Volume 3, Part 3, Ideology and Religion
Chapter 16, The Threat of the Anglican Bishops
During the first half of the 18th century, there were sporadic schemes to impose Anglican
bishops upon the American colonies. The schemes had been bitterly resented by all the non-Anglicans
in America, and even opposed by most of the Anglicans themselves, who were generally low
church and happy to be governing themselves free of English control. The schemes had died
down during the war with France, but even then, Bishop Thomas Secker, who had assumed
the post of Archbishop of Canterbury in 1758, quietly laid plans to revive the scheme as
as soon as the war was over. His installment was the occasion for the Reverend Samuel Johnson
of New York, a long-time advocate of an American episcopate, to join with a group of Anglican
ministers in New York and New Jersey to petition for this innovation. Secker replied with the
assurance that he had long had at heart the idea of American bishops. He added that the
The matter must remain in abeyance, but that the powerful Lord Halifax, President of the
Board of Trade, was enthusiastic over the scheme. As soon as the war was over, Secker
launched his campaign. The grand design for imperial assumption of power over the colonies
was well underway, Secker informed Johnson, and the time was therefore right for pushing
and the Project for American Bishops.
The imperialistic Duke of Bedford was, not surprisingly, quite willing, but Secker continued
in secrecy until plans could fructify.
It was in an atmosphere of fear and rumor engendered by these machinations that agitation
against an American bishopric resumed in the colonies.
The controversy burst to the fore in early 1763 when the great libertarian divine of
Massachusetts, Jonathan Mayhew, was provoked by an Anglican minister's spirited defense
of the Anglican society for preservation of the Gospel. The Reverend Mr. Mayhew's famous
reply, observations on the Charter, strongly attacked the SPG's long-standing and dangerous
Agitation for an American Episcopate. Against this scheme, Mayhew thundered, when we consider
her Church of England enormous hierarchy, ascending by various gradation from the dust
to the skies, and the threat that all of us will be taxed for the support of bishops and
their underlings. Can we avoid crying out? Will they never let us rest in peace? Is it
Is it not enough that they persecuted us out of the old world?
Will they pursue us into the new to convert us here, compassing sea and land to make us
proselytes?
What other new world remains as a sanctuary for us from their oppressions in case if we
need?
Where is the Columbus to pilot us to it before we are deluged in a flood of episcopacy?
Mayhew's stirring observations performed the function of intensifying and polarizing the
conflict, stirring interest in activity among his supporters, and drawing bitter replies
from several prominent Anglicans. Many of the replies called for a full-fledged Anglican
establishment, while a rebuttal pamphlet by Archbishop Secker tried to be more moderate
and to stress the simple administrative functions of American bishops.
Jonathan Mayhew was unimpressed.
Once they are here, Mayhew replied, the bishops will try to attain the power of their English
colleagues and ambition and avarice never want plausible pretexts to accomplish their
end.
A gradual plan for bishops was in the long run as grave a threat as the extreme one.
Indeed, Mayhew wisely commented, people are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once,
but gradually, by one encroachment after another, as it is found they are disposed to bear them.
Furthermore, Mayhew expressed great distrust of the revival of high Church-Tory principles
and Maxims, under the new king, George III.
Jonathan Mayhew's pamphlets in 1763 and 1764 on the Anglican Question had a profound effect
in rallying colonial opposition to an Episcopal scheme and in sowing distrust of and hostility
to English imperial projects.
The Treasurer of Massachusetts wrote of the unprecedented general approbation and applause
greeting Mayhew's observations.
John Adams, writing later of these events, testified to the importance of the controversy
that began with Mayhew's pamphlets.
It spread a universal alarm against the authority of Parliament.
It excited a general and a just apprehension that bishops and diocese and churches and
priests and tithes were to be imposed on us by parliament. It was known that neither
king nor ministry nor archbishops could appoint bishops in America without an act of parliament.
And if Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England with all its
creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies and tithes, and prohibit all other churches.
So influential were Mayhew's writings, indeed, that the conservative, Calvinist, Congregationalist,
who had been hostile to Mayhew's highly liberal views, now ranged alongside him and the other
so severe was the reaction that the frightened archbishop-secker was soon willing to call off the whole thing, but the damage had been done.
Furthermore, rumors tended to fly overseas of impending appointments of American bishops, thereby keeping America hostile and on the alert.
Meanwhile, irritations against church and state accumulated in America.
The Anglican governor of New York, James Delancey, refused to allow Presbyterians and Lutherans
to control their own property.
And as early as 1761, the Crown had prohibited the emigration from England of any school
School Teacher to New Hampshire, who was not an Anglican and certified by the Bishop of
London.