Religious rivalry lit up the American Revolution
In a rare piece of cheery news, the New York Times reported last December that the reconstruction of the Notre Dame Cathedral was on track to meet President Emmanuel Macron’s ambitious timetable. Millions of people had watched with horror on April 15, 2019, when a fire ripped through the 860-year-old Parisian landmark, destroying its roof and spire.
The Notre-Dame fire echoed the diary of Captain Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, on September 21, 1776, in New York City: “The appearance of the Trinity Church, when completely in flames was a very grand sight, for the Spire being entirely framed of wood and covered with Shingles, a lofty Pyramid of fire appeared, and as soon as the Shingles were burnt away the frame appeared with every separate piece of timber burning, until the principal timbers were burnt through, when the whole fell with a great noise.”
My recent book, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution, explores the social, political, and military background of this historic fire. The Great Fire destroyed hundreds of homes—one-fifth of New York City. Rebellious Americans almost certainly set the fire, in order to deprive the British of a winter headquarters and naval base, strike at the property of wealthy Loyalists, and strike at the Church of England. Religious motivations, which I have explored in other writings, were vital to my understanding of the Great Fire.
Trinity Church was the most prominent structure in New York: It could seat two thousand people and its spire was 180 feet high. The Anglican Church, supported in part by funds from England, was (and still is) also a major Manhattan landowner, with extensive holdings between Broadway and the Hudson River. Working-class families signed ninety-nine-year leases for lots on church lands and constructed modest wooden dwellings in the shadows of Broadway’s brick mansions. New York City (along with three of its surrounding counties) was one of the only places in the northern colonies with an Anglican church establishment.
The bulk of George Washington’s army in 1776 were Congregationalists from New England. These “Independent” New Englanders were predisposed to hold an animus toward the Church of England. During the rebel occupation of New York, armed men interrupted a service at Trinity Church because its ministers continued to pray for the king’s health. The family of the church’s rector, Samuel Auchmuty, later claimed that the rebels threatened to display him in his pulpit with “his Ears cut off, his Nose slit, to be tarr’d, & feather’d.” He fled before they could make good on their threat. New Englanders were also shocked to discover that the city’s houses of prostitution operated out of the so-called “Holy Ground ” behind Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Cathedral, on land owned by the local Anglican churches. After a summer of harassing Loyalists and threatening to burn New York City, the rebel army finally fled on September 15, when the British army landed at Kip’s Bay and took (or rather retook) Manhattan.
The fire began sometime after midnight, six days later. Although witnesses disputed the exact course of the fire, some of them saw Trinity Church catch fire at almost the exact time that other fires broke out. As the fire raged over the next twelve hours, the British garrison and local civilians were able to save St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was further up Broadway, but not Trinity Church.
British officers and Loyalists were quick to accuse New Englanders of targeting Trinity Church and the church lands west of Broadway. There was plenty of evidence that the rebels set the fire deliberately. The fire apparently broke out in several places at once. Witnesses uncovered caches of combustible materials and a trail of gunpowder, and British soldiers caught people in the act—carrying incendiary material and setting buildings on fire. Observers were also suspicious because Washington had previously ordered that all church bells in town be removed and melted into cannon. When the fire broke out, the city’s residents couldn’t sound the alarm, so firefighting efforts were unable to stop the spread of flames.
The civilians, officers, soldiers, and saboteurs who burned New York City may have been acting on orders from the Continental Army, but if so, any such orders are lost to historians. It’s possible that the incendiaries acted on their own in defiance of Washington’s orders. Regardless, because the Continental Army had evacuated the city six days before the fire, Washington was able to claim he knew nothing about what had taken place.
While we can only guess at the motivations of the incendiaries, it would be odd to ignore the long-standing rivalry between New England Congregationalists and New York Presbyterians (a newspaper called them “that detestable Fraternity of Fanaticks”) on the one hand, and the Church of England on the other. “It really seems the conflagration was directed against the interest of the Church,” wrote William Tryon, New York’s last royal governor. The Reverend Charles Inglis echoed him: “The church corporation has suffered prodigiously, as was evidently intended.” Ambrose Serle, a pious Anglican who served as secretary to the British admiral, maintained that the rebellion was “a religious War” that had “been fomented by Presbyterian Preachers, with a View to the Extirpation of the Church of England from the Colonies.” One of those Presbyterian preachers, a rebel chaplain named Philip Vickers Fithian, agreed that New York had been “set on Fire by some of our zealous Whiggs.”
The ministers of Trinity Church estimated its losses between £25,000 and £40,000, not including the lost rental income from at least two hundred tenants. One described the ruined Trinity Church as “awful & majestic in Ruins, silently reproaching the infernal monsters by whose hands it fell for their impious rage.”
When the Reverend Auchmuty returned to New York, he was “shocked on viewing the Ruins of so great a Part of the City . . . Especially those of Trinity Church, that ancient and once venerable Edifice! The Sight drew Floods of Tears from him.” His health decayed daily after the shock of losing his church, parsonage, and worldly possessions; he died in March of the following year at the age of fifty-six.
St. Paul’s Cathedral remains one of the very few pre-Revolutionary structures still standing in Manhattan. In 2001, rescue workers used the building as a place of refuge after another fiery attack on New York City.
The Great Fire of New York speaks to those of us with an interest in American religious history. The American Revolution was a political and military conflict—yet we also need to understand the religious rivalries that bolstered the ideological commitments and emotional responses of people on both sides. Religious edifices were a potent target for the radical elements of the revolutionary movement, just as the British destroyed the meetinghouses of Dissenting Protestants. The shock over such acts deepened the enmity of the Anglo-American civil war.
New Yorkers constructed a new Trinity Church over the ruins of the first, and early historians of the Revolution did their best to forget the Great Fire. Yet New York’s first Great Fire, in the year of the nation’s birth, holds lessons well worth remembering.
Benjamin L. Carp teaches history at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Image: Franz Xaver Habermann – New York Public Library Digital Collection. Public Domain