of his main reform cause: the effort to bring an Anglican bishop to American shores (fig. 1). Chandler’s mentor was not a Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards but Samuel Johnson, the conservative theologian, royalist, and first president of King’s College in New York City, and Chandler built his conservatism on the scaffolding of Johnson’s High Church Anglicanism. Inferiors owed their superiors loyalty and obedience; they especially owed allegiance to their church and king. The threshold for rebellion, in Chandler’s mind, was high, and the colonists had not met it. With fierce, biting sarcasm, he turned Whig arguments on their head by denouncing the Continental Congress as tyrannical and corrupt, and he warned that breaking away from Great Britain would prove suicidal for the American people.
The differences with Green went beyond crystalline ones over reform; they extended to their worldviews arising from their religious principles. Besides improving the church’s administrative efficiency, Chandler believed the episcopal office was a linchpin of a properly functioning society where hierarchy and monarchy would reign. Traditional English society with its social gradations and elaborate governmental system thrilled Chandler, and he wanted it replicated in British North America. Bringing bishops to America was one way he would accomplish this goal. Jacob Green strongly disagreed with Chandler’s worldview. He rejected episcopacy, believing it was unbiblical and unnecessary. Moreover, as he made clear in his 1776 tract, Green detested the British system with its hierarchical ranking of power and its multitude of offices; he derided the system as undemocratic and financially reckless—lordly offices such as the bishoprics cost money, required oppressive taxation to support, and were meddlesome in the laity’s affairs. Bishops and High Church councils should not be running things, according to Green; the people in their congregations should. For these reasons and more, Green wanted the thirteen colonies to declare independence and establish their own nation.
Besides providing a stark contrast in the ministers’ reform drives and worldviews, Chandler’s story is included for two other reasons. One is to break free from the limitations of the traditional biographical format, which focuses on one individual, by employing a narrative technique commonly found in novels. That is, in telling a main story of reform and revolution, Jacob Green’s Revolution mixes in a backstory of an Anglican loyalist whose experiences in the Revolution were 180 degrees from that of a Calvinistic patriot. Thus the dueling stories better capture the variety of revolutionary experience than would a traditional biography of one man.
The second reason for Chandler’s inclusion is that the two men lived eerily parallel lives. Both were raised in the insular world of New England Congregationalism (Green, who was born in 1722, was from Massachusetts; Chandler, who was born in 1726, was from Connecticut). Green was the product of a humble family, Chandler a wealthy one. Both graduated from college (Green at Harvard, Chandler at Yale). Both arrived in New Jersey within two years of each other, settled nearby in places that reflected their personalities (Green in anodyne Hanover, Chandler in stately Elizabeth Town), and became ministers (Green reluctantly for the Presbyterian faith, Chandler enthusiastically for the Anglican) (map 1). Both were talented writers with wildly different styles (Green wrote, and spoke, in a susurration, Chandler in a shout). Both possessed wildly different personalities—Chandler was garrulous, socially outgoing, quick tempered; Green was reserved, shy, disciplined. Both died in 1790 within a few weeks of each other (Green in May, Chandler in June). Both possessed towering intellects and were shaped by Puritan culture and the Enlightenment, and both became acclaimed figures in New Jersey’s revolutionary drama—Green for the rebelling colonists, Chandler for the king. It was Jacob Green in 1776 who helped persuade reluctant New Jerseyans to back independence by writing a well-regarded tract advocating separation from the king, and it was Thomas Bradbury Chandler who helped rally loyalists against the coming rebellion.19
And, of course, both were aggressive reformers. Green’s lifelong dream was to create a stronger, purified church; Chandler’s was to create a stronger state church. From Green’s desire to create a purified church flowed a bewildering, almost vertiginous, array of causes that ranged from curbing the acquisitive impulses of Americans to outlawing slavery. Chandler’s vision was narrower but powerful in its own right. Laser-like, he focused on strengthening the Church of England in the colonies, and that meant trying to bring a bishop to American shores—an unpopular cause among American Whigs suspicious of British power and intentions. No shrinking violet, Chandler fought tenaciously for an American episcopate despite violent opposition from the likes of Sam Adams, and he became the leading Anglican in the northern colonies as he strove to make the king’s church relevant in America.20
The opening section of Jacob Green’s Revolution, “The Worlds of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler,” describes the two ministers’ early lives and their intellectual development in the years leading up to the revolutionary drama. The second section, “Revolutionary Thinkers and the Trials of War,” explores the drama of war and how it related to their reform regimes—Green’s effort to foster revolution and shape it; Chandler’s attempt to oppose it and his decision to flee to London in 1775. The final section, “Reformers on the Home Front,” looks in greater depth at their reform causes during the long and frustrating war years. An epilogue tells the stories of the two men’s deaths and examines their reform legacies in the new republic.
In concocting a dueling story of religion and reform during the revolutionary era, two important subthemes emerge. One is the importance of the Mid-Atlantic to Green’s and Chandler’s reform causes. The weakness of the English church in New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic made Chandler obsessive about bringing a bishop to America, because he felt a strong leader was needed if the church was to successfully take on the numerous dissenting churches in the region (and for that very reason, dissenters opposed a bishop; they wanted to keep the king’s church—and the king himself—weak and ineffectual in New England and the middle colonies).
For Green, geography was more complicated. He lived in Morris County, a Presbyterian–Whig stronghold that enthusiastically backed the war and became a haven for George Washington’s beleaguered Continental troops during the Revolution. With the exception of the slavery issue, the county was a safe base for him that helped foster his radicalism. But New Jersey itself had a sizable population of neutrals and loyalists. The colony’s reluctance to enter the fray and commit to independence in the mid-1770s forced Green to leave the safety of his pulpit and to enter politics. Then, when war arrived, New Jersey’s dangerously central position in the fighting helped him to see the “glorious cause” in all its majesty and folly. The insights he gained from observing the independence movement so up close and personal informed his views and inspired him to write essays on, among other things, liberty and finance. Taken together, the experiences of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler tell a tale about a region that receives far less attention in the literature than does New England and the South.21
A second subtheme is the slippery nature of defining conservatism and radicalism during a tumultuous time in Western history, when the Enlightenment was making rapid strides in overturning traditional norms, Calvinism was struggling to remain relevant, and political revolutions were engulfing America and France. Who was a “conservative” and a “radical” may seem obvious, but the lives of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler show that this was not quite so. In seeking to make Calvinism a force in society after years of attack, Green was “conservative” in an important sense—he was trying to defend a traditional movement and its centuries-long view of moral agency. From the pulpit, this stern Calvinistic minister could be found railing against immoral behavior; Green decried the bibulous and the licentious in the strongest terms possible. To modern ears, Green was quite the crank and killjoy. But, of
