Anglican Commemoration
First Bishop of the Episcopal Church
November 14 · d. 1796
also known as Seabury's Consecration, The Scottish Consecration, First American Episcopate
Samuel Seabury was the first bishop of the American church, consecrated at Aberdeen, in Scotland, on 14 November 1784. When the English bishops, bound by law to require an oath of allegiance to the Crown, could not consecrate a citizen of the new republic, three bishops of the small and disestablished Scottish Episcopal Church did so, and Seabury undertook in return to carry the Scottish form of Holy Communion, with its invocation of the Holy Spirit, home to the American church, where it passed into the first American Book of Common Prayer. A Connecticut priest and a convinced Loyalist in the Revolution, he served as the first bishop of Connecticut until his death in 1796. His consecration is kept on November 14.
Samuel Seabury was the son of a convert. His father had been a Congregationalist in Connecticut who came over to the Church of England and crossed the ocean to be ordained for it, and the son was raised in that harder, less favored allegiance, an Anglican in a land of Puritans. Seabury took his degree at Yale, studied medicine at Edinburgh in Scotland, and then sailed to London to be made a deacon and a priest, for there was no bishop in all of America who could ordain him. He came home and served quiet parishes in New Jersey and New York for twenty years.
Then the Revolution came, and Seabury chose the losing side. He believed the colonies owed their obedience to the king and to Parliament, and he said so in print, in a set of biting pamphlets signed "A Westchester Farmer." A young man named Alexander Hamilton answered him in kind. Seabury's neighbors were not gentle with a known Loyalist: a company of armed Patriots seized him and carried him off, and he spent weeks a prisoner, and later served as a chaplain to the British army. When the fighting ended he had backed a cause that had lost, and the country he lived in was now a nation he had opposed.
But the war had done something to the church that no one on either side had willed. Every Anglican parish in America had, until now, looked across the sea to the Bishop of London as its father in God. Only a bishop could confirm the young and ordain new priests, and there had never once been a bishop on American soil. While the colonies were British this was merely inconvenient; now it was mortal. An independent nation could not have its church governed from London, and a church that could not ordain its own clergy would, in a generation, simply die as its old priests died. The American church needed a bishop of its own, and it had no way under heaven to make one.
The clergy of Connecticut, ten of them, met and did a bold thing. They elected a bishop and sent him across the ocean to get himself consecrated, and the man they chose was Seabury. He sailed to England in 1783 and knocked on the door of the English bishops, and found it shut. They were not unwilling, but they were bound: by the law of the land every bishop they consecrated had to swear allegiance to the King, and Seabury was now the citizen of a foreign country that had just fought itself free of that King. Month after month the lawyers and the bishops turned the problem over, and month after month nothing moved. More than a year went by.
There was one other door. In the north of Scotland there was a church that knew what it was to be shut out. The Scottish Episcopal bishops had refused, a hundred years before, to swear to a new king, and for that conscience they had been driven from their cathedrals, hunted after the Jacobite risings, and forbidden by penal law to gather more than a few together to pray. They were poor, disestablished, and few. But through all of it they had kept the one thing Seabury had crossed an ocean for: the unbroken line of bishops reaching back to the apostles, and with it the power to lay on hands and make another bishop. They owed the government in London nothing, and they asked no oath of allegiance from an American.
So Seabury turned north. On 14 November 1784, in an upper room of Bishop John Skinner's house at Aberdeen, three Scottish bishops, Robert Kilgour, Arthur Petrie, and John Skinner, laid their hands on him and made him the first bishop of the American church. The next day the two churches signed an agreement, and in it Seabury made the Scots a promise. Their service of Holy Communion had kept an old and beautiful thing that the English Prayer Book had let fall: a prayer that calls down the Holy Spirit upon the bread and the wine, asking God to bless them and make them the Body and Blood of Christ. Seabury undertook to carry that prayer home and to commend it to the church he was going back to serve.
He kept his word. When the American church wrote its own Book of Common Prayer in 1789, the Communion it set at the center was the Scottish one, with the Spirit called down over the holy table. Seabury went home to Connecticut the first of American bishops and set about the plain work of building a church. He ordained the first priests ever ordained on American ground, he charged his clergy, he helped shape the Prayer Book, he took Rhode Island under his care as well. The man who had chosen the losing side of the Revolution had given the new nation's church its bishops and much of its prayer.
Seabury died at New London, in Connecticut, in 1796, the first of a long line. The small and hard-pressed church in the north of Scotland had given the young nation more than a bishop. It had given it a prayer, the calling-down of the Holy Spirit that the Scots had kept alive through a century of loss, and it has been prayed at American altars ever since.
There is a temptation, when we tell the story of a nation's church, to tell it as a story of winners. Almost nothing at the root of the American church was a winner's story. Its first bishop had backed the losing side of the Revolution and had been seized and imprisoned for it; across the new border another loyal king's man, Charles Inglis, lost his church and his country for the very same conscience and was made the first colonial bishop of the church Seabury had just left. And the bishops who at last consecrated Seabury, when the powerful established church could not, were the poorest and most hunted in Britain: a Scottish church driven from its cathedrals, forbidden by law to gather, which had kept the apostolic succession alive through a century of loss and asked an American for no oath at all. The gift came, in other words, from the losers to the losers. Is that not usually how the kingdom moves? It is a mustard seed and not a cedar; it passes from the disinherited to the disinherited, and it does not wait for the permission of the strong. The prayer that Seabury carried home from a suppressed church in Aberdeen, the calling-down of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and the wine, is prayed at American altars still. What might we yet receive, if we were willing to go looking for it among the small and the shut-out rather than the established and the sure?
How we know Seabury is, for a figure this recent, unusually full. He is a documented man of the eighteenth century, not a saint of the mists: his letters survive, the acts of the Connecticut clergy survive, the Scottish bishops recorded the consecration they performed, and the Concordat he signed the next day is a preserved document. The standard life is Eben Edwards Beardsley's Life and Correspondence of the Right Reverend Samuel Seabury (1881), which prints much of the correspondence; the fullest modern study is Bruce Steiner's Samuel Seabury, 1729-1796 (1971), which reads him within the high-church tradition he served. The Scottish Episcopal Church keeps its own memory of the day, down to the chair on which the Primus sat.
Seabury was born on 30 November 1729 at Groton, Connecticut, the son of a Congregationalist who had conformed to the Church of England and been ordained for it in 1730. He graduated from Yale in 1748, studied medicine at Edinburgh, and was ordained deacon and priest in London at the close of 1753, the Bishop of London then holding jurisdiction over the American colonies. He served parishes at New Brunswick in New Jersey, at Jamaica in Queens, New York, and at Westchester, north of the city, from 1754 until the Revolution.
His Loyalism is a matter of record and was, on his own account, a matter of conscience. Writing as "A Westchester Farmer" in 1774 and 1775, he defended the authority of Parliament against the Continental Congress in a series of pamphlets, the best known being Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress; Alexander Hamilton, then a student, answered him in A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress and The Farmer Refuted. Seabury was seized by a party of Patriots in November 1775 and held some weeks in Connecticut; during the war he served as chaplain to a Loyalist regiment, the King's American Regiment.
The problem his consecration solved was structural. The American Anglican parishes had depended on the Bishop of London, and independence severed them from him without providing any bishop of their own; no one on the continent could ordain, confirm, or consecrate. The clergy of Connecticut elected Seabury in March 1783 and sent him to seek consecration in England. The English bishops were willing but legally unable, for the statutory oath of allegiance to the Crown could not be administered to a citizen of the United States, and Parliament did not at first act to relieve the difficulty. After more than a year, Seabury applied to the bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church, a body disestablished since 1689 and subjected to penal laws after the Jacobite rising of 1745, which required no such oath.
On 14 November 1784, at Aberdeen, in the chapel of Bishop John Skinner's house in Long Acre, Robert Kilgour, Primus and Bishop of Aberdeen, Arthur Petrie, Bishop of Ross and Moray, and John Skinner, Kilgour's coadjutor, consecrated Seabury a bishop. The following day the Scottish bishops and Seabury signed a Concordat whose articles bound the two churches in communion. Its fifth article, reproduced in William Stevens Perry's centenary discourse of 1884, set the eucharist at the center:
The consecration of Samuel Seabury is kept on 14 November, the day it happened, in the calendar of the Episcopal Church and of the Anglican Church in North America. It is remembered less as the feast of a man than as the birthday of an office: the day the American church first had a bishop of its own, and the beginning of an American succession that has continued unbroken since, the succession that would in time send the church's first missionary bishop, Jackson Kemper, out into the western frontier. The Scottish bond is remembered with it. Americans have long made their way to Aberdeen, and the tie between the two churches has been marked by gifts back and forth across the ocean; the chair on which the Primus, Robert Kilgour, sat at the consecration is kept as a relic of the day at Keith, in Moray. In Connecticut Seabury's own see and seat are honored, and the institutions that carry his name trace their line to him. Where he is shown in glass or carving he is a bishop in rochet and chimere, and the Scottish inheritance he carried home is remembered every time an American priest, at the holy table, calls down the Spirit upon the bread and the wine in the words the Scottish church kept alive.
Bishop Seabury's Second Charge, to the Clergy of His Diocese(English, 1786)
Seabury's own words to the Connecticut clergy soon after his consecration, stating the high-church, primitive-church understanding of the Eucharist that he had carried home from Scotland.
Public domain: Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org)
The Concordat between the Scottish Bishops and Bishop Seabury (1784)(English, 1784)
The agreement signed the day after the consecration, binding the Scottish and Connecticut churches in communion; its fifth article carries Seabury's undertaking on the Communion Office, the seed of the American eucharistic rite.
Public domain: Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org), in Perry's centenary discourse
Life and Correspondence of the Right Reverend Samuel Seabury, D.D.(English, 1881)
The standard nineteenth-century Life, its chief value the large body of Seabury's own correspondence it prints; the foundation of everything written since.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Samuel Seabury, 1729-1796: A Study in the High Church Tradition(English, 1971)
The standard modern scholarly biography, sober with the evidence and sympathetic to Seabury's churchmanship; the fullest single portrait of the man and his high-church world. Out of print; borrowable at the Internet Archive.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Primary sources. Seabury's own writings survive. His Communion Office (New London, 1786) set the Scottish eucharist before the American church; his Earnest Persuasive to Frequent Communion (1789) argued for weekly Communion; and his Charges to the Connecticut clergy state the high-church convictions he brought to the new episcopate. The 1784 Concordat with the Scottish bishops is a preserved document, its articles reproduced in the later historical literature. His letters are printed at length in Beardsley's Life.
Principal life. Eben Edwards Beardsley's Life and Correspondence of the Right Reverend Samuel Seabury (1881) remains the fullest nineteenth-century treatment, valuable above all for the correspondence it prints; it is free to read at the Internet Archive.
Recommended modern study. Bruce E. Steiner's Samuel Seabury, 1729-1796: A Study in the High Church Tradition (Ohio University Press, 1971) is the standard modern scholarly biography, careful with the sources and sympathetic to the churchmanship Seabury represented; out of print, but borrowable at the Internet Archive, and the book for a reader who wants the whole man and his world.
Further reading. William Stevens Perry's centenary discourse (1884) and William Jones Seabury's Memoir of Samuel Seabury (1908), both at Project Canterbury, set the consecration within the memory of the church that received its fruits. For the Scottish side, general histories of the Scottish Episcopal Church under the penal laws show what the church that consecrated him had endured, and why its succession was so hard-won.
Online resources. Project Canterbury (anglicanhistory.org) holds Seabury's second Charge, the Perry and Seabury memoirs, and related documents; the Internet Archive holds Beardsley's Life and Steiner's study.
as the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, or the administration of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, is the principal bond of union among Christians, as well as the most solemn act of worship in the Christian Church, the Bishops aforesaid agree in desiring that there may be as little variance here as possible.
In keeping with the article, Seabury undertook to commend the Scottish Communion Office to the American church. He published his own Communion Office in 1786, following the Scottish Liturgy of 1764, and when the American church settled its first Book of Common Prayer in 1789 it adopted the Scottish shape of the prayer of consecration, including the epiclesis, the explicit invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the bread and wine, which the English Prayer Book had dropped after its first edition of 1549. Seabury ordained the first priests on American soil at Middletown, Connecticut, on 3 August 1785. He governed the diocese of Connecticut, took charge of Rhode Island as well from 1790, served as Presiding Bishop of the new church, and died at New London, Connecticut, on 25 February 1796.
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Consecration of Samuel Seabury to be a Bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50