Rev. Samuel Seabury: St. Paul's Loyalist Rector and America's First Episcopal Bishop

The front of Samuel Seabury's pamphlet from the "Letters of a Westchester Farmer," late 1774, which attacked the Continental Congress and made him New York's most controversial Loyalist.

Samuel Seabury, a politically active and theologically conservative clergyman, was the Anglican rector of St. Paul's Church in Eastchester from 1766 to 1776, on the eve of the Revolution.

Background

• Born in Connecticut in 1729, son of another Samuel Seabury, a Yale-trained Congregationalist who became an Anglican rector at Hempstead, Long Island.
• Yale graduate in 1744, at 15; he began reading prayers at an Anglican parish in Huntington.
• 1752: sailed to Edinburgh to prepare for ordination, also studying medicine — at times much of his living came from practicing as a physician.
• Early posts: missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), the Anglican church's colonial missionary arm, at New Brunswick, New Jersey. In October 1756 he married Mary Hicks, daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant; they had six children, and their son Charles also became a clergyman.
• Jamaica, New York (1758): a sprawling parish covering today's Queens, with churches at Jamaica, Flushing and Newtown and many dissenters and Quakers. He tried to hold weekly services at all three, met resistance to his high church emphasis on the sacraments, quarreled with wealthy parishioners, and even had a public debt dispute with his father-in-law that led to his arrest.

St. Paul's

A transfer to lower Westchester — churches at Westchester Square (today's Bronx) and St. Paul's — came as relief. He was the fourth and last Church of England minister appointed there by the SPG.

• A skeptical town: lingering Presbyterianism, local Deists, and many who opposed any organized church; even regular congregants were reluctant to take communion, which Seabury put down to fear of divine punishment but which also reflected old anti-Catholic instincts.
• An unfinished church: in June 1767 he noted the town had "just completed the roof of a large, well built stone church, on which they have expended, they say 700 pounds currency" — today's building. Funds ran short, and he failed to raise more.
• A wider stage: with income from a private school on top of the local church tax, he turned outward, becoming a leading Anglican voice in religiously diverse lower New York and arguing for a colonial Anglican bishop, so ministers need not sail to Britain for ordination. That campaign failed, but it sharpened his skill as a pamphleteer.

The Westchester Farmer

His greatest historical role came in 1774–75. Provoked by the First Continental Congress's boycotts, his "Farmer" essays — anonymous, though everyone knew the author — warned that abandoning established authority for revolution and unknown leaders endangered life and property. Part of a pamphlet duel with young Alexander Hamilton, they made him notorious among Patriots; militia arrested him in 1775 and briefly jailed him in New Haven.

Flight

• Patriot militia challenged his prayers for the King. From April 1776, as New York braced for a British attack, American troops passing through insulted and threatened him, and county committees watched him.
• After the British landed at Brooklyn in August, several local Tories were arrested. On Sunday morning, September 1, helped by friendly parishioners, Seabury escaped by boat from near today's Whitestone Bridge and reported to General William Howe, declaring loyalty to George III.
• He guided Howe's invasion of Westchester in October 1776 with his knowledge of local roads — likely pointing out the nearly finished St. Paul's as a hospital site — and accompanied the army at White Plains.
• In New York City for the rest of the war, he was chaplain to a Loyalist hospital and a Loyalist regiment of Westchester men, and practiced as a physician.

First American bishop

In 1783, about to join thousands of Loyalists going into exile in Canada, Seabury changed course after a chance conversation about rebuilding the church. Connecticut Anglicans needed a bishop, and the Connecticut-born Seabury was their choice.

• London refused: as an American citizen he couldn't swear the required oath to the King, and his support came from Connecticut clergy, not the state, which didn't recognize the Episcopal church as official.
• Scotland agreed: the Scottish Episcopal Church, long independent of the Church of England, consecrated him at Aberdeen on November 14, 1784 — the first American Episcopal bishop.

He died in 1795.

Sources

Based on "Rev. Samuel Seabury: St. Paul's controversial minister of the era of the American Revolution," St. Paul's Church National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.