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Introduction

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as a people’s revolution, a chance to establish democratic rights and create a more just society that would overthrow outdated institutions and redistribute political and economic power.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. In the Watchung Mountains of northwestern New Jersey, a backwoods reformer pursued a revolutionary program as ambitious as anything Thomas Paine could dream up. Yet he hardly fit the image of a revolutionary. He was unassuming and shy, and fairly old by the standards of revolution—fifty-three in 1775. Home was not the august halls of Williamsburg or the smoky parlor of a Boston tavern but a modest parish house in Hanover, New Jersey. He was not an erudite lawyer or an angry rioter but a quiet man of the cloth who preached discipline and obedience to God. Even after spending years in the pulpit as a Presbyterian minister, he was uncomfortable appearing before crowds of people and was an uninspiring public speaker. Bad nerves and bouts of melancholia undermined his health.

His pen, however, hinted at no such weakness, and this revolutionary brought to his task the penetrating eye of a critic who questioned not only British but American society. To an official in London reading his influential 1776 tract advocating independence, he was a troublemaker and a radical. To a slave owner in the Mid-Atlantic perusing his letters on liberty advocating a just society and denouncing slavery, he was a menace to good order. Jacob Green, a radical? He would have denied such a thing. When elected to the New Jersey Provincial Congress in May 1776, he went reluctantly and resigned his post within six weeks, as soon as decorum allowed. He scurried home to Hanover, to his library and his pulpit.

Jacob Green’s concerns were wider than taxation and representation (although, as a good Whig, he was concerned with both those things). Green wanted the rebelling Americans to abolish slavery, broaden democratic rights, reform the currency, and establish a fairer, almost communistic economic system that would give the downtrodden a fighting chance to succeed against the wellborn. Most ambitiously, he wanted a society that would be defined not by materialism and self-interest but by devotion to God and the common good. And he saw the American Revolution as his chance to achieve these ambitious goals, despite the numerous failings of the American people that he perceived and publicly lamented. In pursuing such a broad and idealistic reform agenda, Jacob Green was hardly alone; the American Revolution, as is well-known, produced its share of dreamers throughout the thirteen colonies.²

The particularly interesting fact about Green’s reform drive, as this book will fully explore, was its source: it stemmed not from Whig philosophy or Lockean principles—the famous “contagion of liberty” that inspired so many colonists to revolt—but from his religious beliefs, specifically his Calvinism and the tenets he derived from the complex thought of Jonathan Edwards.³ Under assault from many quarters (including Enlightenment scientists and rationalists), Calvinism was a tired and harried religious movement by 1776, with many contemporaries seeing it as a barrier to reform and the improvement of society. Founded in the sixteenth century by John Calvin (1509–1564) during the early days of the Protestant Reformation, Calvinism dominated the intellectual thought of western Europe for the next three centuries, a domination resting on the simplest of premises—God preordained who was saved and who was not. In their rejection of Catholic conceptions of good works, indulgences, and purgatory, Calvin’s predestinarian teachings built on the insights of Augustine and Luther. Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century maintained that humans were incapable of lifting themselves up from their fallen states through acts of charity and good works. They especially rejected the idea that someone could “buy” salvation through timely gifts to the church. The definitive statement on this heretical notion came from the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther: under his justification by faith, God grants salvation to those who believe. Calvin’s followers then pushed the implication of Luther’s theory to its logical extreme: God alone does the granting—good behavior cannot earn someone salvation; a person cannot “work” his or her way to eternal bliss. Moreover, in this Calvinistic schemata, an all-powerful God can see far into the future and know ahead of time what will happen because he has preordained the course of events, including who will be saved and who will be damned.⁴

From the beginning, Calvin’s teachings on predestination had their critics, who recoiled against the doctrine’s inherent cruelty: God decides ahead of time who will not be saved, and there’s nothing a person can do to keep from spending eternity in hell? One such critic was Henry VIII, the philandering English king who broke away from Rome in the late 1530s and anointed himself head of his country’s church. Under Calvinism, Henry wondered, where was the incentive to do good—to pursue reforms that would benefit society? Why should anyone behave morally and justly if good behavior did not matter? If bad behavior were preordained? While Henry agreed with Luther and Calvin that the Catholic Church had become a corrupt institution and that indulgences were wrong, he felt the reformers had gone too far in the other direction by seemingly dismissing all acts of charity. In Henry’s mind, salvation would be determined only after a final accounting at the Day of Judgment when a person dies.⁵

Richard Hooker (1554–1600), the renowned English theologian during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, expounded on Henry’s critique: telling someone that her fate was determined before she was born and that she must follow the path laid out by God dampened the motivation for individuals to act morally. Hooker argued, instead, that reason was a gift of God, as was free will. It was up to individuals whether they wanted to do good, or bad—whether they wanted to spend their time in taverns or helping to feed and clothe the hungry and the homeless. Like Henry VIII, Hooker believed that good works played an important role in human society, and he constructed a comprehensive theological system built on reason and order that allowed for a far larger scope of human choice and action than Calvinism supposedly allowed.⁶

These challenges, which in essence called into question whether Calvinism could be an agent for the reform of individuals and ultimately society, were only the beginning. Scientists during the Enlightenment were chipping away at Calvinism from another direction by slowly unraveling the mysteries of nature and the cosmos, thanks to, among other things, the invention of the microscope and the telescope. Scientists’ discoveries were raising uncomfortable questions about both the Bible and God’s powers. Was the Bible really an accurate accounting of human history? How do you explain its inconsistencies? Did God really control all? Or was free will paramount? Was God’s divine power behind the workings of nature, or were other forces responsible? The spirit of scientific inquiry brought a new, Baconian way of thinking that challenged researchers to analyze phenomena—and the Bible—based on evidence and observation, not on blind faith. The resulting skepticism brought renewed scrutiny to a sixteenth-century religious coda resting on the doctrine of predestination, and this skepticism produced what Peter J. Thuesen, a historian of Jonathan Edwards’s thought, terms Enlightenment latitude—“a new skepticism [after 1725] about rigid orthodoxies and a growing indifference toward old doctrinal confidence.” One result of this Enlightenment latitude was “a growing confidence in human ability and [it] entailed a strong interest in natural religion.” Deists exemplified the new skepticism most forcefully: God created the universe, they said, but he then sat back and watched his handiwork unfold. It was up to man to act, and it was man who was responsible for his actions—not his creator.⁷

Thus, to its contemporary critics, Calvinism was a dour philosophy that stifled human initiative and ultimately dampened the reform drive in human society. Some modern historians looking at the religious underpinnings of the American Revolution have seen Calvinism in the same light. In Bernard Bailyn’s telling, enlightened Whig thinkers “felt that it was precisely the heavy crust of custom that was weighing down the spirit of man; they sought to throw it off [during the American Revolution] and to create by the unfettered power of reason a framework of institutions superior to the accidental inheritance of the past.” At the opposite end of these forward-looking, enlightened Whigs of the 1770s were “covenant theologians”—Calvinists and Puritans—who “contin[ued] to assume the ultimate inability of man to improve his condition by his own powers.” For Nathan O. Hatch, the great energy unleashed by the Revolution came from evangelical upstarts like the Baptists and the Methodists; ministers who “clung to an undiluted Edwardsean theology, the authority of ordained clergymen, and the necessity of church discipline” were out of step with the emerging democratic ethos. Calvinism, in other words, was an intellectual shackle that kept its practitioners from embracing both the scientific advances of the age and the revolutionary opportunities afforded by the crisis with Great Britain.⁸

Adherents of Calvinism mounted a vigorous defense through the years, and this counteroffensive began with Calvin himself. While conceding that predestination could be seen as cruel and uncaring, he asserted that the doctrine was nevertheless indisputable because of God’s unlimited power and majesty. “No one can deny,” Calvin wrote, “that God foreknew the future final fate of man before He created him, and that He foreknew it because it was appointed by His own decree.” God was sovereign, Calvin reminded his followers, and man was utterly and completely dependent on him. The “elect” could look forward to salvation; the “reprobates” to eternal flames. Such an answer certainly did not quiet Calvin’s critics, and legions of theologians took up the task of defending Calvinism’s conception of God’s power. One of the most prolix was English writer William Prynne, who reiterated in 1629 “that God from eternity hath freely of his own accord, chosen out of mankinde a certaine select number of men, which can neither be augmented nor diminished; whom he doth effectually call, save, and bring to glory.”⁹

More ambitiously, others denied that Calvinism ignored good works and reform. One English sermon delivered in 1592 maintained “that whether a man be predestinate or no, yet he should live so much as may be in a holy obedience . . . for he that hath that hope that he is one of God’s sons doth purify himself, and being a vessel of honor must keep himself fair and clear for the use of his Master, being sanctified and prepared unto every good work.” A 1579 catechism that was included with the English version of the Geneva Bible provided an even clearer answer to the question of why, under predestination, anyone should do good: “Good work is a testimony of the spirit of God, which is given to the elect only.” In other words, performing good works was a way to show the world that you were not a reprobate, that you were, indeed, one of the chosen. This insight became a key tenet of faith for generations of Calvinists—from parliamentarians in 1620s England to Congregationalists in 1740s Massachusetts. Calvinism, they insisted, did not dampen moral behavior; it encouraged it.¹⁰

Defenders of Calvinism in the eighteenth century, however, had an even tougher task than did their sixteenth-century predecessors. The Enlightenment was a mature movement by the 1750s, and Richard Hooker’s assertion that reason and free will were gifts of God had gained a wide following. Calvinists of Jonathan Edwards’s generation had to reconcile reason and religion, free will and God’s omnipotence. One who took up this daunting challenge was English theologian Isaac Watts. “Man is an intellectual and sociable Being,” he asserted in a 1747 tract. “Human Reason is the first Ground and Spring to all human Religion. Man is obliged to Religion because he is a reasonable Creature. Reason directs and obliges us not only to search out and practice the Will of God, as far as natural Conscience will lead us, but also to examine, receive, and obey, all the Revelations which come from God.”¹¹

Like Watts, the brilliant American theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) did not deny the power of reason or the importance of science. True free will, he agreed, meant the ability to do what one chose to do. But while popular conceptions of free will were nebulous, even incoherent, Edwards carefully defined the term—people acted within the confines that God laid out for them. In other words, a wise and beneficent creator granted individuals a range of actions. That argument, in turn, rested on a deeper insight that undergirded Edwards’s defense of Calvinism. Critics like Henry VIII said predestination was a cruel doctrine; Edwards countered that God was not cruel—he was not capricious or petty or vindictive. He was loving and good and kind, a benevolent deity who wielded his immense power wisely. Edwards’s God was also clever. To explain the existence of evil and to account for the scientific advances of the age, Edwards posited that God governed the universe through multiple means: he established laws of nature for inanimate things—the laws that scientists were uncovering during the Enlightenment. But for humans, God governed with a somewhat looser hand, endowing his most important creation with reason and implanting within them free will and something called moral necessity: people were responsible for their actions. In his greatness, God allowed individuals the power to choose within the limits that God decreed. Thus, for Edwards, Calvinism did not undercut moral agency. It actually heightened it because of God’s loving greatness and human free will—God gave the elect good hearts, and these chosen ones wanted to do good for the glory of God. They wanted, in other words, to live godly lives, to improve themselves and society. That was their Christian mandate as God’s elect.¹²

Jacob Green was fascinated by this debate and followed it closely. In the early 1740s, as a farm boy soaking up the heady intellectual atmosphere of college life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he began questioning his faith as he struggled to understand all the ramifications of Calvinism. Raised in New England in a Congregationalist household, Green at first accepted Calvinism without questioning it. Then he was intellectually whipsawed by several events: the historic revivals of 1740–41 during the Great Awakening helped lead to his rebirth and a recommitment to Calvinism, before exposure to the Enlightenment during his classwork at Harvard College had him again questioning his predestinarian beliefs. As he readied to leave Cambridge in 1744 after graduating, Green confessed to a classmate that he was thoroughly confused about Calvinism and did not know how to reconcile all its paradoxes. Not surprisingly, Green was easily unmoored from his Calvinistic beliefs by ministers with “Arminian” leanings when he arrived in New Jersey in 1745. Still unsure what to think as he settled into the ministry, Green retreated to his study to explore the writings of Isaac Watts and Jonathan Edwards and to ponder the great questions that were so frustrating him.¹³

Green’s subsequent journey into the thicket of Calvinism and Arminianism (the doctrine asserting that salvation is open to all) was telling and fascinating, for it helps us to see how contemporaries grappled with the conundrum that King Henry raised back in the 1540s: how could Calvinism spur men and women to act morally, to do good for themselves and for society?

The answer to this question is the central concern of Jacob Green’s Revolution: Radical Religion and Reform in a Revolutionary Age, albeit with an American twist: how did Calvinism (and specifically an Edwardsean version of it) produce such a strong reform drive during the American Revolution? The book’s main subject is a reformer, theologian, and writer who was thrust into New Jersey revolutionary politics in spring 1776 when he published an influential tract called Observations on the Reconciliation of Great-Britain that urged wavering colonists to declare independence. The tract was so well received in the middle colonies that it led to Green’s election to the Provincial Congress that cast New Jersey’s lot with the rebelling colonists; it also led to his selection as the chairman of the committee that wrote New Jersey’s first constitution as an independent state.¹⁴

Green was born in Malden, Massachusetts, near Boston, in 1722, the son of a struggling farmer who died a year after Jacob’s birth. His mother and uncles who raised Green tried to teach him a trade or to steer him to farming, but this serious youth with a love of books had other ideas. Despite limited financial resources, Green managed to enroll in Harvard, where his great intellectual journey began and where he was exposed to not only books of the Enlightenment but also the evangelical world of George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. About a year after graduation, when a job offer from Whitefield fell through, Green found himself in New Jersey, where he became a minister for the Presbyterian congregation in Hanover, a farming community about twenty-six miles west of New York City. Despite his feelings of inadequacy, Green’s talents and energies quickly began to emerge, as he aggressively led the Presbyterian congregation and worked as a farmer, miller, teacher, and physician. His intellectual prowess, as well as his connections in New Jersey Presbyterianism, secured him a seat on the College of New Jersey’s board of trustees, and he served briefly as college president after the death of his mentor, Jonathan Edwards.¹⁵

From a variety of sources, including a thorough examination of biblical history and Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, Green in the 1750s developed his ideas on Calvinism, free will, reason, and the church that, when mixed in with his Lockean understanding of politics and the cauldron that was the American Revolution, undergirded his ambitious reform efforts. For Green, the central concern in his sermons and various writings was, why act morally? Why should anyone—saved or unsaved—perform good works? In painstaking detail over four decades, Green laid out his answers.

The key issue for him—one that was fraught with political implications for the governing of society—was the need to create stronger and purer churches. While some reformers trying to smooth out Calvinism’s rough edges were arguing that the church should become more inclusive by allowing more people, even the reprobate, to join, Green was taking an opposite tack. Churches, he maintained, should be raising standards, permitting only the elect to be full members and to partake in the sacraments. And to become full members, Green explained, applicants needed to show they were among the saved; they needed to show they were performing good works and living exemplary lives. Thus Green’s most important crusade in the years before the Revolution was to purify the church. From this core interest flowed, magma-like, his broader causes—to improve religiosity, he needed to improve the behavior of individuals and society.

Green’s reform regime emerged in stages over three decades. In the late 1760s, he first wrote a series of tracts for a learned audience, primarily theologians, that argued his case for creating a pure church and why it was so important to religion and society. In 1770, he took his cause to the general public, publishing a best-selling pamphlet called A Vision of Hell that lampooned the materialism and selfishness of contemporary society. Using illustrations by Paul Revere of Boston fame, A Vision of Hell was a brilliant satire that poked fun at a wide-ranging group of targets—from less-than-devout ministers to sybaritic merchants and Sabbath-ignoring farmers who cared more about the state of their crops than the state of their souls.¹⁶

The revolutionary crisis of the 1770s presented Pastor Green with a new set of opportunities and headaches. This Calvinist saw the arrival of war as preordained and a God-given opportunity to achieve the changes in society Green believed were needed. The crisis of war would force Americans to work harder and to put the good of society ahead of their selfish private interests, he reasoned. And the ethos of liberty had the potential to sweep away another dark cloud hovering over the landscape—the holding of Africans in slavery. However, the Revolution’s emphasis on liberty and freedom of choice presented a special challenge for Green and other American Calvinists. How do you reconcile liberty with divine control? How much freedom does God give a person? Just how controlling is he? Moreover, how do you maintain Christian order and improve religiosity in an era of freedom and liberty?¹⁷

Green’s answer was sophisticated and, at first blush, paradoxical. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, he began to preach the virtues of voluntarism and the need for granting more rights to laymen. Yet, at the same time, he also preached the need for greater discipline and for maintaining high standards in church and among the devout. Green resolved this inherent paradox—greater discipline during an era of greater freedom—by giving people a choice. They could work hard, show they were of the elect, and commit to the church—or not. It was up to them whether to act righteously or sinfully, but when they decided to join, they had to truly commit to the high standards Jacob Green was demanding.

The doctrine of the covenant helped Green reconcile his political and religious views. God, he reasoned, entered into a covenantal relationship with chosen individuals (the predestined “elect”), and it was up to these individuals to respond to his offer of salvation. No one could be coerced into grace; it could only be freely offered by God and freely accepted by man. Melding his knowledge of Lockean political philosophy with his Edwardsean thought (which stressed free choice within the bounds set by God), Green in the 1770s increasingly viewed the laity as constituting the real church—the moral authority of the congregation rested on individual believers. When one was of the elect, he or she was on an equal footing with the church’s minister. Such equality gave the laity a great say in the running of their congregation. Equally important was the covenant’s contribution to his conceptions of liberty. Green increasingly believed in voluntary associations of like-minded believers who joined of their own free accord. By 1780, liberty for him had come to mean the liberty to choose—within the dictates of God’s mandate to act morally. He not only opposed any kind of religious establishment, he also argued that “every man . . . [should] be encouraged to think and judge for himself in matters of religion.” No one, in other words, should be forced to join a church or to partake in the sacraments.¹⁸

In the 1770s, Green grasped the direction that American society was heading, and he was an early proponent of laymen’s rights and of Jeffersonian democracy before it even existed. In the late 1770s, he wrote two letters on liberty that extolled independent yeomen and tradesmen as the bedrocks of a democratic society. Green disdained the rich and decried their excessive influence on the body politic. During the war, he broadened his rebellion against the king to the American Presbyterian Church because he saw the Synod of New York and Philadelphia as high-handed and imperious. Green opposed the centralizing trend in the church and wanted power to rest with individual congregations and their laymen. This belief led him in 1779 to secede from the Presbyterian Church—a decade before the American church approved a stronger, centralizing, federalist-style constitution—and to direct an independence movement resting on the creation of associated presbyteries, which were voluntary associations of like-minded churches that pursued a congregational system of Presbyterianism. Green was also out front on democratizing education. As early as 1770, he was calling for changes in how ministers were educated and ordained; Green wanted less emphasis placed on formal education and more on evangelical values—in other words, a fairer and more democratic system. He wanted the ministry opened to more people, all in an effort to create a more nimble Presbyterian Church that could meet the needs of a democratic, frontier society.

In these diverse ways, Jacob Green’s attempts to reconcile Calvinism during the revolutionary era fostered an activist, democratic faith that led him to undertake an extremely ambitious reform program that had both secular and religious components. To fully understand just how radical Green’s Calvinism was, Jacob Green’s Revolution tells a second story. High Church Anglicanism and its values of sacramental ceremony, conformity, and obedience to the state were polar opposites of Green’s Edwardsean and democratic values. Thus this second story, told as vignettes between the main chapters, focuses on another New Jersey minister, Thomas Bradbury Chandler, who lived about twenty miles from Green in Elizabeth Town.

Chandler was one of the most colorful—and hated—American members of the English church, who was despised by Presbyterians and Congregationalists because of his main reform cause: the effort to bring an Anglican bishop to American shores (fig. 1). Chandler’s mentor was not a Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards but Samuel Johnson, the conservative theologian, royalist, and first president of King’s College in New York City, and Chandler built his conservatism on the scaffolding of Johnson’s High Church Anglicanism. Inferiors owed their superiors loyalty and obedience; they especially owed allegiance to their church and king. The threshold for rebellion, in Chandler’s mind, was high, and the colonists had not met it. With fierce, biting sarcasm, he turned Whig arguments on their head by denouncing the Continental Congress as tyrannical and corrupt, and he warned that breaking away from Great Britain would prove suicidal for the American people.

The differences with Green went beyond crystalline ones over reform; they extended to their worldviews arising from their religious principles. Besides improving the church’s administrative efficiency, Chandler believed the episcopal office was a linchpin of a properly functioning society where hierarchy and monarchy would reign. Traditional English society with its social gradations and elaborate governmental system thrilled Chandler, and he wanted it replicated in British North America. Bringing bishops to America was one way he would accomplish this goal. Jacob Green strongly disagreed with Chandler’s worldview. He rejected episcopacy, believing it was unbiblical and unnecessary. Moreover, as he made clear in his 1776 tract, Green detested the British system with its hierarchical ranking of power and its multitude of offices; he derided the system as undemocratic and financially reckless—lordly offices such as the bishoprics cost money, required oppressive taxation to support, and were meddlesome in the laity’s affairs. Bishops and High Church councils should not be running things, according to Green; the people in their congregations should. For these reasons and more, Green wanted the thirteen colonies to declare independence and establish their own nation.

Besides providing a stark contrast in the ministers’ reform drives and worldviews, Chandler’s story is included for two other reasons. One is to break free from the limitations of the traditional biographical format, which focuses on one individual, by employing a narrative technique commonly found in novels. That is, in telling a main story of reform and revolution, Jacob Green’s Revolution mixes in a backstory of an Anglican loyalist whose experiences in the Revolution were 180 degrees from that of a Calvinistic patriot. Thus the dueling stories better capture the variety of revolutionary experience than would a traditional biography of one man.

The second reason for Chandler’s inclusion is that the two men lived eerily parallel lives. Both were raised in the insular world of New England Congregationalism (Green, who was born in 1722, was from Massachusetts; Chandler, who was born in 1726, was from Connecticut). Green was the product of a humble family, Chandler a wealthy one. Both graduated from college (Green at Harvard, Chandler at Yale). Both arrived in New Jersey within two years of each other, settled nearby in places that reflected their personalities (Green in anodyne Hanover, Chandler in stately Elizabeth Town), and became ministers (Green reluctantly for the Presbyterian faith, Chandler enthusiastically for the Anglican) (map 1). Both were talented writers with wildly different styles (Green wrote, and spoke, in a susurration, Chandler in a shout). Both possessed wildly different personalities—Chandler was garrulous, socially outgoing, quick tempered; Green was reserved, shy, disciplined. Both died in 1790 within a few weeks of each other (Green in May, Chandler in June). Both possessed towering intellects and were shaped by Puritan culture and the Enlightenment, and both became acclaimed figures in New Jersey’s revolutionary drama—Green for the rebelling colonists, Chandler for the king. It was Jacob Green in 1776 who helped persuade reluctant New Jerseyans to back independence by writing a well-regarded tract advocating separation from the king, and it was Thomas Bradbury Chandler who helped rally loyalists against the coming rebellion.¹⁹

And, of course, both were aggressive reformers. Green’s lifelong dream was to create a stronger, purified church; Chandler’s was to create a stronger state church. From Green’s desire to create a purified church flowed a bewildering, almost vertiginous, array of causes that ranged from curbing the acquisitive impulses of Americans to outlawing slavery. Chandler’s vision was narrower but powerful in its own right. Laser-like, he focused on strengthening the Church of England in the colonies, and that meant trying to bring a bishop to American shores—an unpopular cause among American Whigs suspicious of British power and intentions. No shrinking violet, Chandler fought tenaciously for an American episcopate despite violent opposition from the likes of Sam Adams, and he became the leading Anglican in the northern colonies as he strove to make the king’s church relevant in America.²⁰

The opening section of Jacob Green’s Revolution, “The Worlds of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler,” describes the two ministers’ early lives and their intellectual development in the years leading up to the revolutionary drama. The second section, “Revolutionary Thinkers and the Trials of War,” explores the drama of war and how it related to their reform regimes—Green’s effort to foster revolution and shape it; Chandler’s attempt to oppose it and his decision to flee to London in 1775. The final section, “Reformers on the Home Front,” looks in greater depth at their reform causes during the long and frustrating war years. An epilogue tells the stories of the two men’s deaths and examines their reform legacies in the new republic.

In concocting a dueling story of religion and reform during the revolutionary era, two important subthemes emerge. One is the importance of the Mid-Atlantic to Green’s and Chandler’s reform causes. The weakness of the English church in New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic made Chandler obsessive about bringing a bishop to America, because he felt a strong leader was needed if the church was to successfully take on the numerous dissenting churches in the region (and for that very reason, dissenters opposed a bishop; they wanted to keep the king’s church—and the king himself—weak and ineffectual in New England and the middle colonies).

For Green, geography was more complicated. He lived in Morris County, a Presbyterian–Whig stronghold that enthusiastically backed the war and became a haven for George Washington’s beleaguered Continental troops during the Revolution. With the exception of the slavery issue, the county was a safe base for him that helped foster his radicalism. But New Jersey itself had a sizable population of neutrals and loyalists. The colony’s reluctance to enter the fray and commit to independence in the mid-1770s forced Green to leave the safety of his pulpit and to enter politics. Then, when war arrived, New Jersey’s dangerously central position in the fighting helped him to see the “glorious cause” in all its majesty and folly. The insights he gained from observing the independence movement so up close and personal informed his views and inspired him to write essays on, among other things, liberty and finance. Taken together, the experiences of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler tell a tale about a region that receives far less attention in the literature than does New England and the South.²¹

A second subtheme is the slippery nature of defining conservatism and radicalism during a tumultuous time in Western history, when the Enlightenment was making rapid strides in overturning traditional norms, Calvinism was struggling to remain relevant, and political revolutions were engulfing America and France. Who was a “conservative” and a “radical” may seem obvious, but the lives of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler show that this was not quite so. In seeking to make Calvinism a force in society after years of attack, Green was “conservative” in an important sense—he was trying to defend a traditional movement and its centuries-long view of moral agency. From the pulpit, this stern Calvinistic minister could be found railing against immoral behavior; Green decried the bibulous and the licentious in the strongest terms possible. To modern ears, Green was quite the crank and killjoy. But, of course, he was “radical” in other ways, pushing for voluntarism and democratic rights, and arguing for a fairer economic system where all could reap the rewards of hard work. Others might view Calvinism as an anachronism and a philosophy best relegated to the sixteenth century; Jacob Green did not. This “conservative” also embraced Lockean political principles and was sympathetic to the rationalism of the Enlightenment despite the huge threat it posed to his Calvinistic beliefs. Green’s great tract in 1776 advocating revolution was as “radical” as anything from the pens of other American Whigs. Chandler’s views were not so muddied as Green’s, but he too could be hard to pigeonhole at times. Chandler was so consumed with bringing bishops to America that he was pushing for a strong state church that even Anglicans in England had rejected since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In this sense, Chandler was more backward-looking than Green was with his defense of Calvinism. And, of course, Chandler was the epitome of a conservative in his love of traditional society, and of order and hierarchy. Thomas Bradbury Chandler did not like change, and he did not like democracy. Nor did he trust the masses; Jacob Green did. Throughout all his writings, Chandler was fighting to preserve contemporary society from an emerging liberalism. But Chandler was something of a radical in his embrace of reason and in his intuitive understanding that creating the pure church that Green envisioned was folly. He sided with power and a strong central government, two very modern notions. Thus Chandler, in this one area, was more of a realist and was more forward-looking than Green was.

The book’s subtitle has its ironies as well—was Calvinism really a “radical religion”? Many would argue no, for all the reasons given above, but a number of historians of religion would answer yes. Keith L. Griffin, for instance, details in his book on Religion and Revolution all the ways that rebellion against a tyrannical ruler was justified under the Reformed Protestant tradition, and he maintains that Calvinism and other Reformed traditions were inherently radical. So did Alan Heimert in his famous, and hotly disputed, Religion and the American Mind: in complex ways, Calvinists stimulated the democratic movement that resulted in the American Revolution. To Heimert, Jonathan Edwards and his fellow Calvinists were the radicals, the liberal “rationalist” Whigs the conservatives.²²

Another irony relating to the subtitle was Presbyterianism itself. Was the Presbyterian Church to which Green belonged radical? The British had long believed it was, because of the power the church accorded to the laity; in the 1630s and 1640s, Charles I, for one, railed against the Presbyterian system, worrying that it fostered democracy and encouraged sedition and thus posed a threat to the Crown. His counterparts in the eighteenth century were equally fearful of Presbyterianism, fuming over the church’s strong support for the American rebellion. Jacob Green, ironically, would answer no—the church was not democratic enough for his tastes, and he lambasted both the church’s synods and the General Assembly as dictatorial. In a final irony, the Revolution that the American Presbyterian Church backed so wholeheartedly unleashed a series of changes that by 1800 had the church looking quite unrevolutionary compared with the surging Baptists and Methodists (who were seen as pro-British during the war): it still insisted on an educated ministry, “clung” to its Calvinistic ways (to cite Nathan Hatch’s phrase), sometimes downplayed emotional religion popular with evangelicals, and was slow to expand to the frontier.

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.