The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut by M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.

M >> M. Louise Greene, Ph. D. >> The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30

Joseph Bellamy's influence, great as it was as writer and preacher,
was even greater as a teacher. His home in Bethlehem from 1738 to
1790 was virtually a divinity school, and it is estimated that at
least sixty students, trained in his system of theology and in his
antagonism to the Half-Way Covenant, [k] spread through New England
an influence counter to that of the Mayhews, Briant, [l] Webster, and
other disciples of the Liberal Theology. Upon Bellamy, as a leader,
fell Edwards's mantle.

While Bellamy was the great exponent of Jonathan Edwards's teachings
in Connecticut, another friend and famous pupil of the great divine's,
Samuel Hopkins, taught at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 1743-69,
and in Newport, Ehode Island, 1770-1803, urging an extension of his
master's principles--especially of that of "benevolence." Hopkins,
however, attributed a certain value to "means of grace," while
teaching that sin and virtue consist in exercise of the will, or in
definite acts. [m] Consequently, he included in his theology a denial
of man's responsibility for Adam's sin, which Edwards had
maintained. Hopkins advocated also a willing and disinterested
submission to'God's will, the Hopkinsian "to be saved or damned,"
since God, in his wisdom, will do that which is best for his
universe. These characteristic doctrines, both of Bellamy and Hopkins,
were modified by the younger generation of students, notably by
Stephen West, John Smalley, Jonathan Edwards, Jr., and--greatest of
all--Nathaniel Emmons, who, together with the first Timothy Dwight,
were to introduce two sub-schools of the New Divinity. [n] Emmons,
following Hopkins, developed extreme views of sin, even in little
children; held the theories of reprobation and election; and was most
intensely Calvinistic. Dwight developed a more conciliatory and benign
system of theology, but his influence, as founder of a school of
religious thought, belongs to the post-Revolutionary era. Emmons held
one long pastorate at Franklin, Massachusetts, 1773-1827, [o] where,
as a trainer of youth for the ministry, his influence was greatest,
and his powers at their best. Nearly a hundred ministers passed to
their pulpits from his tutelage.

Such were the teachings that fashioned a generation of preachers, of
ministers, wielding a tremendous influence over the men and measures
of pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary days. The clergy were then the
close friends of their parishioners; their counselors in all matters,
spiritual or worldly; and frequently their arbitrators in disputed
rights, for the legal class was still small, and its services
costly. The pastor knew intimately every soul in his parish. He was
the State's moral guardian. He was the intellectual leader and more,
for, in the scarcity of books and newspapers, not alone in his Sunday
sermon but in those on fast days and thanksgivings, and on all public
and semi-public occasions, he talked to his people upon current
events. The story is told of a clergyman who in his Sunday prayer
recounted the life of his parish during the preceding week, making
personal mention of its actors; who then passed, still praying, from
local history to the welfare of the nation, including a tribute to
Washington and a description of a battle; and who did not end his
hour-long prayer until he had anathematized the enemy, and circled the
globe for recent examples of divine wrath and benevolence. Such a
clergyman is by no means a myth. Each pastor made his own
contribution, inconspicuous or notable as it might be, to the
broadening of thought, and contributed his part to the development
among his people of ideas of personal liberty, even as the colonial
wars were developing confidence in the ability to defend that liberty
should it be endangered. A voluntary theocracy may uphold a faith
which teaches that only a very limited number are of the "elect," but,
under the ordinary conditions of life, such a belief is discouraging,
deadening, and as men threw off this idea of spiritual bondage, they
advanced to a larger conception of personal responsibility, dignity,
and freedom. Such enlargement of ideas necessitated a mutual tolerance
of diverse opinions. It also tended to create revolt against
infractions of civil liberty or violations of political justice. The
colonists were not so badly taxed--as colonial policy went--when they
made their stand for "no taxation without representation," when they
exhausted their resources in a long war because of acts of Parliament
that, had they submitted to them, would have offered a precedent for
still more repressive measures and for the overthrow of the
Englishman's right to determine, through the representatives of the
people, how the people's money should be spent.

If the town-meeting, the sermon, the religious or political pamphlet,
and the newspaper did each its part in developing a people, there was
also another factor that, starting as part of a discussion of
ecclesiastical polity, brought before all men important questions of
civil, political, and personal liberty, and of constitutional rights.
However unnecessary the severe anguish of Jonathan Mayhew's spirit,
due to his exaggerated fear of the American episcopate, he did but
express "the sincere thought of a multitude of his most rational
contemporaries." [l49] A review of events will show some reason for
the antagonism and horror that filled New England when the project of
the episcopate was revived. After the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the
Crown took no interest in the project of an American episcopate until
Thomas Sherlock became Bishop of London in 1748. The Connecticut
clergy of the Church of England, together with others of New England
and the Middle colonies, had, however, never ceased their efforts to
secure an American bishop; and now, in Bishop Sherlock, their
Metropolitan in London, they had one who firmly believed in the
necessity of colonial bishops, who deliberately refused to exercise
the traditional powers of his office, or to obtain a legal renewal of
them (in so far as they applied to the colonies), because he had
determined that by such a policy he would force the English government
to appoint one--or preferably several--American bishops. He defined
his scheme for the episcopate as one in which the Bishop was: (1) to
have no coercive power over the laity, only regulative over the
clergy; (2) to have no share in the temporal government; (3) to be of
no expense to the colonists; (4) and to have no authority, except to
ordain the clergy, in any of the colonies where the government was in
the hands of dissenters from the Church of England. This plan was
essentially the same as that advocated later by Bishops Secker and
Butler, and by succeeding bishops to the time of the
Revolution. Bishop Sherlock obtained the King's permission to submit
his plan to the English ministers of state. So great was the dread
inspired in America by the rumors of a revival of active measures for
a colonial episcopate, that a deputation, sent to England in 1749,
appointed a committee of two to wait upon those nearest to the King
and to advise them that the appointment would be "highly Prejudicial
to the Interests of Several of the Colonies." [150] This committee
redoubled its energies in 1750, and it was due to its watchfulness as
well as to the clearer foresight of the King's ministers that Bishop
Sherlock's plan was frustrated. The chief advisers of the government
objected to it on the ground that it would be repugnant to the
dissenting colonies, to the dissenters of all sorts in England, and
would also rouse in the home-land party-differences that had slumbered
since the overthrow of the Pretender in 1745.

Despite the English opposition to Bishop Sherlock's scheme, its
discussion in England and the journey of the bishop's agent through
the several American colonies to sound their sentiment had created so
much apprehension that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
enjoined its missionaries, in 1753, "that they take special care to
give no offence to the civil government by intermeddling with affairt,
not relating to their calling or function." Even Bishop Seeker of
Oxford, a strong adherent of Bishop Sherlock, saw fit, in 1754, to
suppress Dr. Johnson of Stratford, Connecticut, bidding his enthusiasm
wait until a more propitious season, and advising him, and the rest of
his clergy, to conciliate the dissenters. Bishop Sherlock, himself, in
1752, withdrew sufficiently from his first position to assume the
ecclesiastical oversight of the colonies, although he would not take
out a commission to renew that which had expired by the death of
Bishop Gibson. Meanwhile, Sherlock's demonstration that the Bishop of
London had little authority in law, or in fact, over the American
colonies created two parties. One [p] held that the colonies were a
part of the English nation and consequently were subject to the civil
and religious laws existing in the home country, and that the
authority of the Church of England extending to the colonies had been
reinforced by the Gibson patent of 1727-28. The other party
maintained that the colonists were not members of the Church of
England, nor subject to its rules. They quoted the Lord Chief Justice,
who declared to Governor Dummer, in 1725, that "there was no regular
establishment of any national or provincial church in these
plantations" (of New England), and that Bishop Gilman, in his letter
of May 24, 1735, to Dr. Colman had written, "My opinion has always
been that the religious state of New England is founded on an equal
liberty to all Protestants, none of which can claim the name of a
national establishment, or of any kind of superiority over the rest."
This party further maintained that no acts of Parliament, passed after
the founding of the colonies, were binding upon them, unless such acts
were specially extended to the colonies. Here again was the old
contention that had appeared in the earlier controversy over the
Connecticut Intestacy Act.

An American controversy, parallel in time with the attempt to
establish the episcopate, roused the always latent New England
hostility to the Episcopal church as one contrary to gospel
teaching. This controversy of 1747-51 [q] broke out over the validity
of Presbyterian ordination versus Episcopal. The battle surged about
the contingent questions of (1) whether the Church of England extended
to the colonies; (2) whether it was prudent for the long established
New England churches to go over to the English communion; and (3)
whether it would be lawful. In debating the last two, incidental
matters of expense, of unwise ecclesiastical dependence, and of the
consequent decay of practical godliness in the land, were discussed by
the Rev. Noah Hobart of Stratford, Conn., who represented the
Consociated churches, while Episcopacy was defended by Rev. James
Wetmore of Rye, N. Y., Dr. Johnson of Stratford, Conn., Rev. John
Beach of Reading, Conn., and by the Rev. Henry Caner of Boston.

This discussion at once suggested to a few far-sighted men that the
bishops recently proposed, and which at the end of the Seven Years'
War, in 1763, were again earnestly advocated by Bishop Seeker (who had
become Archbishop of Canterbury) should not acquire any powers in
addition to those suggested by Bishop Sherlock. The growing fear of
such increased authority flamed out again in the Mayhew controversy of
1763-65, when all the inherited Puritan dislike to the Church of
England as a religious body, and all the terror of such a hierarchy,
as a part of the English state, hurled itself into argument, and threw
to the front the discussion of the American episcopate as a measure of
English policy,--an attempt to transplant the Church as an arm of the
State; an attempt to "episcopize," to proselyte the colonies, and
eventually to overturn the New England ecclesiastical and civil
governments.[r] "It was known," wrote John Adams fifty years later,
"that neither the king nor ministry nor archbishop could appoint
bishops in America without Act of Parliament, and if Parliament could
tax us, it could establish the Church of England with all its creeds,
articles, ceremonies, and prohibit all other churches as conventicles
and schism-shops." [s] Therefore, when England declared her right to
tax the colonies, and followed it by Sugar Act and Stamp Act, the
political situation threw a lurid light about the Chandler-Chauncy
controversy [t] of 1767-71 as it rehearsed the _pros_ and
_cons_ of the proposed episcopate. The New England colonies were
greatly excited, and others shared the unrest, for, even where the
Church of England was strongest, the laity as a body preferred the
greater freedom accorded them under commissaries as sub-officers of
the Bishop of London. The indifference of the American laity as a
whole to the project of the episcopate; the impotence of the English
bishop to attain it, thwarted as he was by the threefold opposition of
the ministry, the colonial agents, and the great body of English
dissenters, did not lessen the prevailing suspicion and fear among the
colonists, especially among those of New England. They felt no
confidence in the profession [u] that authority purely ecclesiastical
would alone be accorded to the bishop, or that American churchmen
themselves would long be satisfied with a bishopric so shorn of
power. And already, on November 1, 1766, the Episcopalians of New
York, New Jersey, and Connecticut had met together in their first
annual convention at Elizabethtown. [v] The avowed object of their
conference was the defense of the liberties of the Church of England,
and "to diffuse union and harmony, and to keep up a correspondence
throughout the united body and with their friends abroad." [151]

It was a time of drawing together, whether of the colonies as
political bodies, or of their people as groups of individuals
affiliating with similar groups beyond the local boundaries. Upon
November 5, 1766, also at Elizabethtown, the Consociated Churches of
Connecticut had united with the Presbyterian Synod of New York and
Philadelphia in their first annual convention, which was composed of
Presbyterian delegates to the Synod and of representatives from the
Associations in Connecticut. While the general object was the
promotion of Christian friendship between the two religious bodies,
the spread of the gospel, and the preservation of the liberties of
their respective churches, the conventions of 1769-75 determined to
prosecute measures for preserving these same liberties, threatened "by
the attempt made by the friends of Episcopacy in the Colonies and
Great Britain, for the establishment of Diocesan Bishops in America."
[152] Accordingly this representative body at once entered into
correspondence with the Committee of Dissenters in England. In
recalling these movements towards combination, one remembers that,
among the dissenters, the Quakers had long held to their system of
Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual Meetings, to their correspondence with
the London Annual Meeting, and to the frequent interchange of
traveling preachers. In the years 1767-69, the scattered Baptists of
New England had united in the Warren (Rhode Island) Association. It
was a council for advice only, yet its approval lent multiple weight
to the influence of any Baptist preacher. It urged the collection of
all authentic reports of oppression or persecution, and a firm, united
resistance on the part of the weaker churches. [w] The founding of
Brown University, Rhode Island, as a Baptist College in 1764, gave the
sect prestige by marking their approval of education and of a "learned
ministry."

To return to the subject of the episcopate, the Chandler controversy
had been precipitated by Dr. Johnson of Connecticut, who, at the
Elizabeth convention, urged that the opposition to the American
bishops was largely caused by ignorance concerning their proposed
powers and office, and that if some one would put the scheme more
fully before the people, they might be won over. The task was assigned
to Thomas Bradbury Chandler, who published his "An Appeal to the
Public," 1767. Dr. Charles Chauncy of Boston replied to Chandler,
giving the New England view of bishops in "The Appeal Answered."
Chandler, as has been said, retorted with his "The Appeal Defended,"
and the newspapers took up the controversy. The discussion turned
immediately and almost entirely from the ecclesiastical aspect, with
its dangers to New England church-life, to the political and
constitutional phases of this proposed extension of the Church of
England. The New York and Philadelphia press agitated the subject in
1768-69, while all New England echoed Mayhew's earlier denunciations
of the evils to be anticipated. In the pulpit, by the study fire, and
at the tavern-bar, leaders, scholars, people discussed the possible
loss of civil and personal liberty. Let the bishops once be seated;
and would they not introduce ecclesiastical courts, demand uniformity,
and impose a general tax for their church which might be perverted to
any use that the whim of the King and of his subservient bishops might
propose? There is no question that this subject of the episcopate,
with its political and constitutional phases, and with the
considerations of personal and civil liberty involved, did much to
familiarize the people with those principles upon which they made
their final break with England, and helped to prepare their minds for
the separation from the mother country.

In considering the various elements that contributed to the
development of the national spirit, to the destruction of that
provincialism so marked in the colonies before 1750, and to the
creation in each of breadth of thought and clearness of vision, trade
and commerce had their part. Because of them, came increasing
knowledge of the widely different habits of life in the thirteen
colonies. It came also from the association of the people of the
different sections when as soldiers of their King they were summoned
to the various wars. Still another impetus was given to the national
idea by the fashion of long, elaborate correspondence. Especially was
this true after the Albany convention of 1754, called to discuss
Franklin's Plan of Union, had introduced men of like minds, abilities,
and purpose, and also the needs of their respective sections, and had
interested them in the common welfare of all. Moreover, Franklin was
the highest representative of still another movement that roused the
slumbering intelligence of men by opening their minds to impressions
from the vast and unexplored world of natural science. He founded, in
1743, the University of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophical
Society. The recognition, in 1753, [x] of his work by European
scholars was an honor in which every American took pride as marking
the entrance of the colonies into the world of scientific
investigation. Such honorable recognition produced a widespread
interest in the stuiy of the physical world and its forces. Following
this awakening and broadening of the intellectual life, there came, at
the very dawn of the Revolution, the first out-cropping of genuine
American literature in the satires and poems of Philip Freneau of New
York, a graduate of Princeton, and in those of John Trumbull and Joel
Barlow [y] of Yale. New Haven became a centre of literary life, and
the cultivation of literature took its place beside that of the
classics, broadening the preeminently ministerial groove of the Yale
curriculum.

In considering some of the individual acts leading up to Connecticut's
part in the Revolution, we find that the colony had disapproved
Franklin's Plan of Union of 1754. She thought it lacking in efficiency
and in dispatch in emergencies, and possibly dangerous to the
liberties of the colonies. She also believed it liable to plunge the
colonies into heavy expense, when many of them were already
floundering in debt. Yet Connecticut had, with Massachusetts,
willingly borne the brunt of expense and loss necessary to protect the
colonies in the wars arising from French and English claims. She,
accordingly, greatly rejoiced at the Peace of Ryswick, 1763, for it
gave security to her borders by the cession of Canada to England,
brought safety to commerce and the fisheries, and promised a new era
of prosperity. The attempt of England to recoup herself for the
expenses of the war by a rigid enforcement of the Navigation Laws--an
enforcement that paralyzed commerce, and turned the open evasion of
honorable merchantmen into the treasonable acts of smugglers--grieved
Connecticut; the Sugar Act provoked her, and the proposed Stamp Act
drove her to remonstrance. Her magistrates issued the dignified and
spirited address, "Reasons why the British Colonies in America should
not be charged with Internal Taxes by Authority of Parliament." [z] It
was firmly believed in the colony that when the severity of the
English acts should be demonstrated, they would at once be removed and
some substitute, such as the proposed tax on slaves or on the fur
trade, would be adopted. Jared Ingersoll, the future stamp-officer,
carried the address to England. There it received praise as an able
and temperate state-paper. Ingersoll is credited with having succeeded
in slightly modifying the Stamp Act and in postponing somewhat the
date for its going into effect. Having done what he could to modify
the measure, and not appreciating the growth of opposition to it
during his absence, he accepted the office of Stamp-Distributer, and
returned to America, where he was straightway undeceived as to the
desirability of his office, but made his way from Boston to
Connecticut, hoping for better things. On reaching New Haven, he was
remonstrated with for accepting his office and urged to give it
up. But learning that Governor Fitch, after mature deliberation, had
resolved to take the oath to support the Stamp Act, and had done so,
though seven of his eleven Councilors, summoned for the ceremony, had
refused to witness the oath, Ingersoll decided to push on to
Hartford. Starting alone and on horseback, he rode unmolested through
the woods; but as he journeyed through the villages, group after group
of stern-looking men, bearing in their hands sticks peeled bare of
bark so as to resemble the staves carried by constables, silently
joined him, and, later, soldiers and a troop of horse. Thus he was
escorted into Wethersfield, where, virtually a prisoner, he was made
to resign his commission. The cavalcade, ever increasing, proceeded
with him to Hartford, [aa] where he publicly proclaimed his
resignation and signed a paper to that effect. Everywhere the towns
burned him in effigy. Everywhere the spirit of indignation and of
opposition spread. The "Norwich Packet" discussed the favored East
Indian monopolies and the Declaratory and Revenue Acts of
Parliament. The "Connecticut Courant" (founded in Hartford in 1764),
the "Connecticut Gazette," the "Connecticut Journal and New Haven
Post-Boy," [ab] and the "New London Gazette" encouraged the spirit of
resistance. A Norwich minister[153] preached from the text "Touch not
mine anointed," referring to the people as the "anointed" and arguing
that kings, through Acts of Parliament which take away, infringe, or
violate civil rights, touch the "anointed" people in a way forbidden
by God. This Norwich minister was not alone among the clergy, for the
sermons of the three sects, Baptist, Separatist, and Congregational,
"connected with one indissoluble bond the principles of civil
Government and the principles of Christianity." The laity of the
Episcopal church were, as a body, patriots, and so, also, were many of
their clergy; but party spirit, roused by the discussion of the
episcopate and of their relation to the King, as head of their church
as well as head of the State, tended to Toryism. From their pulpits
was more frequently heard the doctrine of passive obedience. But in
all the opposition to the Stamp Act, in all the preparations for
resistance, in the carrying out of non-importation agreements, in the
movement that created small factories and home industries to supply
the lack of English imports, and later during the struggle for
independence, the Connecticut colonists, whether Congregationalists,
patriotic Episcopalians, Baptists, or Separatists, worked as one.

Toward the Separatists, oppressed dissenters yet loyal patriots, there
began to be the feeling that some legislative favor should be
shown. Accordingly the Assembly, having them in mind, in 1770 passed
the law that--

no person in this Colony, professing the Christian protestant
religion, who soberly and conscientiously dissent from the worship
and ministry established or approved by the laws of this Colony
and attend public worship by themselves, shall incur any of the
penalties ... for not attending the worship and ministry so
established on the Lord's day or on account of their meeting
together by themselves on said day for the public worship of God
in a way agreeable to their consciences.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30