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Slavery and Racism in the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey: From Trinity Cathedral, Trenton

By Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.

Delivered at ‘Til Earth and Heaven Ring, Evening Prayer Service

Trinity Cathedral, Trenton, New Jersey, May 7, 2023

 

The Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey has a long, and troubling history with slavery and the oppression of African Americans. It is a history that we White Christians can no longer hide from. We must be honest about it, admit it, and deal fully with its consequences.

From the very beginning of Anglican interest in colonial New Jersey, race-based chattel slavery was considered to be an integral part of the colonial project. Elite Anglicans set up the colony as a plantation economy dependent for its profits on enslaving Africans.[1] Many of the most prolific early enslavers were Anglicans like Governor Lewis Morris.[2] Many priests participated in this plantation economy and owned slaves themselves,[3] but the salaries for all priests sent to minister in colonial New Jersey were funded (in part) from the profits of Codrington Plantation in Barbados, where hundreds of Africans were kept enslaved.[4] Early draconian slavery codes[5] were successfully enacted by a group of influential Anglican legislators,[6] and Archbishop Tenison specifically worked to support provisions preventing baptism from being considered as a criterion for manumission.[7]

Attributed to Simon Du Bois artist QS:P170,Q12056662,P5102,Q230768,
 Simon Dubois (attrib.) - Portrait of Thomas Tenison,
marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons

            The founding and establishment of the Anglican, and later Episcopal, Church in Trenton was made possible by a number of plantation owners, many if not all of whom enslaved Africans, including Gov. Lewis Morris, William and Mary Trent (for whom the city is named), the Tindalls, the Parkes, the Eatons, the Heaths, and Col. Daniel Coxe & family.[8] The Coxe family at one point laid claim to as many as 1 million acres of land in West Jersey, and Daniel Coxe was part of that Anglican ring of legislators that passed the early slavery codes. Coxe and his family enslaved many people and his son William was even a slave trader operating out of Philadelphia.[9] The Coxe family were major patrons of St. Michael’s throughout its first century.

After the Revolution, and the founding of the Episcopal Church, the first bishop of the Diocese, Bishop Croes, kept slaves.[10] The second bishop, Bishop Doane, was chosen to serve as bishop partly due to his wife’s personal wealth, as the diocese would not need to pay him. That very great wealth was derived from her first marriage to a man whose riches came directly from the slave trade.[11] Throughout this time slavery remained legal in New Jersey and in general the Episcopal Church did little to challenge it. Many wealthy Episcopalians enslaved blacks, and supported the confederacy during the Civil War. As is no doubt known to many here, legal slavery was only abolished in this state (except as a punishment for a crime) when the 13^th amendment became law, superseding the New Jersey legislature’s initial rejection of the amendment. But slavery continued to cast a long shadow, and its presence in the prison system still has not been fully eradicated.

            After the war Bishop Odenheimer helped oversee the Freedman’s Commission, a weak northern Episcopal effort to aid newly emancipated Blacks, which only ever received very lackluster support.[12] The diocese essentially viewed itself as existing for the benefit of Whites,[13] with Blacks in some cases tolerated or allowed, but often only in segregated spaces and with limited opportunities. Jim Crow policies developed rapidly in the state following the war, and the Diocese generally went along with prevailing White attitudes.

Bishop William Odenheimer, by Hermon Griswold Batterson, marked as public domain, 
more details on Wikimedia Commons

Across the diocese during the mid-20^th century, Episcopal Churches participated in white flight[14] from Trenton, Camden, and other urban areas, relocating churches for the convenience of white parishioners, without concern for the Black parishioners and Black communities left behind. White Episcopalians were among those who sat on the local planning boards that used New Jersey home rule legal precedents to keep African Americans out of their communities.[15] During this very era, the era of civil rights, church historians attempted to conceal this troubling history, straining to emphasize how much the Church loved Blacks,[16] when an impartial reading of the historical record could only have shown that such love was, in even the very best of instances, only half-hearted. If White Christians had truly loved their African American sisters and brothers, the Trenton riots of 1968 may never have happened. It seems it would be more accurate to say that the Episcopal Church had for the most part decided to be a chaplain blessing a racist White society, doing  little meaningful to challenge its depredations, and doing little to love and serve Black Americans.

In 1982, in the Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, African American historian and theologian Rev. Dr. Robert Earl Hood (later of General Seminary) wrote: “perhaps since the Episcopal Church cannot become a fit shepherd within the [B]lack community… it can adjust itself to being a perpetual servant in that community – a community of former servants. Perhaps… the Episcopal Church as an institution of former lords, can become a servant to the [B]lack servants of God.”[17] His words, written over forty years ago, are just as challenging today. There has been some movement, some faithful response, there has been some success, but the challenge has not been fully met. The challenge still stands.

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Hood, center. Courtesy St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, Gary, IN:
https://scalar.usc.edu/works/episcopal-diocese-of-northern-indiana-archives/rev-robert-earl-hood

Even so, even amid horrific structural obstacles, African American Christians (in New Jersey, in Trenton) have resisted oppression in all its forms, including oppression from their own churchly institutions. Our African American brothers and sisters have strived for faithfulness, even when relegated to the galleries of predominantly white churches. Even when treated with paternalistic condescension and neglect by White Diocesan authority structures. Even when treated as irrelevant by White decision makers looking to pull resources from Black neighborhoods to follow White congregants to White suburbs to build White churches. Even the success of our diocesan anti-racism training has been built on the hard experience of ongoing, active, living racism in our church.

Our Church’s history of wrongs haunts our present. Not just the African American present, but the White Christian present. If we are to make a better future, a better Church, a better Trenton, we can neither hide from our history, nor can we hide from our present. We cannot hide from our responsibility.

In the Mishnah,[18] Rabbi Tarfon is recorded as having said: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

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[1] As can be seen in the logic employed in Rev. Thomas Thompson’s The African Trade for Negro Slaves shewn to be Consistent with Principles of Humanity and with the Laws of revealed Religion (London: Baldwin, 1772).

[2] His mine at Tinton Falls accounted for approximately half of the enslaved Black population of Monmouth County at the time (Hodges, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North, 12).

[3] Such as Rev. Samuel Cooke at Shrewsbury, who baptized his own enslaved Blacks, Rev. Thomas Thompson (as mentioned above), and Rev. Alexander Innes, unassigned priest resident in Monmouth County, owned a sizeable plantation (150 acres) which he managed via enslaved labor. A large proportion of the S.P.G. priests either owned plantations themselves (including at least Innes, Cooke, Beach, Vaughn, Skinner, and Lindsay) or received income from glebe or Church-owned plantation land (e.g. Blackwell, Ogden, Odell, Frazer) often worked by enslaved Blacks. Sporadic, brief references to these situations occur throughout Burr’s The Anglican Church in New Jersey. Rev. Thomas Haliday did not think the state of affairs adequate and suggested a more regularized and comprehensive plantation funding scheme employing enslaved Blacks to better ensure the comfort of the S.P.G. priests assigned to New Jersey (Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey, 132).

[4] See Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 141-70.

[5] Of 1704: See “An Act for Regulating Negro, Indian, and Mallatto Slaves within this Province of New Jersey,” December 12, 1704, in Bernard Bush, Laws of the Royal Colony of New Jersey, Vols. 1-5 (Trenton: New Jersey Archives, and Records Management, 1977-1986), 2:28-30.

[6] The so-called Anglican “ring.”  See Nelson R. Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey (Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954), 373-75.

[7] The administration of the Archbishop had drafted a law “For Converting the Negroes &c In the Plantations” which specifically stated that baptism did not in any way change the property status of a slave. This was sent to various authorities in the colonies to influence the legislative process. See “1^st draught” in Lambeth Palace Archives, Gibson Papers, MSS 941, No. 72. Also Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey, 225.

[8] See Hamilton Schuyler, A History of St. Michael’s Church, Trenton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1926).

[9] See Darold D. Wax, “Negro Import Duties in Colonial Pennsylvania,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97.1 (1973): 22-44, here p. 36.

[10] Bayker, Blakley, and Boyd, “His Name Was Will: Remembering Enslaved Individuals in Rutgers History,” p. 80.

[11] Eliza Greene Callahan Perkins had first been married to James Perkins, who was a wealthy slaveowner and slave trader. See “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery,” (Boston: Harvard University, 2022), p. 22.

[12] See H. Peers Brewer, “The Protestant Episcopal Freedman’s Commission, 1865-1878,” HMPEC 26.4 (1957): 361-381.

[13] See, for instance, the tables and commentary on Church growth which appear in the back of The Anglican Church in New Jersey (pp. 467-485), which indicate Nelson Burr’s assumption that the Episcopal Church in New Jersey was a white-oriented institution.

[14] See oblique commentary in Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey, p. 476.

[15] This occurs to this day under the guise of objections to “affordable housing.”

[16] See Nelson Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey, pp. 224-228.

[17] R. E. Hood, “From a Headstart to a Deadstart: The Historical Basis for Black Indifference Toward the Episcopal Church 1800-1860,” HMPEC51.3 (1982): 269-296.

[18] This is a popular rendering of a few verses appearing in Pirkei Avot, commenting on that great justice text Micah 6:8. Quoted here from https://reformjudaism.org/beliefs-practices/spirituality/3-jewish-reminders-when-world-seems-overwhelming.

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