32. The Beginning of the Struggle over American Bishops

The Anglican communion, even in those colonies where it served as an established church, lived under strictly local control. Ministers were appointed by local vestries and approved by the governor of the colony. The church in America thus remained under secular American and even local direction; it was not subject to more than the nominal control of the bishop of London. Nor could it be otherwise so long as the church was not represented by resident bishops in the American colony.

The only pleas for the installation of Anglican bishops in America came not from the Southern colonies, where the established Anglican clergy relished their independence and the laity their local control, but from the far weaker missionary clergy in the Northern provinces. The first agitation for American bishops came from the Society for Propagating the Gospel (SPG), the great English missionary society founded in 1701. The SPG proved to be the greatest single force in extending the Anglican communion in America, especially in the Northern and middle colonies. Dr. Thomas Bray, founder of the SPG, was the first to launch the campaign in 1701, and the cause was soon taken up by the Reverend John Talbot, one of the leading missionaries in the Society in the middle colonies. In 1705, fourteen Anglican missionaries assembled at Burlington, New Jersey, and petitioned for a bishop. The SPG itself continued to head the agitation, and the campaign came to a climax in 1713, when petitions for bishops came in from New York and New England, and Queen Anne agreed to the proposal. This agreement is not surprising, as it fitted in admirably with Queen Anne’s high Tory aim of exalting the power of throne and altar over her hapless subjects.

The death of Queen Anne in 1714, however, followed by the accession to power of Sir Robert Walpole and the Whigs, shattered the plan for American bishops and dashed other high Tory hopes as well. Thus ended the first campaign for an American episcopate.

The SPG now ended its organized agitation, but petitions from missionary ministers continued to come into London. At first the agitation was rather desultory, but the lead was soon taken in 1723 by a group of Connecticut ministers newly converted from the Puritan faith and headed by the Reverends Samuel Johnson and Timothy Cutler. Johnson and Cutler mobilized the New England Anglican clergy to petition for bishops in 1725 and 1727. The dramatic conversion of Cutler, the rector of Yale College—the center of orthodox Calvinist training in America—along with several Yale instructors, particularly rankled and alarmed the Puritan clergy of New England. Especially galling was Cutler’s admission that he had been a secret Anglican even before assuming his post at Yale. An attempt was indeed made by the church to install a bishop not in New England but in Anglican Maryland, but the courts in Maryland (where the clergy were opposed and the proprietary brooked no such interference in its own control) quickly blocked the plan.

The Reverend Mr. Johnson, in the course of his pleas to England, urged that an episcopate would be most useful in cementing the rule of the English Crown over America and preventing any dangerous tendencies toward American independence. As Johnson trenchantly put it: “It has always been a fact, and is obvious in the nature of the thing, that anti-episcopal are of course anti-monarchical principles. So that the danger of our effecting independency... would naturally flow from the want of [episcopacy, which]... would be the most effectual means that could be devised to secure a dependence on our mother country....”

Yet in England itself, and even in the SPG, interest in the scheme had all but ended with the death of Queen Anne. Its first revival came with a sermon before the Society by Bishop Thomas Secker in 1741. Secker took up the argument of Johnson, and his public address alarmed the New England dissenting clergy. In a reply, the liberal Massachusetts Congregational minister Andrew Eliot expressed his alarm over an episcopate that would inevitably entail the dangers of an Anglican establishment in the Northern colonies. Such dangers included a general tax to support the establishment, to be extracted from the pockets of the non-Anglican colonists. Bishops established in America would, in short, inevitably obtain the considerable temporal power and revenue that their counterparts enjoyed in England. In sum, an Anglican episcopate inevitably could not be a simply spiritual matter; it had grave political implications for American liberty.

The drive for an American episcopate began in earnest with the accession of Thomas Sherlock to the bishopric of London in 1748. Pursuing his grand design for an American establishment intertwined with the English state and church, Sherlock immediately began to press the king for an American bishop. Sherlock was repeatedly turned down by the shrewd officials of the Crown, under pressure of the influential English Dissenters. Particularly active in rejecting the proposal for Anglican bishops were the great Whig leaders, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Hardwicke, and Horatio Walpole. The liberal Horatio Walpole expressed the shrewd sentiments of the Whigs by warning that such a far-reaching scheme would really provoke and alienate the American colonists, Dissenters and even Anglicans alike.

Sherlock was joined in his agitation, however, by Bishops Secker and Cutler, and Sherlock raised the problem to a new plane by deciding to employ virtual blackmail upon his American communicants. For in an effort to force the Anglicans in America to demand a resident bishop, Secker virtually refused to exercise any of his jurisdiction over the church in America. Pursued by successive bishops of London, however, this policy only left Anglicans in the colonies with even less English control and supervision than they had experienced before.

Furthermore, Secker’s methods aroused the ire of Anglicans, especially in the South, and particularly alarmed the New England Puritans and other Dissenters who saw the specter of an Anglican establishment from which so many of them had fled. As early as 1750, the liberal Reverend Jonathan Mayhew warned that “people have no security against being unmercifully priest-ridden but by keeping all imperious bishops, and other clergymen who love to lord it over God’s heritage, from getting their feet into the stirrup at all.” Mayhew trenchantly warned that “in plain English, there seems to have been an impious bargain struck up betwixt the sceptre and the surplice for enslaving both bodies and souls of men.”

The agitation over possible bishops in America died down during the distractions of the war with France, only to flame up again when the war was over.

In addition to the specific problem of the bishops, general Anglican encroachments on religious liberty exerted a significant impact on politics and opinion in New York. That colony, where Anglicans were aiming at an establishment, found a great champion of religious liberty in William Livingston, of the leading landed family of New York. As a student at Yale, Livingston had been influenced by the English rationalist liberal writings of John Locke and the Independent Whig rather than by Calvinist orthodoxy. The Independent Whig, written in the early 1720s, was the great arsenal of argument for religious liberty and against establishment, written by the English journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. In late 1752, Livingston and his friends launched the publication of a weekly paper, The Independent Reflector, dedicated to opposing establishment and consciously modeled after Trenchard and Gordon’s Independent Whig. The principal goal of the paper was “opposing oppression, and vindicating the liberty of man.” Livingston stoutly affirmed that in the “cause of the truth and liberty” he would defy “all tyrants civil or ecclesiastic,” and specifically any Anglican domination over New York. Moreover, Livingston’s libertarianism was by no means confined to defense against the Anglicans; he also boldly defended the Moravian church against the attacks of his own Presbyterians.

The lively, trenchant Independent Reflector quickly won fame not only in New York but throughout the Northern colonies, and was ardently discussed in pulpits, coffeehouses, and taverns. The Independent Reflector, drawing blood, stimulated an intense Anglican counterattack. But much of the Anglican rebuttal only furnished more material to alarm its critics. Thus, William Smith, inspired by the Anglican leader the Reverend Samuel Johnson, blatantly declared:

National Establishment can... diffuse through a country, the full social advantages arising from religion.... If, according to the Reflector’s scheme, all religions were equally favored by the civil power, none established, and every man left at liberty to preach and practice what he thought proper, what a scene of confusion would thence arise... from such unbridled liberty of conscience....

As to the political uses of national Establishments... the statesman has always found it necessary for the purposes of government, to raise some one denomination of religion above the rest.... This favored denomination, by these means, becomes as it were the creature of the government, which is thus enabled to.... keep all in subjection.... But let a government once give away the power of bestowing its own favors, and let all sects and persuasions be equally favored, equally independent... how shall they be influenced or how ruled?

Smith concluded by accusing the Reflector of being un-British: this “leveling notion” of perfect religious equality before the law was derived not from British liberty but from the Frenchman Voltaire.

In contrast, William Livingston declared that “matters of religion... have nothing to do with the interest of state... the civil power hath no jurisdiction over the sentiments or opinions of the subject....”

Anglican pressure, however, soon made a mockery of any freedom of the press in the colony. Livingston’s printer, threatened with deprivation of the vital public printing contracts, succumbed to pressure and refused to continue printing the Independent Reflector. Printers in Boston and Philadelphia also refused to print the controversial paper and it was forced to close in early 1754. But while the Anglican government managed to kill the Reflector, the paper refused to die. Its name persisted, and bound copies and later reprints were eagerly sought. Furthermore, the public protest induced another New York paper that had closed its doors to antiestablishment opinion to open them again; and William Livingston continued, with learning and wit, to belabor his opposition in a “Watch-Tower” column. The religious controversy also served to polarize New York politics, with the DeLancey faction becoming a pro-Anglican party and the Livingston faction reflecting its Presbyterian leadership.