Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [131]
The rigid order imposed on inmates of the almshouse was quite different from what the poor experienced when they were lodged in rented private dwellings. This might explain why the new institution drew only nineteen people its first year (twelve adults and seven children) and why some inmates, though prohibited from leaving without permission, fled at the return of clement weather—only to come back “almost naked,” as the Common Council complained in 1738, when winter again approached.
Once the almshouse was in operation, moreover, the city drastically slashed outdoor relief—the traditional system of granting aid to the poor in their own homes. By 1747 it had been all but eliminated, and the gulf between those who enjoyed the privileges of membership in the municipal corporation and those who didn’t was wider than ever.
“GETHSEMANE! GETHSEMANE!”
The transformation of public life in New York received further impetus during the depression from that outpouring of piety known as the Great Awakening. Linkages between politics and evangelical religion were nothing new. Nearly two decades had now passed since Theodore Frelinghuysen began drawing on the pools of Leislerian resentment that still lay under the Dutch churches in the Raritan Valley. In the mid-1720s William Smith (Zenger’s sometime attorney) and Gilbert Livingston led a faction within the New York Presbyterian Church that struggled against clerical orthodoxy and managed the installation of the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton as pastor.
After 1710, moreover, Baptists began gaining ground among the city’s laboring population when the Rev. Valentine Wightman came down from Groton, Connecticut, to preach. Wightman kept a low profile, speaking only at private homes and performing baptisms by night, until several converts, disdaining further subterfuge, demanded daylight baptism. Governor Hunter offered his protection and even went to the waterfront to watch, accompanied by other gentlemen. By 1715 Baptists in the city were meeting at the Broad Street home of a brewer named Nicholas Eyres. In 1724 the Baptist Church was formally organized and moved into a new building atop Golden Hill, along what is now Cliff Street (near John).
Enter now George Whitefield, a young preacher from Oxford University who had been closely associated with Charles and John Wesley in the budding Methodist movement. Whitefield was an unusually talented orator and within a few years after his graduation in 1736 became renowned in England for his attacks on clerical laxity as well as for his ability to awaken the slumbering religious fervor of popular audiences. So large were the crowds that flocked to hear him—and so hostile were the established clergy to his speaking in their churches—that Whitefield took to preaching outdoors, a practice that soon became his trademark.
In the summer of 1739, aware that many of his printed sermons had already aroused great interest in America, Whitefield crossed the Atlantic for a tour of the colonies. His first stop was Philadelphia, where he spoke to excited multitudes of as many as six thousand people. In mid-November he went up to New York, staying at the home of William Smith, the prominent Presbyterian layman. Seeking a pulpit from which to speak, Whitefield approached the Rev. William Vesey, now in his forty-fifth year as rector of Trinity and more doggedly conservative than ever. Vesey refused the use of his church, charging Whitefield with various violations of canon law (to which Whitefield replied that the aging cleric spent too much time in the taverns). Faithful to the arrangement struck years before with the Anglicans, Dominie Henricus Boel likewise refused to let Whitefield speak in the Dutch Reformed church. Whitefield had his sympathizers, however, and when the Rev. Ebenezer