¹ Colored American, 27 Dec. 1839; Crummell, A., Jubilate: the shades and the lights of a fifty years’ ministry, Washington, DC 1894, 7–8Google Scholar.

² Moses, W., ‘Alexander Crummell’, in Gates, H. L. Jr and Higginbotham, E. B. (eds), African American lives, Oxford– New York 2004, 198Google Scholar. Following Crummell's rejection, the anti-slavery advocate and Episcopalian Jay, John castigated the denomination, claiming ‘the true cause which led the Trustees to nullify the constitution and deny the rights of the candidate … was, that he was a coloured man’: Caste and slavery in the American Church: by a churchman, New York–London 1843, 8Google Scholar. Crummell also published the correspondence between himself and Onderdonk, commenting that ‘I have been recognized, not as a man, but as a colored man, not as a candidate, but as a colored candidate’: Colored American, 27 Dec. 1839. Early biographers of Crummell argued that his rejection was for racial reasons. Thomas Clark, bishop of Rhode Island, wrote that the application was refused ‘solely on account of the extraordinary prejudice which prevailed against the race to which he belonged’: Crummell, A., The greatness of Christ and other sermons, New York 1882, p. viiGoogle Scholar. DuBois, W. E. B. argued that the bishops who decided to reject Crummell ‘were not wicked men … they said slowly “It is all very natural – it is even commendable; but the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church cannot admit a Negro”’: The souls of black folk, Chicago 1903, 135Google Scholar. Historians have also argued that Crummell's rejection was due to race. Hein, David and Shattuck, Gardiner Jr argue that Crummell was rejected ‘on the grounds that it was not suitable to have an African American enrolled at the seminary’ and that he was ‘humiliated by Onderdonk's undisguised racism’: The Episcopalians, Westport–London 2004, 75Google Scholar.

³ Prichard, R., A history of the Episcopal Church, complete through the 78th General Convention, Harrisburg 2014, 188Google Scholar; Holmes, D., A brief history of the Episcopal Church, Harrisburg 1993, 80Google Scholar; Butler, D., Standing against the whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in nineteenth-century America, New York 1995, 147Google Scholar.

⁴ Freedom's Journal, 16 Mar. 1827.

⁵ Moses, W. J., Alexander Crummell: a study of civilization and discontent, New York 1989, 14Google Scholar; The Liberator, 25 July 1835. Rogers's article refers to him as ‘Cromwell’.

⁶ Craig Townsend comments that ‘the church was meant to be in this world, but not of it’: ‘Episcopalians and race in New York City's anti-abolitionist riots of 1834: the case of Peter Williams and Benjamin Onderdonk’, Anglican and Episcopal History lxxii (2003), 499Google Scholar.

⁷ Gaustad, Edwin and Barlow, Philip argue that the Episcopal Church's decision to remain neutral was due to the denomination ‘fearing schism above all else’: New historical atlas of religion in America, New York 2001, 74Google Scholar. See also Butler, Standing against the whirlwind, 147.

⁸ Within the Anglican holy communion service, prayers were said for the king, for example: ‘We beseech thee also to save and defend all Christian Kings … and especially thy Servant George our King; that under him we may be godly and quietly governed’: Holmes, D. L., ‘The Episcopal Church and the American Revolution’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church xlvii (1978), 290Google Scholar.

⁹ After being locked out of his church, burned in effigy and threatened with physical violence, the Maryland minister Jonathan Boucher armed himself with two loaded pistols when he entered the pulpit: Boucher, J. J., Reminiscences of an American Loyalist, 1738–1789, Boston 1925, 104–41Google Scholar, cited in Hein and Shattuck Jr, The Episcopalians, 41. Hein and Shattuck note (p. 41) that numerous members of the Anglican laity who remained loyal to Britain were tarred and feathered or forced to ‘ride the Tory rail’.

¹⁰ See Kidd, T. S., God of liberty: a religious history of the American Revolution, New York 2010, 179–86Google Scholar.

¹¹ Noll, M. A., America's God: from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, Oxford 2002, 166CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Journal of the Proceedings of the Annual Convention, of the Protestant Episcopal Church, in the State of North-Carolina … 1820, Fayetteville 1820, 24.

¹³ Nathan Hatch argues that the American Revolution ‘eroded traditional appeals to the authority of tradition, station, and education’: ‘The democratization of Christianity and the character of American politics’, in Noll, M. A. and Harlow, L. E. (eds), Religion and American politics: from the colonial period to the present, Oxford–New York 2007, 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Finke, R. and Stark, R., The Churching of America, 1776–2005: winners and losers in our religious economy, New Brunswick 2005, 56Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Butler, Standing against the whirlwind, 13.

¹⁶ ‘Cranmer’ [Charles McIlvaine], ‘The Oxford Tracts’, Gambier Observer, 15 Mar. 1839, repr. in Episcopal Recorder, 6 Apr. 1839, quoted ibid. 103.

¹⁷ W. L. Garrison, ‘Thomas Paine’, The Liberator, 21 Nov. 1845. Molly Oshatz highlights that making the biblical case against slavery required a huge departure from the entire Protestant understanding of revelation: Slavery and sin: the fight against slavery and the rise of liberal Protestantism, Oxford 2012, 10, 44Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Harlow, L. E., Religion, race, and the making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880, Cambridge 2014, 7, 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Holm, April argues that neutral clergy who were pressed to choose between abolitionist and pro-slavery positions often allied themselves with Southern Evangelicals: A kingdom divided: Evangelicals, loyalty, and sectionalism in the Civil War era, Baton Rouge 2017, 6, 35–7Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, I: 1796–1836, New York 1855, 443Google Scholar. For examples of clergymen criticising abolitionism see Carwardine, R. J., Evangelicals and politics in antebellum America, New Haven 1993, 139–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Oshatz notes that ‘Southern defenders of slavery easily dispatched with the inaccurate [biblical] claims of abolitionist interpreters’: Slavery, 45.

²⁰ Oshatz, Slavery, 51.

²¹ Pyne, T., A sermon preached in the Chapel of St. Peter's Church, New-York, on Thursday, the 10th of December, 1835, being a day appointed by authority as a day of public thanksgiving, New York 1835, 11, 13Google Scholar.

²² Dew, T. R., Review of the debate in the Virginia legislature of 1831 and 1832, Richmond, Va 1832, 106Google Scholar.

²³ Prichard, History of the Episcopal Church, 181. In defending the importance of apostolic succession Bishop Hobart cited William Law's first letter to the bishop of Bangor: Law set out that ‘There is an absolute necessity of a strict succession of authorized ordainers from the apostolical times, in order to constitute a Christian priest’: Hobart, J. H., An apology for apostolic order and its advocates: in a series of letters, addressed to the Rev. John M. Mason, D.D., New York 1844, 115Google Scholar. In examining the relationship between the Churches and slavery, James Birney noted that ‘smallness of … numbers’ of the Church, Episcopal, ‘and the authority of the Bishops, has prevented it from being much agitated with the anti-slavery question’: The American Churches, the bulwarks of American slavery, Newburyport 1842, 39Google Scholar. In comparison, Oshatz notes that Evangelical denominations ‘had no power to force compromise’ and ‘lacked the authority or even the mandate to maintain unity’: Slavery, 98.

²⁴ Commenting on the Crummell case, Onderdonk stated that ‘I had personally no objections to a colored candidate having the advantages of the Seminary; but that the subject was one of very peculiar delicacy … great prudence was necessary in order to avoid the doing of serious injury to colored persons, where it was intended to benefit them; that considerations of the highest and holiest nature required that the subject should not be allowed to agitate our ecclesiastical bodies’: Colored American, 27 Dec. 1839.

²⁵ The specific number of anti-abolitionist attacks and riots is unclear. Leonard Richards argues that there were 179 anti-abolitionist mobs in America in the 1830s and 1840s, while Michael Feldberg argues that there were 209 such incidents during the same period: Richards, L. L., Gentlemen of property and standing: anti-abolition mobs in Jacksonian America, New York 1970, 14Google Scholar; Feldberg, M., The turbulent era: riot and disorder in Jacksonian America, New York 1980, 5Google Scholar.

²⁶ See Hewitt, J. H., ‘The sacking of St Philip's Church, New York’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church xli (1980), 7–20Google Scholar.

²⁷ Hewitt, J. H., ‘Peter Williams, Jr: New York's first African-American Episcopal priest’, New York History lxxix (1998), 104, 117Google Scholar.

²⁸ Reprinted in Woodson, C. G. (ed.), The mind of the Negro as reflected in letters written during the crisis, 1800–1860, Washington, DC 1926, 629–34Google Scholar.

²⁹ Townsend, C. D., Faith in their own color: Black Episcopalians in antebellum New York City, New York 2005, 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Peterson, C. L., Black Gotham: a family history of African Americans in nineteenth-century New York City, New Haven 2011, 102Google Scholar. Some scholars have also criticised Williams. Carter Woodson argued that Williams did not appear to have the ‘moral stamina … to renounce his connection with a church seeking to muzzle a man praying for the deliverance of his people’: The history of the Negro Church, Washington, DC 1921, 96Google Scholar. Hodges, Graham argues that Williams suffered ‘public humiliation’ at Onderdonk's hands: David Ruggles: a radical Black abolitionist and the underground railroad in New York City, Chapel Hill, NC 2010, 65Google Scholar.

³⁰ Wilder, C. S., ‘“Driven … from the school of the prophets”: the colonizationist ascendance at General Theological Seminary’, New York History xciii (2012), 161Google Scholar.

³¹ Journal of the Proceedings of the Forty-First Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of New York … 1826, New York 1826, 17Google Scholar.

³² ‘Riots target Black New Yorkers & Abolitionists’, ‘New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War’, exhibition, New-York Historical Society, 2006–7, <http://www.nydivided.org/popup/People/PeterWilliamsJr.php>, accessed 21 Jan. 2019; cited in Peterson, Black Gotham, 101.

³³ Reprinted in Woodson, Mind of the negro, 629–34.

³⁴ Onderdonk, B. T., The change at the Resurrection: a sermon preached in St. Philip's Church, New York, on Tuesday, October 20, 1840, at the funeral of the Rev. Peter Williams, the rector of the Church, New York 1840Google Scholar. At the 1840 New York diocesan convention, Onderdonk reported Williams's death, commenting that ‘Mr. Williams added to sincere and enlightened piety, and a grade of talent and theological acquirement quite above mediocrity, great soundness of judgment, and prudence in action, and a just appreciation, a sincere love, and a consistent adoption of sound Christian principles’: Journal of the proceedings of the Fifty-Sixth Convention of the diocese of New York … 1840, New York 1840, 77Google Scholar.

³⁵ Cited in Peterson, Black Gotham, 211.

³⁶ Eric Foner notes that by the 1830s merchants, boat companies, banks, insurance companies, clothing manufacturers and printers all had established links with Southern slavery. The city also became a major tourist destination for Southerners, with at least 100,000 visiting the city each summer. As a result hotels such as the Astor, Fifth Avenue and Metropolitan ‘made special efforts to cater to southerners’: Gateway to freedom: the hidden history of America's fugitive slaves, Oxford 2015, 45–6Google Scholar.

³⁷ Richards, Gentlemen, 134–7, 145–6.

³⁸ ‘The fanatics’, Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, 23 June 1834, cited in Harris, L. M., In the shadow of slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863, Chicago–London 2003, 197Google Scholar.

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⁴⁰ Townsend, Faith, 67.

⁴¹ Wilder, ‘“Driven”’, 178.

⁴² Townsend, Faith, 67.

⁴³ Wilder, ‘“Driven”’, 173–4, 177. Journals of the General Conventions of the Protestant Episcopal Church highlight how the seminary was reliant on Southern support. At the 1838 convention, South Carolina had donated over $12,000 to the seminary, while Maryland donated over $5,500, and North Carolina over $4,000: Journals of the proceedings of the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America… 1838, New York 1838, 126Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Cynthia Lyerly notes that the pews in Anglican churches were filled by rank, with the wealthiest and most prominent families seated near the parson: Methodism and the Southern mind, Oxford 1998, 81Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ See Fox-Genovese, E. and Genovese, E., The mind of the master class: history and faith in the Southern slaveholders’ worldview, Cambridge 2005, 444, 465CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his study of Episcopalians in North Carolina Richard Rankin highlights that men were intransigent towards the denomination and refused to become communicants. As a result, by 1840, female communicants outnumbered male communicants by a ratio of 4.7:1: Ambivalent churchmen and Evangelical churchwomen, Columbia 1993, 53Google Scholar. Kenneth Startup argues that throughout the antebellum era clergymen were concerned that slaveholders had too high an appetite for economic gain, which ‘was leading to a deadly indifference toward higher, spiritual things’: ‘“A mere calculation of profits and loss”: the Southern clergy and the economic culture of the antebellum North’, in Noll, M. A. (ed.), God and mammon: Protestants, money, and the market, 1790–1860, Oxford 2001, 218Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Journal of the proceedings of the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the diocese of Virginia … 1833, Richmond 1833, 31Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ F. R. Hanson to William Marbury, 29 Jan. 1839 (private collection), cited in Wyatt-Brown, B., Southern honor: ethics and behavior in the Old South, Oxford 1983, 188Google Scholar. In his sermon at the 1824 General Convention for the Episcopal Church in North Carolina, Bishop Ravenscroft complained that Episcopalians were too generous in donating money to other denominations and that they should reserve ‘pecuniary means … for the wants of our own communion’, rather than contribute to others and show ‘equal regard for all denominations’: London, L. F. and Lemmon, S. M. (eds), The Episcopal Church in North Carolina, 1701–1959, Raleigh, NC 1987, 126Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Rankin comments that, to succeed, an Episcopal clergyman had to satisfy two powerful groups in the congregation: avoid conflict with the powerful men who sat on the vestry and satisfy the needs of his female communicants, ‘or the ladies would desert the pews and leave the church empty’: Ambivalent churchmen, 54–5. Startup highlights that there were occasions where Episcopal clergymen were willing to criticise slaveholders. However, the evidence that Startup uses, particularly in the 1820s and ’30s when the denomination was still fragile, illustrates that clergymen were reluctant to criticise slaveholders directly. Instead, the criticisms came through anonymous articles in the Southern Churchman, or through sermons delivered at diocesan conventions rather than from church pulpits: The root of all evil: the Protestant clergy and the economic mind of the Old South, Athens, Ga 1997, 14, 15, 53Google Scholar. Ministers such as John Ravenscroft and Richard Moore, who were financially secure, were more willing to criticise slaveholders directly: Startup, Root of all evil, 53, 119.

⁴⁹ Dalcho, Frederick, Practical considerations founded on the Scriptures relative to the slave population of South-Carolina, Charleston 1823, 34Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Journal of the proceedings of the bishops, clergy, and laity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America … 1823, New York 1823, 42Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Journal of the Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the diocese of Virginia …1836, Richmond, Va 1836, 29Google Scholar.

⁵² Journal of the proceedings of the 47th Annual Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the diocese of South-Carolina … 1836, Charleston, SC 1836, 13Google Scholar. In 1842 William Whittingham, the Episcopal bishop of Maryland, stated that ‘I loathe and abhor the spirit of abolitionism as it has developed itself at the North … The evils attendant on slavery are aggravated, not cured, by its intervention’: Brand, W. F., Life of William Rollinson Whittingham, fourth bishop of Maryland, New York 1883, i. 264Google Scholar.

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⁵⁴ Cited in Moses, Crummell, 38.