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Yet nothing gave the Triumvirate greater cause for concern than De Lancey’s effort to make New York’s first publicly supported college an Anglican institution. Back in 1746 the Assembly had approved a lottery to raise money for a college, and when a board of trustees was finally appointed in 1751, seven of its ten members were Anglicans. They decided to build on a thirty-acre portion of the King’s (formerly Queen’s) Farm on the west side of Manhattan, donated by Trinity Church on condition that the school’s presidents belong to the Church of England and that it use the Anglican liturgy in religious services. The board then invited Samuel Johnson, the Anglican rector at Stamford, Connecticut, to lead the new institution.

William Livingston, one of the three non-Anglicans on the board, was apoplectic. He revered higher learning as a beacon of enlightenment in a crassly materialistic age and believed that a college would do much to improve New York’s reputation (there were, after all, only four other such institutions in all of British North America: Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, and the College of New Jersey, now Princeton). “Our Neighbours have told us in an insulting Tone, that the Art of getting Money, is the highest Improvement we can pretend to,” he had written in the Independent Reflector. In the spring of 1753, accordingly, Livingston, Smith, Scott, and Alexander launched an all-out attack on the Anglican plan.

Their contention, in Livingston’s words, was that the Anglican scheme would make the college “a contracted Receptacle of Bigotry” and was part of an SPG conspiracy—“so perilous, so detestable a plot”—to impose religious conformity on the colony. The stakes were thus political as well as religious. Inasmuch as the Ministry Act of 1693 hadn’t actually established the Anglican Church, use of the Anglican liturgy in college services constituted an invasion of hard-won legislative prerogatives. Natural rights, constitutional liberty, rational toleration, freedom of thought, diversity of opinion, separation of church and state—those were the real issues, Livingston declared. “The Absurdity of a Religion, supported and inforced by the Terrors of the Law, is too apparent to need much farther Display.”

These Whiggish accusations made the proposed New York college a transatlantic cause celebre by tying it, like the Zenger affair fifteen years earlier, to issues and ideas deeply imbedded in Anglo-American political experience. Thomas Bradbury Chandler, Samuel Seabury Sr., Samuel Auchmuty (rector of Trinity), and other Anglican spokesmen fought back in a succession of pamphlets and newspaper essays. (Belfast-born Hugh Gaine’s New-York Mercury, published at the sign of the Bible and Crown on Hanover Square, was their favorite outlet; the Livingston forces labeled it a “priestly Newspaper.”) Inequality, hierarchy, monarchy, patriarchy, obedience to authority, and an established church—these were the true principles of social organization, the Anglicans declared. Religious toleration was one thing, the anarchy of complete religious freedom quite another. The Church of England symbolized and served the British people as a whole; its clergy acted as custodians of British values, tradition, and culture; its preeminence was as vital in the colonies as in the mother country. Opposition to the proposed college wasn’t merely ignorant: it smacked of treason and rebellion as well.

In 1754, to no one’s surprise, Governor De Lancey granted a charter for King’s College. By July of that year the new institution had opened in the vestry room of Trinity Church with Samuel Johnson as president. Later that year Livingston and his friends founded the New York Society Library. Their intent was not only to serve the city’s inhabitants generally but to maintain some influence over the new college by establishing a collection of books for the use of its students.

Wrangling continued over whether the Assembly would allow public money to be spent for the college. The arrival of Osborne