The Presbyterian Tricentenniel, 1706-2006

by George M. Apperson

In 1706, on a date now lost, an American Presbytery met for the first time. The initial pages of the minutes are missing and when the surviving manuscripts were gathered in 1841, William M. Engels, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly and editor of the Board of Publication, saw that they were, “in danger of perishing.” The first surviving page is captioned Sederunt 2d. 10 bris. 27, with the ordination of John Boyd set for “the next Lord’s day, the 29th inst.” His examination was finished on the 27th when he preached a “popular” sermon on John 1:12 and “gave satisfaction as to his skill in the languages and answered extemporary questions….” Boyd was ordained on Sunday the 29th in the public meetinghouse, “before a numerous assembly.”

This is a partial record of a called meeting of Presbytery in Philadelphia. But in 1706 two Sundays fell on the 29th, September and December in the Julian calendar, in use in Britain and her colonies until 1752. For 1706, events point to December.

Recalling a curious fact of history, the Gregorian calendar in use today was initiated by Gregory XIII in 1582. Protestant Britain abhorred Gregory who advocated deposing Queen Elizabeth and proclaimed a thanksgiving for the massacre of some 70,000 French Protestants in 1572. Prejudice outweighed the utility of a calendar reformed on scientific principles, replacing the old version inaugurated by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C.E.

In 1706 Presbyterians began inter-colonial meetings free from outside ecclesiastical or political control, substantially prior to any other American church body. Three ministers were present at the called meeting, Francis Makemie of Virginia, Jedidiah Andrews of Philadelphia and John Hampton, newly licensed in Maryland. Makemie, Hampton and Boyd were graduates of the University of Glasgow. Andrews graduated from Harvard College. Makemie and his associates, with university educations, held ideas shaped by revolutionary concepts emerging in the chaotic intellectual and political events of contemporary Europe.

Makemie is the only minister involved in Presbyterian action in 1706-1707 for whom we have significant records. His books present his theological and social concepts but contain nothing autobiographical. A few letters survive with comments on his career. Lord Cornbury, governor of New York, who ordered his arrest for preaching without a license, said that he and Hampton intended to “spread their Pernicious Doctrine and Principles, to the great disturbance of the Church by Law Established, and of the Government of this Province.” Cotton Mather, a Congregational minister of Boston, wrote after his death, “That Brave man, Mr. Makemie, after a famous trial at N.York, bravely triumphed over the Act of Uniformity, and the other penal laws for the Church of England,” adding, “The Non-Conformist Religion and interest, is through the blessing of God on the agency of that Excellent person, likely to prevail mightily in the Southern colonies.”

Few of Makemie’s letters survive but two days after the second Presbytery met in 1707, he wrote to Benjamin Coleman, a Boston minister, ordained in London in 1699 by Presbyterian who were now providing two years’ financial support for John Hampton and George McNish who came with Makemie when he returned from England in 1705. Referring to his imprisonment, he warned, “penal laws are invading our American sanctuary, without the least regard to the Toleration [Act of 1689]. Makemie was about to leave for Virginia but was compelled to return for a final trial in New York, “which will be very troublesome and expensive.” He told Coleman that seven ministers attended the second Presbytery but we do not know how many were present for the first meeting.

Frances Makemie monument,
Accomack County, Verginia. Erected
by the presbyterian Historical
Society, 1908. A bronze replica
replaced it in 2000, provided by the
Francis Makemie Society.

Numerous documents relating to Makemie are preserved in the court records of Accomack County, Virginia, where he lived from 1687 until his death in 1707. Makemie appears as a successful businessman, aggressively acquiring land, buying and selling local products and imports from the Indies. By 1704 he owned 5,109 acres in Accomack County with other property in Maryland and across the Chesapeake Bay. Makemie married the daughter of a wealthy Virginia merchant of Onancock who bequeathed them substantial property.

Makemie, like other large landowners in Virginia, used the available sources of labor, indentured white servants and African slaves. An inventory of his estate indicates that he owned more than fifty slaves and an undetermined number of indentured servants. His effort to deal with an inhumane system emerges in the case of a servant who became pregnant by one of his slaves. Under the law, she would have been publicly flogged, but he arranged to pay a fine for her instead, later settled by his wife for 1400 pounds of tobacco. He knew the peril of dependence on indentured and slave labor; “How greedily we increase the number of our Servants and Slaves, as fast as Opportunity presents, and what will it be in a little time if we are not diverted by something else?” In Virginia, Makemie began to assert his Presbyterian heritage and calling. He petitioned Governor Nicholson early in 1699, “asking that a proclamation may issue declaring the freedom and liberty of conscience that is allowed by the laws of England, and forbidding all persons whatsoever to interrupt any sect of dissenters in the free and open exercise of religion.” On 5 October 1699, he petitioned the Accomack Circuit Court to qualify him as a dissenting minister under the Toleration Act of 1689 and to record his own houses at Onancock and Pocomoke as meeting places.

Makemie used his personal wealth and his tireless energy to bring about the formation of the first American presbytery. No other leader of his stature and vision would appear in the church for decades. He resembles in personal ingenuity and in his struggle for a free community, another great Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who enshrined his ideals of religious freedom and human liberty in documents that are integral parts of the American philosophy of life.

  

Posted: 11-Jun-2006 9:32 PM