An unassuming metal sign stands in a quiet Connecticut town alongside a wooded and stonewall-lined road. The day’s bright sunshine reveals its rusted brown background and chipped white letters. 

I am back in my hometown of Ledyard, CT for a family birthday, and my wife and I have stopped to see this sign before driving back to Virginia. Growing up, I passed it dozens if not hundreds of times, though I hardly gave it a second glance. In New England these historical markers are all over the place, so they are easy to pass without a second glance. But in the years since leaving home for college as a nominal Roman Catholic, I have become an Episcopalian who is now discerning a call to the priesthood. This sign now seems quite significant to me.

It reads: “Here was born Samuel Seabury / First Episcopal Bishop in America / Consecrated 1784”

This November 14th, the Episcopal Church will mark the 237th anniversary of the ordination of our first bishop - indeed, of the first bishop anywhere in North America. Seabury had a profound impact on our church. His ordination guaranteed that our church would be an “episcopal” one, that is, a church led by bishops. Though this may seem like a given in retrospect, it was anything but in the late 1700s when others had considered getting rid of bishops altogether. It’s also thanks to Seabury, and his ordination by the Scots, that our church received its Scottish-influenced Eucharistic prayer tradition, which departed from the English form by adding prayers of oblation and an epiclesis (an invocation of the Holy Spirit) after the words of institution. This Scottish influence extends to our current prayer book -  Rite I preserves the Scottish prayer almost to the word, and virtually all the contemporary Eucharistic prayers, though using different language, follow the Scottish pattern. Indeed, Seabury’s Scottish connection is the very reason why the shield of the Episcopal Church includes the St. Andrew’s Cross in the upper left quadrant, a reminder that our church’s first bishop was not ordained in Canterbury or London, but Aberdeen.

Despite his undeniable significance, Samuel Seabury remains a little known figure. The church has mostly treated Seabury with secondary consideration in favor of his contemporaries. Whereas Seabury’s peer William White is remembered in the church calendar on the day of his death (as is traditional), Seabury is commemorated on his ordination day--it is the event being celebrated, not the man. (1) Indeed, the most updated Collect for November 14th doesn’t even mention Seabury by name, instead focusing solely on thanking God for the gift of bishops. (2) In a sign of just how neglected  Seabury’s legacy is, his mitre was only recently recovered and restored by the Diocese of Connecticut after spending decades as the property of a college fraternity. (3)

Some know of Samuel Seabury because of his notorious appearance in the musical Hamilton. Seabury appears as a naive loyalist who urges the colonies to “heed not the rabble who scream revolution,” only for Hamilton to “tear that dude apart.” (4) The song is based on true events. Seabury was a loyalist and wrote a series of letters under a pen name defending the crown and attacking the Continental Congress. Hamilton retorted, and a public battle of words ensued. In reality, Seabury was far less delicate than depicted in Hamilton, calling the Continental Congress “upstart lawless Committee-men” and likened following them to being “gnawed to death by rats and vermin.” (5)

How did a committed loyalist choose to stay and help build a new church predicated on the very fact that it was no longer under the authority of a monarch? As I study Seabury, I find myself wondering what it means to be loyal, to what I owe my own loyalty, and what our first bishop’s story has to teach me.  

Seabury was born in 1729. He attended Yale, and afterward traveled to Edinburgh, where he studied medicine and was ordained to the priesthood in 1753. Before the outbreak of war, he served at churches in New York and New Jersey. (6) A more sobering fact is that Seabury was a slaveholder throughout his life, revealing how the sin of slavery was present at the highest level of our church from its very founding.

Theologically, Seabury typified the high church position of New England, which strongly desired a bishop. In Congregationalist New England, the Church of England was a minority church that often clashed with the colonial powers and was ever reliant on missionary support. In contrast, the Church of England was “established” in most Southern colonies, meaning the church and state were essentially synonymous, so the Church received significant support. Though both North and South suffered from not having bishops (ordaining priests required trans-Atlantic travel), the status quo was more tenable in the South, so much so that some questioned whether bishops were necessary at all. For Seabury and his fellow New Englanders, this was anathema - bishops were an essential part of the one catholic and apostolic church, and they were desperately needed in the Americas. (7)

At the outbreak of the war, Seabury suffered numerous hardships. He was captured by revolutionaries, imprisoned for over a month, and regularly harassed after his release. Eventually, he escaped to the British lines and spent most of the war in loyalist New York where he served as a Chaplain for the British Army. (8) In 1783, as peace was being negotiated, Seabury helped organize loyalist evacuations from New York to Nova Scotia and planned to leave on the last boat to Canada. But then he learned that a gathering of clergy in Middletown had elected him as Bishop of Connecticut. Notably, Seabury was the second choice. The first was Jeremiah Leaming, an older priest who declined the appointment due to health problems, leading the clergy to select Seabury as an alternate. (9)

So why did Seabury stay and accept rather than leave? A simplistic analysis might argue that Seabury flip-flopped or merely acted in self-interest. A flip-flopping Seabury is difficult to reconcile with the historical record, which reveals someone willing to speak his mind and suffer the consequences. If anything, Seabury’s fiercest critics accused him not of flip-flopping but of still being a loyalist, and therefore untrustworthy. These feelings were so pronounced that some tried to keep Connecticut from joining the Episcopal Church. (10) As for self-interest, every loyalist was receiving 200 acres of land in Nova Scotia, and the refugees had already begun appealing to Parliament for a bishop, (11) which they would get in 1787. (12) It’s entirely plausible that Seabury could have refused his election, left for Nova Scotia, and had a comfortable ministry serving in a North American church with bishops under the King, as he had desired. As the Right Rev. Paul Marshall writes, Seabury “chose the much more difficult task of staying behind and serving.” (13)

So why did Seabury choose the more difficult path? The historical record is scant, but the letters we have suggest that Seabury took some persuading. Abraham Jarvis, who delivered the message to Seabury, stressed that there was no other alternate, so if Seabury refused the whole endeavor might fail. (14) For a high-church Anglican  who believed so strongly in the necessity of the episcopate, this argument must have resonated with Seabury. Recalling his election in a 1785, Seabury seems to indicate as much: 

...the clergy who were consulted by Mr. Jarvis gave it as their decided opinion that I ought, in duty to the Church, to comply with the request... Though I foresaw many and great difficulties in the way, yet as I hoped they might all be overcome, and as Mr. Jarvis had no instruction to make the proposal to any one besides, and was, with the other clergy, of the opinion the design would drop if I declined it, I gave my consent... (15)

From this and his other letters, one gets the impression of a person of conviction, with a high regard for duty to the Church and fortitude in the face of obstacles. Indeed, Sabury would need this fortitude right away. It took two years for his ordination to come to pass, including over a year of trying and failing to be ordained in England before setting off to Scotland. He continued to demonstrate this spirit of service throughout his future ministry, where his favorite sermon topic was charity (16) and his personal motto “be useful.” (17) In Seabury, I see not a flip-flopper or opportunist, but someone who answered when he was called, who acted with conviction,  and consistently lived his ministry on behalf of God and others. 

God willing, I will be ordained in the coming years. I am acutely aware of the difficulties clergy face, the way their principles are challenged, and the novel crises they encounter. To what will I ultimately be loyal? Whom will I serve? Which of my sins will I overlook? In my fellow Ledyard native, I find lessons for all these questions. 

In particular, I return over and again to this idea of service to the Church. In our tradition, no one exists in isolation. All are members of their local parish, the diocese, the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Communion, and the universal, catholic church. As a priest, one is called to serve the whole church, something that Seabury understood acutely. He showed commitment to the local church in his countless miles of travel across the diocese at a time when bishops tended to stay put; for the national church in his efforts to unify the American church, even when that required working with those who rejected his very ordination; and for the international church in insisting on ordination from a church in the apostolic line that would help teether the new church to the one, holy catholic church. If there’s anything I would lift from Seabury’s life into my own, it would be this deep commitment to this broad sense of the church and the willingness to likewise say yes when called to serve.

When we remember the ordination of Samuel Seabury, may we all be filled with the spirit to serve our one, holy and apostolic church.

1. Paul Victor Marshall, One, Catholic and Apostalic: Samuel Seabury and the Early Episcopal Church (New York: Church Publishing, 2004), 1-2.

2. Church Calendar, https://www.episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/consecration-of-samuel-seabury/

3. “Saving Samuel Seabury’s Miter,” The Living Church, September 8th, 2017, https://livingchurch.org/2017/09/08/saving-samuel-seaburys-miter/

4. “Farmer Refuted,” Hamilton, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy5ybRNSkb8&ab_channel=AsakiTakaya

5. Samuel Seabury, “Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress,” Project Canterbury, http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/seabury/farmer/01.html

6. Marshall, 81-83.

7. Ibid., 59-68.

8. Bruce Steiner, Samuel Seabury: A Study in the High Church Tradition (Oberlin, OH: The Oberlin Printing Co., 1971), 159-176.

9. Ibid., 187.

10. Marshall, 213.

11. Ibid., 50.

12. Steiner, 100.

13. Marshall, 100.

14. Steiner, 190.

15. Samuel Seabury, Letter to Rev. Dr. Morrice dated February 27th, 1785, from Samuel Seabury: His Election, Consecration and Reception- The Documentary History Re-Edited with an Index, Kenneth Walter Cameron, Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1978, 24.

16. Marshall, 74.

17. Ibid., 83.