Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie - The Slave-galleries

The Slave-galleries

Before the abolition of slavery, there were facilities in New York for negro slaves. An early mentions of the term "slave gallery" to describe the strange spaces in All Saint's Church dates from a 1916 article in the New York Sun entitled, "Last Remaining Slave Gallery in New York." The article remembered the days of slavery in New York state, painting a somewhat nostalgic portrait of "pickininnies" crowding in the galleries while their Episcopalian masters worshipped below.

In 1921, the Living Church published an investigation of the "Slave Gallery" in what was by then a "venerable but little known Church," remembering the days when Episcopalians brought their slaves to church because it was their obligation to convert them or maintain their faith in God. The articles cited no sources for their stories of the slave gallery, both of which assumed that slavery was in full effect in the 1830s in New York though it was abolished in 1827, and implied that all African American New Yorkers were slaves, though even when slavery was legal, free blacks far outnumbered slaves.

These articles were based on interviews with Dr. Kenneth S. Guthrie, who became Rector of All Saint's in 1915 and was committed to bringing the stories of the slave galleries to light.

In the 1920s, under the leadership of the Rev. Guthrie, the congregation tried to come to terms with the memory of slavery and segregation in its church. In 1924, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the congregation's founding, All Saint's Church put on a pageant in which it remembered the slave gallery and the slaves who sat there. The Church's oral tradition already preserved the memory of a gallery created for and filled by slaves. By the 1930s, guide books reported a " Lincoln Museum " housed in the church, in which an iron shackle and a bill of sale for a slave were exhibited.