Notes on First Presbyterians in the American Colonies

In seminary and graduate school, I was taught that the first North American Presbyterians were part of the Puritan immigration that began in the 1620s in Massachusetts and soon spread to other portions of New England, especially Connecticut. The Puritans who peopled New England were usually contrasted with the “Cavaliers” who populated Tidewater Virginia.

Subsequently, I learned that the Puritan movement was a far more variegated and fluid one. The Calvinist-focused Protestantism of the British Isles had yielded an ever-changing spectrum of adherents, with a wide range of practices and commitments. Some were fiercely separatist, wanting full separation from the Church of England, such as those who came to be known as “Pilgrims.” Others were moderate separatists who came to be termed “Congregationalists.” Still others found solidarity in a polity and theology that came to be termed “Presbyterian”—accentuating the oneness of the Church of Jesus Christ and expecting local church elders to work together with ministers in forging creeds and practices. Some Puritans sought to eliminate any traces of Roman Catholicism, while others were quite comfortable with much about traditional worship and work. Of the first Presbyterians in North America, some considered their churches as parishes, encompassing all residents in an area rather than just those with “pure” religion. Other Presbyterians employed the Book of Common Prayer. Many followed Calvin in granting magistrates authority in directing some parts of church life.

In time I also learned that Presbyterianism in the Middle Colonies did not have an ancestry that was exclusively “Scotch-Irish”—think of those dour, stubborn, frugal, bag-pipe playing Scots and Ulster Scots who had been exiled to Northern Ireland before immigrating to America. The Scotch-Irish and their Scottish cousins did in fact populate Pennsylvania, western Virginia, the river basins of the Carolinas, as well as other frontier locations, but that was mostly after the 1620s. Before them, other British Presbyterians had landed on Middle Atlantic shores, including prominent members of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas: Jamestown.  

Jamestown’s “First Chaplain,” Robert Hunt, was “Presbyterian.” You would never know it from the biography provided by the National Park Service, from his shrine at Jamestown, from the legend at the restored Presbyterian meetinghouse on the fringe of Colonial Williamsburg, or from his status in the Calendar of Saints for the Episcopal Church in the USA. And yet he was called by other colonists a “preacher,” not a priest. He wore no clerical garb and oversaw erection of the first Jamestown chapel with a rough pulpit and no altar.

Moreover, Hunt was not alone. It seems that all the Church of England chaplains appointed by the London Company were Presbyterians; so were most of the colonists and probably all the London Company directors who owned the colony until 1624. In fact, Presbyterian proclivities characterized much of the early colonial religious life in Virginia and other Middle Colonies long before Francis Makemie gathered pastors in 1706 to form “The Presbytery,” a feat that earned him the title of “Father of American Presbyterianism.”

A few histories of Presbyterians in Colonial America do cite the Virginia beginnings. But more accept the commonly-received wisdom. They focus on Makemie, the Scotch-Irish, and the organization of presbyteries, synods, and finally a General Assembly. So permit me, if you will, a somewhat heretical overview of Presbyterian beginnings in the British colonies. Perhaps it will help all of us to see how variegated our Reformed heritage really has been.

The anglicized Greek word, “Presbyterian,” was borrowed by the English Reformed from the members of the Church of Scotland who fought for decades to oppose an episcopacy. It came into common use in English about 1607, the year of the Jamestown expedition, though the Reformed movement had been gathering strength since the 1560s in all the isles we now term “Great Britain.” “Presbyterian” was a term used to brand those English-speaking Protestants who sought to balance allegiances of the state-church Anglicans and those of the sola scriptura advocates seeking complete separation from any remnants of the Roman Catholicism they abhorred. As the Presbyterian movement emerged robust in Britain, it appealed to literate leaders in the Church of England, to tradespeople and minor gentry, and to what we might now call an emergent middle class.

The Presbyterian movement in the Church of England consisted of practicing believers, who prayed and engaged in household Bible reading and regular family prayer. Presbyterians tried to call, with concurrence from a gathered church court, their own “preachers”—not priests appointed by bishops—to lead congregations. Most Presbyterians eschewed clerical vestments beyond simple robes and tabs, offered Bible instruction for children, observed a “Christian Sabbath,” revered the Ten Commandments as a moral compass, and considered the Gospel reasonable and consonant with commercial enterprises. Presbyterians prized universal literacy and gradually developed an evangelical consciousness for global mission, seeking to spread the Gospel in Britain and throughout the world. By 1640, they dominated Parliament and commissioned the Westminster Divines to draw up standards for the church—named, conveniently, “The Westminster Standards.”

A primary proponent of the English expedition to Jamestown of 1607, The Reverend Richard Hakluyt was a leader in the Presbyterian movement, a prebendary (senior cleric), and then an archdeacon of Westminster Abbey. His Discourse On Western Planting, presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1584, sought the propagation of the Gospel in the New World. It argued that “this western discovery will be greatly for the enlargement of the gospel of Christ whereunto the Princes of the reformed religion are chiefly bound amongst whom her Majesty is principal.”[1]