so terrible in excommunication?” he wondered. He defended it as the best way “to shew them, & others, that they belong to Satan, & that these sins [if] continued will shut them out of heaven & leave them to go to hell with all the unregenerate.”32
Green began to make concrete changes in Hanover as early as 1757. The most important one was to tighten the standards for baptism and for admittance to communion. From 1747 to 1756, during his Stoddardean phase, Jacob performed an average of eighteen baptisms a year, with a high of twenty-two in 1755 and a low of fourteen in 1748. In the 1760s, he did about seven baptisms a year—less than half of what he had done a decade earlier. To determine whether someone was worthy of admission to the sacraments, Green summoned the applicant to a meeting, where he questioned the person on his or her spiritual state. It was a task, of course, that Green took seriously. He likened the minister’s role to that of a “doorkeeper” who is “under solemn obligations to take care, that those they admit be duly qualified according to the rules of God’s word.” Yet Jacob leavened his tough stance with a touch of humility. “Gospel ministers,” he conceded, could “not pretend to discern the heart [of seekers], or determine who are internally gracious.” Instead, based on these interviews, Jacob admitted to the sacraments those persons “who make an understanding profession of faith, repentance, and new obedience, and whose behaviour and practice gives reason to think their profession is sincere.”33
The tightening of standards created no fissures within the congregation. Quite the opposite. In his autobiography, Green observed that it was his Stoddardean “sentiments” of the 1740s allowing looser admission practices that were unpopular with most members. Implementing tougher standards did not result in any overt protests in Hanover or lead to Green’s ouster, noteworthy outcomes when contrasted with Edwards’s experience in Northampton. When he succeeded his grandfather as congregational pastor, Edwards continued Solomon Stoddard’s liberal (and popular) policies on admission to the church and the sacraments. But, like Green, Edwards was never comfortable with the looser standards, and after intense study he, too, concluded that such permissiveness was false and unbiblical. His decision to abandon the halfway covenant and end Stoddard’s standards caused an uproar in the church. The protests were so virulent that they contributed to Edwards’s dismissal as pastor in 1750.34
Nothing like that occurred in Hanover. Instead, Green pressed on with the task of building a stronger Presbyterian faith. Presbyterianism was a growing force in Morris County in the prerevolutionary years, and the denomination’s strength radiated outward from Hanover. Up to the mid-1750s Hanover Township—a large territory that encompassed Whippany to the south and Dover to the north—had the only Presbyterian church in the area. As the old 1718 meetinghouse deteriorated and the Presbyterian population grew, the presbytery finally agreed in 1755 to build two more meetinghouses, one at Hanover Neck (Green’s home church) and one at Parsippany. Jacob also served as Parsippany’s minister until 1760, when the congregation got its own pastor. By 1775, the Presbyterians had nine congregations in Morris County, the vast majority in Hanover and Morris Townships. By comparison, six other faiths (Baptist, Quaker, Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran, and German Reformed) had only one church in the county each. Thomas Bradbury Chandler’s Church of England had none.35
Green’s contributions to Presbyterianism’s growth in Morris County were both intellectual (he worked out the Calvinistic doctrines that underlay the creation of a purer, stronger church in Hanover) and mundane (he began keeping records and introducing Presbyterian structures to the congregation). During these years, Green matured as a leader. Gone was the nervousness and indecisiveness from his first years on the job. He emerged from his theological studies convinced that he had to act, and his congregation was solidly behind him. It suffered from none of the New Light–Old Light splits that bedeviled other Presbyterian churches.
Ironically, this future champion of laymen’s rights shared the view of his New England compatriots that the minister was the undisputed leader of the congregation. In a Puritan world, the pastor was a highly respected person who was seen as a member of the local aristocracy. Green brought this mind-set with him to New Jersey, and he ruled the congregation for many years strongly, almost haughtily. When he tightened admission standards in the 1760s, he did so without getting the approval of the elders or the presbytery. Green interviewed candidates on his own and decided by himself whether someone should be admitted to the church or the sacraments. When Green concluded that the person was worthy of admission, he passed along his recommendation to the church.36
Hanover, of course, was a Presbyterian church, and this meant that it placed limits on Green’s authority. When he arrived in 1745, Hanover already had deacons in place—but no elders. Green may have seen himself as the congregation’s undisputed leader, but he also well understood in these early years the strengths of the Presbyterian system. To lead effectively, the pastor needed allies among the laity. Without such support, Green could meet the same fate as his two predecessors. Jacob thus moved quickly to get elders in place. In June 1747, a few months after he was formally installed as Hanover’s pastor, five men were selected as elders. All were from leading families and possessed the stature and wealth to help Green lead; two (John Ball and Joseph Tuttle) were longtime deacons and thus the only officers when Jacob came to Hanover.37
The Ball family was among the earliest arrivals to Hanover: Caleb migrated from Newark about 1710, bought land on Hanover Neck, and became a part owner of the forge known locally as the “Old Iron Works.” The Tuttles came later than the Balls but achieved greater prominence. Joseph Tuttle purchased land in Hanover in 1725 and added to it in 1734, when he bought 1,250 acres at Hanover Neck. As a wealthy landowner, Joseph became a county freeholder at Morris’s founding, and he worked with Green for years as deacon and elder. They were close enough that Green wrote the inscription on his gravestone when Tuttle died in 1789 at the ripe old age of ninety-one, with Green praising Tuttle’s leadership and “virtuous honor.” Joseph Kitchel came from a large landowning family in Hanover Neck, where the new meetinghouse was built, and the Kitchells held a variety of posts in the county. Joseph farmed part of a 1,075-acre tract that he and his brother John inherited from their father.38
Besides relying on the help of the congregation’s elders and deacons, Green had two boards at his disposal—a parish board that assisted with the financial details of running a church, and a Presbyterian session of elders that handled discipline and “other matters of record,” according to its minutes. The parish board met periodically in the prewar years, but the session did not convene regularly until 1771, some six years after Jacob formally tightened admission standards to the church and the sacraments. For more than twenty years, in other words, Green pretty much acted alone in matters of church doctrine, although he likely consulted with the elders and had their support when he wanted to make changes.39
The main concern of the parish board was replacing the decrepit meetinghouse. In 1754, the board selected a five-person committee, including elder Ephraim Price, Jr., to oversee the construction of an edifice just to the east of the 1718 meetinghouse on land donated by Henry Burnet. The committee was in charge of raising money, supervising construction, and handling a host of other mundane details, such as deciding what to do with salvageable parts from the 1718 meetinghouse (it voted to give Parsippany the pulpit, the seats from the gallery, and the windows and glass). Because money was so tight, building the replacement was no easy task. Construction dragged on for years, and the parish board struggled to complete the project.40
In April 1758 it appointed a new four-person board to again try to raise enough money to finish the meetinghouse. Seven years later, the parish board gave the go-ahead to plaster the building. Two years later the church was still unfinished. Green was not pleased with the slow progress or with how the meetinghouse itself was shaping up. The money shortage meant that the congregation was relying on temporary seating and not pews; it also meant that the seating arrangements were haphazard. People sat wherever they wanted. In 1769, Green asked the board to reconfigure the church interior so that pews would replace the “common seats” in the west gallery and
