The Shaking of the Anglican Establishment in Colonial Virginia

Exploring the gradual erosion of Anglican establishment support in colonial Virginia requires an understanding of settlement patterns and geography. Knowledge of religious sects and appreciation of the appeal of evangelism, a religion of the heart emphasizing a personal relationship with God, also helps. Colonial laws, events in England, and colonial church government make a natural backdrop for the discussion. Unfortunately, detailing every aspect of the colonial church is not possible in any brief analysis. Therefore, the most advantageous study will succinctly focus on the major themes to set up much of the scene for the eventual disestablishment of the Anglican Church during the Revolutionary Era. Many factors upset the church establishment including Quaker dissent, the Toleration Act implications, settlement of the Shenandoah Valley by a non-English population, and the Presbyterian revival in Hanover County. Not only would dissent affect the establishment but the Anglican Church’s reputation would weaken popular support for its official status and finances. The accumulation of factors hostile to the church establishment was much of the problem for continuing tax-supported orthodoxy, including the proliferation of dissenters, religious diversification at the local level from immigration and the Great Awakening, and lack of Anglican Church foresight.

The Anglican establishment in Virginia did not always exist in law and its definition evolved over time. At first, colonizers favored the idea of adopting the Church of England, also called the Anglican Church, because formal backing could help the colony persevere through the early years. Through church endorsement, the company sought favor for the risky business venture. Later, an English royal charter replaced the company as the colonial Virginia government and slowly the character of the establishment also evolved. Many of the statutory changes regarding the church were legalistic distinctions. For example, before 1619, it was an obligation to worship in accord with the Church of England. After 1619, establishment meant the officially sanctioned Anglican denomination became part of the governmental structure. Political committees, named vestries, managed ecclesiastical affairs in local districts, called parishes, probably before 1636 in Virginia. Vestries probably formed because the colonial church needed to operate independently of the unresponsive church in England. Increasingly, in response to English indifference to colonial religious affairs, the colony established the church in Virginia separately from the church in England. Consequently, the advantage was not any longer for the Church of England, but for the Anglican Church in Virginia.¹

In addition to evolving legal distinctions, political events in England had a profound effect on the nature of the established church in colonial Virginia. At first, the Puritan Revolution in England caused the Virginian colonial government to reiterate and extend adherence to the King and Anglicanism. For example, Virginia instituted stronger laws requiring use of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, objectionable to Puritans for reasons including its reverence for the King. Virginia finally deferred to Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan Revolutionary English head of state, in 1651. Cromwell granted the colony autonomous rule consolidating an independent Virginian church tradition. The House of Burgesses, Virginia’s colonial legislature, became the supreme political authority because it could appoint the Governor while Cromwell ruled England in place of a King. Consequently, the legislature became the chief authority on religious issues. Lawmakers devolved control of church affairs to the parishes. The nearly unanimous monopoly of Anglicans in every parish assured continued support for the establishment. The colonial church, already without a resident bishop, had no connection to the Church of England that the Governor previously supplied. After the Restoration of the English monarchy, church adherence and political submission became synonymous, meaning that acceptance of the colonial church equaled loyalist sympathies.²

While the establishment united its future with acceptance of the crown, it also kept its independent character. Appointed by the Bishop of London as the first commissary to Virginia to reform and reinforce the colonial church, James Blair found many obstacles to reorganization. Earlier Blair founded The College of William and Mary to develop a formidable colonial clergy. Blair’s Plan of 1699 proposed eight points for the establishment’s improvement. For example, he advocated redistricting parishes, as some were too small to adequately pay minister’s salaries and some too big for one minister to oversee. Observers often credited poor quality clergy with the expectation of low wages and job insecurity, the latter because vestries retained the right to dismiss ministers. Other problems addressed in the eight points included a need for good books, lack of sufficient homes and land for clergy, and repeatedly the idea that the colonial church government structure bred an incompetent and immoral clergy.³

Commissary Blair recognized the most commonly attributed problem for the continuance and maintenance of the establishment – the substandard quality of the ministers. Modern historian Patricia Bonomi also attributes many of the problems to the church government. The problem resulted from the shift to the vestries and away from the influence of the Church of England in America, and particularly in Virginia. Originally, vestrymen faced an annual election. In 1662, vestries gained the statutory authority to fill vacancies on the board as needed. The result was that vestries became self-perpetuating political bodies. Bonomi credits Bacon’s Rebellion with empowering colonials to resist consolidation of the ecclesiastical government in Virginia. The standard history of the popular uprising in 1676 by Nathaniel Bacon against the royal Governor is that the colonials revolted because the government refused to protect the frontiersmen from Indian raids, high taxes, and the low tobacco price. Bacon’s Rebellion, as Bonomi sees it, prepared local leaders to realize the power to resist the first real effort of the church in England (after 1680) to actively enforce colonial submission to ecclesiastical dictates. Furthermore, the self-perpetuating feature of the vestries would continue despite colonial legislative attempts to require elections. The vestry is so important because it retained the power throughout the years of accepting a minister, removing a minister, and setting taxation to pay for a minister. Additionally, colonials were adamantly against the idea of ecclesiastical courts to enforce conformity and admonish the ministers of low repute.⁴ Many argue, including Bonomi and historian Arthur P. Middleton, that overwhelmingly the clergy was of good character and ability. However, the perception during the Colonial Era of many, from Blair to the dissenters of the backcountry, was that the ministers were immoral and the worst England had to offer.

There was a clear disconnect between the elite of Tidewater Virginia, in the coastal areas of the east, and the backcountry frontiersmen during the Colonial Era that extended to perceptions of the clergy. The backcountry would provide the largest area for dissenters to populate in an expanding Virginia. Indeed, part of the problem that Virginia faced was that the colonial church establishment was difficult to maintain in the far-flung and vast counties of the west. Two major ethic groups – the Scots-Irish and the Pennsylvania Germans, populated the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding region. Neither the Scots-Irish nor the Pennsylvania Germans traditionally followed the Church of England and neither wanted Anglican tyranny. Originally, both groups came in large numbers to the Colony of Pennsylvania seeking religious freedom and economic success. Unfortunately, both groups found problems such as a lack of available land on the Pennsylvania frontier and that the cost of land was increasing as a matter of policy and, therefore, moved. Some Pennsylvania German historians explain that people from Pennsylvania initially found little resistance from the Indian natives because of their reverence for the honesty of Pennsylvania’s founding proprietor, William Penn. Natives did not get along very well with Virginians.⁵ Virginia political leaders opened the Shenandoah Valley to settlement by Scots-Irish and Germans because of the need for a buffer between the French and natives, and the expansion of the largely English regions of Virginia.⁶ Governor William Gooch also had a more insidious motive – Maryland and the proprietor of Virginia’s Northern Neck, Baron Fairfax, both claimed the Shenandoah Valley and Gooch wanted the settler’s money for Virginia.⁷

The primary problem with the arrival of a non-English population in the Shenandoah Valley was that there was little, if any, genuine adherence to the Church of England’s establishment. Ironically, the church Germans, Lutherans and Reformed, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians would take advantage of the establishment, since, by law, vestries had to operate in the parishes of the Valley. As Pennsylvania German historians note, many German and Swiss settlers came to the Valley without pastors or church government and the Anglican Church offered a ready-built establishment that many initially joined. Most of the Pennsylvania Germans listed as Anglicans later identified with the Lutheran Church once it organized. Germans did not heavily populate the central and northern part of the Valley until the Revolutionary Era, but the earliest German settlers first arrived in 1726 with Adam Miller, a Lutheran mentioned on the Anglican lists, before the Scots-Irish settled further south.⁸ Sectarian Germans on the other hand, primarily represented in the Valley during the Colonial Era by the Mennonites, did not need a formal church organization because of the nature of such sects. Scots-Irish Presbyterians settled predominately in the Southern portion of the Valley alongside a few Germans. By fortune of having settled in large numbers before the Germans in the rest of the Valley, the Scots-Irish were able to use the establishment cleverly during the Colonial Era.

Nelson Alexander, a local historian, adds some colorful insight into the religious activities of Scots-Irish Presbyterian settlers of the upper (southern, upstream) section of the Valley. Unlike the Tidewater, dissenters west of the Blue Ridge Mountains found religious toleration. Governor Gooch granted an exemption for the dissenters in the Valley area from licensing dissenting ministers and registering dissenting houses of worship procedures. Additionally, the settlers were exempt from attendance of the Anglican Church and for 10 years of colony taxes. In exchange, the Scots-Irish and other settlers defended the frontier of Virginia from the attacks of natives. The Counties of Fredrick and Augusta formed from Orange in 1738. Each new county had one parish with Anglican services. Many Anglican services in the Valley had Presbyterian preachers in the pulpit. The parish in Augusta County organized in 1747 with twelve elected vestrymen. The Augusta County vestry operated similarly to parishes in the Tidewater by implementing moral codes and performing many things required of courts today, such as providing guardians for orphans. However, most of the vestrymen in Augusta were Presbyterians belonging to the Presbyterian Augusta Stone or Tinkling Spring churches (see Appendix). Governor Gooch dissolved the vestry and required new elections, which produced the same results, and then capitulated as the government of Virginia recognized it could not effectively enforce its laws in that region. Upon the recommendation of the Governor, Rev. John Hindman an ordained Anglican, who earlier started some of the Presbyterian churches in the area, became the first rector of the Augusta parish in 1747.

The Germans that settled northern Augusta County, in present-day Rockingham and Page Counties, tolerated the Scots-Irish Presbyterian takeover of the church establishment and enjoyed religious freedom. Furthermore, as aforementioned, many German Lutherans joined the established church. Religious cooperation between the Scots-Irish and German settlers is apparent from the realization that the Lutherans and presumably the Reformed Germans attended Anglican services given by Presbyterian clergy. Furthermore, Pennsylvania German historians of the Valley documented numerous ways that the Lutherans and Reformed Germans depended on each other. In the Revolutionary Era and beyond, Lutherans and Reformed Germans would unite to oppose other church German denominations including the Methodists and United Brethren.⁹ Obviously, the church Germans in colonial Virginia were potential allies of the Anglican establishment because of common dissenting enemies. An example of one sect the Anglican establishment and the church Germans both detested was the Moravians. In 1747, during the evangelic Great Awakening, Governor Gooch denounced the New Light (evangelic) Presbyterians, Methodists, and Moravians in a proclamation.¹⁰ Historian Aaron Spencer Fogleman offers a plausible reasoning that explains why the Moravians never got a hold in Virginia. Fogleman argues that when the Moravians started to settle in the Valley, the Lutherans prevented the advance with an environment that was intensely antagonistic to the Moravians.¹¹ It is entirely reasonable to conclude that Lutheran alliances kept the Moravians out of Virginia.

Lutheran resistance to the Moravians could serve as a model for a means to prevent the entrance of dissenting religious ideologies in colonial Virginia. Simultaneously, the Anglican Church establishment of Virginia acted as a powerful model for the necessary ingredients for the failure of keeping dissenters outside the boundaries of the colony. For example, the Quaker dissenters were in Virginia many years before the settlement of the Shenandoah Valley by Scots-Irish and Pennsylvania Germans. The obvious question is, how were the Quakers able to persevere where the Moravians forsook the colony altogether? Warren M. Billings, a historian interested in the letters written by the Quaker George Wilson, notes that Quaker missionaries first went to Virginia in the 1650s. The reason why Quakers were such a threat to the Anglican establishment was the inherent non-compliance with authority. For example, the Quakers (like many of the German and Swiss Mennonites mentioned earlier) did not take oaths and were pacifists. In the early 1660s, Virginian colonial courts and officials tried to eliminate Quakers from Virginia. However, by 1663 the Governor would abandon the effort after a complete failure to accomplish the objective. George Wilson is the only known Quaker who died because of his religion in the early 1660s. Wilson appealed to many authorities from the King to local political figures, using the Bible and often mentioned how the authorities should “cease to do evill, and Learne to doe unto us, as would hath us doe unto you.” In one of his writings, Wilson takes each part of the legislation aimed at Quakers and argues against each. For example, his response to one section begins, “Take notis all majestrats and people, that this is Contrary to the Kings declaration, where in it is Said, that no man Shall be troubled nor molested, for his oppinion or Religion; (or words fully to that affect).”¹² Rather than accepting Wilson’s premises, the established church failed to quell the Quakers because of its inbuilt weaknesses.

When Virginia incorporated the Toleration Act of 1689 into the colonial church establishment laws in 1699, the law severely hampered Anglican Church efforts to maintain religious authority. Quakers had three or four congregations and a few Presbyterian congregations existed near Norfolk and on the Eastern Shore around 1700. In 1699, French Huguenots, that fled the revocation of the Edict of Nantes protecting Protestants, could now move to Virginia, with a separate parish formed in 1700 for Huguenot clergy. The French Protestants also had the benefit of avoiding parish taxes for the first ten years after settlement. The law required compulsory church attendance in dissenting churches for dissenters. The law required dissenting churches to have licenses and qualified ministers. There was not much of an expansion of the forces of dissent until the influx of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Pennsylvania Germans into the Valley.¹³ Even without the Toleration Act, the Anglican Church establishment could not keep dissent limited. After the Toleration Act, the forces necessary for disestablishment were probably already in place. However, there were many other factors yet to surface.

Scots-Irish Presbyterians probably threatened Virginia’s Anglican establishment more than Germans did because Presbyterians quickly introduced an evangelical revival against religious authorities, the Great Awakening, to Virginia. Writing in 1930, Historian Wesley Gewehr portrayed the Great Awakening in Virginia as a dispute between the tidewater and the backcountry. Gewehr argues that the Scots-Irish were devoted Whigs – committed to complete religious liberty and despising church hierarchy. A tradition of pietism, favoring personal relationships with God, meant that the gospel as taught by ministers of the Great Awakening would appeal to Pennsylvania Germans. However, Gewehr maintains that the Scots-Irish immigration and the revival in Hanover County were the two important events in Virginia’s Great Awakening. The Synod of Philadelphia asked Governor Gooch for permission to send Presbyterian ministers to the Scots-Irish in Virginia and Gooch replied in 1738 that it was legal so long as the ministers followed the Toleration Act procedures. From around 1736 on, the Presbyterian Church sent missionaries to tend to the congregations on both sides of the Blue Ridge Mountains.¹⁴

John Craig was the first Presbyterian minister to settle in Virginia. Craig served the Augusta Stone and Tinkling Spring congregations, among others. When Rev. Samuel Davies came to preach in Hanover County in the eastern Virginia Piedmont, there were only four other Presbyterian ministers in Virginia, and only one other than Davies, Rev. Samuel Black in Albemarle County, lived east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Missionaries came from both the Old Light Synod of Philadelphia and the New Light Synod of New York regularly. However, the four Presbyterian ministers in the western part of the colony were Old Light Presbyterians and, as such, not Great Awakening advocates. New Light evangelism moved among the Scots-Irish Presbyterians in the Valley from missionaries.¹⁵ Historian Marilyn Westerkamp argues that the inner-Presbyterian Great Awakening struggle was between Orthodox Calvinists disagreeing on the question if people should seek conversion. Calvinists believe in the salvation of only the elect predestined by God. Westerkamp sees the Presbyterian revival as an attempt to do one hundred years of religious experience in a few years. The awakening was part of a larger effort of the Scots-Irish to accomplish a perception of the Reformed tradition of John Knox.¹⁶ The Great Awakening began as a fight between church factions and only affected churches with licensed ministers and a church structure,¹⁷ as opposed to the radical sects like the Moravians, Mennonites, Quakers, and others. As a result, its greatest harm was to establishments.

The recognition that the Great Awakening was a dispute between the tidewater and the backcountry is an important part of the scene. Historian Richard R. Beeman shows how Lunenburg County, in Southside Virginia, is an example of the problems inherent with frontier counties because the vestry and court lacked stature and status and because of the amount of area originally encompassed by the county. Western Hanover County, in the eastern Piedmont, also had many signs of a frontier community. Historian Rodger M. Payne explains how the Presbyterian Great Awakening in Virginia was not a contest between the backcountry farmer and the Tidewater gentry. Instead, Payne argues that at least some of the gentry in the backcountry supported the Presbyterian movement. Payne follows the families of Joseph Shelton and Isaac Winston to show how some people involved in the early Presbyterian Church in Hanover County were among the elite. Conventional interpretations of the revival in Hanover County, while part of the explanation, fail to consider the ongoing broad social upheaval that settling the Piedmont accompanied and do not explain the presence of the Sheltons and Winston.¹⁸

Rev. Samuel Davies received permission from the Governor in 1748 to build three churches in Hanover County. Payne maintains that if the Louisa congregation (Louisa County formed from western Hanover in 1742 because of added population pressures) was representative, then a notable number of the dissenters were among the prosperous. Vast demographical changes occurred in Virginia when the New Light Presbyterian option formed. Gradually, the former Virginian frontier in the Piedmont became an agricultural power in the colony. The new politico-economical elite in the Piedmont, which the Sheltons and Winston embodied, descended from Tidewater planters. The institutions of the Piedmont came from the Tidewater but the translation lost much of the establishment Anglicanism. The influence of the New Light evangelism in the Piedmont mirrored the influences of the Scottish Presbyterian merchants purchasing tobacco from people like the Sheltons. Payne’s impressive argument is that the Hanover revival became a satellite of the international Calvinist Great Awakening and Scottish piety.¹⁹

In addition to the economic rivalry between the Tidewater’s tobacco economy supported by Anglicanism and the Piedmont’s supported by Presbyterianism, there was also the element of rebellion against Tidewater parents. Many of the New Light ministers and congregants in Hanover County were between eighteen and thirty-four years old, with thirty-four probably as an outlier. The competition was probably between generations just as it was between economic factions. Payne states that studies of eighteenth-century Virginian families bear out the idea of a rivalry between generations. Many children felt that the inheritance of land only in the Piedmont meant exile from the Tidewater and resented Tidewater authority as a result. The appeal of evangelism to the descendants of Tidewater planters was the empowerment it allowed – an ability to strive for conversion separate from parental control.²⁰ The traditional explanations also shed some light on the perceptions of Piedmont dissenters including the lack of appeal of the stiff Anglican Church compared to the evangelical alternative. Furthermore, the belief in the immorality and the incompetence of the clergy was pervasive.

Middleton denounces the stereotype of the colonial Virginian parson, or Anglican minister, as anything except pristine. Part of the problem, according to Middleton’s analysis, is that the perception developed from a puritanical and evangelistic evaluation of the Anglican clergy.²¹ However, it really is irrelevant if the ministers were corrupt or if only the common people saw them as such, except to see if the seeds were more within the clergy or the people. Rhys Isaac, whose historical work on the Virginia establishment encompasses a vast scope, argues instead that the Virginia establishment was the vestry and not the clergy. Isaac’s work, while it adds to our understanding of the colonial church establishment, does not fundamentally address the problem. Less than superior candidates for the clergy could not be the only answer, as the problem existed long before the establishment crisis. Isaac recognizes the only threatening dissenters to the established church were the evangelicals, showing that the problem was not dissent, but opposition detrimental to the political order.²² However, simply the matter of taxation, upon the end of the ten-year exemption, could eventually convince other dissenters that the tax-supported establishment was a problem. Ultimately, multiplication of religious options fractured the elite support for the establishment formed for and by the Tidewater planters and the expansion of Virginia made conformity impossible to dictate.

Devereux Jarratt, later an Anglican minister tolerant of unorthodoxy, wrote an autobiography lending insight into the backcountry. Jarratt carried the Presbyterian Great Awakening to the Anglicans, believing in Calvinistic doctrines of the depravity of human nature and that good works were insufficient and the characteristically revival doctrines of a personal and experimental faith.²³ Born in the early 1730s in New Kent County, Jarratt said of his early years, “I so totally neglected the means of religion, that during those years, I do not remember, I ever retired for private prayer, or, in reality, prayed at all.” Jarratt paints the Albemarle County frontier he moved to as a place without religion or civility. However, Presbyterian missionaries influence Jarratt’s religious life as he heard the sermons of Rev. John Flavel read to him every night by one host, whom he wanted to impress, where he stayed part of the time he maintained a school there. Perhaps Jarratt’s justifications for becoming an Anglican minister, instead of a Presbyterian, are the most interesting aspects of his life. For example, Jarratt decided there was not much difference between the Anglican and Presbyterian doctrines and that prejudice against dissenters implied he would have more influence on the establishment and the people from the inside.²⁴

The disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Virginia would have to wait for the Revolutionary Era, however, with the Presbyterian-taught Anglican ministers Jarratt of Albemarle, Hindman of Augusta, and possibly others, the potential for a future schism in the establishment increased. Great Awakening evangelism appealed to the changing scene as Tidewater planter descendants moved into the Piedmont and Southside. Many of the new arrivals to the Piedmont and Southside found New Light Presbyterianism complemented trade patterns and it was refreshing since questions of purpose followed the prosperity of wealth. Jarratt was the exception in the establishment and that lack of Anglican foresight meant that the church did not expand. Additionally, Scots-Irish and German denominations and sects would never allow the establishment any more than a token presence in the Valley. Indeed, the Toleration Act allowed the immigration of countless Protestants of various strains into the colony and offered a ready coalition to resist tax-supported Anglicanism. The very decentralization of the establishment system allowed pockets of dissenters to co-opt or otherwise undermine the vestry’s Anglicanism. Dissenting religions also promoted a disregard for the colonial authorities. And the establishment was too concerned with serving the Tidewater planters to recognize early enough that there was a revolution occurring around it. The expansion of the sheer size of Virginia and the numbers of religious options made the potential for disestablishment very real as much as the historical association with royal loyalty. What factors would finally bring the establishment down would have to await the American Revolution.