Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [215]
Equally disturbing to conservatives was the radical assault on two other powerful corporations—King’s College and Trinity Church. A group of prominent Whigs led by Mayor Duane had petitioned the legislature to give King’s College a new charter embodying “that Liberality and that civil and religious Freedom” secured by the Revolution. What they got instead from the radical majority was an act creating the University of the State of New York. King’s College, renamed Columbia, would henceforth be only one among many prospective institutions of higher learning belonging to and controlled by the university. Furthermore, the university was to be governed by a giant board of regents, most of whose members came from rural parts of the state and could be counted upon to harbor no particular sympathy for an elitist, Anglican institution in the city. This was borne out when the board proposed three highly controversial candidates for president of the university: Joseph Priestly and Richard Price, radical dissenters who had actively supported the American cause, and John Jebb, a reformist Anglican cleric.
Trinity Church presented an even more complicated and potentially explosive case. Only weeks before Evacuation Day, the Tory vestry of Trinity had picked a staunch supporter of the crown, the Rev. Benjamin Moore, to take over as rector (the Rev. Charles Inglis having lately realized that his future looked brighter in Nova Scotia). Even moderate and conservative Whigs were dismayed by Moore’s elevation—he “preached and prayed against us during the war,” Robert R. Livingston recalled—and the Council for the Southern District decided to place the church under the control of nine trustees, all Whigs, including James Duane, Francis Lewis, Isaac Sears, and William Duer. For rector the trustees chose the Rev. Samuel Provoost, whose forebears had years before drifted with so many other well-to-do Dutch families into the Anglican fold.
Moore refused to step aside. Accordingly, in April 1784, the legislature issued a new charter for Trinity, empowering the trustees to call and induct a rector. Simultaneously, in conformity with the principles of religious liberty embodied in the 1777 constitution, the legislature repealed the Ministry Act of 1693, disestablished the Anglican Church, and adopted a law for the incorporation of non-Anglican religious bodies in the state. Later that same year New York Anglicans hosted a convention that organized the American Episcopal Church in strict accordance with the practices of the Church of England.
What really caught the imagination of the legislature’s radical majority, though, was Trinity’s valuable Manhattan real estate. Its centerpiece was the sprawling tract known as the King’s Farm, bestowed upon the church almost a century earlier. Soon after Evacuation Day, heirs of Annetje Jans, the original owner, petitioned the legislature for recovery of the property, whereupon the Assembly decided the land properly belonged to the state. In February 1785 it ordered the attorney general to sue the church for possession. The judicial expropriation of Trinity’s holdings, if successful, would be a milestone in the transformation of society and an invitation to push that transformation still further.
How much further wasn’t clear, although there were plenty of hints. Since Evacuation Day, the Sons of Liberty, the Mechanics Committee, and other radical groups had expressed an interest in such matters as the popular election of mayors, free public schooling, easier naturalization laws, and the abolition of primogeniture and entail. During the war, many had urged the state to