Читать книгу Jacob Green’s Revolution - S. Scott Rohrer - Страница 14

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Father

The center of Jacob Green’s domestic universe was a handsome one-and-a-half-story parsonage on Hanover Neck (fig. 5). It was an unpretentious house befitting the domicile of a Presbyterian pastor ministering to a country church—a residence that was approximately half the size of the mission house that Jonathan Edwards resided at in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—but the parsonage, with its symmetrical windows and centered doorway, did offer up a touch of rustic Georgian elegance. Inside was a mix of the practical and the pious, the simple and the elegant. Green’s growing family attended to their household chores while the patriarch retreated to his book-lined study to write his sermons and peruse his diverse library of theology, philosophy, history, and literature. Jacob may have preached simplicity in his sermons, but his domestic space demonstrated he had a taste for the refined. His family dined on queensware and pewter plates—luxuries few could afford in early America—and for amusement members could play a forte piano.¹

Outside the parsonage was a complex landscape that reflected the myriad interests of a financially struggling country parson. The house sat on ten acres surrounded by cornfields and cleared swampland; within shouting distance were a barn and a tenant’s farmhouse. Across the street was Jacob’s Latin academy, where for a time he taught school to approximately eight boys from throughout Morris County. A little farther on, about a quarter of a mile from the parsonage, was the new meetinghouse, which finally replaced the dilapidated structure that greeted Jacob in 1745. And farther still was the gristmill that Green partially owned on land he used to farm.²

In important ways, the completion of the parsonage in spring 1758 represented another step toward stability for the thirty-six-year-old parson, with the house helping to anchor Jacob in this Presbyterian world as he pondered the larger questions concerning God and society that so consumed him in the two decades before the American Revolution. Before the congregation agreed to build the parsonage in 1754 (construction began in 1757), Jacob and his family lived in a small house in lower Whippany that he had built largely at his own expense after his arrival in Hanover Township in 1745.³

Between 1745 and 1756, Green experienced the highs of seeing four children born and the lows of his wife’s death—his beloved Anna. Although such setbacks were not unusual for the times (one of his deacons endured the deaths of five wives), they tested Green’s faith and darkened his mood as he struggled to establish himself in a new colony. Jacob had arrived in Hanover in 1745 as a bachelor and remained one for two years, an eternity in the harried life of a country parson with a demanding flock to tend and a large territory to oversee. In 1747, things changed for the better when he married Anna Strong. How the young couple met is unclear—Jacob was loath to discuss such intimate details in his autobiography, and two sons from a later marriage who wrote about their upbringing never knew her. Anna hailed from the fishing and farming community of Brookhaven, New York, on the western end of Long Island, within hailing distance of New York City. The paths of Jacob and Anna likely crossed during one of Jacob’s trips to synodical meetings in Newark or New York.⁴

Despite his silence about their courtship, Jacob loved her. The marriage produced four children in eight years—three daughters and a son. The first child, who was born in the fall of 1748, only a year after the wedding, was named in honor of her mother. When Anna died of “a consumption” in November 1756, according to Jacob, her death left her husband badly shaken. Describing Anna as a “tender amiable Wife,” her gravestone reflected the grief that her passing produced: “A Blessing to her Relatives in Life / Her Death their Loss beyond expression grate.” For Jacob, a strict Calvinist who viewed the powers of God as absolute and magisterial, Anna’s early death at age thirty-one was portentous. It sent him into mourning and caused him to become even more reflective about the questions that had occupied him for years—the tenuousness and brevity of life, the power and mystery of God. To work through his grief, Jacob began preaching more intently, which led to his first “revival” in Hanover—in addition to more emotional preaching, he divided the congregation into four sections for catechizing and “conversed with the youth every week.” This quickened activity led to a revival of religion and a “special outpouring of the Holy Spirit” among congregants, according to his son Ashbel. Jacob thus strove to turn his personal tragedy into something positive. He would use his revival as an opportunity to strengthen the congregation and spark a resurgence of piety among Hanover’s populace. The loss of his wife also strengthened Green’s Calvinistic faith. “I prayed and preached with an increased sense of divine things,” Jacob wrote years later. “I would thank God; for I would give him the glory of exciting and quickening me.” It was a marked contrast to his feelings in 1745, when he struggled to understand the paradoxes posed by Calvinism.⁵

In October 1757, as carpenters readied the parsonage for their minister and his children, Green remarried. The marriage was both a bow to the practical needs of family and a signal that Green was moving on in the wake of his wife’s death. Jacob had several young children to raise and a household to run. He needed a helpmate. The woman who filled this void and took Anna’s place at the hearth was Elizabeth Pierson, and there is little doubt about how the two met. She was the daughter of a Presbyterian pastor named John Pierson, who ministered to a congregation in nearby Mendham, after having served earlier in Woodbridge, New Jersey, and was well-known and respected in church circles. He was born in 1689, was a Yale graduate, and was a Puritan descendant who gained a reputation as a Presbyterian moderate. As a close friend of Jonathan Dickinson’s, Pierson possibly got to know Jacob in Elizabeth Town. Pierson was also a founder of the College of New Jersey, and they may well have connected through that association. Regardless, John came to live with his daughter and new son-in-law after he retired from the pulpit, and he spent his remaining years in the Hanover parsonage.⁶

The second marriage, like the first one, produced a bushel of children—seven in twelve years, beginning in 1758 with the birth of Elizabeth and ending in 1769 with the arrival of John Wickliffe (only six survived; the biblically named Benoni was born in 1760 and did not live to see his first birthday). The match between Jacob and his bride was excellent. Besides a strong physical attraction, the couple shared a commitment to the Presbyterian Church and a love of books. “Both my parents were eminently pious,” noted Ashbel, the talented third child of Jacob and Elizabeth who was born in 1762. “My mother [was] always praying with the family, when my father was from home.” Together Jacob and Elizabeth introduced their children to Calvinistic religion and to the disciplined ways of Presbyterianism. Ashbel, a brilliant scholar who became a Presbyterian minister, was struck by just how stern his upbringing was: “In no other family have I ever known the Lord’s day to be observed with equal strictness and solemnity.” On Sundays, after Jacob had returned from church services, the parents gathered the children for “instruction and devotion,” according to Ashbel. Writing in his old age, some seventy years later, Ashbel could still vividly recall seeing his father “sitting in his arm chair, and without book, and commonly with his eyes shut, asking in regular order every question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, helping or correcting those [children] who could not repeat it perfectly.”⁷

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

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

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

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

“Why do you not pray, my son?”

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

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

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

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

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