Friday Feature—Dr. Rudder: A precocious youth from ... South America’s Wild Coast?!

New Amsterdam, British Guiana

I love surprises and big open questions. 

Rev. Dr. William Rudder, whom we’ve met so often in these posts and the church, just provoked some winners. I finally noticed that biographies report this formidable American cleric, St. Stephen’s last High-Church rector, was born in British Guiana. When that detail registered, the “story nose” began to twitch.

Rev. Dr. Willliam Rudder

I consulted his memorial sermon by The Most Rev. Arthur Cleveland Coxe, Bishop of Western New York, who’d known Dr. Rudder since his early years in Hartford, Connecticut. As the newly ordained rector of Hartford’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, Coxe, a recognized poet-scholar, mentored the youth, a student at Hartford’s Washington [later Trinity] College. Coxe had been asked to do so by Rudder’s rector at Hartford’s Christ Church, the Rev. Dr. George Burgess, who’d singled out Rudder’s mother as an “esteemed parishioner” but especially her precocious and devout son whom he’d followed since secondary school. Once graduated, Rudder gratified Coxe, a High-Church churchman, by entering his alma mater, the High-Church General Theological Seminary and pursuing an illustrious career in the Church before he died prematurely.

That straightforward “mentored potential” story made Rudder’s briefly mentioned early years overseas even more tantalizing. Bishop Coxe offers another puzzle: He claims Rudder’s widowed mother moved to “academic” Hartford to properly educate her gifted son, then her only child.

Why the United States rather than England, a colonial British family’s typical choice for educating sons? Why Hartford as their home, not just a schooling venue? 

The Rudders, reported Coxe, were specifically from Berbice (Bur-BEECE), a region of British Guiana, now Guyana (a republic since 1966), a tiny English-speaking country beside Venezuela. As we’ll see, William Rudder grew up in its years as a plantation colony that had just shifted from Dutch to British hands, undergoing tumultuous change that profoundly shaped its future. 

Long-ignored, British Guiana/Guyana is now a hot topic, with publications emerging regularly on its Dutch and English colonial history and trade, piracy, enslavement and immigration. Thanks to data from civil records and newspapers now available online and from the Philadelphia City Archives (applause to Milton and Robin!), I offer a preliminary sketch of Dr. Rudder’s early life in British Berbice. 

Why does this story matter? Rudder’s beginnings provide a unique glimpse of a colonial life that brings more nuance into the stereotype. We also see the challenges of the fledgling Anglican community in a shifting colonial world. 

Berbice was one of three Dutch colonies established on South America’s untamed, muddy “Wild Coast” in the 17th c. that were rendered permanently to the United Kingdom at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815). All three colonies were situated on major rivers that flow from the continent’s tropical interior into the Atlantic. Berbice typified them all in having plantations along, or with access to, the rivers. 

These waterways were the colonies’ lifeblood for irrigation, transport of raw materials (agricultural and mining) for export, and local travel even today.

The British developed Berbice’s modest capital, New Amsterdam, a reclaimed port at the mouth of the Berbice River soon after they gained the territory. Fifteen years later (1831), they merged the three colonies as British Guiana (indigenous word for land of many waters) with its capital in Georgetown, on the Demerara River to the west. 

Though I found little about conflicts between colonists and the indigenous peoples in the interior, daily life was dangerous: disease and high mortality; pirate attacks even in the interior; violent treatment of slaves; and frequent slave rebellions since the 17th c. that scarred and nearly destroyed the colony. Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1834 opened the colonies’ doors to global immigration (often indentured) to fill the new labor vacuum, creating an exceptionally diverse population. 

William Rudder, as I mentioned, lived in British Berbice in precisely these formative years. Though biographies vary on the date, his true birth year should be 1823: his Philadelphia death certificate states he died at 57 of “uremia [kidney failure]” on 29 January 1880. His widowed mother, as Bishop Coxe identifies her unnamed, fits the description, in Berbice obituaries, of Caroline Rudder, widow of William F. Rudder, Esq. druggist, who died in June or July 1834. Though it’s not yet known when they arrived and from where, the Rudders’ address as “Berbice,” unlike others specifying New Amsterdam, suggests they lived beyond town.

Yet working and living near settled areas makes sense for W.F. Rudder’s profession as a druggist, a multi-faceted practice that by the eighteenth century in Britain enjoyed prestige--and was likely much in demand in a tropical colony plagued with health problems. Near town, W.F. Rudder would have access to clients from all around and to supplies from the port. He may have used “Esquire” like many British professional males of that time with no other titles (Rev., Dr.). We might gauge his standing within the colony in his role as “co-curator” (co-executor?) in 1824-7 of the estate of a prosperous New Amsterdam woman, a merchant and slave-owning plantation owner. I don’t yet know whether the Rudders ever owned slaves; neither is recorded among Berbice’s slave owners in 1819 and 1822. 

I can only guess when Caroline Rudder took her son to Hartford, working backward with known dates. Bishop Coxe reports Rudder graduated from Washington College in 1848 when, according to his known birth date (1823), Rudder was 25. If he undertook the standard four-year course, he entered the college in 1844 at 21. Coxe claims Rudder began his Hartford education in secondary school, so perhaps they arrived around 1840 when Rudder was about 17.

Again, why Hartford and the US, and not the UK?

The Dutch Evangelical Lutheran Church, New Amsterdam

Finally, the colony’s religious life which was embroiled in the turbulent changes. Though various denominations were long active, the colony officially became Anglican under British rule, with missionaries throughout the region and priests in settlement parishes. Bishop Coxe claims the young Rudder was baptized in 1828 (the year he guessed Rudder was born), presumably as an Anglican. That year the 5-yr old Rudder likely would’ve been baptized, according to Berbice parish records, by the Rev. Thomas Rowan (rector 1828-1832) who, like his colleagues before and immediately after, lacked a home church. Local Anglicans worshipped in rotation at the Dutch Evangelical Lutheran church in New Amsterdam until the new All Saints’ Anglican Church was consecrated there in 1839. The young Rudder might’ve been catechized for confirmation by Rowan’s successor, the Rev. Thomas Redwar (rector 1833-1842).

Were these rectors’ experiences, views and practices like those of their better-known colleague who became British Guiana’s first bishop in 1842, Lord William Piercy Austin? Himself a colonial, Austin engaged sensitively with the colony’s fraught diversity. Though British-born and -educated, he was the son of local planters, lived in the colony and served as curate and vicar in New Amsterdam long before young William Rudder was born. According to historian John Pinnington, Austin was firmly High Church yet thoughtful about differences among the denominations within the colony, between the Established Church at home and its more informal colonies—and about the tensions with his missionaries, many of whom, as with other denominations, were abolitionist evangelicals (“Factors in the Development of the Catholic Movement in the Anglican Church in British Guiana,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 37, 4 [December 1968], pp. 355-369). 

Many planters, as in other plantation communities, condemned missions that sought to Christianize blacks by teaching them to read the Word. Planters feared enslaved blacks would feel empowered to rebel again. Blaming such missionaries for the 1823 rebellion in Berbice, planters destroyed New Amsterdam’s Mission Chapel Congregational Church.

The colony’s growing religious diversity, according to Pinnington, helped to clarify Austin’s doctrinal views along traditional post-Reformation battle lines. At one pole were the evangelicals, the Dutch Lutherans and missionaries. At the opposite pole were the growing Roman Catholic immigrants from Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Austin’s “middle course” aimed to temper the evangelical hostility to Romanism in his flock as he personally rejected Roman Catholicism’s adherence to papal succession for the Anglican embrace of apostolic succession. Austin consequently reaffirmed the Anglican Communion as the Church that most faithfully implemented the mission of the primitive Church. Though High Church, he apparently supported only some of the controversial Oxford Movement’s arguments. 

What impact did Berbice’s Anglican clergy and their approach to the colony’s growing pains have on the young William Rudder? We might hope they provided a nuanced perspective on Christian doctrines and practices in a rapidly changing world. Did the clergy advise the Rudders on plans to leave, and to where? 

How did Rudder’s youth in a fraught tropical British colony shape the man?  

Did I mention that I love open questions?

— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator