Reviewed by Travis Glasson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

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Reviewed by Travis Glasson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Travis Glasson, Temple University

The Imperial Origins of the King's Church in Early America, 1607–1783. By James B. Bell. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 324 pages. $90.00 (cloth).
James B. Bell's book supplies an account of the Church of England's development in the thirteen colonies from the first performance of religious services at Jamestown to the church's postrevolutionary rebranding as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Bell's primary interests lie in the institutional functioning of the church and its ties to the British government. As the "King's Church," the Church of England in early America was associated closely with agents of imperial power such as the Board of Trade, royal governors, and the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). This connection to the Crown shaped American attitudes toward the church and guided its development over the course of nearly two hundred years.	1
Bell divides his work into four thematic sections. Part one focuses on the English government's key role in planting the church overseas in the seventeenth century. Particularly after 1670 officials including Thomas Osborne and the politically active bishop Henry Compton began to take an interest in strengthening royal authority through the national church. This strategy extended to America, where government financial and logistic support secured legal establishments in some colonies and enabled the construction of churches in important urban centers.	2
Because it remained an Episcopal church without an episcopate in early America, the church was an administrative hodgepodge. In part two Bell examines the often-conflicting ecclesiastical powers wielded by royal governors, commissaries appointed by the bishops of London, local vestries, and the SPG. The third part analyzes how the Church of England was modified in its colonial setting, changes that Bell argues contributed to the Americanization of the church. Most concretely, an increasing number of American-born men served as ministers of colonial congregations. Subtler structural changes also occurred. Colonial clergymen departed from English precedents and held regular conventions to discuss the state of the church in their colony. Similarly, the absence of a well-defined ecclesiastical hierarchy meant that colonial vestries wielded more power over church affairs than their English counterparts. This "vital difference" contributed to "a more democratic reorganization of the church after the Revolutionary War" (141).	3
Given the work's focus on Anglicanism as the king's church, the Revolution looms large in Bell's account. He devotes a chapter to the controversies with New England Congregationalists that occurred before the Revolution and argues that these disputes "irreparably restrained the development of the colonial church" (184). In part four Bell examines the effect of the Revolution by comparing a statistical snapshot of the colonial clergy in 1775 with the situation in 1783. Due to loyalist clergymen going into exile and the church's inability to fill vacancies created by deaths or resignations, only 137 of the 296 clergymen active in 1775 were still serving at war's end (201). Bell's information on these developments supplements Nancy L. Rhoden's Revolutionary Anglicanism: The Colonial Church of England Clergy during the American Revolution (New York, 1999). In an epilogue Bell notes that it would take American Episcopalians until the mid-nineteenth century to rebuild and restructure the church to fit a nation no longer ruled by the British Crown.	. . .

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