CHAPTER VI.

WILLIAM VESEY, FIRST   RECTOR.

Parentage and Birth—A Member of a Jacobite Family Connected with the Church of
England—Graduates at Harvard College—Lay Worker at Sag, Long Island, and after¬
wards at Hempstead—Origin of the Falsehoods about him—Refutation of the State¬
ment that he was a Presbyterian—Officiates, as a Layman, at King's Chapel, Boston—
Called thence to New York—Autobiographical Sketch of Early Life and Work—A
Churchman from his Birth.

IT is high time that the cloud of misrepresentation and
misstatement affecting the honor and good name of
the first rector of Trinity Church should be dispersed,
and that charges against him, calumnious in their nature
if not in intention, should be so fully exposed that they
may never be repeated. The statement has been made,
and down to the present day has obtained credence
among respectable and fair-minded men, that Mr. Vesey
was a Dissenting minister, and a special protege of In¬
crease Mather's, when elected to the position of minister
of the City of New York ; that he betrayed the Presby¬
terians, in whose interest he had been chosen to that
ofifice ; that he allowed himself to be caught by Colonel
Fletcher and the managers of the Church of England;
and that he turned coat and took Holy Orders in that
Church, in order to secure the tempting bribe of the call
to the rectorship of the parish in New York.'    As these

^ Even so learned and unprejudiced a man as ray friend the late Dr. George H.
Moore accepted this story as substantially true, while he attempted a defence of Mr.
Vesey's cause, and apologized for him as follows ;

" This is the earliest record of Mr. Vesey's adhesion to the Church of England.
It is but Just to infer that his course was dictated by honorable sentiments.    There