A New Job for the Rev. Edward Bass

As the Revolutionary War wore on, the Rev. Edward Bass of Newburyport sent letters to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) in London, begging to remain in good standing as an Anglican minister.

Bass asked congregants and colleagues to write and even speak to people in London on his behalf. They argued that he’d never embraced the new American governments and merely compromised on small matters for the good of his congregation.

By the end of 1781 the S.P.G. had considered Bass’s case three times, and each time it came to the same conclusion: he was no longer behaving like a loyal representative of the Church of England.

In 1786 the minister appears to have given up on getting anything but the last word since he paid to publish his side of the case in London:

A Brief Account of the Treatment which Mr. Bass, Late Missionary from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, at Newburyport, New England, Hath Received from Said Society. Drawn up by Himself, with Remarks upon Particular Parts of It, and Addressed to the Impartial Public.

Even as Bass burned his personal bridges, other American Anglicans were trying to build new ones before the supply of priests ran out.

American ministers were casting about for how to institute a national church hierarchy while being independent from the British Crown. Previously all aspiring Anglican priests had gone to England to be ordained since there were no bishops in North America. (Indeed, the threat of a bishop had kept many New Englanders in a state of alarm for years before the war.) And as part of that ordination, men swore the Oath of Supremacy, promising loyalty to the monarch of Great Britain.

In 1783 the formerly Anglican clergymen of Connecticut gathered and elected their first bishop: Samuel Seabury (1729–1796, shown here). Yes, this was the same pamphleteer who serves as the voice of Loyalism in Hamilton. Seabury went to Britain, seeking people in authority to consecrate him as an American bishop, and eventually found those officials in the Scottish Episcopal Church, which had slightly different rites.

In 1785 Seabury began to ordain new ministers in America, and a general convention of former Anglicans drafted a constitution and proposed an American Book of Common Prayer. American representatives negotiated with Church of England officials. To preserve some authority, the English episcopate decided to make some compromises.

In February 1787 bishops in London consecrated two American ministers as bishops. A second general convention in Philadelphia in July–August 1789, with delegations from New York south to South Carolina, approved an Episcopal Church constitution and formed a House of Deputies and House of Bishops.

Meanwhile, in May 1789 formerly Anglican ministers from New England had convened in Salem. They elected a bishop for Massachusetts and Rhode Island. And the man they chose was the senior minister in the state, the chair of their convention, a man who had stuck it out through the war: the Rev. Edward Bass.

The convention in Philadelphia approved of that choice. However, New Englanders had come to value having some say in the choice of their clergy, and only ministers had voted for Bass. Therefore, there was another, broader election for a bishop of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire seven years later in 1796. The Right Rev. Mr. Bass was officially consecrated the following year.