rights, and arguing for a fairer economic system where all could reap the rewards of hard work. Others might view Calvinism as an anachronism and a philosophy best relegated to the sixteenth century; Jacob Green did not. This “conservative” also embraced Lockean political principles and was sympathetic to the rationalism of the Enlightenment despite the huge threat it posed to his Calvinistic beliefs. Green’s great tract in 1776 advocating revolution was as “radical” as anything from the pens of other American Whigs. Chandler’s views were not so muddied as Green’s, but he too could be hard to pigeonhole at times. Chandler was so consumed with bringing bishops to America that he was pushing for a strong state church that even Anglicans in England had rejected since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In this sense, Chandler was more backward-looking than Green was with his defense of Calvinism. And, of course, Chandler was the epitome of a conservative in his love of traditional society, and of order and hierarchy. Thomas Bradbury Chandler did not like change, and he did not like democracy. Nor did he trust the masses; Jacob Green did. Throughout all his writings, Chandler was fighting to preserve contemporary society from an emerging liberalism. But Chandler was something of a radical in his embrace of reason and in his intuitive understanding that creating the pure church that Green envisioned was folly. He sided with power and a strong central government, two very modern notions. Thus Chandler, in this one area, was more of a realist and was more forward-looking than Green was.
The book’s subtitle has its ironies as well—was Calvinism really a “radical religion”? Many would argue no, for all the reasons given above, but a number of historians of religion would answer yes. Keith L. Griffin, for instance, details in his book on Religion and Revolution all the ways that rebellion against a tyrannical ruler was justified under the Reformed Protestant tradition, and he maintains that Calvinism and other Reformed traditions were inherently radical. So did Alan Heimert in his famous, and hotly disputed, Religion and the American Mind: in complex ways, Calvinists stimulated the democratic movement that resulted in the American Revolution. To Heimert, Jonathan Edwards and his fellow Calvinists were the radicals, the liberal “rationalist” Whigs the conservatives.22
Another irony relating to the subtitle was Presbyterianism itself. Was the Presbyterian Church to which Green belonged radical? The British had long believed it was, because of the power the church accorded to the laity; in the 1630s and 1640s, Charles I, for one, railed against the Presbyterian system, worrying that it fostered democracy and encouraged sedition and thus posed a threat to the Crown. His counterparts in the eighteenth century were equally fearful of Presbyterianism, fuming over the church’s strong support for the American rebellion. Jacob Green, ironically, would answer no—the church was not democratic enough for his tastes, and he lambasted both the church’s synods and the General Assembly as dictatorial. In a final irony, the Revolution that the American Presbyterian Church backed so wholeheartedly unleashed a series of changes that by 1800 had the church looking quite unrevolutionary compared with the surging Baptists and Methodists (who were seen as pro-British during the war): it still insisted on an educated ministry, “clung” to its Calvinistic ways (to cite Nathan Hatch’s phrase), sometimes downplayed emotional religion popular with evangelicals, and was slow to expand to the frontier.
In the end, the verdict on the question of radicalism should be readily apparent in Jacob Green’s Revolution. The book takes the reader on a journey through the Enlightenment and a revolutionary age, focusing on an obscure but paradoxical man who embraced both the harshness of Calvinism and the soaring democratic hopes of the American Revolution.
The Worlds of Jacob Green and Thomas Bradbury Chandler
The journey from Stoneham, Massachusetts, to Cambridge carried Jacob Green past the familiar scenes of his childhood—the farmsteads and weathered houses of Stoneham, the rocky pastures, woodlands, and hills of Malden (map 2). Spurring his horse southward in the summer heat, down the narrow lanes and rutted roads that permeated the New England countryside, he crossed the Malden and Mystic Rivers and turned west toward his destination. It was a short and easy ride in some ways, a mere nine miles over well-traveled roads that ran near Charlestown and Boston.
But, of course, in another important sense, the journey was anything but easy. Serious and hardworking—dour, even—Jacob Green remained a callow youth in 1740 as he readied to take his place among the elite of Harvard College: shy among strangers, afraid to speak in public, unsure about his plans and prospects. His father was long dead. His family was neither prominent nor rich, and his home of late was Stoneham, a hardscrabble farming community that enjoyed none of the success, prestige, or wealth of a Boston or Salem. His intellectual journey over the next four years would prove to be equally challenging; exposure to the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening had him fretting over his Calvinism in 1744, the year of his graduation.
When Jacob arrived in Cambridge on that August day in 1740, his lack of social standing became painfully evident. Harvard ranked him next to last in the thirty-three-member freshman class of 1744, one spot above James Welman of Lynn, Massachusetts, the son of a yeoman farmer who could afford Harvard only because of the beneficence of his pastor, Stephen Chase. At the top was Samuel Welles; a mere fifteen years old upon his entry to Harvard, he was the eldest son of a wealthy and respected merchant in Boston who owned a wharf and sat on the colony’s Province Council. Thomas Cushing, who went on to become a lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was ranked fourth. His family boasted a coat of arms, a father who served as a justice of the peace, and a grandfather-merchant who built the family fortune. The Greens possessed none of these things.1
Jacob was a farm boy. He was born on February 2, 1722, in Malden, an agricultural village some eight miles north of Boston. He was named after a father he never got to know. In 1723, Jacob the elder died of “a nervous fever,” in the son’s words, when Jacob was about eighteen months old. How this loss affected Jacob is impossible to know but he surely felt his absence keenly. In his autobiography Jacob avoided the topic, keeping his description of his father to twelve words and coldly stark: “My father’s name was Jacob Green, the youngest son of Henry Green.”2
With his father dead, the task of raising Jacob fell to his mother, Dorothy Lynde Green, and a large family circle—primarily three uncles and his four older sisters. This circle of kin encompassed not only the Green clan but also the Lyndes and the Barret family, whom Dorothy married into after the death of her husband. The Lyndes and Greens were especially close; Jacob’s mother was the daughter of Captain John Lynde and Elizabeth Hills, who was the widow of William Green. Dorothy’s sister Martha married into the Green family a few years after Dorothy did, while years earlier Nathan Lynde had married Lydia Green.3
The Greens were a thoroughly conventional family of middling Puritan farmers who resided in middling Puritan towns. Jacob’s grandfather Henry was descended from Thomas Green, the Puritan forebearer, who was the first in the family to arrive on America’s shores. Henry had eight children; Jacob’s father, who was born in 1689, was the youngest. The Green men worked as farmers and craftsmen—Henry was a weaver, and Jacob’s uncles pursued an assortment of crafts. But farming was the main family occupation,
