Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [171]
In May 1766 more than eighty Presbyterian and Reformed clergymen and deacons from around the colonies assembled in New York to voice their opposition to the appointment of an Anglican bishop for America. Arguments for such an appointment, though not new, had recently been revived by Samuel Johnson, president of King’s College, and the Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler; they would be heard again the following year, with still greater force, when John Ewer, the bishop of Landaff, denounced the colonists as “infidels and barbarians” in an address to the Society for the Preservation of the Gospel, and the society began an all-out push for the creation of an Anglican episcopate in America. Read in light of Townshend’s simultaneous attempt to tax the colonies, news of the SPG offensive was received by dissenters as well as secular radicals with indignation and apprehension. Their objection, as John Adams later explained, wasn’t just to the office of bishop as such “but to the authority of parliament, on which it must be founded.”
In New York, William Livingston, probably with the help of William Smith and John Morin Scott, entered the fray with a series of essays entitled “The American Whig.” Running in the New-York Gazette from March 1768 to July 1769—thus overlapping the spirited Assembly campaigns of those years, the failure of dissenting congregations to secure charters of incorporation, and the new upsurge of evangelical fervor—Livingston’s “American Whig” assailed the proposal for an American episcopate with arguments and a fervor reminiscent of the Triumvirate’s attacks on King’s College a decade earlier.
Evidence of Livingston’s effectiveness came early in 1769, when New York’s leading Baptists and Presbyterians—Alexander McDougall, William Livingston, John Morin Scott, David Van Home, and several members of the Livingston clan, among others—formed the Society of Dissenters to fight episcopacy. One of the society’s first recommendations was to urge the public to support dissenters rather than Anglicans in that year’s Assembly elections. It subsequently advocated legislation relieving dissenters of the duty to pay taxes for the upkeep of Anglican clergy in the colony and, in 1770, got a bill through the Assembly repealing the Ministry Act of 1693. The bill died in the heavily Anglican council, however, and several years later Governor William Tryon would rule that the Anglican Church in New York was in fact legally established and immune from legislative interference. The whole experience confirmed that the line between religion and politics in New York had grown exceedingly fine indeed.
By the end of the decade, as one Methodist preacher reported to John Wesley in May 1770, the “religion of Jesus” had become a “favorite topic in New York.” Even the city’s “gay and polite” inhabitants were now “alive to God.” “A person who could not speak about the grace of God and the new birth was esteemed unfit for genteel company,” testified another observer. Thirteen of eighteen Protestant congregations in Manhattan had already gone over to pietism, while Trinity, that citadel of Anglicanism in New York, harbored a budding minority of evangelicals. (There was also a burst of church building and renovation. Between 1750 and 1776 half of the city’s twenty-two religious houses were built or substantially refurbished.)
Religious orthodoxy and denominationalism had always been vital to the order of things in British New York. Their precipitous retreat during the 1760s not only made the rehabilitation of imperial power next to impossible but threw into question the authority of all social and political institutions as well. What was more, the corresponding advance of pluralism, individualism, and antiauthoritarianism—habits of mind whose meanings are as much religious as secular—increased the willingness of