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
