In the aftermath of the American Revolution, many African-Americans who had been involved to some degree with the Anglican (or after the War, Episcopal) Church moved away from the denomination in New Jersey, and elsewhere. There were many reasons for this, including ongoing Episcopal support for slavery, continued horrific treatment by White enslavers, segregation of even emancipated Blacks in the church, and limited opportunities for Black leadership. These factors often were more important than the ostensible, but at best paternalistic, welcome and educational attention offered by the Episcopal Churches. Other denominations, such as Baptists and Methodists, often permitted greater freedoms of participation, and the various Black churches that were founded during the early Republic, such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, afforded complete affirmation of Black religious leadership.
One documented example of free Blacks choosing to leave the Episcopal Church comes from the Sourland Mountain region of New Jersey as described by Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills, founders of the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, in their recently published book If These Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain, and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey (Lambertville, NJ: Wild River Books, 2018). They describe details of the religious affiliations of some of the earliest free Black landowners in the region, William Stives and Catherine Vanois.
Stives settled in the region as a free Black man following his decorated service in the Revolutionary War. Soon after, he married Catherine, who was likely previously enslaved by the Vanois family (also spelled Vannoy), who locally owned a great deal of agricultural land. The two were married November 15, 1789 by the Rev. William Frazer at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Ringoes, New Jersey.[1] Ten years later, William Stiver (another name Stives sometimes went by) was listed as a member of the Old School Baptist Church of Hopewell, New Jersey. He remained a faithful member there until his death in 1839,[2] but there is no record of the reason for his change in congregations. It is possible that Stives left St. Andrew’s because of the death of Frazer in 1795, after which the congregation never again had a regular minister in that location.[3]
However, it is also possible that Stives’ affiliation with the Old School Baptist Church predates his listing in the rolls and may have occurred for other reasons. The Rev. Joseph Vannoy was born in Hopewell in 1716 and went on to become a Baptist minister, indicating the Baptist leanings of the Vannoy family. Such family affiliation may have led William also to affiliate with the local Baptist Church due to his wife’s likely connections there.
Another possibility is that Stives chose to be married by the Rev. Frazer at St. Andrew’s in order to ensure that his marriage to Catherine was fully and legally recognized by the courts, and by powerful Whites in the area. Frazer served simultaneously at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Trenton, and was politically connected in the state capital. Free blacks in the region at times used this kind of strategy as a way of protecting their, often highly contingent, legal rights.[4]
Whatever the reason, Stives left the Episcopal Church and remained a Baptist thereafter. The limited historical records of his church life provide an example of a very common change in religious affiliation at the time for African Americans in New Jersey, even if our suppositions about the reasons for the change can only be conjectural. For those seeking additional information, Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills’ book is an excellent resource for further explorations of the African American history of the Sourland Mountain region in New Jersey.
Jolyon G. R. Pruszinski, Ph.D.
Reparations Commission Research Historian
Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey
[1] Elaine Buck and Beverly Mills, If These Stones Could Talk: African American Presence in the Hopewell Valley, Sourland Mountain, and Surrounding Regions of New Jersey (Lambertville, NJ: Wild River Books, 2018), 58-60. See also Henry Race and William Frazer, “Rev. William Frazer’s Three Parishes, St. Thomas’s, St. Andrew’s, and Musconetcong, N.J., 1768-70,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography 12.2 (1888): 212-32. The Church was sometimes known as St. Andrew’s Church, Amwell, and has since moved to Lambertville, New Jersey.
[2] See Buck and Mills, If These Stones Could Talk, 125-26. See also Lisa Cokefair Gedney, “Town Records of Hopewell, New Jersey,” in The New Jersey Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Old School Baptist Church, by Authority of the Board of Managers of the New Jersey Society of the Colonial Dames of America (Hopewell, NJ: Little & Ives, 1931).
[3] Nelson K. Burr, The Anglican Church in New Jersey (Philadelphia: The Church Historical Society, 1954), 526-529.
[4] This kind of tactic may have been used by another local free Black man, Samson Adams, as seen in his will, preserved in the Samson Adams papers (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/adams/index.html). In his will, which is dated to the same period and which implicates the same clergyman (as Frazer also served St. Michael’s in Trenton), he left a modest amount of money to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Trenton, while leaving the majority of his estate to his sister. It is likely the gift to St. Michael’s would ensure that the politically connected Whites at St. Michael’s Church would insist on the legal legitimacy of the document in order to claim their church’s portion of the estate, and by extension protect Adams’ sister’s right to the bulk of the estate.
