A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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slave ownership was “unlawful for any Christian, and particularly for Clergymen.”46
Some historians have argued that slavery was a primitive traditional agricultural institution to which supporters of a more enlightened, liberal, mercantile economy would object.47 The truth was, however, more complex. In the 1680s some of the enlightened thinkers of England did, to be sure, come to object to slavery. John Locke, for example, moved from supporting slavery in the 1660s (when he coauthored the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina that allowed slavery) and 1670s (when he bought shares in the Royal African Company) to rejecting in his Two Treatises of Government (published 1690) any form of involuntary servitude except for that of prisoners of war.48 Nevertheless, enlightened ideas about human rights worked in the opposite direction as well. As William Pettigrew has demonstrated in Freedom’s Debt (2013), “The ‘rights of man,’ or their more elastic substitute ‘freedom,’ contributed to the escalation of the slave trade. Eighteenth-century Britons believed that the Glorious Revolution would protect their liberties,” and one of those liberties was “the right of all English subjects to trade in the enslaved.”49 It was with appeals to the rights of free citizens that independent slave traders were able in 1712 to convince the British parliament to overturn the monopoly of the Royal African Company and to open the slave trade to independent traders. The result was “a massive expansion of slave trading” and a loss of any regulation of the way in which the enslaved were to be treated.50 While no single private slave company would rival the number of slaves carried by the Royal African Company, collectively the independent traders were able to transport far more enslaved people.
During the first decades of the eighteenth century, colonies north of Maryland began to adopt comprehensive slave legislation of the sort that colonial governments had pioneered in the Caribbean, Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina. New York adopted, for example, its first comprehensive slave code in 1702, and New Jersey followed two years later.51
Some colonists began to accept a curious reading of Genesis 9:10–27, the story of Noah’s curse on his grandson Canaan. In the biblical account Noah declared that Canaan, who was one of the four sons of Ham, would be a slave to Ham’s brothers Shem and Japeth. The passage was probably intended in the first instance as a justification for the Jewish conquest of the Canaanite people. Later interpreters, however, reapplied the passages to a variety of convenient targets. Some ninth-century Muslims reinterpreted the passage as a justification for the enslaving of sub-Saharan Africans. An alternative medieval Christian reading was to use the passage to justify treatment of heretics and sinners. The Spanish and Portuguese picked up the sub-Saharan argument from the Muslims, and by the late sixteenth century the English had adopted the argument from them or directly from Muslim sources. A number of seventeenth century supporters of English colonization suggested applying the passage to Native Americans.52 By the eighteenth century, however, it became common for defenders of the slave trade to apply the story exclusively to Africans; they would continue to do so up to the time of the American Civil War.
Having lost its monopoly, the Royal African Company began to remake itself as an advocate for a humane, regulated trade in slaves and a critic of the excesses of the independent slave traders. The company’s new “pro-regulation, humane, disinterested rhetoric” would later provide “much of the inspiration for the political will and some of the political rhetoric of the antislavery cause.”53
The Colonial Church in the Eighteenth Century
In 1724, Bishop of London (1723–48) Edmund Gibson sent a questionnaire to Church of England clergy in the American colonies. He found that the condition of the church had markedly improved since Thomas Bray’s General View (1698). Bray had found approximately eighty-five churches, of which almost all were in Maryland or Virginia. Gibson’s survey, in contrast, noted one hundred sixty-one places of worship, ranging from South Carolina to Massachusetts. The survey included replies from Virginia (sixty places of worship), Maryland (forty-five), New York (seventeen), South Carolina (fourteen), Rhode Island (eight), Pennsylvania (four), New Jersey (seven), Connecticut (three), and Massachusetts (three).54
Respondents reported that their churches were full. In Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, parishes for which complete data were available, the majority of the population attended worship regularly in the Church of England, and approximately fifteen percent of the population received communion.55 The latter figure was three times higher than that of parishes in the English Diocese of Oxford.56
This picture of a thriving church runs contrary to a more negative portrayal that has been commonly offered since the nineteenth century. Non-Episcopal authors who were apologists for other religious traditions tended to generalize examples of clergy misbehavior into a portrait of conduct that they contrasted unfavorably with that of clergy of their own denominations.57 Nineteenth-century Episcopal authors were often critical of their eighteenth century coreligionists as well. Both evangelical and high church Episcopal authors noted the lack of the values that were central to their own ways of thinking and concluded that the church must have been in serious decline in the century before their own arrival. For nineteenth-century evangelicals the problem was that Episcopalians had not yet adopted the insights of the Great Awakening; for high church authors the problem was an insufficient appreciation of catholic principles.58 Many later historians have accepted the negative depictions of clergy of the colonial Church of England uncritically.59
A number of recent authors have reached different conclusions. To this point Virginia, where Church of England clergy were the most numerous in the eighteenth century, has been the most studied. Patricia U. Bonomi cited a survey of colonial rectors there from 1723 to 1776 revealed that “at most ten percent of the ministers ever had authentic charges brought against them.”60 John K. Nelson came up with similar figures in his study of the entire period from 1690 to the 1770s.61 Charles Bolton arrived at comparable figures for South Carolina.62 The lack of comprehensive cross-denominational studies for the colonial era or for the contemporary church makes it difficult to say whether this ten percent rate is significantly higher or lower than in other denominations or centuries.63 Bonomi’s observation that “in the modern Episcopal Church about eight percent of the ministers are deposed” is suggestive, however. Misconduct rates in the colonial Church of England may not have been very different from current ones.64 Short of further study, it seems best to remain with Nelson’s positive statement of the evidence: “Nine of every ten priests who served in Virginia between 1690 and 1776 apparently carried out their functions without violating seriously the norms of conduct and belief.”