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By Root 7522 0

the century were followed by revivalists energized by the Second Great Awakening, then rolling into Manhattan from the frontier. Making use of successful camp-meeting techniques, they got urban congregants clapping, jumping, and screaming in holy ecstasy. Those seeking salvation were coaxed from their pews and “called to the altar,” where they were prayed over until the spirit struck. Baptists gathered outdoors at the shoreline point of Corlear’s Hook and performed rites of immersion in the East River. Between 1816 and 1826, at least ten Baptist churches were enlarged, rebuilt, or constructed in working-class wards, and shopfront chapels became a common sight along the Bowery. Though popular evangelicalism would remain predominantly a western and rural phenomenon, by 1825 New York City had nevertheless become one of its three leading centers.

Baptising Scene, lithograph by Endicott and Swett, 1884. Immersions were a common sight along the Hudson as well as the East River. This one took place near the foot of modern Horatio Street in Greenwich Village, just below the White Fort erected during the War of 1812. (I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)

Methodists won working-class male and female converts by offering “free churches” that did not charge pew rents, allowing prayer in mixed-gender assemblies, and teaching that possession of earthly riches did not signify grace and might even suggest sin. On July 4, 1826, at potter’s field, a gardener and lay preacher named David Whitehead invoked divine wrath against the “pretty set” who lived in luxury. Also in the mid-1820s, a group including Sarah Stanford, Baptist and daughter of almshouse chaplain John Stanford, began denouncing elite Presbyterians for their luxurious diets, clothing, and home furnishings.

Not all evangelicals were pleased with this turn of events. Nathan Bangs, “preacher in charge” of the Methodist Circuit of New York City since 1810, believed that the revivals had “degenerated into extravagant excitements.” A severe, self-educated son of a Connecticut blacksmith, Bangs denounced the “impatience of scriptural restraint and moderation, clapping of the hands, screaming, and even jumping, which marred and disgraced the work of God.” Bangs also demolished the old John Street chapel in 1817 and replaced it the following year with a much grander edifice. Gradually he marginalized the more enthusiastic preachers, curtailed the singing of spirituals, and imposed order, efficiency, and method. Bangs’s emphasis on disciplined self-repression appealed to some Methodists, especially second-generation members who sought to combine spiritual salvation with dignified respectability. But others were distressed at Bangs’s restrictions and the imposing new John Street Church. They broke away in 1820, formed their own “Methodist Society,” and erected three more modest structures in the uptown wards.

African Methodists too were roused to new assertiveness. In 1821 Mother Zion broke from its parent body and, with two other black churches, formed its own denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (later the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church). African Zion became the largest black congregation in the city; its recruits included Isabella Van Wagenen, a newly arrived (1828), recently freed, Hudson Valley slave who would later rename herself Sojourner Truth.

Black Episcopalians also established a presence in the Five Points area. Peter Williams Jr., son of the sexton at John Street Methodist, studied for the Episcopal priesthood and in 1818 supervised the emergence of Saint Philip’s Episcopal Church. With encouragement and financial aid from the parent denomination, members of St. Philip’s, some of them skilled mechanics, constructed their own wooden church on Collect Street between Anthony and Leonard, right in the middle of the Fresh Water Pond landfill. In 1820 Williams was ordained a deacon; in 1826, elevated to the priesthood, he