USA > New Jersey > Middlesex County > Woodbridge > History First Presbyterian Church, Woodbridge, New Jersey 300th Anniversary May 25, 1975 > Part 2
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The Great Awakening of the 1730's and 1740's was an important influence leading to the establishment of new churches and the re- vitalization of old ones. After the first impulse of new colonization in the seventeenth century, a widespread indifference to the church as a moral force in colonial life set in. Frontier life was hard and unre- warding; there were no educational institutions, little social activity, frequent competition and disputes over land ownership, much callous- ness, and little kindness. Many ministers, clinging to old ideas, did not adapt themselves or their ideas to American conditions. The Re- vival was an appeal to the individual on the need for an active faith,
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the leading of a holy life, and working to realize the kingdom of God. It emphasized man's sinful nature, tried to make understandable the terror of not being a True Christian, and preached the need for re- pentance and regeneration by the divine spirit. It was critical of out- moded orthodoxy and irrelevant formalism, and it deplored the moral degeneration it found everywhere. Revival preaching was confined to established church services, usually Sunday morning and afternoon and one weekday afternoon, and it emphasized not immediate conversion but the need for individual struggle with conscience, aided by frequent pastoral visiting and counsel. Only by a mighty struggle within himself could sinful man know repentance and true faith.
Some of Gilbert Tennent's sermon titles were: "The Danger of Forgetting God;" "The Necessity of Religious Violence;" "A Solemn Warning to the Secure World." It was a movement to make the role of religion a real and vital thing in the life of the individual. It was another important step in the Americanization of Christianity, and in New Jersey, particularly, of the Presbyterian church.
The strongest center of the revival was the Presbytery of New Brunswick, where three of the sons of William Tennent were all active. John and William Tennent Jr. at Freehold, and Gilbert Tennent at New Brunswick. Gilbert's sermons were designed to change the smug- ness of self-satisfaction into new dedication to do God's work. Jona- than Dickinson of Elizabeth was another exponent of the new way. Both Dickinson and Tennent preached at Woodbridge, where Pierson and his congregation were receptive to the revivalists.
The activities of these men flung a challenge at established ways that was bound to evoke controversy. At least three major issues emerged that were to cause serious division within the church.
One was the fact that many of the revivalists wanted to preach in other pulpits than their own, where they could stir up the people even if their own minister was unsympathetic. An outstanding example of this itinerant preaching was set in New Jersey by George Whitefield, the great English evangelist, who came to the colonies in 1739 and on Pierson's invitation, preached in Woodbridge on April 28, 1740, to an open air congregation of about 2.000 people outside the church. His powerful voice and dramatic appeal for a new birth in Christ were to influence deeply many congregations throughout the middle colonies.
A second issue revolved around the need for liberalization in the training of candidates for the ministry, in particularly the need to ex- amine candidates as to their experimental acquaintance with religion. It was largely to meet this need that William Tennent Sr. founded Log
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College in Pennsylvania. Some of the ministers trained there were preaching in other parishes than their own. This issue implied a strong criticism of many ministers with orthodox education and training; that is, that they did not fully commit themselves to their calling. Gilbert Tennent's famous sermon in 1739, "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry," charged that opponents of the revival had training and or- thodoxy but were dead in heart; they were not true shepherds for their flock. Tennent's flamboyant mannerisms and raving sermons on hellfire and damnation brought him much criticism from more con- servative clergymen.
A third and related issue arose over whether Presbytery or Synod was the proper judge of the qualifications of ministerial candidates. The revivalists, particularly in the Presbytery of New Brunswick, strongly emphasized the authority of the Presbytery in the licensing of preachers, being thus able to allow those whose training had been at Log College to practice the ministry.
Naturally these challenges did not go unanswered. In 1737 and 1738 the Synod made two decisions to control these developments. It prohibited members of one Presbytery preaching to congregations of another without an invitation. And it decided that candidates for the ministry must have a diploma from either a European or a New England college or apply to Synod for examination before a com- mittee. These decisions were followed by a dispute over the licensing of a member of the New Brunswick Presbytery, which led to the ex- pulsion of that Presbytery from the Synod of Philadelphia. Other advocates of the new way eventually withdrew from the Synod and in 1745 formed the rival Synod of New York, with thirteen ministers from the Presbytery of New Brunswick, and nine from the Presbytery of New York. John Pierson played a prominent role in helping to form the new Synod; he was later to be instrumental in bringing about the reunion that occurred in 1758.
The new Synod, representing a union of the Tennents and their supporters and the New England trained men, held what was to be- come the prevailing view. To them, the revival was the work of God, and a minister of the word should be not only versed in doctrine but Christian in conduct. Their goal was not to transplant a European church to America but to adapt the church that they knew to American life. The two rival Synods were about equal in the number of their ministers in 1745, but by the reunion of 1758, the Synod of New York had grown from twenty-three to seventy-three ministers, and the ortho- dox Synod of Philadelphia had remained stationary. The largest Pres- bytery was New York (to which Woodbridge belonged), with twenty-
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three ministers, of whom sixteen were graduates of Yale, and four of the College of New Jersey. In the reunited Synod as a whole, only fifteen of the seventy-eight ministers were graduates of universities in Scotland and Ireland - another mark of the process of Americani- zation.
Before this reunion occurred, the Synod of New York realized the immediate need to establish a new college for the training of min- isters. The calls for ministers far exceeded the available supply, and statistics relating to the period all showed the number of vacant pulpits almost as large as the number of filled ones. Log College had not proven sufficient to fill the need. Accordingly in 1745, four prominent ministers of the Synod, all favorable to the Great Awakening, petitioned the governor of New Jersey, Lewis Morris, to found a college. The four were John Pierson, thirty years at Woodbridge: Jonathan Dick- inson, already thirty-six years at Elizabeth; Ebenezer Pemberton, at New York for eighteen years; and Aaron Burr, at Newark for nine years. Because of traditional Anglican hostility, Morris refused; but an interim governor, John Hamilton, granted a charter in 1746, and a revised one was granted in 1748 by Governor Jonathan Belcher. The College of New Jersey first met in Dickinson's parsonage in Eliza- beth, then in Burr's in Newark, and finally in 1756 moved to the town of Princeton. All but one of the clerical members of its Board of Trustees were members of the Synod of New York.
So it was that John Pierson, minister of the Woodbridge church from 1714 to 1752, grandson of a Massachusetts Congregational min- ister, son of the Harvard trained minister of the Newark church who was unsuccessfully sought for Woodbridge in 1669 and who later be- came a founder and first president of Yale, graduate of Yale, became instrumental in the founding of Princeton, and for nineteen years on its Board of Trustees. So much has one family in one church con- tributed to the cause of higher education. Mr. Pierson left Wood- bridge in 1752 to preach in Mendham, New Jersey where he died in 1770, at the age of 81, having preached the Gospel for fifty-six years.
By 1760, the separation from Europe was complete. The Pres- byterian church had begun in the colonies under conditions lacking an established church; in its Presbyteries and Synod it had created an exclusively American authority; its outlook had been revitalized by the Great Awakening; it had founded its own educational institution to train its ministers, and the great majority of its ministers were gradu- ates of the colonial colleges. In short, well before the American Revo- lution, the Presbyterian church had become an American institution. Symbolically perhaps this was marked for Woodbridge by the decision
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of the freeholders in 1754 to appoint a committee to seek a charter for the church, in order to preserve in perpetuity the uses of the land according to the intent of the original inhabitants, i. e., the ground on which the meeting house stood, the burial ground, and the par- sonage land.
Rev. Nathaniel Whitaker, a licientate of the Presbytery of New York, succeeded Mr. Pierson; he was ordained and duly installed De- cember 10, 1755. The congregation applied for and received a royal charter from George II of England in 1756. This action resulted largely from the influence of Mr. Pierson. The charter gave the trustees legal possession of the land which had been granted to them by the Lord's Proprietors. It was conveyed to them by the Royal Governor Jona- than Belcher. The Church was thus incorporated as 'The First Pres- byterian Church of Woodbridge.' Rev. Whitaker asked to be dismissed five years later, and very little more is known of him.
The original charter is still in the possession of the Woodbridge church, having been lost for a time but came to light in 1922 in an old safe, which was put up for sale at a local auction.
In 1763, Azel Roe, the famous rebel clergyman of New Jersey, came to Woodbridge as its minister, a post he was to hold fifty-two years until his death in 1815 at the age of seventy-seven. A Long Islander by birth, he graduated from the College of New Jersey in 1756 at the age of eighteen, was ordained to the ministry a few years later, and in 1800 received a Doctor of Divinity degree from Yale.
His style of preaching is said to have been argumentative and very effective. He was a man of excellent address and commanding presence. A zealous man, he rode frequently over to Metuchen to hold meetings at private homes. The Metuchen Presbyterians had for several years prior to this effected some sort of an organization, holding meetings for religious worship by the courtesy and with the assistance of neighboring ministers. On the 5th of August, 1767, the Metuchen congregation united with that of Woodbridge, arrangement being made to share Mr. Roe's services equally. In Roe's Manuscript Church History we find it stated that these churches were to be con- sidered as one in all things of an ecclesiastical nature; in their gov- ernment and discipline to have but one Session, but separate in their temporalities. Until 1793 the Metuchen society was known, after the union, as the "Second Presbyterian Church of Woodbridge;" frequently it was distinguished as the "upper congregation." Dr. Roe's Manu- script states further: "Sometime near the year 1790, the old congre- gation of the First Church became uneasy with their situation, not
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satisfied with their union with the Metuchen or Second Church that they should have an equal share in the labors of their minister, but wished for the whole of his service which they were willing and thought themselves able to support. They therefore applied to the Presbytery to have the union dissolved, which after repeated applications were effected though with some difficulty, being warmly opposed by the Metuchen Congregation. They have since obtained a minister by them- selves and become respectable as a church. They have since put in a claim to be a part of the great Parsonage given as has already been mentioned by the original proprietors of the Town for maintenance and support of the Gospel Minister. They have had their claim or right to said Parsonage tried in Court of Chancery and in the Court of Appeals and have lost in both these courts." The above dispute refers to the disposition of the two hundred acres of land alloted the church by the original charter.
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Chapter 2
1775 - 1875
The second century in the history of the First Presbyterian Church of Woodbridge was the period in which it developed from being the community church, independent in nature, though already Presby- terian in government, into a distinctly denominational church, con- servative in character. While the Woodbridge Congregation became Presbyterian early in the eighteenth century and secured a royal charter in 1756 incorporating it as the "First Presbyterian Church of Wood- bridge," as late as December 30, 1801, a special Town Meeting was called "for the purposes of choosing a Minister or Ministers of the gospel for the Township, and taking the opinion of the inhabitants on the propriety of dividing the Great Parsonage Lands . . . "
Important to the development of the character of this church was its geographical location. William A. Whitehead in his "Early History of Perth Amboy," published in 1856 writes, "At the period of the Revolution the position of Woodbridge among the other towns of the colony was far more important than at present, exceeding greatly in influence many which now are far ahead in the great race of progress . . . The town was then on the great thoroughfare between New York and Philadelphia and the road which was traveled over by the worthies of that day retains for miles the characteristics it then possessed." 1 To quote Rev. Dr. Wallace N. Jamison, from the inside cover of his book, Religion in New Jersey: A Brief History: "Perhaps the greatest single influence on New Jersey's religious history, however, is the state's geographic position between traditionally liberal New York City and conservative Philadelphia. An inevitable tug-of-war between these conflicting spheres of influence prompted the state's religious factions to try to resolve for themselves the basic theories and questions that arose. It is this very struggle which forms the story of how people of one state, New Jersey, have sought to discover their religious iden- tity." The Woodbridge Church, situated enroute between the two cities was in position to be influenced by every trend ecclesiastical and po- litical. Although communication was slow, travel by stagecoach and horseback and boat was via Woodbridge, and the Inns were popular for rest and refreshment, and news centers as well. Even such impor-
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tant men as George Washington and Lafayette were here. News of bloodshed at Lexington came by messenger on way to Philadelphia, April 23, 1775.
Presbyterians were second to none in their patriotic devotion to the cause of American independence. This was true in the Woodbridge church. "Religious as well as economic and political causes underlay the American Revolution. Many non-Anglicans, especially the Pres- byterians, were alarmed at the desire of the English Church to send a resident bishop to the American colonies . . . Presbyterians could not forget that many of their immediate ancestors had come to America to escape persecution from government supported Anglican prelates in England, Scotland and Ireland. They had no desire to see similar ca- lamaties overtake them in their new home, and were ready to resist with sword, if necessary. On the other hand, most Episcopalians outside of the South favored the 'loyalist', or British side, in the Revolution against the 'patriot', or American side." 2 Woodbridge was a typical example. Woodbridge was occupied by the British, December 2, 1776 to June 22, 1777. 3 According to tradition, the Episcopal Church, situated in a portion of the original kirk green just beyond the Presby- terian burying ground was used as an English barracks and the Rectory as the English Fort. At this time a long list of Presbyterian men were volunteers in the American Army.
"Woodbridge, during 1776, was the scene of the greatest excite- ment. Troops were constantly passing and repassing through the town. In the latter part of the year the British had collected about four hun- dred head of cattle and two hundred sheep in the place, intending that these should feed their troops during the cold weather; but a company of impudent American militia entered the town on the night of the 11th of December and quietly drove John Bull's beef and mutton into the other camp." 4
Skirmishes between British and American troops were common events, and farms and homes were raided, often deprived of their most prized possessions. Rev. Azel Roe, whose pastorate extended through the Revolution and post-war period, was a devoted patriot. "By word and action he urged the cause of liberty. On one occasion he incited some of his people to assist the Continental troops against the British at "Blazing Star" landing, and took part himself. He was taken pris- oner at a subsequent date, and came by experience to know the horrors of the 'Sugar House Prison' in New York City." 5 Blazing Star Land- ing is in Carteret which was once part of Woodbridge.
Difficult times reached into homes of church members. British soldiers ravished the neighborhood. Striking instances are told by Mr.
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Dally in his Woodbridge and Vicinity. For example: "Smith and Tim- othy Bloomfield were both away in the Continental Army, and the old homestead and farm were open to the predatory raids of the enemy. Among other things stolen were the old family Bible and a brindle cow. The precious book could not be readily given up. Eunice, the daughter of Timothy Bloomfield, concluded at length to appeal to the British Commander on Staten Island for the restoration of the priceless volume. In company with another girl, residing in the family home, Eunice started from home, walking to the river. Reaching the shore they were non-plussed. How should they reach the other side? Not far off they espied an old scow. Pushing it into the water they paddled across." 6 A guard on the other side conducted them to the officer in command, who listened to their complaint and not only restored the Bible, but also the cow. A guard of soldiers escorted the girls toward home.
Dally tells also about an ancestor of his, left alone to care for her children and home, watching a skirmish on the road to Perth Amboy from her dormer window, moved back barely in time before it was blown out.
Daniel Moores was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and led the singing for many years. The following story is a good illustration of how the war reached into the very homes of the church people.
"Britain Moores, son of Daniel, was a sturdy friend of the Ameri- can cause and suffered for it. The Tories visited the house in which he lived in Woodbridge and carried him a prisoner to New York, where he was kept, 'in durance vile', for six weeks. James, his brother, was also abused for his patriotism. The mother, Mrs. Moores, was very sarcastic in her conversations with the Tory neighbors and some- times openly hostile to them. One of these, Isaac Dunham, would drop over to see the Moores occasionally, and appeared covertly pleased with the evidences of misfortune he saw at the old homestead. He always seemed to know when a raid had been made and availed him- self of the first opportunity to call on the afflicted household to rejoice in its sorrows. An emphatic protest by Mrs. Moores, on one occasion, accompanied by vigorous demonstrations with various loose articles near at hand, caused Isaac to put his long legs in rapid motion, with a mental resolution never to go near that dangerous woman again. He suspended his neighborly visits for an indefinite length of time."7
Almost all of the able bodied men of the church were away from home in the service of the Continental army and many stories of their heroic exploits have been told. In a paper on "The Revolutionary
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Heroes" by Ellis B. Freeman, printed in the 225th Anniversary book- let "Celebration," the names of more than fifty are listed. Some families are represented by father and son, some by several brothers. Many are buried in the church cemetery. Among those mentioned by Rev. Joseph M. McNulty in his historical sermon on the occasion of the 200th Anniversary are Capt. Nathanial Fitz Randolph, the brave and dashing Chieftain (whose daring exploits are described in Dally's His- tory), Capt. David Edgar, the spirited Cavalryman; Lieut. James Paton, the courageous Scotch patriot; Major Reuben Potter, the faithful friend of liberty; Col. Sam'l Crowe, Col. Benj. Brown, Capt. Ellis Barron, Capt. Abraham Tappen, Gen'l Clarkson Edgar and Capt. Mathias Edgar of Revolutionary fame. Capt. Asher Fitz Randolph was a leader under whom several Woodbridge men served.
In all the histories of the church, special honor is given to Dr. Moses Bloomfield. He was a man of more than ordinary culture and ability. His patriotism was fervent and he offered his services to his country at a very early period of the war and became Senior Physician and Surgeon in the hospitals of the United States. He was a Repre- sentative in the Provincial Congress and General Assembly and an Elder of the Presbyterian Church. He served forty years as Physician and Surgeon.
As an elder, Dr. Moses Bloomfield set a fine example for the congregation. The following is quoted from History of Woodbridge Township, adapted from Leon McElroy's materials.
"What may be said to be the first anti-slavery meeting ever held in the United States was held in Woodbridge on the 4th day of July, 1783, seven years after the Declaration of Independence and six years before George Washington was inaugurated as President of the United States. This meeting was held on the farm of Moses Bloomfield, a surgeon in the Continental Army, located north of Freeman Street where Barron Avenue runs through Prospect. Great preparations were made for the event which had been freely advertised in the neighboring communities. An ox was roasted whole and a vast crowd assembled to listen to the orator of the day, Dr. Bloomfield. At the appointed time, Dr. Bloomfield mounted the platform followed by his slaves, fourteen in number, who took their places on each side of him, while he addressed the multitude on the evil of slavery. At the close of the speech, Dr. Bloomfield turned to his slaves, stating that inasmuch as we as a nation had declared that all men had the right to freedom, he could not consistently undo the principles of the Declaration of Inde- pendence by holding slaves. He ended his speech with the announce- ment, 'From this day they are free'. Tradition has it that each of the
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slaves freed that day continued to labor for the venerable doctor but for adequate compensation." 8 This meeting was within sight of the church and much of the congregation must have been gathered there.
During and immediately following the Revolution the people were more concerned with establishing new independence of the country, less with the local church. Most of the active men of the church were away much of the time which may be one reason there are no minutes of session meetings for the first twenty-eight years of Dr. Roe's min- istry. However, Dr. Roe kept a record of baptisms and new members and session minutes resumed in 1793. There was general impover- ishment after the war and the minister's salary was paid in wood and food, and he was given the privilege of letting his cows graze in the cemetery. It is interesting to note that Dr. Roe's records register bap- tisms of blacks as well as whites, and also blacks as members, some of whom had only first names, for example, "Hannah, a black" and "Joe, a Negro."
The session minutes deal at length with the discipline of indi- viduals in moral matters, even drunkenness. The 225th Anniversary Booklet gives this report. "In the early days of the century discipline in the Presbyterian Church was not a dead letter. The church's au- thority was respected and enforced. The minutes contain the records of many citations and trials. Elders were appointed to endeavor in love to restore the erring one, and we read of confession, contrition and restoration. These occasions, and the results, gives us a glimpse at the character of the Elders. Ever zealous of the reputation of church members, the Elders in a number of instances cited their associates to answer charges brought against them personally, or by common report, and they were even asked to stand aside from the Communion Table until the charges could be investigated. 9 This assertion of discipline by the session may have been an effort to counteract the alarming moral and spiritual decline throughout the land following the war.
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