Founding of the Episcopal Church, Part II
Previously
in This Series
The Revolutionary War had serious effects on the Anglican churches in
the New World. A meeting of some Maryland clergy and laymen in
1780 tried to cope with some of the local financial consequences, and
the name "Protestant Episcopal Church" came out
of this meeting. The present article recounts the first steps
taken toward creating a unified Episcopal Church nationally. The
time period is 1782 to 1785. The people involved had differing
points of view on how to unify the churches, points of view greatly
dependent on geography. Although great differences in values
were involved, the principal characters knowingly or unknowingly set
themselves on a course in this time period that would allow them
ultimately to come together. There were four principal
characters: William White of Pennsylvania and William Smith of Maryland
were introduced
in the previous article, Samuel Seabury of Connecticut is introduced
in the present article, and Samuel Parker of Massachusetts will be
introduced in the next article.
Priorities
The official end of the Revolutionary War came with the Treaty of
Versailles in 1783, but hostilities had largely ended by the beginning
of 1782. Anglican clergy in the
United States saw that the relationship between the mother church
in England and the daughter church in America would have to change
in serious ways. At the least, the clergy would have to address
the maintenance of the apostolic succession and the need for changes
in liturgy. For the most part they wanted also for the church
in America, which they called the Episcopal Church or the Protestant
Episcopal Church, to remain united. Their priorities, however,
were greatly influenced by geography.
In the New England states, where the Church of England had suffered
from minority status, the priority was on ecclesiastical principles,
especially that the new church organization should be created and
managed by bishops. Samuel Seabury (1729-1796) of
Connecticut would come to be the leader from these states.
In the middle states, which had been well positioned to admire the
process of creating a new nation, the priority was on democratic
principles, especially the idea expressed in the Declaration of
Independence that governments "derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed." William White (1748-1836) of
Philadelphia would come to be the leader from these states. The
southern
states tended to share the priority of the middle states---just as soon
as the consequences of the disestablishment of the Church
of England could be dealt with. William Smith (1727-1803)
of Maryland would come to be the leader from these states for the first
few years. The views of high-church vs. low-church in liturgy
tended to be highest in the north and lowest in the south People
in South Carolina, for example, were distrustful of everything
associated with aristocracy. High-church ritual and bishops
suggested aristocracy to them, partly because in this period all
bishops in the Church of England were members of the House of Lords.
In short, the priorities of the New England states and the
middle/southern states were exact opposites. Seabury wanted to
have bishops in place first, and then questions of organization could
be discussed, led by the bishops in top-down fashion. White and
Smith wanted to have an organization in place first, and then questions
of bishops and apostolic succession could be addressed in bottom-up
fashion. It was far from clear that unity was at all possible
without some compromises of principles by one group or the other.
Point of View in the Middle States
An early step was taken by William White, rector of Christ Church in
Philadelphia and cochaplain of the Continental Congress. White
committed some of his thoughts on all these matters to a pamphlet
entitled
"The Case of
the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered." This
document was published in August 1782 and was widely circulated.*
One theme of the pamphlet was to find a way of keeping the church
united in the changed circumstances; the other was to deal with
apostolic succession. Although the Church of England under some
name was still the established church in a few states, White
anticipated
that the Episcopal churches would ultimately be completely separate
from the civil government. In Britain the Church of England
proceeded from the monarch and Parliament; the church was regarded as
one flock, and the civil government thus appointed bishops and carved
out dioceses. As the population grew, the dioceses were then broken
into individual
parishes. In America with the civil government not in the picture
and with individual parishes already in place, it made sense to have
a different system that avoided vesting too much power in one
individual
or group of individuals. As White wrote, "The power of electing a
superior order of ministers [bishops] ought to be in the clergy and
the laity together, they being both interested in the choice."
Government support being lacking, White saw an "impossibility that the
churches should provide a support for that superior order of clergy ...
; of consequence, the duty assigned to that order ought not materially
to interfere with their employments, in the station of parochial
clergy; the superintendence of each will therefore be confined to a
small district; a favorite idea with all moderate Episcopalians."
With these principles in mind, White went on to sketch a three-tiered
representative government involving grouping individual Episcopal
churches into small districts, the small
districts into three large districts, and the three large districts
into the whole. Each church in a small district was to get
equal representation, independent of its size. Clergy and lay
people were to be involved equally. Decisions were to be
made at the lowest possible level. The representatives of the
large districts were to meet once every three years. And so on.
As to liturgy, White felt that limiting changes to as few as necessary
in order to make prayers compatible with the new civil government was
the most likely course for producing unity. Finally White turned
to the question of apostolic
succession. His proposal at this time was for conditional
ordinations and consecrations; he cited some precedents and suggested
some detailed procedures. He summarized by saying, "The conduct
meant to be recommended ... is to include in the proposed frame of
government
a general approbation of Episcopacy, and a declaration of an intention
to procure the succession, as soon as conveniently may be; but in the
mean time to carry the plan into effect without waiting for the
succession."
He argued, "This is founded on the presumption that the worship of God
and the instruction and reformation of the people are the principal
objects of ecclesiastical discipline: if so, to relinquish them from
a scrupulous adherence to Episcopacy, is sacrificing the substance to
the ceremony."
Point of View in the New England States
The New England Episcopal clergy had a
different idea. Having
suffered as a minority under Congregationalists, they tended really to
appreciate the system of organization within the Church of England, and
many of them still harbored loyalist feelings. The largest
concentration of them was in Connecticut, where there
were fourteen clergy and forty churches with a total membership of
perhaps as many as 40,000. Ten of the fourteen met in secret on
March 25, 1783, at a house in Woodbury, Connecticut. Lay people
were not included and written records were not kept of the meeting,
since the ten felt that their actions might be misunderstood. It
was to be almost a year before actions resulting from the meeting would
become widely known. The plan was to elect a bishop, who was to
travel to England to seek consecration. If that attempt failed,
he was to try in Scotland. After consecration he was to try to
return
to Connecticut, or to some other state if Connecticut was impossible,
or to Nova Scotia if no state was possible. At the least a bishop
would then be available in Nova Scotia to ordain new ministers.
The
ten Connecticut clergy selected two candidates, both of whom were
natives of Connecticut living in New York. The first declined
because of age and health. The second, Samuel Seabury, was
a long-time missionary, then serving on Staten Island, and he agreed
to make the trip.
Seabury had impeccable credentials as a loyalist, and it was thought
that these credentials might be looked upon with favor by the
British: He was almost certainly the author of four pamphlets
written in 1774 and 1775 under the pseudonym A.
W. Farmer (short for "A Westchester Farmer"), the first one entitled
"Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress"; these
were answered by a young Alexander Hamilton. He was a signer
of the White Plains protest of 1775 against "all unlawful congresses
and committees," he served as a chaplain for a British regiment in
1778, and he continued to receive a pension of half pay for this
service.
Seabury left for England on July 7, 1783, on the flagship
of a
departing British admiral, armed with persuasive documentation.
Despite his credentials, Seabury's stay in Britain was a mixture of
small
successes and overall failure at getting the rules changed and
British clergy's hearts softened so that he could be consecrated.
With his money running out in late 1784, he went to Scotland, where
the Scottish bishops were only too happy to offer him
consecration.
The service took place on November 14, 1784, in a private chapel
in Aberdeen. Seabury and the Scottish bishops signed a
"Concordat" (or "bond of union") the next day containing a number of
stipulations, the only unexpected one of which was that Seabury would
use his best
efforts to persuade the Americans to adopt the communion liturgy used
by the Scottish Episcopal Church rather than that used by the Church of
England. Seabury left England on March 15, 1785, stopped in Nova
Scotia and stayed there a while, made a short stop in Rhode Island, and
arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 29, 1785. He became
rector of St. James Church in New Haven and was introduced to
Episcopalians in Connecticut as their bishop at a meeting beginning
August 2, 1785.
Effects of Disestablishment on Church Property Ownership in the
South
Before Episcopalians in the southern states could do anything about
unity, they had to arrange for their churches in effect to be
disestablished without the loss of property. South Carolina was
the first to settle matters. Before 1776
all the people had been taxed to support the churches of one quarter
of the population, and this had to change. Accordingly Article 38
of the South Carolina Constitution of 1778 provided, among other
things, that the state religion would henceforth be enlarged to be
Christian Protestant, that all the existing Anglican churches would be
incorporated and would keep their real estate and other property,
that a procedure would be in place for other Christian Protestant
churches
to be recognized and incorporated, and that people would not be
compelled
by law to pay toward the support and maintenance of religious worship
other than their own. The effect of the incorporation was to free
the Anglican churches from all state rules except for adherence to a
minimal list of religious beliefs, and the Anglicans in the state could
thus pursue a united Episcopal Church.
In principle Maryland and Virginia proceeded in the same way, but the
details were different and consequential. Maryland would succeed
in sorting out its problems by 1783, but
Virginia's problems extended well into the 1800s.
--Tony Knapp
* White's pamphlet has been transcribed online at http://individual.utoronto.ca/hayes/anglican/white.htm.
In the transcription the title is given in abbreviated form, and the
year is recorded incorrectly as 1787.