Boston Presbyterian Minister John Moorhead Dies in December 1773

Rev. John Moorhead, portrait by John Greenwood, 1750

Presbyterian Reverend John Moorhead, head of New England's first Scots-Irish congregation, died in Boston in December 1773, just as the America Revolution was about to start. 

Formerly of Newtonards, County Down, Moorhead had emigrated with his congregation of 30 parishioners, and established the Church of the Presbyterian Strangers in 1729. They built an Irish Meeting House in a converted barn at the corner of Berry Street and Long Lane (now Channing and Federal Street). 

As church historian Harriett E. Johnson writes in Handbook of the Arlington Street Church, (1929) these Scots-Irish were “Good, quiet, law-abiding citizens . . .. [W]ith their sober, steadfast, hardworking, moral philosophy of life they constituted an excellent balance to the idealistic, variable [Puritan], who so often preached freedom, but practiced intolerance and bigotry.”

The Church of the Presbyterian Strangers had prospered enough so that the modest barn was replaced by a proper church in 1744; that Church later was the site in 1788 chosen to consider the adoption of the Federal Constitution. By 1749, twenty years after the church was formed, Reverend Moorhead had baptized more than 1,200 children. The congregation grew prosperous over the years and Reverend Moorhead remained the pastor until his death in 1773.

The Irish Presbyterians appeared eager to bring into the church a number of their slaves, and congregation’s records indicate a number of African-American children being baptized in the church. Between 1737 and 1748 James Mayes baptized “three Negro children, Rosanna, John, and Sarah,” all presumably the children of slaves. In 1742 a slave named Jeffrey baptized his son Jeffrey, while church member William Baird had a “Negro boy baptized Thomas.” And in 1742 “Cato and Flora, a Negro man and woman” were married by Reverend Moorhead. 

Reverend Moorhead and his family were connected with Africa slaves, including Phyllis Wheatley, considered America’s first Black poet. Reverend Moorhead was one of 18 judges who formally attested that Phyllis Wheatley was the true author of her poetry, prior to it being published, according to the Massachusetts Historical Society. Others on the panel included John Wheatley, James Bowdoin and John Hancock, according to the Phyllis Wheatley Historical Society.

In 1773, the year her popular book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published, Wheatley penned a moving poem to Miss Mary Moorhead, the daughter of Reverend Moorhead, who had died in December. Wheatley’s poem is titled “Elegy to Miss Mary Moorhead, on the Death of her Father, The Rev. Mr. John Moorhead,” and reads in part: 

Involved in clouds of woe, Maria mourns, 

And various anguish wracks her Soul by turns;

See thy loved parent languishing in Death,

His Exit watch, and catch his flying breath…

Thine, and the Church’s Sorrows I deplore;

Moorhead is dead, and Friendship is no more.

Though a liberal minister, Reverend Moorhead was a staunch loyalist to the British Crown. Many in his congregation were sea captains and merchants directly affected by the taxes, while others in the church stood to gain from the British presence. When Moorhead died in late 1773, the congregation turned on itself and church services were suspended for several years as the war got under way. 

This Boston congregation, also referred to as the Church of the Presbyterian Strangers, was known variously as “the Meeting House in Long Lane” and “the Federal Street Church,” the congregation was named the Arlington Street Church in 1862, accord to church notes.

Test + Research, Michael Quinlin