the Provincial Congress that cast New Jersey’s lot with the rebelling colonists; it also led to his selection as the chairman of the committee that wrote New Jersey’s first constitution as an independent state.14
Green was born in Malden, Massachusetts, near Boston, in 1722, the son of a struggling farmer who died a year after Jacob’s birth. His mother and uncles who raised Green tried to teach him a trade or to steer him to farming, but this serious youth with a love of books had other ideas. Despite limited financial resources, Green managed to enroll in Harvard, where his great intellectual journey began and where he was exposed to not only books of the Enlightenment but also the evangelical world of George Whitefield and Gilbert Tennent. About a year after graduation, when a job offer from Whitefield fell through, Green found himself in New Jersey, where he became a minister for the Presbyterian congregation in Hanover, a farming community about twenty-six miles west of New York City. Despite his feelings of inadequacy, Green’s talents and energies quickly began to emerge, as he aggressively led the Presbyterian congregation and worked as a farmer, miller, teacher, and physician. His intellectual prowess, as well as his connections in New Jersey Presbyterianism, secured him a seat on the College of New Jersey’s board of trustees, and he served briefly as college president after the death of his mentor, Jonathan Edwards.15
From a variety of sources, including a thorough examination of biblical history and Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, Green in the 1750s developed his ideas on Calvinism, free will, reason, and the church that, when mixed in with his Lockean understanding of politics and the cauldron that was the American Revolution, undergirded his ambitious reform efforts. For Green, the central concern in his sermons and various writings was, why act morally? Why should anyone—saved or unsaved—perform good works? In painstaking detail over four decades, Green laid out his answers.
The key issue for him—one that was fraught with political implications for the governing of society—was the need to create stronger and purer churches. While some reformers trying to smooth out Calvinism’s rough edges were arguing that the church should become more inclusive by allowing more people, even the reprobate, to join, Green was taking an opposite tack. Churches, he maintained, should be raising standards, permitting only the elect to be full members and to partake in the sacraments. And to become full members, Green explained, applicants needed to show they were among the saved; they needed to show they were performing good works and living exemplary lives. Thus Green’s most important crusade in the years before the Revolution was to purify the church. From this core interest flowed, magma-like, his broader causes—to improve religiosity, he needed to improve the behavior of individuals and society.
Green’s reform regime emerged in stages over three decades. In the late 1760s, he first wrote a series of tracts for a learned audience, primarily theologians, that argued his case for creating a pure church and why it was so important to religion and society. In 1770, he took his cause to the general public, publishing a best-selling pamphlet called A Vision of Hell that lampooned the materialism and selfishness of contemporary society. Using illustrations by Paul Revere of Boston fame, A Vision of Hell was a brilliant satire that poked fun at a wide-ranging group of targets—from less-than-devout ministers to sybaritic merchants and Sabbath-ignoring farmers who cared more about the state of their crops than the state of their souls.16
The revolutionary crisis of the 1770s presented Pastor Green with a new set of opportunities and headaches. This Calvinist saw the arrival of war as preordained and a God-given opportunity to achieve the changes in society Green believed were needed. The crisis of war would force Americans to work harder and to put the good of society ahead of their selfish private interests, he reasoned. And the ethos of liberty had the potential to sweep away another dark cloud hovering over the landscape—the holding of Africans in slavery. However, the Revolution’s emphasis on liberty and freedom of choice presented a special challenge for Green and other American Calvinists. How do you reconcile liberty with divine control? How much freedom does God give a person? Just how controlling is he? Moreover, how do you maintain Christian order and improve religiosity in an era of freedom and liberty?17
Green’s answer was sophisticated and, at first blush, paradoxical. In the late 1770s and early 1780s, he began to preach the virtues of voluntarism and the need for granting more rights to laymen. Yet, at the same time, he also preached the need for greater discipline and for maintaining high standards in church and among the devout. Green resolved this inherent paradox—greater discipline during an era of greater freedom—by giving people a choice. They could work hard, show they were of the elect, and commit to the church—or not. It was up to them whether to act righteously or sinfully, but when they decided to join, they had to truly commit to the high standards Jacob Green was demanding.
The doctrine of the covenant helped Green reconcile his political and religious views. God, he reasoned, entered into a covenantal relationship with chosen individuals (the predestined “elect”), and it was up to these individuals to respond to his offer of salvation. No one could be coerced into grace; it could only be freely offered by God and freely accepted by man. Melding his knowledge of Lockean political philosophy with his Edwardsean thought (which stressed free choice within the bounds set by God), Green in the 1770s increasingly viewed the laity as constituting the real church—the moral authority of the congregation rested on individual believers. When one was of the elect, he or she was on an equal footing with the church’s minister. Such equality gave the laity a great say in the running of their congregation. Equally important was the covenant’s contribution to his conceptions of liberty. Green increasingly believed in voluntary associations of like-minded believers who joined of their own free accord. By 1780, liberty for him had come to mean the liberty to choose—within the dictates of God’s mandate to act morally. He not only opposed any kind of religious establishment, he also argued that “every man . . . [should] be encouraged to think and judge for himself in matters of religion.” No one, in other words, should be forced to join a church or to partake in the sacraments.18
In the 1770s, Green grasped the direction that American society was heading, and he was an early proponent of laymen’s rights and of Jeffersonian democracy before it even existed. In the late 1770s, he wrote two letters on liberty that extolled independent yeomen and tradesmen as the bedrocks of a democratic society. Green disdained the rich and decried their excessive influence on the body politic. During the war, he broadened his rebellion against the king to the American Presbyterian Church because he saw the Synod of New York and Philadelphia as high-handed and imperious. Green opposed the centralizing trend in the church and wanted power to rest with individual congregations and their laymen. This belief led him in 1779 to secede from the Presbyterian Church—a decade before the American church approved a stronger, centralizing, federalist-style constitution—and to direct an independence movement resting on the creation of associated presbyteries, which were voluntary associations of like-minded churches that pursued a congregational system of Presbyterianism. Green was also out front on democratizing education. As early as 1770, he was calling for changes in how ministers were educated and ordained; Green wanted less emphasis placed on formal education and more on evangelical values—in other words, a fairer and more democratic system. He wanted the ministry opened to more people, all in an effort to create a more nimble Presbyterian Church that could meet the needs of a democratic, frontier society.
In these diverse ways, Jacob Green’s attempts to reconcile Calvinism during the revolutionary era fostered an activist, democratic faith that led him to undertake an extremely ambitious reform program that had both secular and religious components. To fully understand just how radical Green’s Calvinism was, Jacob Green’s Revolution tells a second story. High Church Anglicanism and its values of sacramental ceremony, conformity, and obedience to the state were polar opposites of Green’s Edwardsean and democratic values. Thus this second story, told as vignettes between the main chapters, focuses on another New Jersey minister, Thomas Bradbury Chandler, who lived about twenty miles from Green in Elizabeth Town.
Chandler was one of the most colorful—and hated—American
