In the end, the verdict on the question of radicalism should be readily apparent in Jacob Green’s Revolution. The book takes the reader on a journey through the Enlightenment and a revolutionary age, focusing on an obscure but paradoxical man who embraced both the harshness of Calvinism and the soaring democratic hopes of the American Revolution.
The Worlds of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler
The journey from Stoneham, Massachusetts, to Cambridge carried Jacob Green past the familiar scenes of his childhood—the farmsteads and weathered houses of Stoneham, the rocky pastures, woodlands, and hills of Malden (map 2). Spurring his horse southward in the summer heat, down the narrow lanes and rutted roads that permeated the New England countryside, he crossed the Malden and Mystic Rivers and turned west toward his destination. It was a short and easy ride in some ways, a mere nine miles over well-traveled roads that ran near Charlestown and Boston.
But, of course, in another important sense, the journey was anything but easy. Serious and hardworking—dour, even—Jacob Green remained a callow youth in 1740 as he readied to take his place among the elite of Harvard College: shy among strangers, afraid to speak in public, unsure about his plans and prospects. His father was long dead. His family was neither prominent nor rich, and his home of late was Stoneham, a hardscrabble farming community that enjoyed none of the success, prestige, or wealth of a Boston or Salem. His intellectual journey over the next four years would prove to be equally challenging; exposure to the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening had him fretting over his Calvinism in 1744, the year of his graduation.
When Jacob arrived in Cambridge on that August day in 1740, his lack of social standing became painfully evident. Harvard ranked him next to last in the thirty-three-member freshman class of 1744, one spot above James Welman of Lynn, Massachusetts, the son of a yeoman farmer who could afford Harvard only because of the beneficence of his pastor, Stephen Chase. At the top was Samuel Welles; a mere fifteen years old upon his entry to Harvard, he was the eldest son of a wealthy and respected merchant in Boston who owned a wharf and sat on the colony’s Province Council. Thomas Cushing, who went on to become a lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was ranked fourth. His family boasted a coat of arms, a father who served as a justice of the peace, and a grandfather-merchant who built the family fortune. The Greens possessed none of these things.1
Jacob was a farm boy. He was born on February 2, 1722, in Malden, an agricultural village some eight miles north of Boston. He was named after a father he never got to know. In 1723, Jacob the elder died of “a nervous fever,” in the son’s words, when Jacob was about eighteen months old. How this loss affected Jacob is impossible to know but he surely felt his absence keenly. In his autobiography Jacob avoided the topic, keeping his description of his father to twelve words and coldly stark: “My father’s name was Jacob Green, the youngest son of Henry Green.”2
With his father dead, the task of raising Jacob fell to his mother, Dorothy Lynde Green, and a large family circle—primarily three uncles and his four older sisters. This circle of kin encompassed not only the Green clan but also the Lyndes and the Barret family, whom Dorothy married into after the death of her husband. The Lyndes and Greens were especially close; Jacob’s mother was the daughter of Captain John Lynde and Elizabeth Hills, who was the widow of William Green. Dorothy’s sister Martha married into the Green family a few years after Dorothy did, while years earlier Nathan Lynde had married Lydia Green.3
The Greens were a thoroughly conventional family of middling Puritan farmers who resided in middling Puritan towns. Jacob’s grandfather Henry was descended from Thomas Green, the Puritan forebearer, who was the first in the family to arrive on America’s shores. Henry had eight children; Jacob’s father, who was born in 1689, was the youngest. The Green men worked as farmers and craftsmen—Henry was a weaver, and Jacob’s uncles pursued an assortment of crafts. But farming was the main family occupation, and land was their most prized possession. They hoarded it and swapped it, and these farmsteads enabled them to keep their family together. Jacob’s father inherited Henry’s main farm, as well as a lot that was behind an uncle’s house. The elder Jacob’s siblings also got farms, all bordering various Greens.4
Malden, as a result, served as the geographical center of the Green family. Various branches clustered in the town’s northwestern section, where their farms formed an arc between Ell Pond and the Reading town line. Greens, Lyndes, and Barrets could also be found in Stoneham and Leicester, as well as Killingly, Connecticut. Jacob, who primarily lived in Malden and Stoneham, was to get to know all four places during a peripatetic childhood.5
As modest as their economic circumstances were, the Greens did achieve some prominence in town and church affairs—Henry served as a lieutenant in the militia and held several public offices, including moderator of Malden’s town meeting and a selectman in the town government. Jacob’s uncle Daniel, whom Jacob lived with for a year, was a town selectman and a deacon in Stoneham’s congregational church, a position of prestige and importance in Puritan communities.6
One reason for the vagabond existence was Dorothy’s marriage to John Barret of Malden in the mid-1720s. The marital union enlarged Jacob’s circle of kinship—the couple went on to have three children of their own—and presumably brought additional support from the new brood of step-siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But the marriage also meant upheaval: Dorothy and John moved to Killingly in eastern Connecticut in 1729 or so, and Jacob left Malden for a time. Because the Barrets were not wealthy, Dorothy sent Jacob to live with various uncles after he turned fourteen, and he endured long absences from his mother, with one separation lasting two years.7
Jacob apparently was not close to his stepfather. In his autobiography, he had virtually nothing to say about John Barret. In contrast, Jacob cited his mother’s influence and expressed his adoration for her. Despite the absences, it was Dorothy who instilled a love of learning in Jacob and nurtured his interest in religion. “My mother took much pains to teach me to read, and early to instil into my mind the principles of religion,” he recalled. Jacob described her as a deeply devout woman who impressed upon him the importance of prayer, advice that Jacob took to heart from a young age.8
A pious, female-dominated household (his older sisters read religious tracts aloud to him) fused with a powerful Puritan culture to shape Jacob and steer him toward the ministry. In eighteenth-century New England, the fervor of the founding generation was gone but religion remained central in the lives of the region’s inhabitants. The Sunday tableau of farmers converging on the town green for services at the congregational church was one sign of this importance; hearing the Word each Sunday remained a vital ritual of New England