Jacob Green’s Revolution

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S. Scott Rohrer. Jacob Green’s Revolution

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JACOB GREEN’S REVOLUTION

RADICAL RELIGION AND REFORM IN A REVOLUTIONARY AGE

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His school assignments involved examining the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, but reading also “Mr. Ray’s Consequences of the Deluge”; papers in the Spectator; “Mr. Allen’s Alarm”; and John Locke and Euclid. Jacob worked hard at arithmetic. It was a thoroughly conventional schedule, typical for students of Harvard and Yale in the mid-eighteenth century.33

Logic was an important part of Harvard’s curriculum, and the assignment of John Locke was a sign of the Enlightenment’s arrival in this Puritan bastion, which revered not only Jesus Christ but Aristotle, Cicero, and other giants of the ancient world. In February 1728, Isaac Greenwood became Harvard’s first Hollis professor of mathematics and natural philosophy, and he did much to introduce the college to the Enlightenment and its liberal values. Greenwood was a scientist who observed the sea and the winds, and he published papers at the Royal Society. Edward Wigglesworth, son of Michael, was the Hollis professor of divinity, and he also did a great deal to modernize the Harvard curriculum by encouraging his students to broaden their knowledge of the leading issues of the day. As one historian noted, “America’s ‘enlightenment’ was . . . a ‘moderate’ and conciliatory cosmology that stressed balance, order, and religious compromise,” and Harvard’s students soon learned the importance of each.34

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