This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

THE CRISIS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 45implicated and involved in the old system. In every colony where the Church ofEngland had been established before 1776, the denomination was quickly strippedof its privileged position, as revolutionary governments and new state constitutionsterminated the tax-based financial support on which it had traditionallydepended. Ironically, in those places where Anglican support for the revolutionarycause was the strongest, the denomination had also been the most firmly entrenchedbefore the war and thus lost the most in material terms in the late 1770s.Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina suspended the payment of salaries toAnglican clergy in 1776, and Georgia and South Carolina followed suit in 1777and 1778 respectively. And in 1777 the act that had established the Church ofEngland in the New York City area was repealed. While several of those coloniescontinued to offer general support to all Protestant churches until the mid-1780s,Anglicans no longer held any advantage over rival denominations such as theBaptists and Presbyterians.Although Congregationalists rather than Anglicans faced the main challengeof disestablishment in the New England states, the outcome of the war still didlittle to advance the position of the Church of England there. On the one hand,the legal status of Anglicanism vis-à-vis the various state governments in NewEngland remained officially unchanged in the 1780s: Anglicans (along with Baptists,Methodists, and others) were simply recognized as official dissenters fromthe truncated state religious establishments that Massachusetts, Connecticut, andNew Hampshire continued to maintain. On the other hand, the financial supportand supervision that Anglican clergy had received from London during the colonialera abruptly came to an end with the arrival of peace. Because the SPGcharter did not allow the funding of missions outside the British empire, all clergy,loyalist and patriot alike, lost their stipends after Great Britain officially recognizedAmerican independence in 1783. Despite complaints from a number ofclergy, who felt betrayed by the church and government to whom they had remainedloyal throughout a very perilous and uncertain time, the policies of theSPG were not altered in any way to accommodate the tenuous position of Anglicansin New England. 44Although exact figures are not available, approximately 80,000 loyalists leftthe 13 American colonies during the revolutionary era. Most emigrated to theMaritimes and to other parts of Canada, while some went to the West Indies, toAfrica, and to Great Britain. 45 The fact that so many loyalists moved to the Maritimeprovinces not only doubled the total population of the region but thereaftersignificantly strengthened the position of the Church of England in Canada.Charles Inglis, an SPG missionary and outspoken advocate of an American episcopate,abandoned his position at Trinity Church in New York in 1783 and fledto London. Thanks to his political and ecclesiastical connections in England, hewas later chosen to be the bishop of Nova Scotia, thus becoming (in 1787) thefirst colonial bishop of the Church of England. Although the Nova Scotia legislatureformally established the Church of England, opposition from other Protestantsprevented a full recreation of the British model. As a result, Inglis was