Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [317]
There, in the last month of life, Paine was harried by devout visitors, determined to save his soul with an eleventh-hour conversion. Once two Presbyterian ministers pushed their way in, only to be rebuffed. “Let me have none of your popish stuff,” the invalid declared. “Get away with you, good morning, good morning.” He would be badgered one last time, in his final waking moments on June 8, 1809, when the attending doctor asked: “Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?” “I have no wish to believe on that subject,” he replied, and died peacefully in his unfaith. Paine’s theological and political adversaries did not give up, however, and spread rumors that he had undergone a deathbed conversion. When New York’s street commissioners, shortly after Paine’s death, named an adjacent lane Reason Street in his honor, Trinity Church managed to get it renamed Barrow Street, honoring a minor watercolorist who had done a drawing of their new building.
OUT FROM THE BACK OF THE CHURCH
Although the rapid pace of European immigration after 1800 made New York whiter than at any time since the mid-seventeenth century, the continued growth of its black population made African Americans an important element of the city’s new wageearning class—and made the city in turn the largest center of African-American life and culture in the United States. Black impatience with slavery and racism became an increasingly visible part of the city’s public life, as in 1807, when a “numerous and respectable meeting of the Africans” was held at the African Free School on Cliff Street to celebrate the new federal ban on slave imports. Similarly, emancipated men and women quickly abandoned the surnames of their former Dutch or English masters, choosing replacements that affirmed their release from bondage (Freeman) or advertised their artisanal skills (Cooper, Mason, Carpenter). For their children, they rejected the derisive and comical given names bestowed by slaveowners (Pompey, Caesar, Cato), often preferring those of biblical origin—not surprisingly, for black churches were anchors of the emerging African-American community.
Most New York denominations had long routinely segregated their black worshipers, confining them (as visiting Englishman William Strickland reported) to socalled Negro Pews—“usually the back rows in the Galleries”—whose occupants “are not permitted or never presume to mix among the whites.” Methodists were different. From 1787 the Methodist Episcopal Church condemned slavery and welcomed blacks as full participants.
The number of black congregants at the Wesley Chapel on John Street increased rapidly in the mid-ivgos, and in 1800 the denomination provided for the ordination of deacons among its “African brethren.” This initial enthusiasm for integration soon peaked, however. Whites grew uneasy with integrated worship, fearful that blacks might yet exercise leadership authority, and worried that antislavery sentiments were dividing northern Methodists from their southern coreligionists. Blacks, pushed to the fringe where other white churches consigned them, asserted their autonomy and pushed to form an independent church.
The mainstay of this movement was sexton Peter Williams. Born of slave parents in a cowshed adjacent to their masters’ Beekman Street town house, Williams had been purchased as a young man by tobacco merchant James Aymar and become an expert cigar maker. He also became a Methodist. In