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
Grand, it was not. Tucked away on nearly four acres along the Whippanong River, Hanover’s Presbyterian meetinghouse looked more like a failing country store than a hieratic shrine to the Lord. A dilapidated, oblong structure built of logs, the two-story church lacked the crowning grace of a cupola or spire. Worshipers wanting to sit in the gallery had to mount stairs from the outside (fig. 2). The pulpit consisted of a carpenter’s bench, the pews of crude benches. Constructed in 1718, the church was falling apart when Jacob Green arrived in late 1745, but congregation members had been unable to agree on the location for a replacement or how to pay for it. For Jacob, more discomforting than the meetinghouse’s sad state was the congregation’s history. The presbytery had dismissed Green’s two predecessors following, in Jacob’s typically understated words, “uneasiness” between the minister and his people.1
As dolorous as all this was, Jacob’s prospects upon his arrival were not hopeless. Hanover represented the oldest and most settled township in the newly formed county of Morris, serving as the jumping-off point for the settlement of land west and north of the village. Moreover, its abundant natural resources held the promise of economic growth. The numerous rivers enticed settlers to the area and became home to forges and mills. Of greater significance to Jacob was Hanover’s stature as the center of Presbyterianism in northwestern New Jersey; his congregation was the mother church that sired numerous offspring in the years before the American Revolution, meaning that his appointment as Hanover’s interim pastor instantly made him the leader of Presbyterianism in the region.2
The timing of his arrival was also auspicious. The New York Synod, which oversaw Hanover, had held its first session on September 19, 1745. Led by Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr, and dominated by New Siders, the synod was seeking to spread its New England brand of Presbyterianism in New Jersey and elsewhere. Dickinson and Burr viewed Jacob as an important recruit in this missionary effort. The troubles of Green’s predecessor, John Nutman, presented them with the opportunity to place an ally in an important congregation in East Jersey. Jacob Green would serve as a foot soldier in the New Siders’ fight for evangelism and revivalism.3
Jacob was flattered by the attention. Still unsure about his suitability for the ministry, he needed the encouragement from Dickinson and Burr, whom he held in “great regard.” Dickinson and the young Jacob Green likely saw each other as kindred spirits; although both men supported the Great Awakening, Dickinson and Green rejected the excessive emotionalism and divisiveness that accompanied it. Dickinson, who came to Elizabeth Town in 1708, was a leading Presbyterian in the middle colonies and a moderate New Sider who sought a middle ground on the raging controversies of the day, including the dual threats of Arminianism and antinomianism.4
When Green arrived in Hanover, he likely found the place congenial: the township was populated by second- and third-generation Puritans-turned-Presbyterians from New England. Hanover resembled Stoneham in several ways. It was a growing agricultural community of small farms whose cultural life revolved around the meetinghouse and the family. Culturally, a New England spirit infused the place. Former Puritans from Long Island, Newark, and Elizabeth Town, whose families originally came from Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and elsewhere, founded the township and launched Presbyterian life in 1718 when they built the meetinghouse and began holding services. Green approvingly described these early settlers as stout Calvinists, and he strove to establish a rapport with their descendants throughout the fall of 1745. Before his formal ordination as Hanover’s pastor in November 1746, Green served a one-year probation that allowed each side to get to know the other. Because the congregation’s relationship with Green’s two predecessors—Nathaniel Hubbard, who served until 1730, and John Nutman, who lasted until 1745—had ended badly, this was no formality. Congregants listened to Green’s sermons, met with him in their houses, prayed with him in the evenings.5
The members obviously liked what they saw, despite the shortcomings that Jacob so candidly described about himself. During these first years in Hanover, Green remained shy and unsure of himself, even in private settings. “I could speak but poorly in publick,” he lamented, “and I was bashful, backward and unapt to speak in private.” One step he took to overcome his nervousness and make himself “useful” to the membership “was to give out questions in writing, and have a time appointed to meet the people and hear them answer the questions as they thought proper, and then to make my own observations upon them.” The sessions could be quite freewheeling, and Green used them to become acquainted with his congregants on a personal level.6
Jacob’s insecurities ran deeper than his personality—they extended to his religious views, which were in flux in the 1740s and 1750s and were easily swayed by the luminaries he encountered in New England and New Jersey. George Whitefield, Gilbert Tennent, and other apostles of the Great Awakening helped turn Jacob into what he termed in his autobiography a “zealous Calvinist” during his Harvard years (although this was an exaggeration). But despite his enthusiasm for John Calvin and the Reformed spirit, and despite his Puritan upbringing in Massachusetts, he departed Cambridge troubled about his Calvinistic faith and the paradoxes it presented. Across a broad front in the fields of science and religion, rationalists and advocates of the Enlightenment were questioning the theological system that had dominated western Europe for three centuries, and their attacks on predestination resonated with Jacob while he was a student at Harvard. As he confessed in the May 1744 letter to Nathaniel Tucker, he was unsure about predestination and free will and how one solved the many paradoxes they presented. Still, in 1744, his New England upbringing held firm, and he thought of himself as a Calvinist, believing that God controlled all and that “unregenerate men have now no power to embrace the offers of the Gospil.”7
Such certainty did not survive his first encounters with Dickinson and Burr in Elizabeth Town in 1745. The two Presbyterian leaders easily brought him around to their views on Presbyterianism and on a looser church membership. Abandoning Congregationalism for Presbyterianism was not a difficult step for Green; the two faiths arose out of the same Reformed tradition and had much in common, including a commitment to Calvinism and to a biblical-based church. The reversal on membership, however, was a dramatic repudiation of Jacob’s Puritan beliefs, which rested on the notion that only the elect could be full church members and participate in the sacraments. Dickinson and Burr, Green succinctly noted in his autobiography, “induced me to embrace Stoddard’s sentiments, which before I had thought were not right.” The reference was to
