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.

“Mr. Bass was conducted into his deviations”

The Rev. Edward Bass of Newburyport was under pressure from both sides during the Revolutionary War.

As a minister in the Church of England, still feeling personal loyalty to the Crown, he tried to avoid complying with the independent governments’ demands.

But that exposed him to attacks from the Patriot populace. On 4 May 1782 the Rev. Jacob Bailey (1731–1808, profile shown here), an Anglican minister who moved around the New England frontier, wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.) in London:

I am very confident, both from the repeated assertions of Mr. Bass himself, and other circumstances, that he refused to read the Declaration of Independency, and he became, on that account, extremely obnoxious to the violent party.

I am certain that he was publicly reported for a Tory, and I was, one evening just upon my arrival at his house, witness to a scene equally ludicrous and indecent, for as he was returning from an entertainment with his wife, he was pursued along the street by near two hundred persons, who pelted him with dirt and stones, and treated him with the most indelicate language.

Meanwhile, Anglican ministers who had fled New England complained that Bass was too compliant toward the Patriot authorities. The Rev. Joshua Wingate Weeks of Marblehead reported that Bass had preached in support of American soldiers—and he said he’d heard that from Bailey.

Bailey wrote his 1782 letter to refute that charge. He recalled:

being compelled to leave my family to avoid confinement on board a guard ship, I wandered through the country, and about the middle of November came to Newburyport, and was at Church on a day of public thanksgiving appointed by the Congress. Mr. Bass desired me to preach, but I refused, assuring him that I would never deliver a charity sermon to collect money for clothing the rebel soldiers.

This I repeated soon after to Mr. Weeks, but, as nearly as I can remember, Mr. Bass gave us a general discourse, without descending to particulars, or even mentioning the occasion of the solemnity. After sermon, the collection was made. Many refused to contribute, and a lady of some distinction declared with a spirited voice, “I will never give a single penny towards the support of rebels.” This bold declaration was perhaps the occasion of my retaining the above in my memory.

On the whole, I am persuaded that Mr. Bass was conducted into his deviations, not from even the least inclination to the cause of the revolters, but from a mistaken zeal for the Church, which, he imagined, in some measure, would justify his compliance.

As noted yesterday, by 1776 Bass had stopped receiving the half of his salary paid by the S.P.G. Later in the war he realized his situation was even worse: the organization had marked the St. Paul’s pulpit as empty, no longer recognizing his existence as a minister.

TOMORROW: Routes to reinstatement?

“In Lieu of that Part of his Salary received annually from England”

New England’s Puritan heritage made those colonies less than welcoming for the Church of England.

There was an Anglican missionary organization called the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.). It paid for ministers to visit Native American communities.

It also supplemented the salaries of ministers in New England on the assumption that their congregations were small and their work difficult.

The Rev. Edward Bass was one of those ministers. He was born in 1726 in Dorchester into a family that had arrived early in the English settlement of Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard College and spent a couple of years teaching and preaching in Congregationalist meetings.

But by 1752 Bass decided that he really belonged in the Church of England. He sailed to Britain to be ordained, returning to take up the pulpit of St. Paul’s church in Newburyport.

Twenty years later came the war. As quoted yesterday, news of the Declaration of Independence prompted the wardens and vestrymen of St. Paul’s to ask their minister to leave prayers for King George III and his family out of their services for the sake of the church. On 16 July 1776 the Rev. Mr. Bass agreed: “I think it incumbent on me for so important an end to comply with this request during the present state of our political affairs.”

Bass tried to walk a narrow line. He dropped the public prayers for the king but continued to support the Crown personally. When the Massachusetts Council ordered all ministers to read the Declaration of Independence to their congregations, he declined to declaim it from the St. Paul’s church pulpit but evidently allowed a lower church official to do so.

But already other Anglican ministers were complaining about Bass’s conduct. On 15 July 1775 the Rev. Dr. Henry Caner of King’s Chapel in Boston had written to the S.P.G.: “Mr. Bass has complied perhaps too far with the orders of the Rebels.”

The war stopped the S.P.G.’s regular payment to Bass. On 25 Nov 1776, nine Newburyport men signed this pledge:

We the Subscribers of St. Paul’s Church in this town being truly sensible of the Distress which our worthy minister must suffer without some Relief in Lieu of that Part of his Salary received annually from England, and which the present unhappy Times prevent his obtaining, do promise to pay on Demand to Mr. John Vinal the several sums affixed to our Names to be by him delivered to the Rev. Mr. Bass.

The promised amounts ranged between £10 from Tristram Dalton and John Tracy to 18 shillings from Abram Gallisham. As for Vinal the schoolteacher and church warden, his signature doesn’t appear on this document. Perhaps he chipped in on his own, or perhaps his contribution lay in wrangling the contributions of others.

TOMORROW: Did that settle matters?

The “Doctrine of Projectiles” and Other Doctrines

On 10 Aug 1775, the Newburyport schoolmaster John Vinal wrote out the text of a new advertisement to appear in the next day’s Essex Journal and succeeding issues.

That was nearly four months into the war, and Vinal’s ad reflected that situation:

AT a Time when our Enemies are endeavouring our Ruin it is highly proper to qualify ourselves in the best Manner we can to defend our injured Country:

And as the Doctrine of Projectiles, or Art of GUNNERY is of such Importance that no Person should undertake the Direction of any Piece of Ordnance without a competent Knowledge of it, the Want of which has proved fatal to many:

The Subscriber therefore proposes to instruct those who may incline to attend four Afternoons in a Week, from five to seven o’Clock, or from eleven to one A.M. [sic] in the above Art at a very moderate Price

JOHN VINAL.

N.B. The Subscriber received his Knowledge of the above Art from a Gentleman who was an Engineer in the British Army the whole of the last War.

Newbury Port, August 10th, 1775.

In April and October 1776 Vinal went back to advertising private lessons for the “youth of both sexes” in the standard school subjects, not gunnery.

Vinal was also a warden of St. Paul’s, the town’s Anglican church, founded in 1711. On 16 July 1776 he, fellow warden Joseph Cutler, and eight vestrymen gave this letter to their minister, the Rev. Edward Bass (1726–1803):

Rev’d Sir;—

The Representatives of the United Colonies in America, having in Congress declared s’d colonies free and Independent States, and disavowed all Allegiance to the King of Britain and the service of the Church to which we belong, prescribing certain prayers, &c., to be used for s’d King, his Family & Government, We find ourselves under the necessity of requesting you to omit in your use of the Service all Prayers, Collects, or Suffrages which relate to the King, Royal Family, or Government of Great Britain, both as we would avoid great Inconsistency and as we value the welfare of the church, being assured that without such omission the Existence thereof would immediately cease.

Most of Boston’s Anglican clergymen had left with the British military, and others in Massachusetts were keeping a low profile. Bass had to worry about local opinion, his congregation, his sacred oaths—and his salary.

TOMORROW: A special collection.