Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

grand design for an American establishment intertwined with the English
state and church, Sherlock immediately began to press the king for an American
bishop. Sherlock was repeatedly turned down by the shrewd officials
of the Crown, under pressure of the influential English Dissenters. Particularly
active in rejecting the proposal for Anglican bishops were the great
Whig leaders, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Hardwicke, and Horatio Walpole.
The liberal Horatio Walpole expressed the shrewd sentiments of the Whigs
by warning that such a far-reaching scheme would really provoke and alienate
the American colonists, Dissenters and even Anglicans alike.
Sherlock was joined in his agitation, however, by Bishops Seeker and
Cutler, and Sherlock raised the problem to a new plane by deciding to
employ virtual blackmail upon his American communicants. For in an effort
to force the Anglicans in America to demand a resident bishop, Seeker
virtually refused to exercise any of his jurisdiction over the church in
America. Pursued by successive bishops of London, however, this policy only
left Anglicans in the colonies with even less English control and supervision
than they had experienced before.
Furthermore, Seeker's methods aroused the ire of Anglicans, especially in
the South, and particularly alarmed the New England Puritans and other
Dissenters who saw the specter of an Anglican establishment from which
so many of them had fled. As early as 1750, the liberal Reverend Jonathan
Mayhew warned that "people have no security against being unmercifully
priest-ridden but by keeping all imperious bishops, and other clergymen who
love to lord it over God's heritage, from getting their feet into the stirrup
at all." Mayhew trenchantly warned that "in plain English, there seems to
have been an impious bargain struck up betwixt the sceptre and the surplice
for enslaving both bodies and souls of men."
The agitation over possible bishops in America died down during the
distractions of the war with France, only to flame up again when the war
was over.
In addition to the specific problem of the bishops, general Anglican
encroachments on religious liberty exerted a significant impact on politics
and opinion in New York. That colony, where Anglicans were aiming at
an establishment, found a great champion of religious liberty in William
Livingston, of the leading landed family of New York. As a student at
Yale, Livingston had been influenced by the English rationalist liberal writings
of John Locke and the Independent Whig rather than by Calvinist
orthodoxy. The Independent Whig, written in the early 1720s, was the
great arsenal of argument for religious liberty and against establishment,
written by the English journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. In
late 1752, Livingston and his friends launched the publication of a weekly
paper, The Independent Reflector, dedicated to opposing establishment and
consciously modeled after Trenchard and Gordon's Independent Whig. The
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