The Revolutionary Period and Early Black Estrangement from the Episcopal Church

Summary: During the Revolutionary War, the British freed all enslaved Blacks who defected to their side, including a large percentage of enslaved Blacks from New Jersey. The Revolutionaries sought to continue the practice of slavery and the fledgling Episcopal Church participated in this practice post-war. In spite of pre-war White Anglican (self-serving) attentions to some Blacks, for the most part Black Americans sought post-war outlets for religious expression that were more affirming of their experience, leadership, and humanity than the Episcopal Church was at the time.

The Revolutionary Period and Early Black Estrangement from the Episcopal Church

         Even as Anglican priests in New Jersey largely avoided directly addressing the issue of the enslavement of Blacks,[1] the effects of S.P.G. missionary attention to enslaved Blacks were not insignificant, and “undermined the authoritarian power of the master in important ways.”[2]

As a transatlantic faith, Anglicanism stressed the importance of international and imperial bonds over local governance. Anglican instructors accentuated the importance of sacred power over the temporal authority. Although Anglicans vigorously denied that baptism mandated emancipation, folk customs held that refusal of this rite placed slave masters in opposition to God, instilling among blacks a critique of slavery. Finally, Anglican educational efforts constructed genuine English establishment ties to blacks, which made African American choices in the American Revolution very easy.[3]

While many Anglican parishes in New Jersey[4] certainly allowed both free and enslaved Blacks in worship,[5] and the opportunities available to some enslaved Blacks through participation in Anglican parishes in New Jersey were not insubstantial, nevertheless these attentions to enslaved Blacks on the part of the S.P.G. missionary priests did not translate into large-scale affinity among Black Americans for the Episcopal Church in New Jersey after the Revolutionary War. 

John Jea: Internationally renowned preacher and mariner.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

            Even as the Anglican churches may have afforded one of the most robust opportunities to Black Americans to participate formally in church life before the War, this reality did not overcome the problems associated with this avenue of institutional religious participation. Among the reasons for hesitancy were the problem that there was no avenue authorized by Church of England authorities for Black religious leadership in Anglican parishes in New Jersey in the colonial period. Ordination was effectively impossible.[6] Gifted, knowledgeable, and earnest Black Christian leaders in the region like John Jea and George White, who had experience and training with the Anglican Church in their background, found the need to express their calling outside the Episcopal Church, in part because it was too limiting of their free expression of their faith and leadership.[7] The Methodist split, and the further formation of what would become independent African Methodist Episcopal churches in the region after the War, offered readier opportunities for Black church leadership. A further reason for the hesitancy of Black Americans to embrace the Episcopal Church after the War may be seen in the military policy developments that occurred during the War itself.

            The British military policy toward slavery, which arose during the conflict, could be understood as an about-face from their previous colonial policy. While the colonies had been viewed as a useful source of plantation income, slavery was facilitated. But as soon as the colonies were in rebellion, British commanders saw an opportunity to undermine the rebellion by offering freedom to Blacks who would fight for the Crown. Even before the Declaration was signed (1775), the Governor of Virginia, John Murray, had declared that any slave or indentured servant who would serve in the British military to put down the rebellion would be freed.[8] A steady stream of Blacks fled to the British lines, particularly from New Jersey to New York City, to fight for their freedom. Ultimately this fiat manumission was extended even to those who did not fight, when the British general for New York, David Jones, declared free any enslaved Blacks who left rebel-occupied territory saying “no person whatever [could] claim a right to them.”[9] These military policy-makers were Anglicans, and no doubt much of their motivation came from military concerns rather than moral or scriptural conviction. Nevertheless, the British stuck to their promise, offering Blacks passage out of the United States and confirmed freedom provided they had made it behind British lines before the cessation of hostilities.[10]

            However, rather than viewing the wartime British policy toward enslaved Blacks as an about-face, it should probably be viewed in continuity with the previous policy. Certainly the previous pro-slavery policy was intended to benefit the Crown. The Anglican Church support for the state policy can be viewed as a function of its role as a state church “loyally” working to benefit the economic and political power of the Crown. The S.P.G. attention to enslaved Blacks can be seen in a similar light. Hodges has suggested that these proselytizing attentions were intended as “the strongest bulwark against disloyalty and insurrection,” which were seen as particularly necessary in a land full of “Dissenters” whose loyalty was questionable and who could not be expected to become ready converts to the Church of England.[11]  These attentions were part of a full-spectrum effort which included “secret Crown instructions to royal governors” requiring special efforts to “encourage the Conversion of Negroes… to our Christian religion.”[12]

Seen in this light, the Anglican concern for the conversion of enslaved Blacks in New Jersey was clearly not disinterested, nor motivated purely by humanitarian or spiritual concern. The concerns of the Anglican Church, as an arm of the state, were in inculcating loyalty wherever possible to God, the Church, and the Crown. Loyalty to one of these entities was expected to affect loyalty to the others salubriously. The Church of England’s concern for conversions among enslaved Blacks was an extension of a geopolitical concern, one which bore fruit for the British during the Revolutionary War in the fealty, even if opportunistic, shown by enslaved Blacks seeking freedom under temporarily instituted military policy. 

            Following the War, the Anglican Church in New Jersey was in utter disarray ­–services had been disrupted, and priests had mostly fled.[13] In no position to make further political waves[14] the enfeebled Church continued its previous policy supporting slavery. Its previous pro-slavery sentiments remained consistent with then-current popular opinion in the state. Some New Jersey priests even sought reparations for the loss of their runaways.[15] Since it was Anglicans who had, through military policy, freed “loyal” Blacks during the War (and then left), but also Anglicans who continued to support slavery in New Jersey, it was clear to Black New Jerseyans that the Anglican Church in New Jersey did not have their deepest interests at heart. Anglican institutional interest in Blacks had been largely a function of economic and political self-interest, pious protestations aside.

            Of course the most obvious reason for Black abandonment of the Anglican Church in New Jersey after the Revolutionary War was the fact that the Church had been, and continued to be, fully co-operative with Black enslavement.[16] The ideological, legal, and financial responsibility of the Anglican Church for slavery in what became the Diocese of New Jersey was very significant, and went well beyond accounting for the dollar value of gifts given from slavery encumbered wealth.[17] If hagiography, which emphasizes concern for and education of enslaved Blacks, were the only story to be told,[18] clearly Black Americans would have been more involved in the Episcopal Church in New Jersey after the Revolutionary War. While there was not a wholesale abandonment,[19] there was a clear movement to other institutional expressions of Christian religion.[20] This movement came partly as a result of freer opportunities in these other contexts for the expression of Black leadership and Black faith. It came partly as a result of the previous and continued support for enslavement by Anglican leadership[21] and laity.[22]

            However, perhaps the most significant reason for Black disengagement from the Anglican Church was that it was likely very clear that attention paid them by the Church[23] was primarily the result of self-interested economic and political concern and not predominantly concern for them qua human brethren. Though not formally a “state church,” and in spite of even its predecessor (the Church of England) never having been the officially established church of New Jersey, the Episcopal Church in New Jersey operated toward Black Americans out of its prior broader Anglican identity as a state church and its concerns over political clout and stability, even well after the separation of the American colonies from England. As such, the British military policy enacted during the War should not be seen as a reversal exactly, but rather indicative of a larger –consistent– instrumental view of enslaved Blacks on the part of most Anglicans. Blacks were viewed as either means to more important ends, or as a concern of lesser importance than other, more pressing economic and political concerns. As a result, when allowed the option to leave slavery during the War, many enslaved Blacks left, and when choosing their religious affiliation after the War, Black Americans generally left the Episcopal Church alone.

Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Reparations Commission Research Historian

Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey

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[1] Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 75.

[2] Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 71.

[3] Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 71.

[4] Burr (The Anglican Church in New Jersey, 224-28) collates much of the priestly correspondence on this issue suggesting that there was probably at least partially integrated worship in several parishes, though Edgar Pennington strangely leaves New Jersey out entirely in his treatment of the S.P.G. efforts to reach enslaved Blacks in the American colonies: Pennington, Thomas Bray’s Associates and Their Work among the Negroes(Worcester, MA: The American Antiquarian Society, 1939).

[5] Unlike many other denominations, notably the Quakers who, though more vocal about the abolition of slavery were less willing to extend fellowship to Blacks. Gigantino, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 71.

[6] Certainly during the colonial era, but also after. Absalom Jones proved otherwise in Philadelphia in 1802, though his career shows it remained incredibly difficult for Black Episcopalians to become ordained for decades after the Revolutionary War. See also the experience of Alexander Crummell at General Seminary in 1839 detailed in Craig Steven Wilder, “‘Driven… from the School of the Prophets’: The Colonizationist Ascendance at General Theological Seminary,” New York History 93.3 (2012): 157-185.

[7] See Graham Russell Hodges, ed., Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

[8] Francis L. Berkeley, Jr., Dumore’s Proclamation of Emancipation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1941).

[9] Douglas Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 84.

[10] See the “Book of Negroes,” also known as the “Inspection Roll of Negroes” created by Brigadier General Samuel Birch (1783). National Archives: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/5890797.

[11] Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 28.

[12] Extract from the Instructions to Earl Clarendon when Lord Cornbury & Governor of New York, January 1, 1702/3, S.P.G. Correspondence, MSS Collection B, Vol. 1, Appendix (British Online Archives).

[13] As a result of the aforementioned connected loyalties, which were represented even in the mandatory prayers for the King offered during Church of England worship services. The inclusion of these prayers in the required liturgy was what made Anglican Church services too dangerous to offer during much of the War in New Jersey.

[14] And not seeing any reason to do so when most Anglicans were viewed as loyalist traitors to the new nation.

[15] E.g. Samuel Cooke of Shrewsbury. Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 96.

[16] As evidenced by the Van Wickle slave ring.

[17] There various reasons why such calculations are unhelpful, or even counterproductive. Among them is the fact that this kind of calculation only attends to the value of available “priceable” labor. It does not attend to the “missing value” of the destroyed and disappeared lives of those enslaved persons who did not survive the trans-Atlantic trip, or who were murdered, or who died young due to abuse. This “economic value” is destroyed by enslavers and is irretrievable, but in general is a “disappeared” or “externalized” cost in any system that permits slavery, and in most forensic accounting. This problem makes any accurate calculation of responsibility effectively impossible. Accounting for such gifts cannot be considered partially encumbered, or even entirely encumbered as a result of enslavement profiteering. Rather, such donations should most accurately be understood to be supersaturated with encumbrance: the market value of the gift drastically understates the vast toll of human destruction wrought on countless people in order to extract that small amount of “profit” which is then, by donation, converted to “charity”. For this and other reasons, basic forensic accounting cannot accurately determine a dollar value for responsibility for slavery. 

[18] As suggested by Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey, 224-28.

[19] As evidenced by, for example the Sampson Adams papers (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/adams/index.html), the will from which indicates a significant connection between Adams and St. Michael’s Church, Trenton. Though it is possible that the bequest to St. Michael’s was made only in order to ensure that the will would be honored by the court system and interested White parties, and that, by extension, this would ensure that the bulk of the estate went to his sister, the primary beneficiary.

[20] Including most notably, Methodist churches, the nascent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) movement, Baptist churches, and denominationally independent Black churches.

[21] As previously mentioned, the first Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey, Bishop Croes, enslaved Blacks.

[22] Influential laity like Robert Stockton continued to enslave Blacks well into the gradual abolition period, and worked to remove free Black Americans to Africa.

[23] Particularly the attentions of the S.P.G. in the colonial period.