Читать книгу Jacob Green’s Revolution - S. Scott Rohrer - Страница 12

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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 life. But there were many other signs as well. Bibles and religious tracts occupied a central place in the home. Religion shaped family relations, the education of children, and the organization of communities. Christianity was a source of strength and comfort in bad times and a source of wonderment during good times. Massachusetts Bay’s founders were Protestant radicals who came to the New World preaching to their followers that they were a chosen people on a mission to redeem Christendom. That messianic sense, although much weakened by the fourth generation, remained in the 1720s. Communities still rested on a compact, or covenant, between God and its inhabitants, and this covenant taught that all must obey the Lord or risk bringing the wrath of God down on the entire community. Good Puritans, among other things, read the Bible, went to church, and refrained from breaking the Lord’s commandments. As one historian noted, “Puritanism invited, or rather demanded, active cooperation from every member of society in the eradication of sin. It was held up as a sign of regeneration that a man should reform his friends and neighbors.”⁹

Malden and Stoneham did not rebel against this congregational world. Indeed, as home to such Puritan stalwarts as Michael Wigglesworth (the best-selling author of a famous religious work) and Joseph Emerson (the stern minister of Jacob’s childhood), they helped to perpetuate Puritan culture. Malden was part of Charlestown until 1638 when the colony awarded Malden’s founding proprietors five-acre lots on the “Mistickside & above the Ponds.” In 1722, the year of Jacob’s birth, it remained a small community of several hundred people. Stoneham was both newer and poorer than Malden, its immediate neighbor to the south. Incorporated in 1725, three years after Jacob’s birth, Stoneham grew only haltingly in the following years. A 1754 tax assessment ranked the town near the bottom of Middlesex County, well below Malden and the wealthy college town of Cambridge.¹⁰

Jacob’s exposure to religion and Congregationalism was multifaceted—at home, school, church, and community. The congregational church was obviously one important source of his religious education. Occupying the pulpit during his childhood was the Reverend Emerson, who served Malden’s congregational church from 1722 to 1767. Emerson graduated from Harvard and was a well-educated, scholarly man whose faith rested on Calvinism and a belief in Puritans’ divine mission as a New Israel. He enforced a strict Congregationalism during his forty-five-year tenure that emphasized proper godly behavior and the need for Malden’s good citizens to uphold the covenant—requirements that an adult Jacob Green wholeheartedly supported. In exhorting his flock to lead upright lives, Emerson alternately cajoled and insulted his listeners; one sermon likened the congregation’s spiritual makeup to “a corrupt Fountain, a nest of Serpents, a cage of Unclean Birds, a stie of Filthiness.” He decried weakness and sin, going so far as to sell his chaise because, in the words of one essayist, “of the sinful pride which it awakened in him.”¹¹

The community itself taught Jacob another kind of lesson. In these Puritan bastions throughout New England, all was not peace and love and harmony. Emerson found himself overseeing a devout but argumentative flock. The most troublesome issue was where to locate the meetinghouse: those who lived near it wanted it to stay there, while those farther away wanted it closer. A particularly nasty dispute occurred in 1727, and it directly affected the Greens. The secession of ten families to Reading left the Green clan isolated from Malden’s religious life. In 1734, as a result, when Jacob was twelve years old, the Greens proposed that their neighborhood become part of Stoneham—such a move would reunite the family (some of whom had become Reading residents in the 1727 annexation) and bring them closer to the latter town’s meetinghouse. In a petition dated June 21, 1734, the clan asked the General Court to approve the annexation. They couched their request in traditional terms, citing “their Difficulty to attend the Publick worship of God in their Towns by reason of their Remoteness from the meetinghouse there.” In December, the Court granted the request, including “the land late of Jacob Green, deced.”¹²

But the biggest influence on Jacob may well have come from books. New England was a literate place, and Jacob had the good fortune to grow up in a village with a direct connection to one of New England’s most famed literary figures, the eccentric Michael Wigglesworth. Wigglesworth preceded Emerson as Malden minister. He was a Harvard graduate and probably outshone Emerson in dourness. As one chronicler of his life noted, “We should scarcely exaggerate, I think, if we described Michael Wigglesworth as a morbid, humorless, selfish busybody” whose passion was haranguing people to reform their ungodly ways.¹³

How many people Wigglesworth turned off to religion because of his poor people skills and dark sermons is unknown. Yet his influence as a writer on New England Puritanism is indisputable. In 1662, Wigglesworth published a 224-stanza poem called The Day of Doom that remained popular for more than one hundred years (indeed, it was one of the first best-selling books in the colonies) and that scared the wits out of countless generations of New England children—including Jacob Green. The poem was a favorite of his sisters, and they read it aloud to a rapt Jacob. Wigglesworth named his poem well; The Day of Doom was about Judgment Day, and its simple rhymes contained stark warnings about the fate that awaited “Adulterers and Whoremongers” and others:¹⁴

With dismal chains, and strongest reins,

Like Prisoners of Hell,

They’re held in place before Christ’s face,

Till He their Doom shall tell.

These void of tears, but fill’d with fears,

And dreadful expectation

Of endless pains and scalding flames,

Stand waiting for Damnation.¹⁵

In case anyone missed the point, the main textbook taught in the region’s schools and homes, The New-England Primer, reproduced Wigglesworth’s poem and emphasized many of its themes. Foremost was a simple one: “In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned all.” The Primer consisted of verses, catechisms, and religious lessons, among other things, and it stressed that “the Fall brought Mankind into an estate of Sin and Misery.” Human beings were depraved, and all faced eternal damnation, even young children. Catechisms and verses warned New England’s youth that death was not just for the old and the infirm: “From Death’s Arrest no Age is free, Young Children too may die.”¹⁶

Such was the religious milieu that Jacob Green lived in; along with the death of his father and the teachings of his mother and sisters, it made an exceedingly strong impression on him. The Day of Doom was especially important in shaping his outlook. “Before I was seven years old, I was at times much affected with the thoughts of the day of judgment, and future misery. At that age, I used with attention to hear my sisters read Mr. Wigglesworth’s verses upon The Day of Doom,” Jacob recalled. “That book used much to awaken and affect me: I have always had a peculiar regard for it.” Its warnings and dark language helped to launch Jacob on a seven-year journey of exploration where he examined his “soul and future state. But my corruptions were much stronger than my convictions—In early life I discovered a nature wholly degenerate. . . . I often dreamed that the day of judgment was come.”¹⁷

To deal with these fears, his mother, his congregational church, and The New England Primer taught him the importance of prayer. As the Primer described it, “Come unto CHRIST all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and He will give you rest.” Jacob took these admonitions to heart, especially his mother’s, and at eight years old he began to pray in secret. Praying brought him little comfort, however, and during these early years Jacob said he “had no religion but slavish fear, and [my] corrupt nature was all the while growing stronger and stronger.”¹⁸

Struggling in the spiritual realm, tormented by the Calvinistic thought that he was destined for hell, Jacob was not much happier in the material world either. His family expected him to do what countless generations of Greens had done—to take his rightful place as a farmer and craftsman, and young Jacob tried to fulfill their wishes. When he was fourteen years old, he went to live with his uncle Henry Green in Killingly to learn a trade, but owing to “some difficulties,” according to Jacob, he failed. So Jacob then went to live with another uncle, Daniel Green, in Stoneham. There, an indenture was drawn up, binding Jacob as an apprentice until he was twenty-one. “Pecuniary difficulties,” however, defeated this latest arrangement, and Jacob packed his bags once again to move in with yet another uncle, Thomas Lynde of Malden. This arrangement lasted only a year.¹⁹

It soon became apparent to his family that Jacob had little desire to learn a craft; in fact, in his autobiography, he did not even specify the trades he attempted to learn. His real passion was for books and reading, and Jacob’s family and friends came to recognize his intellectual abilities. When he turned sixteen, Jacob began to think about attending college—an audacious dream, because no one in his immediate family had ever gone to college and because he lacked the money to pay for it. His half brother Bixby Barret came up with a clever plan, however: when Jacob turned twenty-one, he was to inherit land from his father’s estate, and Bixby suggested selling this land immediately and using the proceeds to pay for Harvard.²⁰

To execute this plan, though, Jacob would need a new guardian, who would then sell the land for him. The probate court approved the arrangement, and “the thing was accomplished,” Jacob reported in his autobiography. He marveled at his good fortune. “I viewed it as a favorable providence, that three times I missed being bound out till I was twenty-one years old, which would doubtless have prevented a liberal education.” With the money in hand, the seventeen-year-old’s next challenge was to prepare for Harvard, and that involved enrolling in a grammar school, where Jacob boarded with a minister and undertook the study of Latin—standard practices at the time for those students interested in attending college.²¹

Students seeking admission to Harvard had to pass an oral exam given by the college’s president and its tutors shortly before commencement was held for graduating college seniors. The exam tested whether an applicant could, in the words of the college’s laws, “read, construe, and parse Tully, Virgil, or such like common classical Latin authors.” The incoming freshman was also expected to be able to read Greek and be able to “decline the paradigms of Greek nouns and verbs.” These entrance requirements reflected conventional notions of what constituted a classical education: scholars should be able to read the ancients. If the applicant passed the exam, he received a copy of the college laws and was required to pay all expenses for one quarter.²²

Jacob did not record his experiences, but he likely passed the exam easily because the test focused on languages, his core strength as a student. Six weeks after taking the test, he returned to Cambridge for the fall term. He received his housing assignment and met his two “chums,” or roommates. Then he braced himself for the arrival of the upper classmen, who treated freshmen like plebes in a military academy. The upper classmen made them run errands and serve as their servants. Tasks included fetching bread and beer and washing clothes. Decorum also dictated that the freshmen not wear hats at meals or “lean” at prayers or toss a ball in the yard.²³

Harvard in 1740 was becoming a modern college, albeit slowly. Founded in 1636 in a cow pasture, the college was located in a struggling frontier town, then known as New Town, that had been abandoned earlier that year by most of its Puritan inhabitants, who migrated to the Connecticut frontier under the leadership of the Reverend Thomas Hooker. By the time of Jacob’s enrollment, Harvard consisted of three main buildings grouped in a courtyard called the College Yard. The original Harvard Hall, completed in 1677, was a four-story brick building with a gambrel roof that was both imposing and practical. It was a self-contained structure, holding classrooms, library, buttery/kitchen, and living quarters for two tutors and for students. Twelve years later the college constructed the middle building, called Stoughton Hall, and in 1720 it built Massachusetts Hall. The latter faced Harvard Hall and was erected for the princely sum of 3,500 pounds, Massachusetts currency. Harvard’s leading historian praised the craftsmanship of these buildings: “These ‘colleges’ . . . were built of the best materials and in the best style of which the colonists were capable. They contained every comfort known to the times, for the notion that college students should ‘live like gentlemen’ came over with our founders.” Indeed, college life did carry a whiff of gentility—heady stuff for a farm boy from Stoneham. Students were trained to take their place among New England’s elite, and they lived and dined in some comfort (although, like their modern counterparts, they complained incessantly about the food): the college laws specified that the tables in the “scholars’ Commons,” as the dining hall was known, “shall be covered with clean linen cloths of a suitable length and breadth . . . and furnished with pewter plates.”²⁴

In its aspirations for gentility, Harvard had an Old World feel to it. The college, however, did not forget its Puritan roots. The Harvard of 1740 still served to train Puritan ministers (as well as to prepare leaders for the colonies), and religion still dominated academic life despite the arrival of Enlightenment values. The college laws informed the class of 1744 that “all scholars shall behave themselves blamelessly, leading sober, righteous, and godly lives.” All students were to “seasonably attend the worship of God in the hall morning and evening.” Those late to prayers would be fined four pence per infraction. “And every scholar shall on the Lord’s Day carefully apply himself to the duties of religion and piety,” strictures that Michael Wigglesworth and Joseph Emerson surely would have approved.²⁵

Harvard’s record in living up to these lofty ideals was mixed. Out of Jacob’s graduating class of thirty-three, eleven did go on to become ministers. One noteworthy example was Jonathan Mayhew, the famed Boston minister. Yet Jacob described religion at Harvard as being “at a very low ebb” during his years there, and his comment hints at just how complex the college’s intellectual atmosphere was in 1740.²⁶

“Liberalism” was steadily gaining a foothold on campus. A milestone of sorts had occurred in 1708, when John Leverett assumed the presidency at Harvard. Leverett was the first person to lead the college who was not a minister. Although he made few changes in the curriculum, Leverett did much to establish the college’s liberal tradition, strengthening Harvard’s finances and overseeing an ambitious expansion in course offerings and enrollment during his seventeen years in office: establishing the first endowed chair, the first student club, and the first student publication (The Telltale, which was largely secular in tone).²⁷

Yet when Jacob Green took his place at Harvard, the traditional educational system remained largely intact and would have been familiar to a student of 1640. A single tutor, who served three-year terms, taught all subjects to the entire class of 1744. (It was not until January 1767, during the presidency of Edward Holyoke, that Harvard tutors specialized in a particular subject.) Jacob’s first tutor was Daniel Rogers, himself a Harvard graduate, who began teaching at the college in 1732. Rogers was not particularly popular on campus or respected. His very presence at Harvard, in fact, was a symbol of his failure—after graduating, he was unable to land a job as a minister despite numerous tryouts and New England’s perennial need for men of the cloth. In the 1730s, mischievous students stole his wine, beer, and silver tobacco box. A fellow tutor, meanwhile, derided Rogers as an “Ignoramus [and] Blockhead.”²⁸

Harvard, like Yale, based its curriculum on European models, and both colleges used virtually the same texts. Harvard’s laws explained that “the Undergraduates shall be brought forward by their respective Tutors, in the knowledge of three learned Languages [Latin, Greek, and Hebrew] . . . and also in the knowledge of Rhetorick, Logick, natural Philosophy, Geography, Ethicks, Divinity, Metaphysicks, and . . . Mathematicks.”²⁹

To aid them in the study of the Old Testament, freshmen studied the grammar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. By the end of the year, their tutor expected them to be able to translate biblical passages from the original. Sophomores studied logic; juniors “natural philosophy” (basic sciences, such as physics, astronomy, and biology) and math; seniors “metaphysics” (the study of the “existence of things, their natures and causes”). Several subjects were constants for all four years: theology, ethics, oratory.³⁰

The curriculum was designed to produce ministers who fully understood the Bible and possessed the ability to think and speak on their feet. To hone their skills as preachers and debaters, students delivered recitations and public disputations, culminating in the commencement exercises when the graduates delivered theses summarizing what they had learned during their time at Harvard. Yet the study of natural philosophy, math, and metaphysics also took the class of 1744 deep into the Enlightenment.

Jacob found life at Harvard demanding, even health-threatening. Part of the fault was Jacob’s. “I studied too hard while I was at college—early and late, and sometimes all night, without a wink of sleep,” he conceded. “I was very imprudent, and hurt myself. . . . I did not allow myself proper exercise of body, nor was I then sensible of the need of it.”³¹

A typical day, according to a diary he kept during his third year, began a little after 6 a.m., when he studied the Bible for an hour. He then attended prayers in the college hall and “read part of a chapter in Hebrew, till 8 o’clock.” After breakfasting, Jacob spent the rest of his day reading and studying until 7:00 p.m. He attended a religious society meeting for two hours, when, at 9:00 p.m., he supped and allowed himself the indulgence of a pipe. Jacob then prayed until bedtime, “a little before 11” (but on other nights, he stayed up as late as 1:00 a.m.).³²

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

However, the real “liberal” advances in the curriculum came after Jacob graduated. As his diary shows, theology remained the most important and time-consuming subject. Jacob did not yet know whether he would become a minister after graduation, but his indecision did not really matter. At Harvard in 1740, all students were to master this most important subject. Even a “science” course had a theological twist to it: metaphysics explored nature, and its point was to glean the wisdom of God in the workings of the material world. Indeed, the Puritan philosopher William Ames stressed that metaphysics was a branch of theology.³⁵ Traditional texts from the seventeenth century and earlier remained popular, especially Ames’s Medulla Theologiae (“The Marrow of Sacred Divinity”). Along with Johann Wollebius, Ames emphasized traditional Calvinist themes and attacked Arminianism. In doing so, both authors reinforced the covenantal teachings of Puritanism.

Students took all this religion with varying degrees of seriousness. A 1731 report on the state of Harvard lamented that “religion . . . [was] much in decay” and that “the worship of God in the Hall is scandalously neglected.” Students’ riotous behavior drew the condemnations of the report’s authors, who complained about the students’ “gross immoralities.”³⁶

The class of 1744 did little to improve the atmosphere. A number of them spent their four years at Harvard in nearly constant trouble. Their favorite pastime was drinking rum. Nathaniel Bourne of Marshfield, who was a year younger than Jacob, was fined for drinking it and for tempting “Several Delinquents . . . to the Breach of the Law against prohibited Liquors.” Anthony Lechmere got drunk and made “indecent Noises, in the College Yard and in Town.” Isaac Bowles was a bit more creative. Besides being punished for drinking rum, he was severely admonished for lying, for gambling, and for “associating Himself with Company of a loose and ill Character.” Even Jonathan Mayhew, who went on to great fame as a minister and patriot, found himself in trouble for “drinking prohibited Liquors.” Mayhew reacted haughtily to his being caught and, “in a very impudent manner, made an impertinent Recrimination upon some of the immediate Government of the House.” In 1743, the faculty condemned the entire class for gathering to drink “prohibited Liquors” after 10:00 p.m. and for being slow to disperse after being ordered to return to their rooms.³⁷

Jacob, though, avoided trouble. Even at this young age he was studious and serious. His best subjects, according to his son Ashbel, were math and languages, especially Hebrew—a notoriously difficult subject that had given generations of students fits. But not Jacob. His idea of a relaxing time was to talk Latin with his chum and to “look on the Moon through a telescope.” He clearly did not approve of his classmates’ antics; in a letter he wrote

to Ashbel years later, Jacob condemned Harvard as a “vicious college” and stressed “the necessity of [students’] Shunning and opposing vice” while at college. Jacob practiced what he preached. He focused on his studies, winning three scholarships and becoming Scholar of the House. The latter honor was especially fitting for this stern young man—in return for being paid an annual stipend of about five pounds, Jacob policed his classmates’ behavior.³⁸

Jacob’s main extracurricular activity was his membership in a small religious society that he joined during his first year in Cambridge. The society had a membership of about twelve and met once a week for what he characterized as “religious exercises.” It was an uncomfortable experience during Jacob’s freshman year. To avoid ridicule and harassment, the society was forced to meet in secret, and members were careful not to draw attention to their activities. “So contemptible and persecuted were religious and religious persons, that we dared not sing in our worship,” Jacob complained.³⁹

A pair of storms that swept through Harvard in the fall of 1740 and the winter of 1741 further upended the religious atmosphere on campus. The first disturbance was sparked by George Whitefield, the Anglican itinerant from England, who visited Cambridge on September 24 as part of a grueling, and wildly successful, forty-five-day tour of New England, where he delivered more than 175 sermons to crowds as large as twenty thousand. Whitefield was a mere twenty-five-years old in the fall of 1740, but he was a wizened veteran in the ways of revivalism, having conducted a successful tour of England a year earlier. Whitefield brought with him to New England a devotion to ecumenicalism, to the new birth, and to revivalism. Most of all, he brought a flair for the dramatic—he was a talented performer with a powerful voice that carried across open fields and crowded halls.⁴⁰

Each appearance was an event. Nathan Cole, a farmer from Middletown, Connecticut, who went to hear the Great Awakener on October 23, 1740, captured the spectacle as well as anyone. Cole was working in his field when a messenger galloped by with the news that Whitefield was approaching Middletown: “I dropt my tool . . . and ran home to my wife telling her to make ready quickly to go and hear Mr. Whitfield preach at Middletown, then run to my pasture for my horse with all my might.” Fearing they would arrive late, Cole and his wife hurried toward the meetinghouse where Whitefield was to preach. Cole was astounded by the scene that awaited them. As they approached, “I saw before me a Cloud or fogg rising; I first thought it came from the great River,” he recalled, “but as I came nearer the Road, I heard a noise something like a low rumbling thunder . . . it was the noise of Horses feet coming down by the road.” A large throng—Cole estimated the “multitude” at three or four thousand—was gathering, and all was chaos: “The land and banks over the river looked black with people and horses all along the 12 miles I saw no man at work in his field, but all seemed to be gone.” Whitefield did not disappoint his hearers. Cole described him as “almost angelical; a young, Slim, slender youth before some thousands of people with a bold undaunted Countenance . . . [and] he looked as if he was Cloathed with authority from the Great God.” His sermon left Cole shaken and his heart pierced: “I saw that my righteousness would not save me; then I was convinced of the doctrine of Election.”⁴¹

The Harvard community received Whitefield cordially, with President Edward Holyoke entertaining the itinerant and students flocking to hear him speak at Cambridge’s meetinghouse. Standing before the assembled students, tutors, overseers, and guests, he preached on the theme of “We are not as many, who corrupt the Word of God.” Whitefield was fairly pleased with how it went: “God gave me great boldness and freedom of speech,” and he returned in the afternoon to speak to a crowd of about seven thousand. Whitefield was again satisfied with the results: “The Holy Spirit melted many hearts.”⁴²

Henry Flynt, who succeeded the hapless Daniel Rogers as Jacob’s tutor, agreed that Whitefield’s visit was a success. He found Whitefield “affecting in his delivery,” a “good man [who is] sincerely desirous to doe good to the souls of Sinners.” Harvard’s students, Flynt reported, were tremendously moved and shaken by Whitefield: “Many Schollars appeared to be in great concern as to their souls and Eternal State.”⁴³

Yet, thanks to Harvard’s irreligious ways, Whitefield’s appearance was controversial. The Great Awakener himself thought little of Harvard. “Discipline,” Whitefield confided in his journal, “is at a low ebb” at the college: “Bad books are become fashionable among the tutors and students. Tillotson and Clark are read, instead of Shepard, Stoddard, and such-like evangelical writers.” When Harvard’s faculty members learned of Whitefield’s criticisms, they were stung. His plans to return to New England in 1744 prompted them to publish “The Testimony of the President, Professors, Tutors, and Hebrew Instructor of Harvard College, against George Whitefield.” The essay condemned Whitefield on several levels—as a man (he was “an Enthusiast, a censorious, uncharitable Person, and a deluder of the People”); as a danger to organized religion (“he is presently apt to run into slander, and stigmatize them [ministers] as Men of no religion, unconverted, and Opposers of the Spirit of God”); and as an itinerant (“we apprehend this Itinerant Manner of preaching to be of the worst and most pernicious Tendency”). These critics at Harvard came to oppose the Great Awakening as a regressive and backward-looking movement, and their stance was another sign of the college’s growing liberalism. It demonstrated how Harvard was becoming more latitudinarian, and more Armininian, than Yale.⁴⁴

Jacob’s position in the college’s growing rift between “liberal” Arminians and “traditional” Calvinists was no mystery—he was thunderstruck by Whitefield’s performance and supported him: “I heard him with wonder and affection, and approved highly of his preaching and conduct.” Green at this young age wholeheartedly backed the goals of the Great Awakening—to spark a resurgence of piety—and he agreed completely with Whitefield’s harsh assessment of Harvard. For Jacob, it was obvious that Harvard’s staid religious scene needed shaking up.⁴⁵

In fact, he and some other members of the Harvard community were so excited by Whitefield’s preaching, and felt so strongly about what he was trying to achieve during his New England appearances, that they followed him to neighboring Massachusetts towns as he continued on his tour. Among this Harvard contingent was Daniel Rogers, the unpopular tutor of Jacob Green’s who had faced ridicule from students and teachers alike.

In September 1740, Rogers still harbored dreams of preaching, and Whitefield’s tour inspired him to take to the field. This, at last, was his chance to make a real difference in religion and to win a preaching position, and when the great George Whitefield himself asked Rogers to itinerate he enthusiastically concurred. The college authorities were not happy with his decision—Rogers was abandoning his students for a New Light itinerant, and they asked him to return to the classroom or to resign. Rogers did neither at first, explaining “that the blessed Spirit of God has led me out; and how far I shall proceed He only knows.”⁴⁶

Like Rogers, Green dropped what he was doing in late September and followed Whitefield as he made his way across Massachusetts. Whitefield’s first stop after Cambridge was “Mr. Foxcroft’s meeting-house,” where the Great Awakener preached before a packed crowd. The next stop was an appearance at Roxbury before “many thousands.” For Jacob, the places, and the days, must have blurred as Whitefield kept up his punishing pace: Marble Head, Salem, Ipswich on September 29; Ipswich, Newbury, and Hampton on September 30; York and Portsmouth on October 2—and on and on, into mid-October, including a stop at Malden, where Jacob had been born and lived for so many years. Green witnessed firsthand some of the most stirring appearances of the 1740 tour, including Whitefield’s October 12 visit to Boston. Accompanied by the Massachusetts governor, Whitefield recounted how he preached his “farewell sermon [at the Boston Common] to near twenty thousand people,—a sight I have not seen since I left Blackheath [England],—and a sight, perhaps never seen before in America.”⁴⁷

Jacob made it as far as Leicester, which Whitefield visited on the afternoon of October 15. Green was apparently fatigued and homesick at this point—Leicester was in western Massachusetts, about six miles from Worcester, and not too far from Killingly, Connecticut, where his mother lived. She was seriously ill (indeed, she would die in December 1741), and Jacob left Whitefield to visit her. As it turned out, this was the last time he saw her.⁴⁸

As momentous as Whitefield’s tour was, the arrival of Gilbert Tennent only a few months later made an even deeper impression on Jacob. Tennent came to Cambridge in late January 1741. Uncouth, haughty, and loud, Tennent was not Whitefield’s equal in speaking ability or intellect, but he stirred Jacob in ways that Whitefield did not. Part of Tennent’s influence on Jacob had to do with the timing of his visit on that cold January day, and part of it with the message he delivered. Jacob had never heard of Gilbert Tennent when this controversial Presbyterian itinerant came to Harvard, and he went to hear him only out of curiosity. Tennent’s sermon was on false hope. “Some of you may try to maintain your old hope, though it shakes and has no foundation, and you will flatter and deceive yourselves,” Jacob recalled him saying. “But your hope must come down. I know it will be like rending soul and body asunder, but down it must come, or you must go to hell with it.”⁴⁹

These words struck Green with tremendous force. Every doubt he had long harbored about his spirituality, every fear he had long felt about his eternal fate under the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, came washing over him as Tennent shouted his warnings from the pulpit. The sermon left Jacob deeply upset and troubled: “I saw myself fit for hell. The sinfulness of my heart and nature appeared infinitely more dreadful than ever it had done before. I had a new and dreadful sense of my wickedness.” To his friends and acquaintances, Jacob was serious and hardworking, but Jacob still viewed himself as a wretched sinner. His childhood feelings of inadequacy tormented him. As a young boy raised in the Calvinistic gloom of Puritanism and the dire warnings of Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom, Jacob was convinced that he was unsaved and a sinner in the eyes of God. These doubts grew and became more specific as he got older.⁵⁰

Before he entered Harvard, two incidents had crystallized his sense of crisis and persuaded him that he was going to hell. The first occurred at about age sixteen, when he left Leicester for the fifteen-mile ride to Killingly to see his mother. The trip entailed passing through a “gloomy wilderness” containing few houses. Jacob was unfamiliar with the trail, and he attempted to navigate it as night and rain arrived. When the path forked, Jacob took the wrong turn. Engulfed in blackness, Jacob was unable to find his way back. “What to do I knew not,” he recalled. “Sometimes I moved onward, sometimes [I] stopped and considered; but generally kept moving on.” Pelted by rain, tired and hungry, Jacob became scared and “my conscience fell upon me.” His feelings of sinfulness resurfaced, and he prayed to God for forgiveness. “I confessed my sins and omissions,” and he vowed to change if God “would deliver me out of that wilderness.” Jacob also made his promise as specific as possible: “I would, within one week after I got home from that journey, begin to pray in secret evening and morning, and continue to do so for a fortnight.”⁵¹

Appropriately bucked up, Jacob gave his horse a kick and pressed on in the rain. Almost immediately, he spied a light ahead and moved toward it. It was a house occupied by a family, who provided him with directions. They also agreed to allow a boy to help guide Jacob out of the woods. Thanks to the boy’s help and the moon’s emergence from behind storm clouds, Jacob finally made it to his mother’s house shortly after midnight.

Jacob felt great relief at his deliverance, but he reneged on his promise to begin praying. With each passing day “I was less and less affected with a sense of my being lost in the woods, and the promise I had made.” He returned to Malden feeling “careless, stupid, and insensible of my guilt.” Jacob, of course, felt great guilt at his failure to keep his word to God. His guilt was so intense, it led to the second incident: on the night before he was supposed to begin praying regularly, he suffered a violent nightmare that left him even more afraid for his soul.⁵²

It was the most Calvinistic of dreams. Jacob was in a large room at twilight with a group of elderly men and young boys about six years old. The room contained an open door with two pairs of stairs—the one on the right led upward, presumably to heaven; the one on the left downward, to hell. One by one the children were led to the door, where they learned their fates. In the morning, they returned unharmed, but by taking that fateful step through the door they discovered where they would spend eternity.

Jacob shook with fear as he watched the children head toward the door, and his foreboding grew as his turn approached. As the child ahead of him headed downward to hell, crying and protesting, Jacob “determined that I would not go straight out at the door, as the others did”; instead, he bolted for the stairs on the right. A strong wind, however, blocked his way and, “like a whirlpool, sucked me down the stairs.” Jacob tried fighting the wind, but it was futile, and he wept bitterly “for I thought I certainly belonged to hell.”

He then learned that the room contained a second door, this one on the west side: “In anguish and dreadful distress, [I] went out of this door, and there, in that yard, sat God Almighty, on a kind of throne.” Jacob threw himself at God’s feet and begged Him to tell Jacob why he had been condemned to hell: “He told me it was for breaking my promise made in the woods, together with the sin I had committed against light and the checks of conscience at the time of it.” Jacob asked God why he could not forgive him for his sins: “‘O most merciful God! Didst thou never pardon so great a sin as this!’ No, said he, I never did.” Jacob continued to argue with God, citing the redemption of several sinners in the Old Testament and the saving “merit of Christ,” but God was adamant. Jacob awoke at dawn, trembling, when God repeated that he would not pardon Jacob for the sin he had committed.

The dream left Jacob devastated. He staggered from bed and headed to the barn, where he attempted unsuccessfully to pray: “It seemed as if [God] had turned his back upon me and heard me not.” Jacob was so upset that the family he was living with asked him what was the matter. Slowly, he regained his bearings and “began to have a little hope that I might not have committed the unpardonable sin.” He tried to rationalize that the dream was merely a dream, and that “dreams were not absolutely to be depended upon.” But the nightmare was so vivid and spoke so convincingly to his shortcomings that Jacob concluded it must be true, “and this [realization] would cut me like a knife. After this I never lost a sense of my guilt.”⁵³

Jacob attempted to change nevertheless. He forced himself to pray; joined a religious society while at grammar school; attended church; and tried to lead a godly life, free of sin: “I had now some appearance of religion . . . and by degrees I obtained more and more a hope that I might obtain mercy, and that my sin was not unpardonable.” It was this hope that Gilbert Tennent unwittingly shattered when he addressed the Cambridge crowd in January 1741. Jacob believed that Tennent was speaking directly to him, because the itinerant’s words mocked his Arminian hopes of “working” his way to salvation.⁵⁴

In one sense, Jacob’s tale, replete with his wandering in a wilderness, was a traditional evangelical one, containing a lesson that any Calvinist could grasp: only the Lord granted salvation. Yet in another, more important sense, it was revealing of his personality, demonstrating just how much of a New Englander he was. Jacob imbibed the Puritan ethos of discipline, righteous living—and frightening insecurities about whether he was of the elect or was a “reprobate.” He had been taught from an early age—by his mother, his minister, and his textbooks—that an all-powerful God saved only the chosen few, that even young children could not expect any mercy from the Lord if they were sinners in God’s all-knowing eyes. Jacob’s tale, right down to the parable of the wilderness, reflected these teachings. From his earliest days, he placed tremendous pressure on himself to behave and to be a virtuous Christian worthy of God’s love.

Yet no matter what he did, he felt it was not enough. In his autobiography, Jacob recalled with disgust the time the minister of his grammar school invited Jacob to become a church member. The offer should have been a moment of triumph, a reward for his changed ways: the minister was impressed by Jacob’s efforts at piety and believed that Jacob was worthy of church membership because of his outwardly Christian behavior. Jacob saw things differently; the offer left him “thunderstruck, for . . . I did not conceive myself to be at all qualified for it.” Jacob drew two conclusions from the incident. It was “a sad instance of the minister’s carelessness in admitting members to his church, and of my own presumption in consenting to his proposal.” Both minister and congregant came up short in Jacob’s demanding view.⁵⁵

Jacob was extremely hard on himself in another way—he struggled to achieve a rebirth. He did not become reborn after the wilderness adventure or his terrifying dream. He did not immediately undergo a conversion even after seeing the Great Awakening up close at the hands of two of its greatest practitioners, who did so much to expose his perceived shortcomings. Instead, this momentous moment in his spiritual life finally came about two months after Jacob heard Tennent’s discourse on hope. And the conversion came in the most ironic way—through study. By reading “authors on the harmony of the divine attributes,” Jacob simply came to understand Jesus Christ’s role in the atonement of sin, “and that God could glorify himself in pardoning a sinner through Jesus Christ.” Such a simple revelation was powerful nonetheless: “When I came to see that God could be glorified and sinners saved . . . it astonished me, it filled me with raptures of admiration.”⁵⁶

Jacob’s struggles, however, were not over. He spent the rest of his college years attempting to maintain the conversion he had achieved in the winter of 1741. As he put it lyrically in his autobiography, “Sometimes I would have light, joy, and comfort, for a week or two together, and then for as long a time, I would be in darkness, doubts, and fears.” He also struggled to maintain his Calvinistic faith as his knowledge of the Enlightenment improved. In May 1744, Jacob confessed in a letter to a classmate just how confused he was about predestination; the classmate, Nathaniel Tucker, had taken the Arminian stance that individuals can achieve salvation on their own by embracing the gospel. Jacob wrote that he was at a loss as to how to respond, that the topic was so complicated “I cannot come to any determination of [it] in my own mind.”⁵⁷

Despite the supposed problems with backsliding and his doubts about Calvinism, Jacob’s piety and intelligence were obvious to others, and, as his time at Harvard drew to a close, friends and colleagues urged him to become a minister. Jacob resisted, however. Despite his rebirth, he remained doubtful about whether he truly was of the elect. He also doubted whether he possessed the personality to be a pastor—he was shy and disliked public speaking, especially on something as personal as religion. In private, he said, “I generally had great fervour and engagedness of soul . . . but when I come to be among people, I found myself bashful and reluctant to speak.” While at Harvard, Jacob admired those individuals who could “speak with freedom and earnestness to others.” He wished he were one of those people.⁵⁸

Green graduated from Harvard in July 1744, unsure about what he would do for a living. He wanted to pursue advanced studies, but he had no money left to pay for it. Unlike many of his classmates, he “had no wealthy friends to help me.” Despite the entreaties of his friends and an unnamed congregation that sought to hire him, Jacob did not feel ready to for the pulpit, given his gauche ways and nagging doubt about his faith. Instead, as a stopgap, Jacob accepted a teaching position at Sutton, about fifty miles from Harvard, where Daniel Rogers was assisting the minister.⁵⁹

When his teaching contract expired after a year, Jacob was still unsure about what to do next. It was now 1745, and a towering figure from Jacob’s past was then touring New England. Learning that Green was looking for work, George Whitefield offered him the opportunity to run his orphanage in Savannah, Georgia. Jacob was delighted, calling the offer “unexpected and surprising.” He accepted and agreed to meet Whitefield in New York after he settled his affairs in Massachusetts. Jacob caught up with Whitefield in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey, where he received some bad news: Whitefield had failed to raise enough money for the orphanage. Whitefield, however, volunteered to “fulfil his agreement with me for half a year, if I chose to go on with him; and that if I chose to stop, he would defray the expense I had incurred in coming thus far.”⁶⁰

Jacob’s indecision now returned. He found himself in a colonial backwater, several hundred miles from home, with little money and no real job prospects. He could proceed south with the Great Awakener and hope something would materialize, or he could return home to an uncertain future. Jacob was in good company as he pondered these unappealing options—he and Whitefield’s entourage were staying at the house of Jonathan Dickinson in Elizabeth Town. Dickinson was a talented Presbyterian minister who was in the process of founding the College of New Jersey (the future Princeton University), and Dickinson and his colleague, Aaron Burr, another renowned Presbyterian clergyman, suggested a third option to Green: he should become a Presbyterian minister and serve in New ­Jersey.⁶¹

Jacob was flattered, but he “viewed the ministry as a great and difficult work; I was but a poor speaker; and on the whole, I shrunk away from the work”—sentiments that he had expressed repeatedly over the past several years. Despite these protestations, Green did feel the pull of the ministry and what he termed “following the calls of Providence.” If God wanted him to serve, this Calvinist would. He would not stand in God’s way. Characteristically, though, Jacob needed reassurance from others that he was cut out for the ministry. So Green consulted with several ministers, pouring out his numerous doubts to them. They urged him to accept, warning that it was “the design of Satan to keep me out of the ministry.” Jacob, however, still hesitated, and he even went so far as to put all of his objections on paper. He showed the paper to Burr, who “read it through deliberately, and then put it into the fire before my eyes, and talked to me in a very friendly and encouraging manner.”⁶²

Burr’s confidence in him, as well as Dickinson’s plans for him as an ally in the New York Presbytery, at last succeeded. Green agreed to become a minister, and he received his license to preach in September 1745. His first assignment was ministering to a struggling congregation in a Presbyterian redoubt in the mountains of northwestern New Jersey. Green had likely never heard of the place. With curiosity, and with some foreboding, he set out to see what he had gotten himself into.

The Loyalist Down the Road:

Thomas Bradbury Chandler, New Englander

The mind of America’s fiercest loyalist was cultivated in the soils of republican New England.

Like Jacob Green, Thomas Bradbury Chandler was descended from good Puritan stock and was raised in a Congregational village. The gulf between the two families was wide, however, for the Chandlers possessed wealth and prestige; the Greens did not. Heirs of William and Annis Chandler, who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 as part of the Great Migration that brought the first Puritans to the New World, the family was talented, hardworking, pious, and rich. As leading citizens of Woodstock, Connecticut, about one hundred miles west of Malden, where Jacob Green lived, their names could be found sprinkled liberally throughout the minutes of the various town and church boards that dominated village life. Indeed, the Chandler men were all known by their titles—Deacon John, Judge John, Captain William, among others.

Captain William Chandler was the third born of the Honorable John Chandler, Esquire, who served on the town committee, represented Woodstock at the General Court, was chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and owned the most prestigious pew (the one next to the pulpit stairs) in the Congregational meetinghouse. Upon his death in 1743, John left behind extensive landholdings and an estate valued at nearly 8,700 pounds. The sixth child, Samuel, inherited the family seat “In Consideration of his great Prudence, Industry and Dutiful Behaviour and application in my Business.” William was barely mentioned in the will. No matter. He was prosperous in his own right, the owner of a thousand-acre estate known as Chandler Hill. William’s plantation hugged the town line to the east and was high enough (597 feet above sea level, according to one modern reckoning) that it afforded the Chandlers a lordly view over the surrounding countryside.

Fortune thus smiled on Thomas Bradbury Chandler, as he entered the world on April 26, 1726, when Jacob Green was four and about to embark on a vagabond existence as a fatherless child. From his father Thomas inherited the gift of command (both were physically imposing men) and from his mother his formidable intellect and piety. Jemima was a remarkable woman—she was both talented and wealthy in her own right. Her father, Thomas Bradbury of Salisbury, Massachusetts, bequeathed to her nearly his entire estate—an unusual gesture in an age when land typically went to the patriarch’s sons. But it was Jemima’s intellect that was most noteworthy. One family chronicler approvingly recalled her “superior natural and acquired abilities and power of mind.” Jemima was literate and a strong student; she excelled at natural philosophy, geography, and, of course, religion. She was, according to a Chandler family historian, “of unaffected piety, exemplary in all her paths.”

Her eldest son would disappoint neither mother nor father; at Chandler Hill, as Thomas grew into manhood, he began cultivating the mind that would thrill loyalists of the king and infuriate supporters of American independence. Thomas, it seems, was destined for big things.⁶³