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“The Manifest Distinction Established by Our Holy Religion”: Church, State and the Consecration of Samuel Seabury

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2022

Brent Sirota
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Abstract

The consecration of Samuel Seabury as bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Connecticut in November 1784 is typically taken to mark the threshold that divides the magisterial pretensions of the old-world confessional state from the pluralism of the new-world denominational order. In such accounts, a chastened Anglicanism reluctantly sacrificed its royalism and claims to establishment in acquiescence to the pluralistic religious ecology of the republican United States. The Church of England, in this telling, possessed no native conception of the separation of church and state. The Americanization of Anglicanism, therefore, entailed the acceptance of ecclesiological premises foreign and inimical to its tradition—stemming largely from the intellectual world of the enlightenment and Protestant nonconformity. Such a narrative of denominational beginnings, this article demonstrates, fails to grapple seriously with the strain of antiestablishmentarian thought within Anglicanism itself. The separation of church and state necessarily implicated in Seabury's securing of “a free, valid and purely Ecclesiastical Episcopacy” was neither an alien imposition nor a mere epiphenomenon of American religious liberty. The catholic tendency in Anglicanism had long developed its own conception of ecclesiastical independence, which rejected both state superintendence as well as religious voluntarism. The consecration of Samuel Seabury, this article argues, was secured and defended in an Atlantic milieu characterized by this dual-sided antipathy. By setting the events and controversies surrounding the Seabury consecration back into this broader Atlantic milieu, we will glean a clearer sense of the imperative of ecclesial separateness and distinctiveness that characterized American Episcopalianism in the early republic. American Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century, particularly that of the high church tendency, was remarkably free of the establishmentarian and political impulses of other denominations because it was founded in explicit rejection of them.

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Research Article
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Religion and American Culture , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Winter 2022 , pp. 68 - 107
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Copyright © 2022 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

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References

Notes

1 The Correspondence of Richard Price, Vol. II. March 1778–February 1786, ed. D. O. Thomas (Durham: Duke University Press and Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 275–76. The editor's suggestion that Trumbull was referring to Seabury's 1777 plan and not his own consecration, which became public knowledge in early 1785, is surely an error.

2 Price, Richard, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution (Dublin, 1785), 34–49, 72Google Scholar, emphasis mine.

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6 Price, Observations, 37. See also Correspondence of Richard Price, Vol. II, 229–30.

7 The standard account of the “bishop controversy” of the 1760s and 1770s was, for a long time, Carl Bridenbaugh, Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities and Politics, 1689–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), but its conclusions have largely been superseded by a series of recent works. Donald F. M. Gerardi, “The Episcopate Controversy Reconsidered: Religious Vocation and Anglican Perceptions of Authority in Mid-Eighteenth-Century America,” Perspectives in American History, n.s. 3 (1987): 81–114; Ned Landsman, “The Episcopate, the British Union, and the Failure of Religious Settlement in Colonial British America,” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 75–97; Katherine Carté Engel, “Revisiting the Bishop Controversy,” in The American Revolution Reborn, ed. Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 132–49; Peter W. Walker, “The Bishop Controversy, the Imperial Crisis, and Religious Radicalism in New England, 1763–74,” New England Quarterly 90, no. 3 (September 2017): 306–43.

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15 Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America, 238.

16 The catholic tendency in Anglicanism long preceded the appearance in the later 1830s of the term Anglo-Catholic; hence my reluctance to use that arguably more familiar term in the later-eighteenth-century context. See Tavard, George, The Quest for Catholicity: A Study in Anglicanism (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964)Google Scholar; Nockles, Peter B., The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship, 1760–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; W. S. F. Pickering, Anglo-Catholicism: A Study in Religious Ambiguity, rev. ed. (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke and Co., 2008).

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18 Peter W. Walker, “The Church Militant: The American Loyalist Clergy and the Making of the British Counterrevolution, 1701–92,” (PhD thesis, Colombia University, 2016), 235–36.

19 The so-called English pluralists of the early twentieth century made pioneering inquiries into the political implications of this alternative conception of the separation of church and state. See J. Neville Figgis, “Respublica Christiana,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Third Series, 5 (1911), 84; Laski, Harold J., Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1917), 69–119Google Scholar. Subsequent ecclesiological considerations of the Anglican high church tradition have not really capitalized on their insights.

20 G. V. Bennett, “Patristic Tradition in Anglican Thought, 1660–1900,” in Oecumenica: Jahrbuch für ökumenische Forschung 1971/2 (Centre d’études Oecumeniques Strasbourg, 1972), 63–85; Quantin, Jean-Louis, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

21 On the problem the royal supremacy posed to later-seventeenth-century churchmanship, see Rose, Jacqueline, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See John R. Griffin, “The Radical Phase of the Oxford Movement,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27, no. 1 (January 1976), 47–56; Piers Brendon, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement (London: Paul Elek, 1974), 111–14.

23 Potter, John, A Discourse of Church-Government: Wherein the Rights of the Church and of the Supremacy of Christian Princes Are Vindicated and Adjusted (London, 1707), 11Google Scholar, 16, 18, 23–25, 137. On the historical context of Potter's Discourse, see Stephen Taylor, “Archbishop Potter and the Dissenters,” Yale University Library Gazette 67, no. 3/4 (April 1993), 118–26; L. W. Barnard, John Potter: An Eighteenth Century Archbishop (Ilfracombe, UK: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1989), 27–35.

24 The American John Henry Hobart's Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Protestant Episcopal Church recapitulates Potter's Discourse on Church-Government virtually word for word. See Hobart, A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America (New York: T&J Swords, 1804), 16–17, 20–22, 36.

25 Potter, Discourse of Church-Government, 161.

26 See, for instance, Jeremy Collier, A Brief Essay Concerning the Independency of Church-power (1692).

27 See Sanders, Thomas G., Protestant Concepts of Church and State (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 161–222Google Scholar; Miller, Nicholas P., The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Beneke and Benda, “Introduction,” The First Prejudice, 6

29 On the emergence of the concept of civil society in the later eighteenth century, see Livesey, James, Civil Society and Empire: Ireland and Scotland in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Samuel Seabury, “Of Christian Unity,” in Discourses on Several Subjects, 2 vols. (Hudson: William E. Norman, 1815), 1: 183.

31 Jonathan Boucher to George Washington, May 25, 1784, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-01-02-0271.

32 On Erastianism, see John Neville Figgis, “Erastus and Erastianism,” Journal of Theological Studies 2, no. 5 (Oct. 1900), 66–101.

33 George Berkeley to John Skinner, November 18, 1782, quoted in Samuel Wilberforce, A History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, 3rd ed. (London: Rivingtons, 1856), 200–201, emphasis mine. On Berkeley's earlier advocacy of an American episcopate, see Ingram, Robert G., Religion, Reform and Modernity: Thomas Secker and the Church of England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 247–49Google Scholar.

34 For a useful rethinking of the pietist/ritualist typology of nineteenth-century American political groupings, see Philip R. Vandermeer, “Religion, Society, and Politics: A Classification of American Religious Groups,” Social Science History 5, no. 1 (Winter 1981), 3–24. According to Vandermeer, ecclesiastical denominations like the Episcopalian “viewed religious and secular affairs as belonging to separate spheres.” Vandermeer, “Religion, Society, and Politics,” 8.

35 For an overview of the antebellum “benevolent empire,” see Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997); Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

36 On the interdenominational benevolent empire as surrogate establishment, see James Fulton Maclear, “‘The True American Union’ of Church and State: The Reconstruction of the Theocratic Tradition,” Church History 28, no. 1 (March 1959): 41–62; Green, Steven K., The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sehat, David, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51–69Google Scholar.

37 Dorn, T. Felder, Challenges on the Emmaus Road: Episcopal Bishops Confront Slavery, Civil War and Emancipation (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013), 284–95Google Scholar.

38 On the centrality of the tensions surrounding these antipathies to Episcopal identity in this period, see Butler, Diana Hochstedt, “The Church and American Destiny: Evangelical Episcopalians and Voluntary Societies,” Religion and American Culture 4, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 193–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and see also Guelzo, Allen C., For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of Reformed Episcopalianism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Butler, Diana Hochstedt, Standing against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

39 See the 1805–1806 debate documented in A Collection of Essays on the Subject of Episcopacy, which originally appeared in the Albany Centinel (New York: T.&J. Swords, 1806).

40 Mullin, Robert Bruce, Episcopal Vision/American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 138–39Google Scholar.

41 See Brent S. Sirota, “Ecclesiology and the Varieties of Romanticism in American Christianity, 1825–1850,” in A Companion to American Religious History, ed. Benjamin E. Park (Wiley Blackwell, 2021), 165–78; James D. Bratt, “Religious Anti-Revivalism in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 65–106; H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A. Loetscher, eds. American Christianity, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1960–1963), 2: 66–118. On Bushnell, see Robert Bruce Mullin, The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 68–72, 104–105. On Bellows, see George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 26–27.

42 Pennsylvania Packet XI, no. 90 (August 6, 1782). The three earlier meetings of the Anglican clergy and laity of Maryland between 1780 and 1782 had not produced any tangible results beyond the adoption of the name Protestant Episcopal Church. Mills, Bishops by Ballots, 190–91.

43 The peace overtures of Sir Guy Carleton and Rear Admiral Digby were made public in the same week that White's pamphlet was first advertised. Bird Wilson, Memoir of the Life of the Right Reverend William White, D.D. (Philadelphia: James Kay, Jr. & Brother, 1839), 80–81.

44 [William White], The Case of the Episcopal Churches in the United States Considered (Philadelphia, 1782), iv. See also John F. Woolverton, “Philadelphia's William White: Episcopalian Distinctiveness and Accommodation in the Post-Revolutionary Period,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 43, no. 4 (December 1974), 279–96.

45 White, Case of the Episcopal Churches, 16–17.

46 On the ordeal of Anglicanism during the War of Independence, see Nancy L. Rhoden Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy during the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

47 White, Case of the Episcopal Churches, 17–19; on White's view of worship, see Harvey Hill, “Worship in the Ecclesiology of William White,” Anglican and Episcopal History 62, 3 (September 1993), 316–42.

48 White, Case of the Episcopal Churches, 8–9.

49 White, Case of the Episcopal Churches, 10–11, 18–19. See also Gregory K. Hotchkiss, “The Revolutionary William White and Democratic Catholicity,” Anglican and Episcopal History 70, no. 1 (March 2001), 40–74.

50 White, Case of the Episcopal Churches, 19–20,

51 Charles Inglis to William White, New York, June 9, 1783, in William Stevens Perry, Historical Notes and Documents Illustrating the Organization of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (Claremont, NH: Claremont Manufacturing Co., 1874), 259–60.

52 Jacob Duché to William White, Asylum, August 11, 1783, in Perry, Historical Notes, 261–62.

53 Inglis to White, June 9, 1783; Alexander Murray to William White, London, July 26, 1783; Inglis to White, New York, October 22, 1783, in Perry, Historical Notes, 259–66.

54 George Berkeley to Bishop John Skinner, March 21, 1783, in The Scottish Church Review, 1 (1884), 42–43.

55 This letter is printed in Beardsley, Life of Seabury, 98–102.

56 On the Woodbury meeting, see Steiner, Samuel Seabury, 187–90.

57 Samuel Seabury to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel [draft], February 27, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §82, General Theological Seminary (GTS); Abraham Jarvis, A Discourse Delivered before a Special Convention of the Clergy, and Lay Delegates of the Episcopal Church in the State of Connecticut (New Haven, 1796), 18–19.

58 Daniel Fogg to Samuel Parker, Pomfret, July 14, 1783 [copy], Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §53, GTS. In a provocative essay, it has been claimed that no such instruction regarding consecration in Scotland was ever actually transmitted to Seabury; see Clinton Rogers Woodruff, “The Part of Dr. Routh in Dr. Seabury's Consecration,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 9, no. 3 (September 1940), 231–46.

59 Clergy of Connecticut to the Archbishop of Canterbury, [April 1783], The Churchman's Magazine 4, no. 1 (January 1807), 37–39; Clergy of Connecticut to the Archbishop of York, New York, April 21, 1783, The Churchman's Magazine, 3, no. 3 (March 1806), 112–13.

60 Copy of a letter by Charles Inglis, et al. [the New York clergy] to Archbishop of Canterbury, May 24, 1783, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §51, GTS.

61 Clergy of Connecticut to the Archbishop of Canterbury, [April 1783], The Churchman's Magazine 4, no. 1 (January 1807), 37–39.

62 See the “Draft of an appeal for an American bishop,” [1784], Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §251, GTS, where the Connecticut clergy plead: “With the independents they [Episcopalians] will never join, conceiving, as has been observed, their ordinations to be invalid and all their ministrations, of course, to be without effect.”

63 Samuel Seabury [to Jonathan Boucher], Edinburgh, December 3, 1784, Folder 333, Protestant Episcopal Bishops Collection (PEBC), Sterling Memorial Library (SML), Yale University.

64 Bishop John Skinner to George Berkeley, Aberdeen, November 29, 1783, in The Scottish Church Review 1 (1884): 106–107.

65 Seabury to Jeremiah Leaming, Abraham Jarvis, et al., London, July 15, 1783, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 (microfilm), SML, Yale University.

66 Seabury to Jeremiah Leaming, Abraham Jarvis, et al., August 10, 1783; Seabury to Leaming, London, October 20, 1783, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 (microfilm), SML, Yale University.

67 Seabury to Jeremiah Leaming, London, September 3, 1783, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 (microfilm), SML, Yale University.

68 Leaming to Seabury, New Haven, January 21, 1784, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §60, GTS.

69 The Public Records of the State of Connecticut for the Years 1783 and 1784, ed. Leonard Woods Labaree (Hartford: State of Connecticut, 1943), 281–82. For the text of the statute, see Acts and Laws of the State of Connecticut in America (New London, 1784), 21–22. On the broader narrative of disestablishment in Connecticut, see Robert J. Imholt, “Connecticut: A Land of Steady Habits,” in Disestablishment and Religious Dissent: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776–1833, ed. Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan J. Den Hartog (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019), 327–50.

70 Leaming, Jarvis, and Hubbard to Seabury, Middletown, February 5, 1784, in Beardsley, Life and Correspondence, 112–16.

71 Seabury to Leaming and Hubbard, London, April 30, 1784, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 (microfilm), SML, Yale University.

72 Seabury to Jarvis, London, May 3, 1784, Box 3: Seabury Correspondence and Manuscripts, 1781–1785, Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut Archives (EDCA).

73 Seabury to Jarvis, London, May 24, 1784, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 (microfilm), SML, Yale University.

74 Charles Inglis, Samuel Seabury, et al., to Sir Guy Carleton, New York, March 21, 1783, Document #7182, Reel 21, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers 1747 (1777)–1783 (microfilm).

75 On Chandler's activities on London, see Thomas Bradbury Chandler, “Memorandums,” typewritten copy of Chandler's unpublished diary, 1775–1785, GTS.

76 Fogg to Parker, Pomfret, July 14, 1783 [copy], Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §53, GTS.

77 Seabury to the Archbishop of York, November 24, 1783, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §59, GTS.

78 Seabury to Leaming, London, September 3, 1783; Seabury to Leaming and Hubbard, London, April 30, 1784; Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 (microfilm), SML, Yale University; Seabury to Abraham Jarvis, London, May 3, 1784, Box 3: Seabury Correspondence and Manuscripts, 1781–1785, EDCA.

79 Seabury to Jarvis, London, June 26, 1784, in The Churchman's Magazine, 3, no. 6 (June 1806), 236–37; “Objections Made to the Connecticut Episcopacy by the B—Ministry,” Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §65, GTS.

80 Seabury to Jarvis, London, September 7, 1784, Box 3: Seabury Correspondence and Manuscripts, 1781–1785, EDCA. See also the account in Seabury to William Smith, August 15, 1785 [photostat], Folder 332, PEBC, SML, Yale University.

81 Seabury to Jarvis, London, June 26, 1784, in The Churchman's Magazine 3, no. 6 (June 1806), 236–37.

82 Katherine Carté, Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (Williamsburg, VA and Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institution and UNC Press, 2021), 302–27.

83 Mason Locke Weems to John Adams, ca. February 27, 1784, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-16-02-0039.

84 John Adams to Mason Locke Weems, March 3, 1784, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified June 13, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-16-02-0043.

85 Translated copies of the Danish ministers’ April 1784 letters to Adams are enclosed in John Jay to William Paca, March 31, 1785, Columbia Digital Library Collections, Columbia University Libraries, accessed July 12, 2018, from https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/catalog/ldpd:82430.

86 The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, 10 vols., ed. Albert Henry Smyth (New York: Haskell, 1970), 9: 238–40.

87 On the question, see Beardsley, Life of Seabury, 134; Woodruff, “Part of Routh in Seabury's Consecration,” 231–46.

88 Nockles, Oxford Movement in Context, 156–64; Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 284–353.

89 Seabury to Leaming, Oxford Street, London, October 20, 1783, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 (microfilm), SML, Yale University.

90 Seabury to Jarvis, London, May 3, 1784, Box 3: Seabury Correspondence and Manuscripts, 1781–1785, EDCA.

91 Journal of the House of Lords 37 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1767–1830), 147, 152–53. See also Richard G. Salomon, “British Legislation and American Episcopacy,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 20, no. 3 (September 1951), 278–93.

92 Seabury to George Horne, London, January 8, 1785 [draft], Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §75, GTS; Granville Sharp to James Oglethorpe, London, November 3, 1784, Box 3183, 13/1/O1, Gloucestershire Record Office (GRO).

93 Berkeley to Bishop Skinner, St. Andrews, December 10, 1783, in The Scottish Church Review 1 (1884): 109–10.

94 John Henry Overton, The Nonjurors: Their Lives, Principles and Writings (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1903), 29–30, 84–91, 119–21.

95 Henry Broxap, The Later Nonjurors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), 276–88.

96 William Cartwright to Thomas Bradbury Chandler, August 30, 1784, Add. MS D 30, f. 34, Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

97 Seabury to Cartwright, (ca.) October 15, 1784, Seabury Copy-Book, GTS. See also Frederick Goldie, A Short History of the Episcopal Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1951), 37–62.

98 On disestablishment, see Jeffrey Stephen, Defending the Revolution: The Church of Scotland, 1689–1716 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 19–76.

99 John Parker Lawson, History of the Scottish Episcopal Church from the Revolution to the Present Time (Edinburgh: Gallie and Bayley, 1843), 287–311.

100 Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (Boston: Samuel H. Parker, 1821), 217.

101 An account of the earlier correspondence may be found in William Walker, The Life and Times of John Skinner, Bishop of Aberdeen and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church (Aberdeen: J & J. P. Edmond and Spark, 1887), 23–30.

102 See William Jones, “Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Dr. Horne,” in The Works of the Right Reverend George Horne, D.D., 6 vols. (London: Rivington, 1818), 1: 150–58. See also Robert M. Andrews, Lay Activism and the High Church Movement of the Late Eighteenth Century: The Life and Thought of William Stevens, 1732–1807 (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

103 Seabury to Jarvis, London, June 26, 1784, in The Churchman's Magazine 3, no. 6 (June 1806), 236–37; Seabury to Jarvis, London, September 7, 1784, Box 3: Seabury Correspondence and Manuscripts, 1781–1785, EDCA. See also Bishop Petrie to Alexander Jolly, October 23, 1784, in The Scottish Church Review 1 (1884), 593–94, where it appears Bishop Skinner sought Dean Horne's advice on the matter of the consecration.

104 Seabury to Myles Cooper, London, August 31, 1784, Seabury Copy-Book, GTS.

105 Bishop Charles Rose to Bishop Robert Kilgour, December 1, 1783, in The Scottish Church Review 1 (1884), 589; Bishop Rose to Bishop Arthur Petrie, October 26, 1784; Rose to Petrie, February 26, 1785, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 [microfilm], SML, Yale University.

106 Bishop William Falconer to Bishop Kilgour, November 29, 1783, in The Scottish Church Review 1 (1884), 588–89.

107 Kilgour to the Reverend John Allan, Aberdeen, October 2, 1784; Seabury to Kilgour, London, October 14, 1784, Seabury Copy-Book, GTS.

108 “Concordat between Church in Scotland and Church in Connecticut, 15 Nov 1784” [copy], Episcopal Diocese of Maryland Archives, Baltimore, Maryland. See also Alexander Jolly to Bishop Petrie, October 23, 1784, in The Scottish Church Review 1 (1884), 594.

109 Seabury to Samuel Peters, Dundee, November 24, 1784, Box 3: Seabury Correspondence and Manuscripts, 1781–1785, EDCA.

110 Beardsley, Life of Seabury, 148–49.

111 [John Skinner], The Nature and Extent of the Apostolical Commission. A Sermon Preached at the Consecration of the Right Reverend Dr. Samuel Seabury, Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. By a Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Scotland (Aberdeen: J. Chalmers and Co., 1785), 9–11, 15–17, 20, 37–39.

112 Seabury to Leaming, Jarvis, and Hubbard, London, January 5, 1785, in Churchman's Magazine 3, no. 7 (July 1806), 276–77.

113 Jolly to Skinner, December 19, 1784, in The Scottish Church Review 1 (1884), 597.

114 Seabury to George Berkeley Jr., London, December 24, 1784, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §70, GTS.

115 George Horne to Seabury, January 3, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §73, GTS.

116 Samuel Seabury to [Jonathan Boucher], Edinburgh, December 3, 1784, Folder 333, PEBC, SML, Yale University; and “Extract of a letter from Bishop Skinner to Bishop Seabury, Aberdeen, 29 Jan 1785,” Seabury Copy-Book, GTS.

117 Seabury to Skinner, December 27, 1784; John Allan to Bishop Petrie, Edinburgh, January 15, 1785, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 [microfilm], SML, Yale University; Abernathy Drummond to Seabury, Edinburgh, January 3, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §74, GTS; John Allan to Seabury, Edinburgh, January 17, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §76, GTS; Alexander Allan to Seabury, Edinburgh, January 18, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §77, GTS. See also “Letters from the Reverend Dr. Myles Cooper, Formerly President of King's College, New York, Written from Edinburgh to Rev. Dr. Samuel Peters, of London,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 2, no. 1 (March 1933): 44–47.

118 Charles Wesley to Thomas Bradbury Chandler, April 28, 1785, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 [microfilm], SML, Yale University; Thomas Bradbury Chandler to Seabury, July 28, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §93, GTS.

119 Seabury to Horne, London, January 8, 1785 [draft], Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §75, GTS.

120 The Gentleman's Magazine 55, no. 2 (February 1785): 105; The Weekly Entertainer 5, no. 117 (March 28, 1785), 304.

121 At Seabury's urging, Skinner's sermon was first published at Aberdeen in January 1785. Seabury to Skinner, December 27, 1784; Skinner to Petrie, Aberdeen, January 4, 1785; Seabury to Skinner, Gravesend, March 11, 1785, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 [microfilm], SML, Yale University.

122 Skinner, Nature and Extent of the Apostolical Commission, 14–15.

123 English Review 5 (April 1785), 273–74. On the religious meaning of “liberality,” see Craig, David, “The Language of Liberality in Britain, c. 1760–1815,” Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 3 (2019): 771–801CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

124 Gentleman's Magazine 55, no. 4 (April 1785): 248; W. C.'s letter to the Magazine repeatedly quoted from Seabury's October 1784 letter to Cartwright.

125 Gentleman's Magazine 55, no. 4 (April 1785): 278–80.

126 Gentleman's Magazine 55, no. 12 (December 1785): 1017–19.

127 Jonathan Boucher to Seabury, Epsom, March 31, 1786, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §111, GTS.

128 Monthly Review, or, Literary Journal 73 (July 1785): 79.

129 Mills, Frederick V., “Granville Sharp and the Creation of an American Episcopate: Ordo Episcoporum Est Robur Ecclesiae,” Anglican and Episcopal History 79, no. 1 (March 2010): 34–58Google Scholar.

130 Granville Sharp to James Oglethorpe, November 3, 1784, Box 3813, 13/1/O1; Sharp to John Hincliffe, Bishop of Peterborough, November 3, 1784, Box 3814, 13/1/P23, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO; Granville Sharp, “A farther Declaration of the ancient popular, or congregational Right to elect Bishops,” in An Account of the Ancient Division of the English Nation into Hundreds and Tithings (London, 1784), 296–365.

131 Sharp to Archbishop of Canterbury, November 19, 1784 [copy], Box 3811, 13/1/C3, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO. Sharp, at this point, was likely only reflecting on Seabury's seeking consecration in Scotland as news of the event had probably not reached London yet.

132 Sharp possessed a copy of Skinner's consecration sermon, Box 3825, 13/3/39; it was sent to him by James Oglethorpe in April 1785. See Oglethorpe to Sharp, April 12, 1785, Box 3813, 13/1/O1, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO .

133 Granville Sharp to James Manning, February 22, 1785, Box 3813, 13/1/M5, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO; Sharp to Manning, March 4, 1785, Box 1, Folder 54, Accession #817, James Manning Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University.

134 Robert Findlay to Granville Sharp, Glasgow, March 29, 1785, Box 3812, 13/1/F4, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO.

135 Oglethorpe to Sharp, April 12, 1785, Box 3813, 13/1/O1, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO.

136 Sharp to Benjamin Franklin [copy], London, October 29, 1785, Box 1, Folder 54, Accession #A977, James Manning Papers, John Hay Library, Brown University; Sharp to Manning, London, December 11, 1785, Box 3813, 13/1/M5; Sharp to Findlay, London, January 19, 1786, Box 3812, 13/1/F4, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO. On the usages controversy, see Broxap, The Later Nonjurors, 35–65; Robert Cornwall, “The Later Nonjurors and the Theological Basis of the Usages Controversy,” Anglican Theological Review 75 (1993): 166–86.

137 Charles Inglis, October 21, 1785, Journal of Occurrences, Inglis Family Papers, MS C-3, University of New Brunswick.

138 Manning to Sharp, Providence, RI, July 26, 1785, Box 3813, 13/1/M5, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO; Henry Purcell to Samuel Seabury, New York, September 15, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §101, GTS; Perry, Historical Notes, 272n2.

139 Sharp to Archbishop Moore, September 13, 1785, Box 3811, 13/1/C3, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO.

140 See William White, Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, ed. B. F. DeCosta (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1880), 86–88.

141 Seabury to Skinner, December 27, 1784, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 [microfilm], SML, Yale University.

142 Andrew Macfarlane to Seabury, Inverness, February 5, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §79, GTS.

143 Seabury to Skinner, December 27, 1784; Skinner to Petrie, Aberdeen, January 4, 1785, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 [microfilm], SML, Yale University; Alexander Allan to Seabury, Edinburgh, January 18, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §77; Macfarlane to Seabury, Inverness, January 21, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §78; Macfarlane to Seabury, Inverness, February 5, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §79, GTS. Mentioned were Bishop Robert Keith's Catalogue of the Bishops of Scotland (1755): “two or three Tracts wrote by Dr. Rattray of Craighall,” among them, presumably, his 1728 Essay on the Nature of the Church. Macfarlane further recommended Bishop John Sage's Principles of the Cyprianic Age (1695) and his lengthy Vindication thereof (1701); as well as Alexander Monro's Enquiry into the New Opinions, Chiefly Propagated by the Presbyterians of Scotland (1696) and the London clergyman Thomas Bennet's 1711 pamphlet The Rights of the Clergy of the Christian Church, a response to Matthew Tindal.

144 Seabury to Jarvis, New London, June 29, 1785, The Churchman's Magazine, III, 7 (July 1806), 278–279

145 White, et al., to Seabury, Philadelphia, July 22, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §91, GTS.

146 James Rivington to Seabury, New York, July 25, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §92, GTS.

147 The Address of the Episcopal Clergy of Connecticut to the Right Reverend Bishop Seabury, with the Bishop's Answer (New Haven, 1785), 4–5, 7.

148 The Scots Magazine 47 (December 1785), 645–48.

149 Gentleman's Magazine 56, no. 4 (April 1786), 286–88.

150 Jonathan Boucher to Seabury, Epsom, March 31, 1786, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §111, GTS; Skinner to Petrie, March 15, 1786; Skinner to Petrie, March 27, 1786, Seabury family papers, 1784–1867 [microfilm], SML, Yale University.

151 Thomas Bradbury Chandler to Seabury, July 28, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §93, GTS; Charles Inglis, 13 October 1785; January 10, 1786, Journal of Occurrences, Inglis Family Papers, MS C-3, University of New Brunswick; Sharp to Archbishop Moore, September 13, 1785; Sharp to Archbishop Moore, February 17, 1786, Box 3811, 13/1/C3; Granville Sharp to Benjamin Rush, October 10, 1785, Box 3814, 13/1/R13, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO.

152 Seabury to William Smith, August 15, 1785, [photostat], Folder 332, PEBC, SML, Yale University.

153 Beardsley, Life of Seabury, 244–45; and William White to Samuel Seabury, February 1, 1786, in The Life and Letters of Bishop William White, ed. Walter Herbert Stowe (New York: Morehouse and Co., 1937), 254.

154 Sharp to Manning, London, December 11, 1785, Box 3813, 13/1/M5; Sharp to Findlay, London, January 19, 1786, Box 3812, 13/1/F4, Granville Sharp Papers, GRO.

155 Journals of the General Conventions of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America from A.D. 1785 to A.D. 1853, ed. Francis L. Hawks and William Stevens Perry (Philadelphia: Joseph W. Raynor, 1860), 24–27.

156 Journals of the General Conventions, 26–27.

157 Seabury to William Smith, August 15, 1785, [photostat], Folder 332, PEBC, SML, Yale University.

158 The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1901), 3: 172–73; Bishop Seabury to Samuel Peters of London, New London, December 14, 1785, Box 3: Seabury Correspondence and Manuscripts, 1781–1785, EDCA. See also Seabury's discourse on the apostolical commission, where he derides “the modern-invented scheme of parochial bishops,” Seabury, Discourses on Several Subjects, 1:88, probably a response to Stiles, Ezra, A Sermon Delivered at Ordination of the Reverend Henry Channing, A.M. (New-London, 1787)Google Scholar.

159 [John Locke], A Letter Concerning Toleration, Humbly Submitted, &c. (London, 1689), 1; Boucher to Seabury, Epsom, June 12, 1786, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §113, GTS.

160 Mills, Bishops by Ballot, 233–87, provides a comprehensive account.

161 Handschy, Dan, “Samuel Seabury's Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Ecclesial Implications of a Sacrificial Eucharist,” Anglican and Episcopal History 85, no. 1 (March 2016), 1–23Google Scholar. See also Marshall, Paul Victor, One, Catholic and Apostolic: Samuel Seabury and the Early Episcopal Church (New York: Church Publishing, 2004)Google Scholar.

162 Holifield, E. Brooks, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 245–51Google Scholar; Noll, America's God, 238–41; McBride, Spencer W., Pulpit and Nation: Clergymen and the Politics of Revolutionary America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 75–80Google Scholar.

163 Taylor, William Harrison, Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Hood, Fred J., Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 1783–1837 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

164 Andrew Macfarlane to Samuel Seabury, January 21, 1785, Bishop Samuel Seabury Papers, §78, GTS.

165 For the pluralistic origins of American religious liberty, see Haefeli, Evan, Accidental Pluralism: America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497–1662 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

166 Butler, “The Church and American Destiny,” 202.

167 Correspondence of Richard Price, vol. 2, 327–28.

168 See Hobart's, John Henry An Address to Episcopalians on the Subject of the American Bible Society (New York: T&J Swords, 1816)Google Scholar; for the most controversial high church Episcopalian critique of the benevolent, paraecclesial and interdenominational groups that had come to define American Protestantism, see Hopkins, John Henry, The Primitive Church Compared with the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Present Day (Burlington: Smith and Harrington, 1835)Google Scholar.

169 For this reflex among evangelical denominations, see Jonathan J. Hartog, Den, Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015)Google Scholar, which Den Hartog schematizes as the move from an establishmentarian Republicanism to a postestablishmentarian Voluntarism.