Connecticut State Library.

446

First Baptist Church, Providence, R.I. Records (provided by Church Historian J. Stanley Lemons)

“A List of the Members belonging to the Baptized Church In Providence under the Care of the Elders Samuel Winsor and Thomas Burlinggame Junr” in book of Minutes 1793 to 1803.

Lemons, J. Stanley. Complete Info on First Baptist Blacks, Revised, circa April 2012.

Lemons, J. Stanley. Notes spread sheet of black members of First Baptist in Providence.

“Names of all the members belonging to the Baptist Church in Providence as given by there Elder, the Revd Saml Winsor to the Revd Morgan Edwards of Phia In Sept 1770 – as taken from the Materials coltd by Edwds for a Histry of the Baptists.” Membership box, FBCIA Mss, Rhode Island Historical Society.

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.

“Act of Incorporation, Causes and Motives, of the African Episcopal Church of Philadelphia. White-Hall, 1810.” Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, 1673-1949. Manuscript Collection 227A, Section 6: Miscellaneous Section, Box 32, File 1.

“Character References for blacks 1787, 1791-1793, 1796, 1816-1817, 1830.” Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Microfilm.

Census facts collected by Benjamin C. Bacon and Charles Gardner, 1838, City of Philadelphia, Pa. Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Microfilm.

Earliest Extant Record Book for St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, Pa. Communicant Register from Oct. 14, 1733 to June 8, 1735 kept by Rev. John Caspar Stoever. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker diaries, 1758-1807, 1975, undated. Manuscript Collection 1760.

First Baptist Church Philadelphia, Pa. Volume 1: Baptisms, Marriages, Burials. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume 296. Philadelphia, 1914.

First Moravian Church Philadelphia, Pa: Baptism, Marriages Copied into this book circa 1900. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania.

447

First Reformed Church Greensburg, Westmoreland Co. 1779-1815. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania.

Records of Christ Church Philadelphia, Volume 1, Baptism 1709-1768. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania.

Records of Christ Church Philadelphia, Baptisms 1769-1794. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia 1906.

Records of Christ Church Philadelphia, Baptisms 1794-1819. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume 167. Philadelphia, 1906.

Records of Christ Church Philadelphia, Baptisms 1820-1900. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume 169. Philadelphia, 1906.

Records of Christ Church Philadelphia Marriages, Confirmations, and Communicants 1800-1900. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume 180. Philadelphia, 1907.

Records of First Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Baptisms 1701-1856. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume XXVII. Philadelphia, 1896.

Record of Scots Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, Baptisms 1822-1855. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume XXXIII. Philadelphia, 1998.

Records of Second Presbyterian Church Philadelphia, Baptism, Marriages, Burials, 1745- 1833. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume 32. Philadelphia, 1898.

Records of St. Gabriel’s P.E. Church 1735-1856, Morlatton, Berks County, Penn.. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1897.

Records of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, 1785-1856. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume I. Philadelphia, 1893.

Register of Scots Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, Baptisms 1767-1806, Burials 1772-1806, Marriages 1781: Transcribed, typed and indexed by Mrs. George C. Lewis. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1954.

448

Sharp, Greenville. Letter to Benjamin Rush concerning money collected for the African Church, Philly. London. ca. Jan. 1792. LCP in HSP. Vol. 28 Mss Corr., pp. 106.

Sharp, Greenville. Letter to Benjamin Rush mentions sending a number of anti-slavery tracts to Philadelphia black minister Absalom Jones. London. Oct. 26, 1808. LCP in HSP. LCP B. Rush. Vol. 28 Mss Corr, pp. 105.

St. David’s Church (Radnor, Pa.) Records, ca. 1706-2006, n.d. Manuscript Collection 1478.

St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, Pa. Records Part 1. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume I. Philadelphia, 1893.

St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, Pa. Baptisms 1745-59, Part 1. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume XXX. Philadelphia, 1897.

St. Michael’s & Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, Pa. Baptisms 1759-71 Part 1. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania. Volume XXXI. Philadelphia, 1898.

St. Michael’s & Zion Evangelical Lutheran Congregation of Philadelphia, Pa. Baptisms 1777-1789, Copied by Rev. A. S. Leiby (Easton, PA 1958-1959). Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

St. Paul’s Church Philadelphia Baptisms 1782-1828, Marriages 1759-1829, Burials 1790- 1832. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania.

Third Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, Baptisms, Marriages, Gravestones Inscription. Bound transcription. Collections of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Volume LIII. Philadelphia, 1896.

Williams, Peter. Letter to N.Y. Manumission Society giving statistics on land ownership and religious and literary societies among New York’s black people. Jan. 10, 1816. LCP in HSP. Grellet Mss. Vol. I. 1701-1818, pp. 219.

Williams, Peter. Letter to Stephen Grellet concerning blacks in New York, their religion and education. New York. Jun 1 1816. LCP in HSP. Grellet Mss. Vol. I. 1701- 1818, pp. 219.

449

Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.

Taylor, Jeremiah. “A Sketch of Religious Experiences in and around New York City, 1811-1858.” Misc. Mss, 1858.

American Negro Historical Society collection, 1790-1905. Microfilm. E185.93.P41.

Library of Congress, Local History and Genealogy Reading Room, Washington, D.C.

Vosburgh, Royden Woodward, ed. Records of the Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church at New Springville, Staten Island, in Richmond County N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1922.

______. Records of the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church at Tottenville, Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1922.

______. Records of Christ’s Evangelical Lutheran Church at Germantown, Columbia County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1913.

______. Records of Christ’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Town of Ghent, Columbia County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1913.

______. Records of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City, N.Y., Vol. 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City, N.Y., Vol. 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the Congregational Church and Society of New Canaan at Canaan Four Corners in the town of Canaan, Columbia County, N.Y., Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the Dutch Reformed Saint John’s Church in the town of St. Johnsville, Montgomery County, N.Y. Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1914.

450

______. Records of the Dutch Reformed Saint John’s Church in the town of St. Johnsville, Montgomery County, N.Y. Volume 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1914.

______. Records of the First Baptist Church of Springfield, in Springfield Center, Otsego County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1920.

______. Records of the First Lutheran Church in the City of Albany, N.Y., Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1917.

______. Records of the First Lutheran Church in the City of Albany, N.Y., Volume 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1917.

______. Records of the First Presbyterian Church at Ballston in Ballston Center, Saratoga County, New York, Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1916.

______. Records of the First Presbyterian Church in the City of Albany, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1917.

______. Records of the First Presbyterian Church in the Village of Durham, Greene County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1920.

______. Records of the First Presbyterian Church of West Galway, in the Town of Perth, Fulton County, N.Y., originally the First Presbyterian Church in Galloway. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1916.

______. Records of the First Presbyterian Church of Whitesboro in the Town of Whitestown, Oneida County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1920.

______. Records of the First Reformed Church of Coxsackie in West Coxsackie, Greene County, N.Y., Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the First Reformed Church of Coxsackie in West Coxsackie, Greene County, N.Y., Volume 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

451

______. Records of the First Reformed Church of Coxsackie in West Coxsackie, Greene County, NY, Volume 3. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the First Reformed Dutch Church at Glen in the Town of Glen, Montgomery County, N.Y, formerly the First Reformed Protestant Dutch Church at Charleston. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

______. Records of the First United Presbyterian Congregation in Cambridge, in the Village of Cambridge, Washington County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1917.

______. Records of the (Freehold) Presbyterian Church in Charlton, Saratoga County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of the German Reformed Church in New Rhinebeck, near Dorlach (or Sharon), now the Reformed Church of Lawyersbille, in the town of Cobleskill, Schoharie County, N.Y. Also Record of the Union Reformed Dutch Church of Cobleskill, 1827-1855. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1915.

______. Records of the Gilead Evangelical Lutheran Church at Center Brunswick, in the Town of Brunswick, Rensselaer County, N.Y., Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1913.

______. Records of the Gilead Evangelical Lutheran Church at Center Brunswick, in the Town of Brunswick, Rensselaer County, N.Y., Volume 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1913.

______. Records of the High and Low Dutch Reformed Congregation at Schoharie, now Reformed Church in the town of Schoharie, Schoharie County, N.Y. Volume 1 part 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1917.

______. Records of the Madison Avenue Reformed Church in the City of New York, Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1921.

452

______. Records of the Paris Religious Society (a Congregational Church) in the Town of Paris, Oneida County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of the Presbyterian Congregation of Harpersfield, in the Town of Harpersfield, Delaware County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of the Presbyterian Church of Cooperstown in Otsego County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1920.

______. Records of the Presbyterian Church of New Scotland in the town of New Scotland, Albany County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1919.

______. Records of the Presbyterian Church of Johnstown, in Fulton County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1916.

______. Records of the Presbyterian Church in New Hartford (Formerly the First Religious Society in Whitestown) in the town of New Hartford, Oneida County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of the Presbyterian Church in the Town of Greenville, Greene County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1920.

______. Records of the Protestant Dutch Church of Greenbush, at East Greenbush, Rensselaer County, N.Y., Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1914.

______. Records of the Protestant Dutch Church of Greenbush, at East Greenbush, Rensselaer County, N.Y., Volume 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1914.

______. Records of the Protestant Presbyterian Congregation of Cambridge, in the Village of Cambridge, Washington County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1916.

______. Records of the Protestant Reformed Dutch Church of Leeds in the town of Catskill, Green Count, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1920.

453

______. Records of the Reformed Church of Fordham in the Borough of Bronx, City of New York, N.Y., formerly the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Fordham. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of the Reformed Church in the Village of Gilboa, Schoharie County, N.Y. formerly the Reformed Dutch Church in Dyse’s Manor, in the Town of Broome and Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in Blenheim in the Old Village of Blenheim, Schoharie County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church at Fort Plain in the Town of Minden, Montgomery County, N.Y., formerly known as the Reformed Calvinist Church of Canajohary, Volume 1 and 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church at Greenwich in the City of New York, Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1920.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of Mayfield formerly in the town of Mayfield, Montgomery County, N.Y. The First Presbyterian Church of Broadalbin in the village and town of Broadalbin, Fulton County, N.Y. The United Presbyterian Church of Broadalbin in the town of Perth, Fulton County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of Schodack at Muitzeskill, in the town of Schodack, Rensselaer County, N.Y. Volume One. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1930.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of Stone Arabia in the town of Palatine, Montgomery County, N.Y. Volume Two. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1916.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of Stone Arabia in the town of Palatine, Montgomery County, N.Y. Volume Three. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1916.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church of the Beaver Dam in the town of Berne, Albany County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

454

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in Oak Hill in the Town of Durham, Greene County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1920.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church at the Owasco Outlet, in the Town of Fleming, Cayuga County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in the town of Nassau, Rensselaer County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in Tompkinsville, Statin Island, Richmond County N.Y. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1922.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Catskill in the Town of Catskill, Greene County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Florida, in the village of Minaville, town of Florida, Montgomery County, N.Y. Preceded by the Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Duanesburgh 1798-1804. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of German Flatts in Fort Herkimer, Town of German Flats, Herkimer County, N.Y., Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of German Flatts in Fort Herkimer, Town of German Flats, Herkimer County, N.Y., Volume 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Herkimer, town of Herkimer, Herkimer County, N.Y., Volume 1, Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1918.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Wynantskill, at Wynantskill, in the Town of North Greenbush, Rensselaer County, NY. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1914.

455

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church on Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y., Volume 2. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1923.

______. Records of the Round Top Lutheran Church in the town of Pine Plains, Dutchess County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of Saint Andrew’s Protestant Episcopal Church at Richmond, Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y. Volumes 2 and 3. Bound Typescript. New York City, April 1923.

______. Records of Saint Luke’s Protestant Episcopal Church at Rossville, Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y., in the former town of Westfield and now in the Borough of Richmond, City of New York. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1923.

______. Records of Saint Pauls’ Protestant Episcopal Church at Tompkinsville, Staten Island, in Richmond County, N.Y. Bound Typescript. New York City, April 1923.

______. Records of the Society of Clinton, A Congregational Church in the village of Clinton, in the town of Kirkland, Oneida County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of St. John’s Episcopal Church in the Village of Johnstown, Fulton County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1919.

______. Records of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church at Manorton, in the town of Livingston, Columbia County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1913.

______. Records of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Town of Berne, Albany County, N.Y., Volume 1. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1916.

______. Records of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Town of Berne, Albany County, N.Y., Volume 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1916.

______. Records of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in the Village of Hobart, Town of Stamford, Delaware County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical

456

and Biographical Society, Supplement. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1921.

______. Records of the Woodrow Methodist Episcopal Church at Woodrow, Staten Island, in Richmond County, NY. Bound Typescript. New York City, 1922.

______. Records of the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Rensselaerwyck and Greenbush now the First Evangelical Lutheran Church, in West Sandlake, Rensselaer County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Bound Typescript. New York City, June 1913.

Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.

Census (Mass) 1763-1793. Ms. S-492.

Cyrus A. Bartol diary, 1834. Ms. N-1812.

DeGrasse-Howard papers 1776-1976, bulk dates 1852-1883. Ms. N-310.

Eli Forbes diary, 1762. Ms. S-284.

First Church (Charlestown, Boston, Mass.) Records, 1631-1980. Ms. N-1248.

First Church (Watertown, Mass.) Records, 1668-1981. Ms. N-284.

First Church (Weymouth, Mass.) Records, 1724-1839. Ms. N-186.

First Parish Church in Dorchester Records, 1636-1981. Ms. N-258.

First Parish (Hingham, Mass.) Records, 1635-1961. Ms. N-1406.

First Parish (Hingham, Mass.) ledger, 1787-1788. Ms. N-1407 (Tall).

King's Chapel (Boston, Mass.) Records, 1686-1942. Ms. N-1867.

Hawwoswee, Moses. Census of Wampanoag Indians [manuscript copy], 19 Mar. 1792. In Miscellaneous Manuscripts. Misc. 1792 Mar. 19.

Jeremy Belknap Papers, 1637-1891, bulk: 1758-1799. Ms. N-1827.

Mayhew, Theodore G., letter to William Jennison, 18 May 1824. In Miscellaneous Manuscripts. Misc. 1824 May 18.

Mayhew, Theodore G. Letter to William Jennison, 18 May 1824. In Miscellaneous Manuscripts. Misc. 1824 May 18.

457

Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts. Misc. Bd. 1751 to Misc. Bd. 1792 September 23.

Old North Church (Christ Church in the City of Boston) Records, 1569-1997. Ms. N- 2249.

Second Church (Boston, Mass.) Records, 1650-1970. Ms. N-2037.

Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America records, 1752-1948. Ms. N-176.

South Congregational Church Records, 1828-1929. Ms. N-304.

Smith, Gerrit, “Some of the duties of an abolitionist: (and every whole man is an abolitionist.) Peterboro, August 27, 1841.” Misc. 1841 Sept. 6.

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church (Hanover, Mass.) Records, 1737-1979. Ms –2161.

Theodore Parker Papers, 1826-1865. Ms. N-661. Microfilm.

Trinity Church (Boston, Mass.) Records, manuscript collection.

New England Historic Genealogical Society, R. Stanton Avery Special Collections Department, Boston, Mass.

A Narrative on the Pequot Girl Hannah Okkuish. Manuscript. Mss C 5095.

Bible record for the Brister Gould family. Mss C 4632.

Church records, Sturbridge (New Medfield, Fiskdale), Mass., 1736-1848. Manuscript. Mss C 3460.

Doliber, Donald A., ed. Methodist Baptisms in Marblehead [Mass.], 1827-1853. Manuscript. Mss C 1639.

Farwell, Stephen T., ed. List of Members of the First Church in Cambridge, 1658-1667, 1792- 1865. Manuscript. Mss A 5859.

Federal-Street Meeting-house (Boston, Mass.) Records, 1787-1830. Manuscript. Mss A 5368.

May, Samuel P., ed. Records of the 2d church in Yarmouth [Mass.], the East Precinct, now Dennis 1727-1758. Manuscript. Mss C 4649.

458

Records of the Church in West Stockbridge, 1789-1889 (bulk: 1793-1809). Manuscript. Mss. C 5050.

Records of the Second Church in Cambridge, Mass., 1739-1850. Manuscript. Mss C 5751.

Saddle River Reformed Dutch Church. Mss A 7181.

Samuel Kirkland letter, 1785 January 20, to Rev. Samuel Mather. Mss A 5537.

Vital Records from the Parish Register of Queen’s Chapel Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Copied and Indexed by Prscilla Hammon 1943.

New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y.

Benjamin T. Onderdonk papers, 1812-1832.

Benjamin T. Onderdonk papers, 1827-1843, n.d.

Broadway Tabernacle Church and Society Papers, 1835-1980 (Bulk 1840-1970).

Congregational Church (Malta, N.Y.). Minutes, 1819-1827, 1836-1851.

Daniel Rogers Diary, Sermons, and Papers (Box 5 - microfilm: diary of Daniel Rogers at Misc. microfilms, reel 6.). Papers of the Rogers Family 1614-1950 (bulk 1831- 1950).

First Congregational Church (Woburn, Mass.). Records, 1817 Apr. 13-1826 Nov. 12.

Israel Brainard Papers, 1800-1823.

Matthias B. Tallmadge correspondence and papers, 1715-1868. Box 6, Folder 10.

NYC Riots, 1834. Misc. Microfilm Reel 34.

Oliver Street Baptist Church (New York, N.Y.). Baptist Church records, 1793-1862.

Ramage family papers, 1766-1856 (bulk 1780-1830).

Samuel Miller collection, 1797-1850. (bulk 1804-1823).

Second Seventh Day Baptist Church (Verona, N.Y.). Record book, 1837-1864.

459

Smith, Gerrit. “To the proslavery ministers of the county of Madison: So you are really afraid that our county will declare herself for the slave, at the approaching election! God be praised, that you have reason to be!” 1843.

St. Pauls' Church (Charlton, N.Y.). Copy of the records of St. Paul's Church, Charlton, Saratoga Co., N.Y., 1827-1868 : manuscript, 1827-1871.

Trinity Church (New York, N.Y.) Records, 1697-1837.

Union Reformed Protestant Dutch Church (New York, N.Y.). Record of the Church at the Corner of Green & Houston Streets, 1823-1864.

New York Public Library, Manuscript and Archive Division, New York, N.Y.

Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the City of New York. New York City Dutch Reformed Church Baptisms, 1801-1811. Manuscript. MssCol NYGB 18140.

First Baptist Church of Bedford Records, 1797-1920. MssCol NYGB 18266.

Methodist Episcopal Church (Rensselaerville, N.Y). Rensselaerville Methodist Episcopal Church records, 1833-1863. MssCol NYGB 18058.

Methodist Society of the City of New York Records, 1820-1851. MssCol NYGB 18038.

Record Book of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Reformation in Lawyersville, Schoharie County, N.Y.: Manuscript, 1848-1914. MssCol NYGB 18069.

Record Books of the First Baptist Church of Christ, Pawling, New York, 1841-1900. MssCol NYGB 18061.

Record Book of the Methodist Episcopal Church at Glenham, N.Y., 1842-1856. MssCol NYGB 18050.

Records Relating to the Lutheran Church in Colonial New York, 1649-1772, Evangelisch Luthersche Kerk (Netherlands). MssCol 955.

New York Public Library, Milstein Division, New York, N.Y.

Atwell, Christine O., ed. The Early Records of the Presbyterian Church of Cazenovia, New York from 1799-1875. Typescript. Cazenovia, N.Y.: 1934.

460

Baptisms and Marriages Performed in the First Reformed Church, Organized 1642, and the Second Reformed Church, Organized 1814, Albany, N.Y., 1888. Holograph transcription. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Barber, Gertrude A., ed. Congregational and First Presbyterian Church Records at Cranbury, N.J. Carbon copy typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Bowman, M. M. and Lilia Smith Seegmiller, ed. Pompton Plains Reformed Dutch Church: Marriage Records, 1735-1746, 1793-1809, Baptismal Records, 1735- 1871. Typescript.

Canal Street Presbyterian Church (New York, N.Y.). Register of Marriages (1815-1853) and Baptisms (1816-1831), New York, Canal Street Presbyterian Church, Manhattan, New York. Unbound photocopy of original church records. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Church of Christ, Charleston, N. Y.: 1813-1880. Carbon copy typescript, 1939.

Church Book of the United Brethren Congregation, now Moravian Church, on Staten Island: [baptism and marriage records, St. Stephen's Church, Staten Island]: Inscriptions from Moravian Cemetery, New Dorp, Staten Island. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Cormack, Maria Noll, ed. Schenectady, New York First Dutch Reformed Church: births and baptisms, 1649-1781. Typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Durie, Howard I., ed. Pascack Dutch Reformed Church Baptisms, 1814-1850. Photoreproductions of a sequence of articles that appeared in The American Genealogist, from vol. 47 (July 1971) to vol. 48 (1972).

Dutch Reformed Church (Rhinebeck, N.Y.). Baptisms and Marriages Recorded in the General Church Book of the Dutch Reformed Church on the Rhinebeck Flatts in Dutchess County: organized on the 28 of June 1731 by the Rev. Petrus Vas of Kingston, Ulster County, New York by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, Fonda, N. Y., from a hand-written transcript of the records, made by Samuel Burhan’s Jr., for the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, New York, N. Y., 1947. Carbon copy typescript.

First Evangelical Lutheran Church Carlisle, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania: Parish Registers, 1788-1923, Volume 1 and 2. Carbon copy typescript, 1970.

First Presbyterian Church in New York City Records: Baptisms 1788-1809, Communicants 1769, Deaths 1786-1804. Holograph transcriptions. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

461

First Reformed Church of Tarrytown (Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.). Tarrytown (Sleepy Hollow) Dutch Church, Westchester County, N.Y. Second book, 1785-1836, copied by Daniel Van Tassel, re-copied by Mrs. Florence E. Youngs & indexed by Edna Huntington. Carbon copy typescript.

Frost, Josephine C., ed. Baptismal Record of the Reformed Dutch Church at Newtown, Long Island, New York, 1736 to 1846: Marriages by Rev. Garretson at Newtown from 1835 to 1846. Carbon copy typescript.

Frost, Josephine C., ed. Baptisms, Marriages, Funerals Recorded at Grace Episcopal Church, Jamaica, Long Island, New York, 1769-1853. Carbon copy typescript.

General Church Book of the Reformed Congregation in Reyn Beck, organized by G. M. Weiss, preacher to the two Low Dutch Congregations in Kats Kill and Kocka Hocky: Records of the Reformed Church of Rhinebeck, Dutchess County, New York. Copied by the Montrgomery County Department of History and Archives from a hand written transcript of the original records, on file in the New York Genealogical and Bibliographical Society, New York, N. Y., 1961. Carbon copy typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Getty, Innes, ed. Records of St. John's Episcopal Church, Yonkers, N.Y.: Baptisms 1820-1826, Marriages 1820-1840, Deaths 1820-1826. Photoreproduction of typescript, carbon copy typescript.

Kinderhook Baptisms, 1717-1799, and Marriages, 1718-1795. Handwritten manuscript in a ruled account book. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Linlithgo Reformed Church (Livingston, N.Y.). Records of the Reformed Church of Linlithgo in the town of Livingston, Columbia County, New York. Carbon copy typescript.

Luckhurst, Charlotta Taylor, ed. Schenectady Dutch Church members: 1694-1839. Carbon copy typescript.

Lutheran Church Records, 1703-1802 New York, Albany, and Other Places. Manuscript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Methodist Episcopal Church (Waldwick, N.J.). The Register for the Methodist Episcopal Church in Franklin Township and County of Bergain, State of New Jersey. Handwritten manuscript transcription. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

462

New York Moravian Church Records: Baptisms 1744-1890, Volume 1 and 2. Photo reproduction of a holograph. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Parish Records of St. George's Episcopal Church, Flushing, Long Island, New York: 1782 to 1834. Copy of typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Quackenbush, John D., ed. Pompton Reformed Church, Pompton Lakes, Passaic County, N.J. Records 1807-1864. Mimeograph copy of two typescripts.

Records of Evangelical Lutheran Congregation of Saint John's Church in Sharon, County of Schoharie and State of New York (known as Turlah or Durlach): 1801-1860. Transcribed from the original records by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, 1957. Carbon copy typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Records of Kingsborough Avenue Presbyterian Church Gloversville, Fulton County, N.Y.: with a History of the Church taken from Historical Manual of the Kingsborough Ave. Presbyterian Church by Rev. Edward Waite Miller, D.D. January 1920. Copied from the original records, by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, Fonda, New York, Volume 1 and 2. Carbon copy typescript transcription.

Record of the “Old First” Presbyterian Chuch, New York City. Holograph manuscript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Records of the Presbyterian Church Pleasant Valley, Dutchess County, N. Y.: 1793-1827. Copied by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, from hand-written transcript of the records, loaned the department, by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, New York, N. Y., 1950. Carbon copy typescript.

Record of the Proceedings of the Presbyterian Church and Congregation at Bowman’s Creek: Church record of the 1st Presbyterian Church, Buel, Montomery County, New York. Typescript.

Records of the Ramapo Reformed Church and Ramapo Lutheran Church 1749-1944. Mimeo typescript. Ridgewood, N.J.: 1944.

Records of Reformed Church of Bethlehem and of Reformed Church at Coeymans, Albany County, N.Y. Carbon copy typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

463

Records of the Reformed Church of Sharon, Schoharie County, N. Y. copied by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives from a typed transcript of the records (transcriber unknown), 1957. Carbon copy typescript.

Records of St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church of New Rhinebeck Town of Sharon, Schoharie County, New York, transcribed from the original records by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, 1956. Carbon copy typescript.

Reformed Dutch Church of Kinderhook, Columbia County, New York, 1756-1799 Index. Compiled by the Montgomery County Department of History and Archives, 1948. Carbon copy of typescript.

Rounds, H. L. Peter, ed. Early Records of the First Presbyterian Church of Caledonia, N.Y.: “The White Kirk” founded in 1805 by Scotsmen who emigrated from Scotland 1798-1803: The First Church of any Denomination West of the Genesee River. Photocopies of excerpts from several publications.

Schenectady, New York First Dutch Reformed Church: baptisms 1794-1938. Carbon copy typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Van Wagenen, Gerrit Hubert, ed. The Records of the Dutch Reformed Church at New Paltz, Ulster County, N.Y.: from 1683 to 1816, Translated from the original French and Dutch by B. Fernow. Manuscript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Vosburgh, Royden Woodward, ed. Records of Christ Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City, N.Y., Volume 1 and 2. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Typescript (carbon copy). New York City, 1919.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church, called Christ Church in the Town of Ghent, Columbia County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Copy of typescript. New York City, 1920.

______. Records of the Reformed Dutch Church in the Town of Middleburgh, Schoharie County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Copy of typescript. New York City, 1918.

______. Records of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Caughnawaga, now the Reformed Church of Fonda, in the Village of Fonda, Montgomery County, N.Y. , Volumes 1, 2, and 3. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Typescript (carbon copy). New York City, 1917.

Vosburgh, Royden Woodward and L.P. de Boer, ed. Records of St. Thomas’s Evangelical Lutheran Church at Churchtown, Town of Claverack, Columbia

464

County, N.Y. Transcribed by the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Typescript (carbon copy). New York, 1912.

Weller, Ralph H., ed. Members of the German Reformed Church, Montgomery, Orange County, New York, 1732-1802. Photocopy of typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Wright, Helen Martha, ed. Records of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Mendham, New Jersey: with Genealogical Annotations. Carbon copy typescript. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

Zion Lutheran Church (Athens, N.Y.). Records of the Zion Lutheran Church of Athens, Greene County, N.Y., 1704-1865, Volume 1 and 2. Positive photostatic reproduction. New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Collection.

New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, N.Y.

St. Philip's Church (Harlem, New York, N.Y.) Records. Sc MG 67. Box 74. Vestry Minutes.

Zoar United Methodist Church (Philadelphia, Pa.) Records, 1841-1984. Microform.

Newport Historical Society Library, Newport, R.I.

First Congregational Church, Newport, R.I., Records.

Lippincott, Bert. Obour Tanner research notes, 13 February 2007.

Second Congregational Church, Newport, R.I., Records.

Seventh Day Baptist Church, Newport, R.I., Record 1708-1738. 1816.

Trinity Episcopal Church, Newport, R.I., Records.

Union Congregational Church, Newport, R.I., Records.

Pettaquamscutt Historical Society, Kingston, R.I.

Congregational Church, Kingston, R.I. subject research file.

Fayerweather Family, subject research file.

465

Kingston Congregational Church, original record copies Torrey, subject research file.

Kingston, Rhode Island, subject research file.

Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pa.

Evangelical Society of Philadelphia, Records, 1809-1815. RG 313.

First Presbyterian Church (Elizabeth, N.J.), Records, 1716-1913. RG 68.

First Presbyterian Church (New York, N.Y.), Records, 1717-1961. RG 413.

Princeton University, Manuscripts Division, The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections., Princeton, N.J.

Andre De Coppet Collection, 1566-1936 (bulk 1770-1865).

Edward Coles Papers, 1797-1881. C0037.

Francis C. Brown Collection on Slavery in America, 1779-1868 (bulk 1820-1865). C0605.

Samuel Miller Papers, 1754-1898 (bulk 1800-1849). C0277.

Winans Collection of New Jersey Documents, 1703-1883. C0234.

Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, R.I.

Christ Church (Episcopal) Providence, Records 1841-1851. Mss 9001-C.

First Congregational Church of Newport, Records, 1805-1825. Mss 418.

Gano, Stephen, Diary, 1813-1814. Mss 9001-G.

Henshaw, John Prentiss Kewle, Diary, 1843-1852. Mss 1133.

Moses Brown Papers, 1753-1836, Letters. Mss 313.

Newman Congregational Church Records, 1681-1978. Mss 584.

Plymouth Union Congregational Church Records, 1720-1974. Mss 139, Series 1.

Rev. John Pitman Papers, Diary. Mss 622.

466

Rhode Island Manuscripts, Newport, Accounts, marriages and letters, 1761-1770. Mss 9004.

Rhode Island Manuscripts, Providence, Letter, 1842. Mss 9004.

Second Congregational Church, Newport, R.I. Mss 108.

Six Principle Baptist Church, Records, East Greenwich, 1743-1831. Mss 145, s 3, loose volume.

Staples, William Read, Providence, Letters. Mss 9001-S.

Stedman, Daniel, Journal, 1829-1859. Mss 1129.

Senator John Heinz History Center, Thomas & Katherine Detre Library & Archives, Pittsburg, Pa.

Collection of Rev. Wallace G. Smeltzer, 1808-1963 (bulk 1815-1817 and 1914-1963). MSS#202. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Methodist Episcopal Church in the City of Pittsburgh 1818-1832, Smithfield Street Church, Book # 1, 1818-1832.

Papers of Robert Ayres, 1785-1837. MSS#23. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Records of the Alleghenytown (later Beaver Street) Methodist Episcopal Church, 1832- 1853. MSS# 324. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Records of the Beulah Presbyterian Church (Churchill, Pa.), 1811-1834 (bulk 1811-1834 and 1983-1984). MSS #83. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Records of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, 1797-1979. MSS#86. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Records of Voegtly Evangelical Church, 1833-1986. MSS #125. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Records of Wesley Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, 1836-1880. MSS 0322.

467

St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Marblehead, Mass. Archive (records provided by Frances Stith Nilsson, Historic Church Committee, April 1, 2012)

“List of Births, Marriages and Burials of non-Europeans recorded at St. Michael's from 1716-1771 as indexed by the Rev. William Reed Woodbridge in 1877.” Compiled Sept. 2010.

“Vestry & Sacramental Records-Coverage & Gaps.”

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Newburyport, Mass. Archive (records provided by Bronson de Stadler, February 26, 2012)

“Baptisms of colour people.” Church Records. de Stadler, Bronson. “History Minute #5.” Delivered April 10, 2011.

Trinity Episcopal Church Wall Street Archive, New York, N.Y.

Baptism St. George’s Chapel 1782-1798.

Baptism Trinity Church 1800-06.

Baptism Trinity 1809-1832.

Copy of Minutes of the Vestry, 1697-1791, Corporation of Trinity Church, Volume 1.

Copy of Minutes of the Vestry, 1791-1826, Corporation of Trinity Church, Volume 2.

Copy of Minutes of the Vestry, 1826-1850, Corporation of Trinity Church, Volume 3.

Marriages Parish 1746-1816.

St. Paul’s Chapel Vol. 1. Baptisms, Marriages, Burials 1855-1883, Confirmations 1855- 1887, Communicants 1828-1891.

Vestry Papers, Trinity Church Archive, Box 288, VP 3, 1816-1820.

Vestry Papers, Trinity Church Archive, Box 290, VP 5, 1826-1830.

Vestry Papers, Trinity Church Archive, Box 291, VP 6, 1835 Jun-Dec.

468

University of Rhode Island Archive, Kingston, R.I.

Fayerweather Family Papers, 1836-1962. MSG# 121.

Records of St. Michael's Church, Bristol, 1718-1999. MSG# 185.

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