Anglicans in Connecticut, 1725-1750: The Conversion of the Missionaries

Abstract

T HE man who headed the Anglican Church in Connecticut during the early eighteenth century was Samuel Johnson, a colonist who had been born in Guilford, Connecticut, raised as a devout Puritan, educated at Yale, and in 1722 had converted to Anglicanism.' For several years Johnson was the only Anglican minister in the colony, but he was eventually joined by the converts he recruited from his alma mater and by missionaries from England. Even at the peak of their strength, however, the Anglican clergy were greatly outnumbered by the Puritan ministers. And throughout the eighteenth century, the ministers and members of the Anglican Church retained their minority status in a colony recognized as the heartland of New England Puritanism.2 Johnson soon realized that the policies of the Church of England required modification if they were to take root in Connecticut. The irony of the Anglicans' situation lay in the fact that they constituted a minority sect, the position traditionally associated with English Dissenters. Johnson and his Anglican allies soon realized that the strength of the argument for an established Church, an argument that formed the bedrock of English Episcopacy, depended less on the biblical sanction for Episcopacy than on the social context in which the Church existed. In Connecticut the Puritan churches were