Emancipated African-Americans Leaving the Episcopal Church: A Case Study from Middletown, New Jersey
Various historians have noted the attentions paid to enslaved Africans by the Anglican Church in colonial New Jersey.[1] In many ways the Anglican Church did more than most other denominations in the colonial period to evangelize, baptize, and worship with enslaved Africans. However this attention did not translate into widespread Black participation in the Episcopal Church once freedom had been gained. Key early Black Christian leaders in the region, like George White and John Jea, had exposure to Anglican worship and teaching but chose to affiliate elsewhere.[2] The Methodist split resulted in many Blacks with some Anglican background affiliating with the Methodists, and then subsequently with the African Methodist Episcopal Church once it was founded. Various independent Baptist churches also afforded a greater degree of freedom of worship for free Black Americans seeking religious self-governance and leadership opportunities.
While it is generally agreed upon by scholars that the majority of African Americans who had been exposed to Christianity through the Anglican, and later Episcopal, Church while enslaved did not go on to worship with the Episcopal Church after gaining their freedom,[3] there is limited documentary evidence available to establish many of the details of this phenomenon in New Jersey. Accurate accountings of such dynamics were not made reliably at the time and, in general, it is not the kind of phenomenon that received robust written documentation. However, an emblematic example for which we do have some documentary evidence is the experience of Charles and Hannah Reeves.
In his recently published book Stories of Slavery in New Jersey, Rick Geffken describes the story of a Middletown, New Jersey couple, Charles and Hannah Reeves.[4] Charles had been enslaved by David Williamson, a well-to-do Middletown farmer. Reeves was freed at the age of twenty-five in 1848 under the New Jersey gradual abolition law. He married Hannah Van Cleif in 1850 at Holmdel Baptist Church. While Geffken suggests that it is not definitively known who Hannah’s enslavers were, the “Taylor family of Middletown had at least two slaves named Van Cleaf at their Kings Highway property.”[5] Geffken notes that “speculations about Hannah’s origins might be validated if a Williamson/Taylor nexus could be proved.”[6] That nexus is likely the mid-nineteenth-century lay leadership of the Christ Churches of Shrewsbury and Middletown.[7]
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| Christ Episcopal Church, Church Street and King's Highway, Middletown, Monmouth County, NJ HABS NJ,13-MIDTO,2- (sheet 4 of 13), marked as public domain, more details on Wikimedia Commons. Published by the U.S. government as part of the Historic American Buildings Survey. |
As the archives of the Christ Church, Shrewsbury parish attest, David Williamson[8] and Joseph Taylor[9] both served in the lay leadership of Christ Church during this time, Williamson as a warden and Taylor on the vestry.[10] Though Hannah’s great-great-granddaughter, Mae Edwards, was never able to determine how the couple met, the Christ Church connection allows ample opportunity for Charles and Hannah both to have become acquainted. Moreover, the parish register of Christ Church, Shrewsbury paints a very disturbing picture of the treatment of enslaved Blacks while slavery was legal in New Jersey. The presence of myriad baptismal entries for enslaved “bastard” and “mullato” “servants”[11] shows that it was a common practice for the members in good standing at the church to rape their enslaved female domestics, and then enslave and baptize their progeny. This practice is widely attested in similar period documents, and as Geffken states, it was an “all too common occurrence at the time.”[12]
These, and other facts suggest a particularly difficult experience during Hannah Van Cleif’s enslavement prior to her marriage. Geffken notes that her first child was born five years before her marriage to Charles, and that in the Reeves family Bible, this son, Isaiah, has no listed father, though all ten of Hannah’s subsequent children are stated to be children of Hannah and Charles. Hannah was likely enslaved when Isaiah was born; she was likely enslaved by Joseph Taylor; and during that enslavement she was likely raped.[13]
Though Charles and Hannah Reeves were certainly exposed to Episcopal worship during their enslavement since the men who enslaved them were prominent members of the well-endowed Christ Church Shrewsbury/Middletown, upon gaining their freedom they did not worship in the Episcopal Church. There are any number of reasons this may have been the case,[14] and indeed there were likely many reasons -among them the likelihood of Hannah being raped by her well-regarded Episcopalian enslaver- but lack of piety was not one of them. All indications from the historical record suggest that Charles and Hannah were very pious.[15] Yet, when they were free to, they did not worship in the Episcopal Church, but in Baptist churches. They were married in Holmdel Baptist Church and later were founding members of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Red Bank.
While the story of Charles and Hannah Reeves is somewhat conjectural, the explanation described here is the most plausible option. Moreover, the experience of the Reeves couple is indicative of the patterns of experience of many Black Americans at the time. Many were exposed to Episcopal worship and teaching, but they were also exposed to Episcopal hypocrisy, mistreatment, and paternalism, and as such, comparatively few, when free to, chose to participate in Episcopal worship.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] See Nelson R. Burr (The Anglican Church in New Jersey [Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954], 224-228) for an explanation that puts a very positive face on it. See R. E. Hood (“From a Headstart to a Deadstart: The Historical Basis for Black Indifference Toward the Episcopal Church 1800-1860,” HMPEC 51.3 [1982]: 269-296) for a more realistic accounting.
[2] See Graham Russell Hodges, ed., Black Itinerants of the Gospel: The Narratives of John Jea and George White (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
[3] See Hood, “From a Headstart to a Deadstart.”
[4] Rick Geffken, Stories of Slavery in New Jersey (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2021), 82-98. Research into their lives was compiled by their great-granddaughter, Amanda Mae Edwards. Geffken’s book relates many of the elements of Edwards’ research.
[5] Geffken, (Stories of Slavery in New Jersey, 88) notes that there were various spellings of this same last name including Van Cleif, Van Cleaf, and Van Cleve.
[6] Geffken, Stories of Slavery in New Jersey, 88.
[7] The parishes were governed by a joint vestry and served jointly by a single priest for many decades until 1854.
[8] See also James Steen, History of Christ Church, Shrewsbury, New Jersey (Shrewsbury, NJ: Christ Church, Shrewsbury, 1972). David Williamson is celebrated yearly by Christ Church, Shrewsbury at their memorial observance.
[9] After the Shrewsbury and Middletown churches ceased to have shared leadership in 1854, Taylor continued to serve in Middletown (see, for example, the Diocese of New Jersey Convention minutes of 1855 and 1857, which show him to be a lay deputy from Christ Church, Middletown).
[10] Also Williamson was married to Phebe Hendrickson, with whose family Taylor was friends. See Joseph W. Hammond, “Orchard Home: The Story of a Gracious Residence, and of the People Who Lived and Worked There,” New Jersey Studies 5.1 (2019): 20, https://doi.org/10.14713/njs.v5i1.149.
[11] Parish register of Christ Church, Shrewsbury, N.J. See also Robert M. Kelley, “Slavery Evidenced in the Parish Register,” in The Crown (Shrewsbury, N.J.: Christ Church, Shrewsbury, 2018).
[12] Geffken, Stories of Slavery in New Jersey, 89.
[13] This theory accords with the educated guess of descendant John Smack that “most likely the slave owner… fathered Isaiah.” Geffken, Stories of Slavery in New Jersey, 90.
[14] See Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, “The Revolutionary Period and Early Black Estrangement from the Episcopal Church,” Diocese of New Jersey Racial Justice Review, January 16, 2023.
[15] See, for example, the comments of John Smack, related in Geffken, Stories of Slavery in New Jersey, 90.
