In December 1881, the archbishop of Canterbury sent to The Times and other newspapers a circular letter addressed to Anglicans about British emigration. Archibald Tait drew attention to the increase in the scale of emigration, with nearly 314,000 emigrants leaving British ports in the first nine months of that year, of whom nearly 160,000 were British subjects. Tait proposed ‘that a systematic endeavour’ should be made for ‘the Christian welfare of the vast population which is continually passing westward from our shore’ to the United States and to British colonies. He mentioned that this proposal was in accordance with the recommendations of the most recent Lambeth Conference (the second such pan-Anglican episcopal conference, which had taken place in 1878), and that a joint committee of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) had been formed with a view to implementing the conference's three proposals: to provide parish clergy with accurate information about emigration destinations, and particularly about their religious and educational resources; to publish cheap handbooks for emigrants about the colonies and the United States; and to make arrangements for the care of emigrants on their arrival, including the provision of commendatory letters from English clergy to their counterparts in the areas emigrants proposed to settle.Footnote ¹

As the circular stated, Tait was acting on recommendation 4 of the 1878 Lambeth Conference, which urged clergy to provide commendatory letters to emigrating parishioners. The recommendation concluded:

As the archbishop's letter intimated, it did not fall unheralded into appropriate Church of England circles, but was part of a revival of that Church's emigrant ministry at the start of the 1880s, a ministry which had begun in the late 1840s through the SPG and the SPCK. Since that beginning, emigrant ministry had been carried on continuously by the SPCK after the SPG relinquished its direct participation in the 1850s in favour of the slightly older society, although it continued to jointly fund this ministry. In June 1881, a combined committee of both societies had been formed to consider a draft of the archbishop's intended letter. The concern of the archbishop and the committee was that emigrants were leaving without adequate information about their colonial destinations, and particularly about the Church in those colonies. As a result they joined other denominations, or none. ‘Many of the emigrants seem to leave without any information or advice as to the means of grace to be found in the country to which they are going, and are left to drift into whatever religious body may first offer itself to them in their new home, or perhaps to drift away from all religion.’ The committee resolved to request that the SPCK provide up to £100 towards the expense of circulating the archbishop's letter.Footnote ³

The lasting result of this 1880s Church of England initiative towards ministry for emigrants leaving Britain for settlement colonies of the British empire was the formation of an Emigration Committee by the SPCK, which took over the remnants of the earlier emigration work of the two societies and expanded it. The initial labour of the committee was the compiling and publication of handbooks for emigrants. However, the longer-term work was the oversight of a network of emigrant chaplains based in British and colonial ports; with other chaplains travelling on emigrant ships, either as emigrants themselves, or (on the shorter run across the Atlantic to Quebec) as British-based chaplains making repeated journeys. The network was overseen by a principal emigrant chaplain who was based in Liverpool, as the port with the largest scale of emigration. The Revd John Bridger was a member of the Emigration Committee and reported directly to it. The work clearly mattered to the Church, enough to invest considerable resources of organization and labour into it, without government funding. As a self-funded organization, the Anglican emigration chaplaincy stands in contrast to the characteristic synthesis of government-subsidized private bodies that Andrew Thompson finds so newly prominent in these decades.Footnote ⁴

Anglican support for emigration into the British empire was a major undertaking by the Church of England which had grown from limited beginnings in the 1840s into a large-scale imperial network, supported by the highest level of its ecclesiastical structure and by one of its most central and well-regarded organizations. The SPCK had been founded in 1698, and by the nineteenth century its principal work was the publication of religious tracts and other religious works. It had a policy of theological moderation that brought it widespread appeal across the divisive Anglican theological spectrum. It also had a history of more direct engagement in foreign and colonial mission. In the eighteenth century the SPCK had been the funding and overseeing partner in the successful German Lutheran mission in southern India,Footnote ⁵ and since the 1840s it had maintained the emigrant ministry in Britain that was now being expanded.

This article seeks to assess the outlooks towards the British empire of the Anglicans directly engaged with it through the emigrant chaplaincy over the six decades of its nineteenth-century existence. Its purpose is to discover those characteristic themes of history – change and continuity – between the 1840s when the chaplaincy first came into existence, and the last two nineteenth-century decades, the period in Britain of high imperialism. For most historians, the Church of England, and its colonial offshoots, were unquestionably at the forefront of British imperialist sentiment and the export of British nationalism. Hilary Carey sees the SPCK as one of the first missionary organizations to infuse its pietistic language with that of nationalism.Footnote ⁶ J. C. D. Clark and Carl Bridenhaugh have seen an enthusiastically imperialist SPG in the eighteenth century; a view repeated for the same organization in the nineteenth century by James Greenlee and Charles Johnson.Footnote ⁷ Carey provides persuasive evidence that Anglican emigration societies in the late nineteenth century, particularly the Church Emigration Society (founded in 1886), propounded a thoroughly patriotic view of emigration as strengthening the Britishness of empire.Footnote ⁸ Other historians who see the emigration work of Anglicans or of the Church of England as the export of Britishness or Englishness include Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine.Footnote ⁹ John Darwin views the imperial transmission of a moral British culture as being the work of British clergy of all denominations, but particularly Anglicans, among settler and expatriate communities well into the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Most recently, the careful work of Joseph Hardwick has detailed some of the ways in which Anglican clergy and laity in settler colonies went about this business of creating a thoroughly British empire.Footnote ¹¹

This article does not seek to overturn this interpretation of Anglican engagement with the British empire as the export of British culture; the evidence, including that offered in some of my own work, is too obvious for that. However, I do want to suggest that these interpretations are too reductionist and monochrome, and that there is another, ecclesiastical, dimension to Anglican imperial engagement. An interpretation that seeks to highlight the importance of Christian belief and theology, including ecclesiology, as a major dimension for Christian engagement with the world has long put my work in the company of significant scholars who have made major contributions to the history of Christianity and the British Empire, including Brian Stanley, who began this theological revision of imperial historiography; Robert Frykenberg, who has argued for the inherent power of Christianity in South Asian history as a religion and not just as a vehicle for imperial power; and Hilary Carey and Andrew Porter.Footnote ¹²

I have already undertaken assessments of the imperial viewpoints of the Anglicans involved with the emigrant chaplaincy from the 1840s to the 1870s, so the original aspect of this article is the contrast of that period with the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote ¹³ In those earlier studies it was found that the clergy directly involved in the emigrant chaplaincy were far more concerned with the extension of their church than with the empire. In this ecclesiastical focus they differed markedly from contemporary preachers, both Anglican and non-Anglican. British preachers in this period who did take up the subject of emigration portrayed the masses of steerage emigrants as potential constructors of colonial Britains, and therefore as glue for imperial loyalty; in other words, it was the preached promulgation of that imperial Britishness which the historians mentioned above have identified. In contrast, the emigrant chaplains funded by the SPG and SPCK in this earlier period viewed steerage emigrants simply as people in need, or as travelling Christians who, if they were ministered to with diligence by the church, would form, not an imperial bond but a Christian one, and a future global Christian or Anglican Christianity. It was planting Christianity or the Church of England in colonial settlements that mattered; empire was just a means to that end.

The question to be addressed in this article, therefore, is this: did the balance between Church and empire shift among these Anglicans in emigrant ministry during the decades of high imperialism? Did these Anglicans’ sentiments move in favour of British imperialism during this later period? After all, the late Victorian and Edwardian decades are commonly regarded as the peak of imperial sentiment across the swathe of British classes. At one extreme, at a popular level, in the period of the South African War, were those imperialist sentiments we know as jingoism; in more political and intellectual circles, there were the proposals for a greater global imperial Britain associated with Joseph Chamberlain in the 1900s and tariff reform in the form of an imperial preference.Footnote ¹⁴

In an earlier article, I pointed to an enthusiastic imperialism being expressed to the SPCK's Emigration Committee from its Anglican Canadian connections in the decades from 1880 to 1910. These included not just Anglican clergy but also Canadian women's organizations in which Anglicans were prominent.Footnote ¹⁵ The Canadian motif of Christianity, or the Church of England, being an agent for a righteous empire had often been expressed negatively in the Anglican past in the form of anxieties about the debilitating effects of the colonial environment on settlers without adequate means of spiritual life. In this negative construction it was a viewpoint that went back to the beginning of deliberate Anglican engagement with the British empire. It had been frequently expressed by clergy and bishops preaching for the SPG since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and was reiterated in a series of sermons preached in England in the 1850s themed around the empire.Footnote ¹⁶ It was voiced again by the SPG in its report for 1838, in response to the sharp increase in emigrants to North America, and particularly Canada, in the 1830s: ‘this country will be deeply sinful before God, if it permit the dependencies of the empire to grow up in practical atheism’.Footnote ¹⁷

Women, including Anglican women, were perhaps particularly attracted to a Christian imperialism in this period because it was argued that this depended particularly upon females for its realization. From 1886 the SPCK worked with the British Women's Emigration Association (BWEA) to send parties of single women to the colonies, under the supervision of a matron, in what were known as ‘protected parties’. The parties were organized, and the matrons selected, by the BWEA, and these matrons were paid by the SPCK. The groups were under the authority of a chaplain, if one was available for the voyage.Footnote ¹⁸ A Christian imperialism similar to that expressed to the SPCK by its Canadian contacts was also evident in the BWEA. That organization had been founded in 1884 as the United Englishwomen's Emigration Association, and was largely controlled by the Hon. Mrs Ellen Joyce of Winchester.Footnote ¹⁹ She had previously been involved in the emigration department of another female Anglican organization, the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS). Ellen Joyce regarded the safe migration of single women as a sacred duty for the promotion of a Christian empire. As the empire had a spiritual significance it required emigrants who were worthy of it. This spiritual task especially devolved on women as wives and mothers, or potentially so.Footnote ²⁰ Female migration was understood by the BWEA as a means of securing the Christian identity of the empire by sending into its overseas territories worthy, moral and devout women who would be the progenitors of the next generations of upright Christian colonial populations.Footnote ²¹ This promulgation of Christian empire through the procreation of women had a eugenic dimension of suitability. Addressing the Winchester GFS, which Joyce described as ‘the greatest Society for purity that exists’, she told them, ‘Emigration is just one of those things in which the doctrine of the “selection of the fittest” must be accepted, and this selection should come from the God-implanted instincts of adventure and enterprise.’Footnote ²²

In the period of a more widespread British pro-imperial sentiment during the late nineteenth century, it is thus apparent that a positive view of empire was shared by at least some Anglicans in their emigration network. Emigration of satisfactorily Christian emigrants, particularly women who would be influential as wives and mothers, was a means of linking Britain and her colonial territories, of enhancing the moral fibre of the empire, and of maintaining or boosting its British character. The empire would be held together by an emigrant British Christianity, whose moral framework looked remarkably like the values of the Victorian middle class, the section of British society from which the Anglicans in the emigrant ministry came. The agenda of making the empire more British, what Hardwick has called ‘an Anglican British world’, was certainly present in this emigrant project.

But was that export of Britishness in the persons of God-fearing Britons all there was to it? Was this Anglican project imperialist in the sense that it viewed the British empire uncritically as a jolly good thing? After all, British settler colonies remained the chaplaincy's major preoccupation, and these emigrant destinations would not have existed but for imperial conquest and acquisition.

In contrast to the explicit imperial sentiments expressed by Canadian Anglicans, and by Joyce and the BWEA that the chaplaincy network worked with, such overt and indiscriminate imperialism was not replicated in the official ecclesiastical base of the emigrant chaplaincy network or the official circles of the Church of England which supported it. We have already seen that the revival of this Anglican emigrant ministry was catalyzed by Archbishop Tait's response to the resolution of the 1878 Lambeth Conference. A decade later the third Lambeth Conference also paid some attention to British emigrants. The encyclical letter that the conference addressed to the churches of the Anglican Communion contained this section on emigration:

Neither here, nor in the attached list of suggestions from the conference committee on the care of emigrants, nor in Tait's circular letter, was there any mention of empire. The suggestions were directed solely at practical ways in which emigrants could be ministered to at sea, and to encouraging colonial churches to do more for emigrants when they arrived.

In the Emigration Committee's records the only explicit mention of empire, other than that from the two Canadian sources already mentioned, comes in the annual report for 1898. Commenting on over 144,000 British travellers who left that previous year, among which the vast majority were emigrants, the report connected these migrating Britons with empire.

Of course, in addition to these few explicit references to the British empire within the emigrant chaplaincy network and its official support, the imperial background to emigration was evidently taken for granted in this whole Anglican project by its attention to British colonies, colonies that would not have existed without imperial expansion by the British.

Nevertheless, the ongoing concern for British emigrants to the United States indicates that the Anglican emigration chaplaincy was not restricted to the empire. The SPCK had spent many years attempting to convince the Episcopal Church in the USA to establish an emigrant chaplaincy in New York, conscious of the myriad of migrants who went there. In March 1883 John Bridger reported to the SPCK Emigration Committee that the Episcopal Church had appointed a chaplain to emigrants in New York, Cornelius L. Twing; but he (Bridger) was having difficulty getting information from the said chaplain to include in the handbook for emigrants to the USA.Footnote ²⁵ Clearly, this appointment was ineffective: in 1886 the Emigration Committee listed a number of local clergymen in Canada and the US who were prepared to act as immigrants’ chaplains. This included clergy in Portland, Maine, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, St Paul (Minnesota) and Florida, but there was no mention of New York.Footnote ²⁶ In March 1887 Bridger again reported to the committee that nothing about New York had yet been done by the Episcopal Church, and the committee agreed that the archbishop of Canterbury should be asked to raise the matter directly with the presiding bishop of the US Church.Footnote ²⁷

However, in the Emigration Committee's report to the SPCK in July 1887 there was a lengthy extract from the Revd Thomas Drumm, also a medical doctor, who had begun work in Castle Garden, New York. Castle Garden in Manhattan, a round sandstone fort, was the first New York immigration station, and predated Ellis Island as a disembarkation point for US immigrants from 1885 to 1890. Drumm signed cards of commendation to ongoing immigrants as the ‘Port Chaplain, Protestant Episcopal Church’; he had offices at Room 227, 22 State Street, New York, and was still doing this work in 1891 when one family's migrant ancestor received such a card from him.Footnote ²⁸ Drumm reported to the Emigration Committee that he had been in the work for three months and confined his efforts to seeking out Anglican immigrants. He had set a large sign in a conspicuous situation, advertising his name under the titles of ‘Church of England, Church of Ireland, Protestant Episcopal Church of America’. Emigrants venturing towards the sign, he said, in self-deprecating humour, would find ‘a little, elderly, clean-shaven, clerically dressed individual’ waiting to greet them and provide them with letters of commendation and advice. He described Castle Garden as a ‘dreary, desolate, uninviting spot’, without any official help or accommodation ‘at least for Protestants or Churchmen’ (which suggests Catholics may have provided some assistance), and he believed his ministry was worthwhile. Drumm was an efficient and experienced pastor, having served as a parish priest in a number of congregations before taking up this work. He noted in his report that he was hoping to ‘purchase or erection of a suitable emigrant lodging-house near the Garden. Our good Bishop's cathedral project may interfere a little with this object, but I hope to accomplish it’.Footnote ²⁹

Notwithstanding Drumm's good work, the New York chaplaincy was still a concern to the Emigration Committee in 1888. In that year they instructed their secretary to write to the bishop of New York and lay the urgency of the need for ‘increasing the number of Emigrant Chaplains’ before him.Footnote ³⁰ So it appears that, although Drumm continued his work, the SPCK was concerned that one chaplain was insufficient for the number of Anglican immigrants flooding through New York.

The committee's minutes point to a proactive change in the institutional development of the New York emigrant chaplaincy occurring in 1898–9. In 1898 the Brotherhood of St Andrew was reported to be doing ‘excellent work’ in New York. This brotherhood is not mentioned in Peter Anson's classic work on Anglican religious communities in the nineteenth century, but may have been connected to the St Andrew's Waterside Mission, the Anglo-Catholic group which undertook ministry to seamen and emigrants in London.Footnote ³¹ The following year the committee noted that a well-resourced mission to immigrants on Ellis Island had finally been established by the Episcopal Church, with offices at 20 Vesey Street in Manhattan.Footnote ³² This initiative, and that of the brotherhood, may have resulted from funding by Trinity Church in the city, as the SPCK Emigration Committee had mentioned the previous year that the church had now ‘taken the matter in hand of looking after immigrants’.Footnote ³³

Returning to the imperial dimension of the SPCK emigrant work, the absence of explicit imperial references in the 1880s and 1890s is striking in an organization directly involved with imperial emigration, particularly in its meagre published material, which among its annual reports included those of the Emigration Committee. It could be expected that at a time of heightened and positive imperialist sentiment in these decades that mention of the British empire would have been a useful means of inculcating support among the public, whose culture was permeated with imperialism in these late Victorian decades.

The Canadian views quoted in the Emigration Committee minutes, and the solitary imperialist reference by that committee, do point to the presence of some Christian imperialism within Anglican emigrant ministry circles. But even more obviously present in these sources than this Christian imperialism was an unequivocal concern for the perpetuation and extension of a global Anglicanism by its British ecclesiastical leaders and their church agents. These leaders included both Anglican leaders, such as the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops of the Anglican Communion assembled in the Lambeth Conferences during the 1870s and 1880s, and clergy and laity in the SPCK Standing and Emigration Committees. There was clearly anxiety at the 1878 Lambeth Conference to have parochial clergy emphasize to emigrating Anglicans the global extent of their Church: ‘carefully instruct them as to the oneness of the Church in its apostolic constitution under its varying organisation and conditions’. Additionally, the recommendation ended with further attention to the global nature of Anglicanism to be impressed upon emigrants: ‘the importance of impressing upon our people the extent and geographical distribution of our Churches, and of reminding them that there is now hardly any part of the world where members of our Communion may not find a Church one with their own in faith, order and worship’. This emphasis on the international nature of colonial and US Anglicanism probably arose from two causes. First, the development of these overseas churches under the growing impetus of voluntaryism throughout the nineteenth century, as delineated by Hardwick,Footnote ³⁴ may have caused some emigrating members of the Church of England to question if it was still the same church in these places as that they knew in Britain. Due to their essentially voluntary composition, the colonial and US churches required more of their membership by way of monetary giving and commitment than did the Church of England. Colonial and US Anglican churches also introduced synods and other structures involving laymen in advance of the Church of England.Footnote ³⁵ Second, the comparative isolation of settler communities outside the cities, and the difficulty of finding clergy for them, meant emigrants could find themselves in a parish or diocese whose churchmanship was less congenial than those they knew back home, with the consequent temptation to depart for a more attractive denomination, or for none. This was particularly problematic in these decades, with the intensity of party feeling amongst internal Anglican groupings.Footnote ³⁶

A concern for international Anglican connectedness was also at the heart of Archbishop Tait's 1882 circular letter: ‘It has been proposed that a systematic endeavour should be made to establish more direct communication than at present commonly exists between the Church at home and the Church in our Colonies, and in America.’ Equally obviously, the same ecclesiastical agenda of concern for the strengthening of global Anglican links and for denominational retention of emigrating Anglicans was present in the pronouncement on the subject at the 1888 Lambeth Conference. Such emigrants were a ‘social link’ between churches of the Anglican Communion, and by keeping a ‘watchful care’ over them on their emigrant journey they could be protected ‘from the dangers moral and spiritual, which beset their path’. Anglican global unity was also a dimension of Ellen Joyce's emigration work, as she expressed in her address to the Winchester GFS:

The SPCK's emigrant chaplaincy network was not directly involved in the promotion of emigration, but in ministering to those who had already decided to make this life change as they travelled to their new homes. While there were dimensions of a Christian imperialism in the Anglican chaplaincy project by the end of the nineteenth century, there is also a remarkable consistency with the outlooks of those involved with its beginnings in the 1840s and 1850s. Anglican engagement with the British empire continued to be varied and nuanced. It included Anglicans at various levels of society and their church who saw the empire through rose-tinted spectacles as a good thing, and others who saw it as a divine vehicle for the perpetuation of the best of all cultures and societies, namely Britain and Britishness. However, Anglican outlooks and engagement with the British empire also contained a more predominant dimension of pastoral response to emigrants’ needs, which was undergirded by a commitment to the expansion and unity of their church and Christian faith rather than to the British empire. Their theological and moral position is one that historians need to take more seriously as an authentic dimension of the dialectic between Christianity and empire in the nineteenth century. Such Christian sentiments and actions as those embodied in the Anglican emigrant ministry were not invariably some sort of cover for other political or cultural values. The leading Anglicans in the SPCK emigration chaplaincy network were far more concerned with the extension and future of their church than they were with their empire, or even with Britishness.