Referring to the successor of Dr. Wales in the Yale chair of divinity, Pres. Stiles wrote, "An Old Divinity man will be acceptable to all the Old Divy. Ministers & to all the Churches: a New Divt man will be acceptable to all the New Divy. Ministers and to None of the Churches, as none of the Chhs. in New Engl. are New Divt."—Stiles Diary, iii, 506, note (Sept. 8, 1793). See also under date of Nov. 16, 1786, where churches are said to take New Divinity pastors "because they can get no others, but persons in the parish know nothing of the New Theology."
[j] "Law Reports of the Superior and Supreme Courts, 1785-1788, by E. Kirby. Just published at this office and ready for subscribers and gentlemen disposed to purchase, for which most kinds of country produce will be received."—Advertisement in Litchfield Monitor of Apr. 13, 1789.
[k] Calhoun, Woodbury, Mason, Clayton, and Hubbard. Judge Reeve retired in 1820; Judge Gould in 1833.
[l] Reporters were admitted to the national House of Representatives in 1790 and to the Senate in 1802.
[m] Bishop Seabnry was consecrated by the Scotch non-juring bishops, Nov. 14, 1786. The latter, about four years later, were restored to their position as an integral part of the Anglican hierarchy. Meanwhile, Dr. Samuel Provoost of New York and Dr. William White of Pennsylvania, on Feb. 4, 1787, were consecrated by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, assisted by the Bishops of Wells and Peterborough, after a special Act of Parliament permitting the consecration to take place without the usual oaths of allegiance to the King as head of the church. In 1789, Bishop Seabury became president of the House of Bishops thus formed in America. The following year, James Madison of Virginia was consecrated by the English bishops, thus giving to the United States three bishops after the English succession, so that the validity of the Scottish rite should hot be questioned in the consecration of future American bishops.
[n] The eighty dollars proposed for privates would not go far toward mending broken fortunes, or care for broken constitutions and crippled bodies.
At the Middletown Convention, Sept. 3, 1783, delegates from Hartford, Wethersfield, and Glastonbury met to denounce the Commutation Act. At its adjourned meeting on Sept. 30 fifty towns, a majority in the state, disapproved the Act in an address to the General Assembly, and called attention to the Society of the Cincinnati. At the last meeting, March, 1784, an address to the people of the state was framed which condemned both the Commutation Act and the Cincinnati.— J. H. Trumbull, Notes on the Constitution, p. 18. Noah Webster, History of the Parties in the United States, pp. 317-320.
[o] Methodism was twenty-eight years old, when, in 1766, Robert Strawbridge introduced it into New York, and Philip Embury preached his first sermon in a sail-loft. In 1771, Francis Asbury, later Bishop Asbury, was appointed John Wesley's "Assistant" in America. In 1773, the first Annual Conference was held. Methodism rapidly spread in the Middle and Southern states. By the year 1773-74, the year's increase in members was nine hundred and thirteen; in 1774-75, ten hundred and seventy-three. The preachers traveled on foot or on horseback, preaching as they went; living on the smallest allowance; sleeping where night overtook them; and meeting often with grudging hospitality, suspicion, and, sometimes, open violence.
Methodism "began when Episcopacy was at its lowest point, both in efficiency, and in the good-will of the people." It agreed with Jonathan Edwards on the nature of personal religion, and separated from the Church of England in this, the Methodist's central principle of "conscious conversion" or "emotional experience." Later in New England, Wesley's missionaries united in Methodist societies many of the converts to the Edwardean theology.
At the opening of the Revolution, the whole body of Methodists were within the Church of England. Of the English missionaries only Asbury, Dempster, and Wharcott remained in America to carry on, with native preachers, the work of proselytizing. It was "the only form of religion that advanced in America during that dark period, and during the war, it more than quadrupled both its ministry and members." At the beginning of the war, it had eighty traveling preachers, beside local preachers and exhorters; a membership of one thousand, and auditors ten thousand. In 1784, there was a year's increase of fourteen thousand nine hundred and eighty-eight members, and of one hundred and four preachers to rejoice in the consecration of Bishop Asbury. In the November of that year, Bishops Coke and Asbury, organizing the "American Episcopal Church," in spite of Wesley's anathemas probably led out one hundred thousand souls as the nucleus of the new church.