Élie Neau

About Élie Neau

Élie Neau was a French Protestant refugee, merchant and lay religious teacher in colonial New York. Also known as Elias Neau, he endured years of forced labor and imprisonment in France before returning to America. His later work brought enslaved New Yorkers into a school connected with Trinity Church. He sought their Christian instruction and baptism, while accepting the institution that kept them enslaved. His history therefore joins a determined commitment to religious education with a serious limitation in his understanding of freedom.

Born about 1662 in Moëze, in the French province of Saintonge, Neau went to sea as a boy. By 1679 he had settled in Saint-Domingue. Pressure on Protestants there eventually brought him to Boston, where he married Susanne Paré in 1688. He later moved his family to New York. In 1692, while commanding a merchant ship bound for Jamaica, he was captured by a French privateer near Bermuda and taken to Saint-Malo.

French authorities treated him as a Protestant who had unlawfully left the kingdom. Offers of release were tied to abandoning his faith. He refused, and in 1693 he was condemned to the galleys. A chained march carried him to Marseille. Historian Ruth Whelan studies his account as testimony shaped in opposition to the authorities’ portrayal of him as a criminal. His writing preserved his own understanding of an experience that official judgment had defined very differently. Whelan emphasizes that such testimony was an act of resistance, preserving a voice otherwise marginalized within the public record of persecution. His surviving writings include letters and hymns.

His captivity included imprisonment in Marseille and at the Château d’If. Sauter’s account, drawing on his letters and published testimony, describes deprivation, isolation and efforts to maintain contact with other prisoners. Scripture and hymn singing occupied an important place in his recollections. He was released in 1698 after diplomatic intervention. Before returning to New York, he traveled in Europe and raised support for Protestants still held in French prisons and galleys. His own release had not brought freedom to all his fellow prisoners.

Back in New York, Neau became involved in the French Protestant congregation. In 1704 he joined Trinity Church and began work as a catechist under the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The diocesan account emphasizes his attachment to the Book of Common Prayer. He later served on Trinity’s vestry. His position was that of a lay teacher and parish leader, rather than an ordained priest.

The school met at Trinity and in Neau’s house. Teaching and preparation for baptism were closely connected: the diocesan history records a substantial body of pupils and people whom he presented for baptism. Religious participation did not itself change their enslaved condition.

That distinction was explicit in Neau’s own position. As Bürmann explains, he reassured enslavers that baptism would not release those they held in bondage. He followed an Anglican argument separating Christian membership from a person’s legal and social condition. His concern for enslaved people did not amount to a program of emancipation. Remembering his work accurately requires retaining both his willingness to teach people whom others excluded and his accommodation of their continued enslavement.

After the New York uprising of 1712, opponents blamed religious instruction for unrest, and threats made Neau afraid to leave his house. Governor Robert Hunter supported the continuation of the school. Relations with Trinity’s rector, William Vesey, also became difficult. In 1715 a dispute over Vesey’s refusal to baptize an enslaved young woman contributed to Neau’s temporary dismissal. He was reinstated and continued teaching until his death. These episodes reveal the dependence of his work on colonial officials, missionary patrons and parish authorities whose support was not always secure.

Neau died in New York City on September 7, 1722. The later history of Black worship in the city extended far beyond his lifetime. Columbia University’s Mapping the African American Past project traces the roots of St. Philip’s congregation to the people taught in his school. At Trinity, Black Christians worshiped within a segregated church. Their eventual creation of a separate congregation reflected their own response to the refusal to end segregation or condemn slavery.

In 1818, Black carpenters helped build St. Philip’s wooden church. It became a center of mutual aid and antislavery activity as well as worship. This later community should not be reduced to an extension of Neau’s intentions: its members acted on concerns that his acceptance of slavery had left unresolved. His school belongs within that longer history of Black religious life, whose participants built institutions and pursued purposes of their own.

In 2024, the Episcopal Church authorized a September 7 commemoration of Élie Naud for trial use during 2024–2027. This is recognition within a particular Anglican church. It preserves the memory of a persecuted believer and teacher without making his life free of contradiction.