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 course, he was “radical” in other ways, pushing for voluntarism and democratic 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