them to keep their family together. Jacob’s father inherited Henry’s main farm, as well as a lot that was behind an uncle’s house. The elder Jacob’s siblings also got farms, all bordering various Greens.4
Malden, as a result, served as the geographical center of the Green family. Various branches clustered in the town’s northwestern section, where their farms formed an arc between Ell Pond and the Reading town line. Greens, Lyndes, and Barrets could also be found in Stoneham and Leicester, as well as Killingly, Connecticut. Jacob, who primarily lived in Malden and Stoneham, was to get to know all four places during a peripatetic childhood.5
As modest as their economic circumstances were, the Greens did achieve some prominence in town and church affairs—Henry served as a lieutenant in the militia and held several public offices, including moderator of Malden’s town meeting and a selectman in the town government. Jacob’s uncle Daniel, whom Jacob lived with for a year, was a town selectman and a deacon in Stoneham’s congregational church, a position of prestige and importance in Puritan communities.6
One reason for the vagabond existence was Dorothy’s marriage to John Barret of Malden in the mid-1720s. The marital union enlarged Jacob’s circle of kinship—the couple went on to have three children of their own—and presumably brought additional support from the new brood of step-siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. But the marriage also meant upheaval: Dorothy and John moved to Killingly in eastern Connecticut in 1729 or so, and Jacob left Malden for a time. Because the Barrets were not wealthy, Dorothy sent Jacob to live with various uncles after he turned fourteen, and he endured long absences from his mother, with one separation lasting two years.7
Jacob apparently was not close to his stepfather. In his autobiography, he had virtually nothing to say about John Barret. In contrast, Jacob cited his mother’s influence and expressed his adoration for her. Despite the absences, it was Dorothy who instilled a love of learning in Jacob and nurtured his interest in religion. “My mother took much pains to teach me to read, and early to instil into my mind the principles of religion,” he recalled. Jacob described her as a deeply devout woman who impressed upon him the importance of prayer, advice that Jacob took to heart from a young age.8
A pious, female-dominated household (his older sisters read religious tracts aloud to him) fused with a powerful Puritan culture to shape Jacob and steer him toward the ministry. In eighteenth-century New England, the fervor of the founding generation was gone but religion remained central in the lives of the region’s inhabitants. The Sunday tableau of farmers converging on the town green for services at the congregational church was one sign of this importance; hearing the Word each Sunday remained a vital ritual of New England life. But there were many other signs as well. Bibles and religious tracts occupied a central place in the home. Religion shaped family relations, the education of children, and the organization of communities. Christianity was a source of strength and comfort in bad times and a source of wonderment during good times. Massachusetts Bay’s founders were Protestant radicals who came to the New World preaching to their followers that they were a chosen people on a mission to redeem Christendom. That messianic sense, although much weakened by the fourth generation, remained in the 1720s. Communities still rested on a compact, or covenant, between God and its inhabitants, and this covenant taught that all must obey the Lord or risk bringing the wrath of God down on the entire community. Good Puritans, among other things, read the Bible, went to church, and refrained from breaking the Lord’s commandments. As one historian noted, “Puritanism invited, or rather demanded, active cooperation from every member of society in the eradication of sin. It was held up as a sign of regeneration that a man should reform his friends and neighbors.”9
Malden and Stoneham did not rebel against this congregational world. Indeed, as home to such Puritan stalwarts as Michael Wigglesworth (the best-selling author of a famous religious work) and Joseph Emerson (the stern minister of Jacob’s childhood), they helped to perpetuate Puritan culture. Malden was part of Charlestown until 1638 when the colony awarded Malden’s founding proprietors five-acre lots on the “Mistickside & above the Ponds.” In 1722, the year of Jacob’s birth, it remained a small community of several hundred people. Stoneham was both newer and poorer than Malden, its immediate neighbor to the south. Incorporated in 1725, three years after Jacob’s birth, Stoneham grew only haltingly in the following years. A 1754 tax assessment ranked the town near the bottom of Middlesex County, well below Malden and the wealthy college town of Cambridge.10
Jacob’s exposure to religion and Congregationalism was multifaceted—at home, school, church, and community. The congregational church was obviously one important source of his religious education. Occupying the pulpit during his childhood was the Reverend Emerson, who served Malden’s congregational church from 1722 to 1767. Emerson graduated from Harvard and was a well-educated, scholarly man whose faith rested on Calvinism and a belief in Puritans’ divine mission as a New Israel. He enforced a strict Congregationalism during his forty-five-year tenure that emphasized proper godly behavior and the need for Malden’s good citizens to uphold the covenant—requirements that an adult Jacob Green wholeheartedly supported. In exhorting his flock to lead upright lives, Emerson alternately cajoled and insulted his listeners; one sermon likened the congregation’s spiritual makeup to “a corrupt Fountain, a nest of Serpents, a cage of Unclean Birds, a stie of Filthiness.” He decried weakness and sin, going so far as to sell his chaise because, in the words of one essayist, “of the sinful pride which it awakened in him.”11
The community itself taught Jacob another kind of lesson. In these Puritan bastions throughout New England, all was not peace and love and harmony. Emerson found himself overseeing a devout but argumentative flock. The most troublesome issue was where to locate the meetinghouse: those who lived near it wanted it to stay there, while those farther away wanted it closer. A particularly nasty dispute occurred in 1727, and it directly affected the Greens. The secession of ten families to Reading left the Green clan isolated from Malden’s religious life. In 1734, as a result, when Jacob was twelve years old, the Greens proposed that their neighborhood become part of Stoneham—such a move would reunite the family (some of whom had become Reading residents in the 1727 annexation) and bring them closer to the latter town’s meetinghouse. In a petition dated June 21, 1734, the clan asked the General Court to approve the annexation. They couched their request in traditional terms, citing “their Difficulty to attend the Publick worship of God in their Towns by reason of their Remoteness from the meetinghouse there.” In December, the Court granted the request, including “the land late of Jacob Green, deced.”12
But the biggest influence on Jacob may well have come from books. New England was a literate place, and Jacob had the good fortune to grow up in a village with a direct connection to one of New England’s most famed literary figures, the eccentric Michael Wigglesworth. Wigglesworth preceded Emerson as Malden minister. He was a Harvard graduate and probably outshone Emerson in dourness. As one chronicler of his life noted, “We should scarcely exaggerate, I think, if we described Michael Wigglesworth as a morbid, humorless, selfish busybody” whose passion was haranguing people to reform their ungodly ways.13
How many people Wigglesworth turned off to religion because of his poor people skills and dark sermons is unknown. Yet his influence as a writer on New England Puritanism is indisputable. In 1662, Wigglesworth published a 224-stanza poem called The Day of Doom that remained popular for more than one hundred years (indeed, it was one of the first best-selling books in the colonies) and that scared the wits out of countless generations of New England children—including Jacob Green. The poem was a favorite of his sisters, and they read it aloud to a rapt Jacob. Wigglesworth named his poem well; The Day of Doom was about Judgment Day, and its simple rhymes contained stark warnings about the fate that awaited “Adulterers and Whoremongers” and others:14
With dismal chains, and strongest reins,
Like Prisoners of Hell,
They’re held in place
