Jacob Green’s Revolution. S. Scott Rohrer

“sitting in his arm chair, and without book, and commonly with his eyes shut, asking in regular order every question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, helping or correcting those [children] who could not repeat it perfectly.”⁷

      Jacob, of course, had strong views about the parental role in religion. The church, he passionately believed, could not do it alone; it was up to fathers and mothers to instill discipline in their children so that they could take their rightful places in the church upon reaching adulthood. “Warn your children,” Green advised his Presbyterian congregants in one sermon. “Reason with them; shew them what they are doing. Give them advice; pray with and for them.” The overarching point, he stressed, was to “bring the case often before God. He has the hearts of all in his hand. He can sanctify and make your children obedient.” But children bore a responsibility, too; Green warned them that their actions had consequences and that poor choices could not be dismissed later as the follies of youth. Several misbehaviors especially concerned Green. Foremost was the child who disobeyed his or her parents; Jacob labeled such disobedience “a great sin, most contrary to the express command of God.” By contrast, obeying thy parents “is a divine precept.” The second serious transgression was “frequenting bad company,” a sin that often led to further misbehaviors—fornication, excessive drinking, “sensual lusts,” profaneness. For those youths who did engage in such acts, Jacob lectured that they had but one recourse: “Yield yourselves up into the hand of God. . . . Look to the mercy of God in Christ.”⁸

      Jacob relentlessly preached these values to his youthful congregants at church and to his children at home. He expected Ashbel and his other children to memorize key church doctrines—and he expected them to understand what they were reciting. Green liked to pose questions to his parishioners, and he used the same technique at home. According to Ashbel, after repeating the Westminster catechism the children had to answer questions “on five chapters previously prescribed.” Jacob would then quiz them about the text he had preached on “and what we could recollect of the sermons we had heard.” Ashbel’s younger brother Calvin had similar recollections: “When I was young my father made it a point to chatechise us on Sabbath nights at 5 o’clock in summer and 6 o’clock in winter. He spent about one hour and a half instructing us.” Jacob also encouraged his children to read beyond the Bible, including poetry, and these Sunday sessions were a time for them to describe their readings. “The whole,” Ashbel said, “was concluded sometimes with a short address from my father, and always by an impressive prayer. No secular business, nor conversation on secular subjects, was allowed in the family, except that which related to milking the cows, and relieving the necessities of other brute animals.”⁹

      For Jacob and Elizabeth’s offspring, growing up in such a demanding religious household obviously posed its challenges. Other children at other times did not handle such demands so well. In the late eighteenth century, James Finley came of age in a Presbyterian household much like the Greens. His stern father was pastor of the Presbyterian congregation at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, and he too made his children repeat the Westminster catechism. The father followed up with questions, just as Jacob Green did, but he did not always get the answers he wanted. In his autobiography James Finley recounted one tense exchange with his ministerial father:

      “James, do you pray?” I replied, “No, father, I do not.”

      “Why do you not pray, my son?”

      “Because I do not see any use in it. If I am one of the elect, I will be saved in God’s good time; and if I am one of the non-elect, praying will do me no good, as Christ did not die for them.”

      Young James Finley took pleasure in challenging his father. Questioning the tenets of his father’s Presbyterian faith was a way to rebel against his Calvinist upbringing. Nor did young James confine his rebellion to the home—he also argued with his father’s congregants about the shortcomings of Calvinism. He argued so much with church members, including the congregation’s elders, that “I became very obnoxious to the high-tone Calvinists, and they looked upon me as very dangerous to their young people.”¹⁰

      The Green children caused their father no such embarrassment. Instead, they spoke lovingly of their parents and of their upbringing. For Ashbel, his years “under the paternal roof” were happy ones. And his brother Calvin, who was three years younger, spoke fondly of both parents but especially of his mother. “When I was 3 or 4 years old my Mother would take me by the hand and lead me to meeting and back again. There was a little foot path on one side of the road that I always walked in when I went to meeting,” Calvin wrote in his short autobiography. “Oh, the best of Mothers to take care of me when young.”¹¹

      These two sons did have mildly rebellious streaks. Excessive drinking was one of the biggest sins that Jacob railed against, but that did not stop Calvin from imbibing at the encouragement of acquaintances. “I heard some people say all must get drunk once,” he recalled. So he did, on wine, and he got violently sick for his trouble. Calvin said he never got drunk again; “I think once is a plenty.” In his autobiography, Ashbel confessed that he caused his parents some grief through his “acts of disobedience, and [through] the youthful and irregularities in which I indulged.” He was surely exaggerating; Ashbel was well behaved throughout his childhood. “My early religious education preserved me, during the time I lived with my pious parents, from open and profligate vice,” he said at another point, and it enabled him to keep his “native corruptions” under control.¹²

      Ashbel did stand up to his father on one important issue. Jacob had peremptorily decided that of his four living sons, the oldest and the youngest should be “scholars” and the middle two should be “farmers or mechanics.” As the second-oldest son, Ashbel was thus supposed to work with his hands. From an early age, however, Ashbel loved books and the classroom. Ironically, Jacob was partly responsible for Ashbel’s rebellion. The Sunday sessions, where Jacob encouraged his children to read broadly, including poetry, planted a seed in Ashbel. His love of books further sprouted because of Jacob’s insistence that his children, even those who were not destined to be “a professed scholar,” master reading and grammar. Ashbel loved reading so much that for a time, in his own words, he “thirsted for the fame of a poet,” and in his poetic compositions he drew the praise of his mother. Jacob did succeed in discouraging Ashbel from becoming a poet—he told his son “to aim at a good prose style, and to let poetry alone”—but not from attending college. Ashbel had an important ally in this quest: his mother. She “favoured” his desire to attend college, and Jacob eventually went along with it.¹³