But which community? I looked no further than the place I had grown up, Morris County in northwestern New Jersey. During the Revolution, Morris was a Presbyterian-Whig stronghold that stridently backed the war and provided a safe haven to General Washington’s shivering Continentals. So the initial vision was a twofer: I would return to my roots by studying a community I knew intimately, and I would probe the radicalism of Presbyterianism. And having settled on this plan, I plunged into the primary sources on revolutionary Morris County.
Jacob Green had other ideas.
As I studied the county, this remarkable man from Hanover, the largest township in Morris at the time, jumped off the pages of the sources I was exploring. A Presbyterian minister, miller, farmer, physician, teacher, best-selling author, and reformer—Jacob Green was everywhere in the primary and secondary sources. Discussions of slavery in Morris County? Green was trying to abolish this most pernicious practice. Should New Jersey declare independence in 1776? Green was arguing for it in an influential tract that sold widely. Who should represent Morris in the pivotal Provincial Congress that decided whether the colony would secede from the British Empire? Green was elected by his peers to head to Burlington. And yet there was no modern biography of this ardent revolutionary.
Biographies of the era focus mostly on the leading founders. Books on Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, to name but two, could fill an entire library, and the output shows no signs of abating. Understandably, Americans are endlessly fascinated with the leading revolutionaries; these were talented and brilliant men who richly deserve the acclaim they receive. Less understood and known among the general public, however, are the Jacob Greens of the independence movement—those revolutionaries who occupied the backrooms of the founding pantheon. And once again, Green told me why someone like him is worth studying. He was all about reforming society. Fifty-four in 1776, Green had the energy of someone half his age. While other New Jerseyans were reluctant—scared, even—to take on the British, he welcomed it and was confident the Americans could win the war. Green saw the Revolution as his great chance to change society, and he offered up one of the most wide-ranging reform programs of any revolutionary, including Jefferson.
The source of this revolutionary energy was especially intriguing. It drew not from the well of the political radicalism of British intellectuals like John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, or the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke (although Green admired Locke and cited him in his writings). The wellspring of Green’s revolutionary energy was stodgy old Calvinism, a once-dominant religious movement that was slipping into irrelevance by 1776.
Jacob Green’s Revolution: Radical Religion and Reform in a Revolutionary Age, as a result, is about several things. On the simplest level, it is the biography of one revolutionary and his experiences before, during, and after the war. On a deeper level, the book is a microhistory that seeks to understand how religion contributed to reform during the founding years. Jacob Green’s Revolution is a microhistory in the sense that it trains a telescope on a distant figure in the American past to illuminate how a backwoods reformer thought and acted during a time of revolutionary possibility in U.S. history. Jacob Green’s Revolution, in other words, isn’t a willy-nilly accounting of one man’s life but a foray into the world of religion and revolution in early America.1
On a third level, Jacob Green’s Revolution is an experiment. Traditional biographies, of course, focus on one individual. This book tries something different by mixing in a brief, alternative biography between the main chapters. The primary reason for including this second story is thematic. Religion’s impact on reform during the Revolution was not uniform. Calvinism produced a reformer like Jacob Green; High Church Anglicanism produced something quite different. To demonstrate the latter and further illuminate the former, the second story sketches the life of a colorful character who was the opposite of the Presbyterian minister from Hanover. Thomas Bradbury Chandler, a conservative Anglican minister, lived a few townships over from Green and was his peer in many ways. Like Green, he was a talented writer and a deeply devout man. But unlike Green, Chandler drew quite different conclusions about reform and society from his study of God. He opposed revolution and feared democracy, and his main reform cause sought to strengthen authority. Thus, in the pages of Jacob Green’s Revolution, two tales emerge that are meant to both entertain and enlighten readers about the revolutionary experience.
In writing this book, I am indebted to a number of people. Foremost is historian Mark A. Noll of the University of Notre Dame. Noll is the dean of American religious history, a one-man writing mill who is churning out tomes on religion and American society with stunning regularity (more than twenty-five books by last count). He also is an authority on Green’s life and the Edwardseanism that undergirded it, and I am indebted to his insights throughout. Beyond all that, Noll encouraged me to write this book and gave me valuable feedback throughout the long process of producing it.
I also thank John Fea, the garrulous blogger and historian who is writing a book on Presbyterians in the American Revolution. In person and by e-mail, Fea offered a number of helpful suggestions, especially regarding the introduction and the larger questions of how to structure the book. In addition, I thank Kathryn Yahner, my editor at Penn State University Press, who was so supportive of this project and who offered excellent guidance throughout. Her critique of an earlier draft was especially telling and helpful. And I thank Craig Atwood, who helped put me in touch with Yahner when I was looking for a publishing home.
Numerous friends played a role in the book’s completion. Marilyn Marks and her family provided me with a place to stay during research trips to Princeton University, where the Green family papers are stored. Despite a punishing work schedule, Steve Manson, a childhood friend from Morris County, found time to do the drawings of the Green church and parsonage, as well as one of the maps. Sally Ratigan, another childhood friend, and her family also provided lodging—and beer—during research trips to Morris County. Peter Bell, a colleague at National Journal, did the second map.
I thank the many libraries and archives that made their holdings available to me: the staff of the rare books and manuscripts department at Princeton University Library; Mary Robison of the Christoph Keller, Jr., Library at the General Theological Seminary in New York City; Diana Yount of the Franklin Trask Library, Andover Newton Theological School; the Library of Congress; the Morris County Public Library; Harvard University Library; the New England Historic Genealogical Society; and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Last but not least, I thank the two pillars in my life—my wife, Anne, and son, Josh, who have inspired me in so many ways. The book is dedicated to my two brothers, Jeff and David, who have been so supportive of me through the years, as well as to several lifelong friends from Mountain Lakes in Morris County—Steve and Janet Manson, and Sally and Kenneth Ratigan.
Friends, all.
When it came to war on April 19, 1775, the fighting at Lexington Green and Concord was a clarion call for the dreamers and the reformers. At last the temporizing was ending, and committed revolutionaries saw their chance to fight for the changes in American society they believed the times demanded. Their ranks were diverse. At the top were the Whig intellectuals steeped in classical thought and the writings of British radicals like John Wilkes, men who dreamed of ending monarchical government and replacing it with a republican society populated by the virtuous. For them, the American Revolution was about self-rule and the chance to create independent governments, free of British meddling, that would solidify the elites’ wealth and power. At the bottom were the masses—the seamen, the laborers, the farmers, the African Americans, the “unruly”—who saw the war as a people’s revolution, a chance to establish democratic rights and create a more just society that would overthrow outdated institutions and redistribute political and economic power. For these legions of people, the Revolution was about creating a better, more prosperous life.1
The sources of revolutionary energy were thus quite broad, and they were fed by streams flowing from vertiginous places. One such stream was from a particularly out-of-the-way place.