This is the summary of initial findings presented at the Diocesan convention March 4, 2023.
Greetings friends. My name is Jolyon Pruszinski, I’m a Lecturer in the Department of Religion at Princeton University and since this past fall I’ve been serving as the Reparations Commission Research Historian for the Diocese. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today to share about some of our initial findings from our research into the history of the Diocese with respect to slavery and the oppression of Black Africans and African-Americans.
There was little Anglican presence in what later became New Jersey when the British took it from the Dutch in 1664, but slavery was already well established. The British continued to employ slavery in both East and West Jersey as part of their goal to establish a plantation economy in the colonies. During this time the Crown operated a monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade with the colonies (through the Royal African Company) and in the Caribbean colonies Anglicans helped create the legal and linguistic conventions of associating “White” with “free” and “Christian” and “Black” with “slave” and “pagan.” These conventions were imported into the Jerseys, especially East Jersey by Barbadian transplants who brought enslaved Africans with them as part of an early speculative land grab. White settlers were compensated with as much as 150 acres of land for each enslaved person they brought with them. In 1704 many of these influential Anglican colonists worked to establish the legal approaches to slavery developed in the Caribbean across the whole, now unified, colony of New Jersey. Manumissions were severely discouraged, and in support of formation of these slavery codes, the staff of the Archbishop of Canterbury sent draft legislation to New Jersey legislators seeking to ensure that baptism of an enslaved Black person would not be allowed as grounds for manumission. This provision, through the efforts of influential Anglicans, was incorporated into the legislation and became colonial law.
During this time the Anglican church was looking to become better established in the colony, which was then peopled mostly with dissenters who were not very interested in the Church of England. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (or SPG), a voluntary Anglican missionary organization, was formed in 1702 to support the development of the church in the colonies and it began sending priests. These priests worked in concert with local elite Anglicans to establish congregations and by the end of the colonial period there were approximately 24 churches established in the colony and a similar number of preaching stations. The Anglican church never became the official church of the colony so financial support was provided by local congregations and the SPG. Local congregations were expected to pay for building and upkeep and to provide some support for a priest, and the SPG provided the bulk of the base salary to the priests, though the Crown also furnished an initial bounty for the sending of many priests. Because the crown was directly profiting from the slave-trade and because the SPG derived significant income from its plantation in Codrington, Barbados (which enslaved hundreds of Africans) we should understand the financial backing for priests in New Jersey at this time to be the product of enslaved labor.
But even more directly, the financial backing for building and establishing Anglican churches in colonial New Jersey came from using enslaved labor. Most the wealthiest Anglicans in the colony at this time were participating fully in the plantation economy and enslaved Black Africans. Col. (and later governor) Lewis Morris, for instance, owned a mine at Tinton Falls in the early 1700s on which he enslaved at least 65 Africans. He was involved in the establishment of the SPG and in the founding of a few different congregations (including Christ Church, Shrewsbury, and St. Michael’s, Trenton). He was probably the most prolific enslaver at that time in all of the American colonies. Col. Peter Schuyler, from the well-known Schuyler family, was heavily involved in the establishment of a few different New Jersey churches as well (including Trinity, Newark). His wealth came from his plantation and from the inheritance of his father’s copper mine in what is now North Arlington. His father was the wealthiest British colonist in the Americas at the time, and operated his mine for decades with enslaved labor. Perhaps a bit better known is Governor William Franklin, son of Ben Franklin, who gave generous gifts to help establish a few different New Jersey churches (including St. Mary’s, Burlington). His wealth was, in part, a product of slavery.
And it was not just the laity that were involved in enslaving Africans and African-Americans. Many priests came to the colony, not merely to establish the church, but to participate in and benefit from the plantation economy. Several of the longest-serving and best established and influential priests who served in colonial New Jersey (such as Alexander Innes, Edward Vaughan, and Samuel Cooke) owned plantations, enslaved Blacks, and fostered a culture of support for the institution of slavery in their congregations. For example, Rev. Thomas Thompson, who served five years in New Jersey (including at Shrewsbury, Middletown, Freehold, and Allentown), and went on to become the first Anglican missionary to Africa, wrote a very influential treatise supporting the institution of slavery and praising its utility for converting African slaves. Thompson’s work shows that the Anglican missionary attentions devoted toward enslaved Blacks during this period were not really benevolent. These attentions were in almost every way, self-serving for White Anglicans, particularly in New Jersey where free Whites were, in general, not interested in the Anglican Church. As such, the potential to develop loyalty among enslaved Africans was viewed as politically and economically useful. This fact became crystal clear when, the British offered them freedom in the rebelling American colonies during the Revolutionary War. The British had been happy to enslave Africans when that benefitted the Crown economically, and were ready to free them when that appeared likely to give them an advantage in different circumstances. Thousands of enslaved Blacks escaped their bondage during this time as a result of these offers of freedom and the population of the enslaved in New Jersey did drop markedly as a result of the War.
After the war the Anglican Church in the state was in disarray as many of the priests had fled and worship at almost every Anglican church in the state had been very interrupted. The state of New Jersey kept slavery intact after the war and the nascent Episcopal church continued to use it for its benefit. It was not until 1804 that New Jersey voted to enact gradual abolition, the last northern state to formalize legislation of this kind. And while the legislation promised freedom after 21 to 25 years of service to African-Americans born into slavery after 1804, immediate effect of the law was to shore up the institution.
In the meantime, the most influential priests in the founding of the Diocese during this post-revolutionary period, the Revs. Abraham Beach and Uzal Ogden both kept enslaved Blacks and derived significant income from industry and farming using enslaved labor. They fostered a culture of support for the institution in their churches and the Diocese and many influential laity during this time continued to own slaves, even laity who identified as abolitionists such as James Parker Jr. of St. Peter’s, Perth Amboy. However, most of the laity who enslaved Blacks were not abolitionists, such as Senator Robert Stockton of Trinity, Princeton who was influential in the racist American Colonization Society, used force to seize what became Liberia to support the colonization project, enslaved Blacks himself in New Jersey, and kept a sizable plantation in Georgia where he kept over one hundred blacks enslaved at any given time.
However perhaps the most notorious Episcopalian enslaver during Gradual Abolition was the corrupt Middlesex County Judge Jacob van Wickle. During this time the enslaved had to consent to sale out of state, as such a sale could result in the alteration of their status from “slaves for a term” to permanently enslaved. Van Wickle sought to profit from such interstate sales and so forged dozens upon dozens of papers of acquiescence, even going so far as to claim that the cries of infants constituted consent. His ring also kidnapped free Blacks in order to sell them south. He and his family were closely associated with St. Peter’s Spotswood, where he is buried.
It is perhaps unsurprising that such actions were normative among the elite Episcopal laity of the time because slavery was left unchallenged by the early bishops. The first consecrated Bishop of the Diocese, John Croes actually enslaved blacks himself and would even manumit them just prior to becoming legally liable for their financial support in old age. The second bishop, George Washington Doane, left the institution unchallenged and sought to curry favor with wealthy slave-owning southerners to garner financial support for his projects. The wealth which allowed him to serve as bishop, derived from his wife, was the product not merely of profiting from slave labor, but from the transatlantic slave trade itself.
While many New Jersey Blacks did not feel welcomed or humanely treated in the Diocese at this time, some persisted in the denomination and sought to carve out a way of being Black and Episcopalian in spite of paternalistic treatment, segregation, and other horrific challenges. The first Black congregation in the diocese, St. Philip’s, was founded in Newark in 1856. After New Jersey was forced by the 13th amendment to end slavery following the civil war and the diocese was split into the Diocese of Newark and the Diocese of Southern New Jersey (now known as the Diocese of New Jersey) the difficulties Black Episcopalians suffered did not cease but transformed into a new set of challenges. The development of Jim Crow laws, the resurgence of the KKK, and the ongoing White efforts to disempower Black Episcopalians in the Diocese are all subjects of our ongoing historical review. So to sum up:
• Anglicans and the Anglican Church were fully involved in the enslavement of Blacks in colonial and antebellum New Jersey.
• The church and its laity worked to create a legal establishment of slavery in the state.
• Many of the priests, bishops, and laity sought to (and did) benefit financially from slavery.
• Their churchly attentions to enslaved Blacks were limited and largely for self-interested reasons, and few influential New Jersey Anglicans or Episcopalians fully opposed slavery.
• All colonial era churches, and most if not all ante-bellum churches in the Diocese were established through the use of funds connected directly to slavery.
Our review is ongoing and we are looking to move into more recent history going forward, including taking oral histories. We are publishing findings on our blog and we want to invite you to get involved in researching your parish history, as some parishes have already begun to do. Please be in touch if you want to get involved with this work. My own contact information can be found on the blog. Thank you for taking the time to listen, and to take seriously this difficult history as going forward we consider together how best to acknowledge, repent, and repair the harms that continue to shape our life as a church to this day. Thank you.
