but not least, I thank the two pillars in my life—my wife, Anne, and son, Josh, who have inspired me in so many ways. The book is dedicated to my two brothers, Jeff and David, who have been so supportive of me through the years, as well as to several lifelong friends from Mountain Lakes in Morris County—Steve and Janet Manson, and Sally and Kenneth Ratigan.
Friends, all.
When it came to war on April 19, 1775, the fighting at Lexington Green and Concord was a clarion call for the dreamers and the reformers. At last the temporizing was ending, and committed revolutionaries saw their chance to fight for the changes in American society they believed the times demanded. Their ranks were diverse. At the top were the Whig intellectuals steeped in classical thought and the writings of British radicals like John Wilkes, men who dreamed of ending monarchical government and replacing it with a republican society populated by the virtuous. For them, the American Revolution was about self-rule and the chance to create independent governments, free of British meddling, that would solidify the elites’ wealth and power. At the bottom were the masses—the seamen, the laborers, the farmers, the African Americans, the “unruly”—who saw the war as a people’s revolution, a chance to establish democratic rights and create a more just society that would overthrow outdated institutions and redistribute political and economic power. For these legions of people, the Revolution was about creating a better, more prosperous life.1
The sources of revolutionary energy were thus quite broad, and they were fed by streams flowing from vertiginous places. One such stream was from a particularly out-of-the-way place. In the Watchung Mountains of northwestern New Jersey, a backwoods reformer pursued a revolutionary program as ambitious as anything Thomas Paine could dream up. Yet he hardly fit the image of a revolutionary. He was unassuming and shy, and fairly old by the standards of revolution—fifty-three in 1775. Home was not the august halls of Williamsburg or the smoky parlor of a Boston tavern but a modest parish house in Hanover, New Jersey. He was not an erudite lawyer or an angry rioter but a quiet man of the cloth who preached discipline and obedience to God. Even after spending years in the pulpit as a Presbyterian minister, he was uncomfortable appearing before crowds of people and was an uninspiring public speaker. Bad nerves and bouts of melancholia undermined his health.
His pen, however, hinted at no such weakness, and this revolutionary brought to his task the penetrating eye of a critic who questioned not only British but American society. To an official in London reading his influential 1776 tract advocating independence, he was a troublemaker and a radical. To a slave owner in the Mid-Atlantic perusing his letters on liberty advocating a just society and denouncing slavery, he was a menace to good order. Jacob Green, a radical? He would have denied such a thing. When elected to the New Jersey Provincial Congress in May 1776, he went reluctantly and resigned his post within six weeks, as soon as decorum allowed. He scurried home to Hanover, to his library and his pulpit.
Jacob Green’s concerns were wider than taxation and representation (although, as a good Whig, he was concerned with both those things). Green wanted the rebelling Americans to abolish slavery, broaden democratic rights, reform the currency, and establish a fairer, almost communistic economic system that would give the downtrodden a fighting chance to succeed against the wellborn. Most ambitiously, he wanted a society that would be defined not by materialism and self-interest but by devotion to God and the common good. And he saw the American Revolution as his chance to achieve these ambitious goals, despite the numerous failings of the American people that he perceived and publicly lamented. In pursuing such a broad and idealistic reform agenda, Jacob Green was hardly alone; the American Revolution, as is well-known, produced its share of dreamers throughout the thirteen colonies.2
The particularly interesting fact about Green’s reform drive, as this book will fully explore, was its source: it stemmed not from Whig philosophy or Lockean principles—the famous “contagion of liberty” that inspired so many colonists to revolt—but from his religious beliefs, specifically his Calvinism and the tenets he derived from the complex thought of Jonathan Edwards.3 Under assault from many quarters (including Enlightenment scientists and rationalists), Calvinism was a tired and harried religious movement by 1776, with many contemporaries seeing it as a barrier to reform and the improvement of society. Founded in the sixteenth century by John Calvin (1509–1564) during the early days of the Protestant Reformation, Calvinism dominated the intellectual thought of western Europe for the next three centuries, a domination resting on the simplest of premises—God preordained who was saved and who was not. In their rejection of Catholic conceptions of good works, indulgences, and purgatory, Calvin’s predestinarian teachings built on the insights of Augustine and Luther. Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century maintained that humans were incapable of lifting themselves up from their fallen states through acts of charity and good works. They especially rejected the idea that someone could “buy” salvation through timely gifts to the church. The definitive statement on this heretical notion came from the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther: under his justification by faith, God grants salvation to those who believe. Calvin’s followers then pushed the implication of Luther’s theory to its logical extreme: God alone does the granting—good behavior cannot earn someone salvation; a person cannot “work” his or her way to eternal bliss. Moreover, in this Calvinistic schemata, an all-powerful God can see far into the future and know ahead of time what will happen because he has preordained the course of events, including who will be saved and who will be damned.4
From the beginning, Calvin’s teachings on predestination had their critics, who recoiled against the doctrine’s inherent cruelty: God decides ahead of time who will not be saved, and there’s nothing a person can do to keep from spending eternity in hell? One such critic was Henry VIII, the philandering English king who broke away from Rome in the late 1530s and anointed himself head of his country’s church. Under Calvinism, Henry wondered, where was the incentive to do good—to pursue reforms that would benefit society? Why should anyone behave morally and justly if good behavior did not matter? If bad behavior were preordained? While Henry agreed with Luther and Calvin that the Catholic Church had become a corrupt institution and that indulgences were wrong, he felt the reformers had gone too far in the other direction by seemingly dismissing all acts of charity. In Henry’s mind, salvation would be determined only after a final accounting at the Day of Judgment when a person dies.5
Richard Hooker (1554–1600), the renowned English theologian during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, expounded on Henry’s critique: telling someone that her fate was determined before she was born and that she must follow the path laid out by God dampened the motivation for individuals to act morally. Hooker argued, instead, that reason was a gift of God, as was free will. It was up to individuals whether they wanted to do good, or bad—whether they wanted to spend their time in taverns or helping to feed and clothe the hungry and the homeless. Like Henry VIII, Hooker believed that good works played an important role in human society, and he constructed a comprehensive theological system built on reason and order that allowed for a far larger scope of human choice and action than Calvinism supposedly allowed.6
These challenges, which in essence called into question whether Calvinism could be an agent for the reform of individuals and ultimately society, were only the beginning. Scientists during the Enlightenment were chipping away at Calvinism from another direction by slowly unraveling the mysteries of nature and the cosmos, thanks to, among other things, the invention of the microscope and the telescope. Scientists’ discoveries were raising uncomfortable questions about both the Bible and God’s powers. Was the Bible really an accurate accounting of human history? How do you explain its inconsistencies? Did God really control all? Or was free will paramount? Was God’s divine power behind the workings of nature, or were other forces responsible? The spirit of scientific inquiry brought a new, Baconian way of thinking that challenged researchers to analyze phenomena—and the Bible—based on evidence and observation, not on blind faith. The resulting skepticism brought renewed scrutiny to a sixteenth-century
