The Anglican Church

Of all the dissenting sects in Connecticut, the most studied is the English Establishment, the Anglicans or, after 1784, the Episcopalians. The literature here is huge, and was listed in Nelson Burr’s “Inventory of the Church Archives of Connecticut, Protestant Episcopal” (New Haven: Connecticut Records Survey of the W.P.A., 1940), which in­cludes capsule histories of all Anglican or Episcopal parishes. This mimeographed work was sponsored by the State Library and is catalogued under Connecticut Records Survey. One reason the literature about Anglicans is so great is the efforts of Kenneth Walter Cameron, who has edited and published some fifteen volumes of materials relating to Connecticut Anglicanism and Episcopalianism under the imprint of Transcendental Books, in Hartford. Many of these volumes are church history and documentary collections, which are not included in this bibliography. Cameron also published under the Transcendental Books imprint Anglicanism in Early Connecticut and New England: A Selective Bibliography (1977).

Beardsley, E. Edwards, The History of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut From the Settlement of the Colony to the Death of Bishop Seabury. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1865.

Beardsley, William Agur. The Life of Eben Edwards Beardsley, Connecticut Churchman and Ecclesiastical Historian (1808-1891). Edited by Kenneth Walter Cameron. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1976; originally published in 1883.

Burr, Nelson R. The Story of the Diocese of Connecticut: A New Branch of the Vine. Hartford: Church Missions Pub. Co., 1962.

Cameron, Kenneth Walter. The Anglican Episcopate in Connecticut (1784-1899): A Sheaf of Biographical and Institutional Studies of Churchmen and Historians with Early Ecclesiastical Documents. Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1976.

Connecticut Diocese of the Episcopal Church. The Jarvis Centenary. New Haven: the Diocese, 1897. A life of Bishop Jarvis and a history of the Church in Con­necticut.

Hart, Samuel. Old Connecticut: Historical Papers on ... Anglicanism. Reprinted by Transcendental Books, 1976.

Hawks, Francis L., and Perry, William Stevens, eds. Documentary History of the Pro­testant Episcopal Church in Connecticut, 1704-1789. 1863; reedited by Kenneth Walter Cameron and reprinted by Transcendental Books, 1976.

Kinloch, Hector G. L. M. “Anglican Clergy in Connecticut, 1701-1785.” Doctoral dissertation, Yale, 1960. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was es­tablished in 1701, and from that date to 1785, when the Episcopal church was founded, forty-five missionary-clergy of the church of England served in Connecticut. This-study also attends to forty-seven other Anglican leaders. Kinloch’s study reveals the creation and molding of an essentially American religious denomination within a framework of disintegrating New England Calvinism.

Jarvis, Lucy Cushing, ed. Sketches of Church Life in Colonial Connecticut: Being the Story of the Transplanting of the Church of England into Forty-Two Parishes of Con­necticut. New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1902; repr. in Cameron, Anglicanism, listed above.

O’Neil, Maud. “A Struggle-for Religious Liberty: An Analysis of the Work of the S.P.G. in Connecticut [1706-1818].” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 20(June, 1951): 17 3-89. O’Neil wrote a doctoral dissertation on Samuel Peters. This piece is descriptive.

Ricketts, Rowland, Jr. “John Bliss: Congregational Anglican.” CHS Bulletin 42(July, 1977)3:65-72. Bliss (1690-1737, Yale 1710), was the Congregational minister in Hebron who converted himself and a small portion of his congrega­tion to Anglicanism.

Seymour, Origen Storrs. The Beginnings of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut. Ter­centenary pamphlet XXX (1934). Seymour, a lawyer, was Chancellor of the Church in Connecticut.

Steiner, Bruce E. “Anglican Officeholding in Pre-Revolutionary Connecticut:

The Parameters of New England Community.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series 31(July, 1974)3:369-406. Anglicans held political and civil office, espe­cially on the local level, much more frequently than has been believed. Steiner counted the offices and got his wife to draw a marvelous map showing where they were in 1774.

—Connecticut Anglicans in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Community Tensions. Bicentennial pamphlet XXVIII (1978). Steiner shows that Anglican laymen— there were thousands of them—were well integrated into Connecticut society, not much persecuted during the War, and quickly re-integrated in the 1780s. See his excellent “Guide to Additional Reading” in the back.

—”New England Anglicanism: A Genteel Faith?” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd series 27(January, 1970)1:122-35. Steiner demonstrates that, contrary to pre­viously prevailing wisdom, Anglicans constituted a cross section of Connecticut society, not a collection of the wealthy.

Tucker, Louis Leonard. “The Church of England and Religious Liberty at Pre-Revolutionary Yale.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series 17(July, 1960)3:314-28. Deals with President Clap’s efforts in 1765 to make Anglican students con­form to Yale Congregational polity or get out. The students wrote to the SPG in London, and shortly Clap’s efforts ceased. Tucker is the author of a biog­raphy of Clap.

Villers, David H. "Connecticut Anglicanism and Society to 1783: A Review of the Historians," Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 53 (March, 1984) 1: 45-59. A survey from Peters through Bancroft and up to Steiner and Kinloch. Villers traces treatment of Anglicans from the monolithic consensus of Bancroft who ignored them, to the work of Kinloch and Steiner who integrate them into Connecticut society, only excepting 1774-1784. The Progressive interregnum, Villers says, was built on reading back into the Colonial period the isolation of Anglicans during the Revolution. Thus Progressive historians portrayed them as an isolated subculture from the beginnings of the S.P.G. in 1701 to the Constitution of 1818.

Weaver, Glenn. “Anglican-Congregational Tensions in Pre-Revolutionary Connecticut.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 26(1957)269-85. Weaver, a pioneer among modern historians in the field, perceived the tensions that Steiner believes were not so great.