Yankee Bishops: Apostles in the New Republic, 1783 to 1873 by Charles R. Henery (review)

Readers of this volume should be aware of two elements that are not entirely evident from the title. First, the bishops that are the subject of this volume are bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (more commonly known by the shorter title as the Episcopal Church). There is little or no reference to the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Methodist church, or to any other denomination in America that made use of the title "bishop" in the period covered by the study. This work is the seventh volume in the Studies in Episcopal and Anglican Theology series for which C. K. Robertson serves as the general editor. It is an internal denominational study that looks at the establishment and growth of the episcopate following the American Revolution in one church from that church's sources.

The second element in the title that may not be immediately evident to all readers is that the term "Yankee" is used as a synonym for "American" and not as a descriptor of a particular geographic region within the United States. As Henery explains in the introduction, "the title of this book comes from the British usage of the term 'Yankee' to refer to American bishops in the nineteenth century" (p. 6). Henery surveys the first hundred bishops ordained to serve the Episcopal Church, regardless of where they served in the United States or in the overseas mission field.

Henery organizes his material in seven chapters. Two initial chapters focus on the establishment and expansion of an American episcopate before (chap. 1) and after (chap. 2) the year 1811. The dividing date is one that has long been used in Episcopal histories to distinguish early bishops who had experience in the colonial Anglican Church from a younger second generation that came to maturity after the Revolution. Five thematic chapters follow, which deal with the background and character of the bishops (chap. 3), the bishops as spiritual fathers (chap. 4), the bishops as pastors to clergy (chap. 5), the bishops as chief evangelists and missionaries (chap. 6), and the bishops as institutional leaders (chap. 7).

The volume includes an initial listing of the bishops studied and nine appendices and illustrations, with such information as the educational institutions attended, the design of the mitre worn or the text of the confirmation certificates issued. There is a well-constructed and useful index.

The volume does what it sets out to do; it provides a portrait of the nineteenth-century development of the idea of the episcopate in the Episcopal Church, illustrated by such sources as the ordination sermons that bishops preached at one another's consecrations (an apparent departure from the British pattern in which prominent presbyters were usual ordination preachers). One thing is immediately evident, that these early bishops had a vision of a more substantial role for the episcopate that had most of the clergy and laity of the Episcopal Church at the time of the Revolution—some of whom had argued (as had layman Richard Bland of Virginia) that the office of bishop was "a relic of papal encroachment upon the common law" (p. 10) and as a Virginia Convention of May, 1785 (not cited by Henery but illustrative of the attitude cited by him), had stated that the office of bishop "differs in nothing from that of other ministers of God's word, except in the power of ordination and confirmation, the right of superintending the conduct of clergy, and of presidency in ecclesiastical assemblies." Henery's work is a demonstration of an expansion of that limited vision to a more robust understanding of the role of the episcopate.