LITMIR.BIZ

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Green lead; two (John Ball and Joseph Tuttle) were longtime deacons and thus the only officers when Jacob came to Hanover.³⁷

      The Ball family was among the earliest arrivals to Hanover: Caleb migrated from Newark about 1710, bought land on Hanover Neck, and became a part owner of the forge known locally as the “Old Iron Works.” The Tuttles came later than the Balls but achieved greater prominence. Joseph Tuttle purchased land in Hanover in 1725 and added to it in 1734, when he bought 1,250 acres at Hanover Neck. As a wealthy landowner, Joseph became a county freeholder at Morris’s founding, and he worked with Green for years as deacon and elder. They were close enough that Green wrote the inscription on his gravestone when Tuttle died in 1789 at the ripe old age of ninety-one, with Green praising Tuttle’s leadership and “virtuous honor.” Joseph Kitchel came from a large landowning family in Hanover Neck, where the new meetinghouse was built, and the Kitchells held a variety of posts in the county. Joseph farmed part of a 1,075-acre tract that he and his brother John inherited from their father.³⁸

      Besides relying on the help of the congregation’s elders and deacons, Green had two boards at his disposal—a parish board that assisted with the financial details of running a church, and a Presbyterian session of elders that handled discipline and “other matters of record,” according to its minutes. The parish board met periodically in the prewar years, but the session did not convene regularly until 1771, some six years after Jacob formally tightened admission standards to the church and the sacraments. For more than twenty years, in other words, Green pretty much acted alone in matters of church doctrine, although he likely consulted with the elders and had their support when he wanted to make changes.³⁹

      The main concern of the parish board was replacing the decrepit meetinghouse. In 1754, the board selected a five-person committee, including elder Ephraim Price, Jr., to oversee the construction of an edifice just to the east of the 1718 meetinghouse on land donated by Henry Burnet. The committee was in charge of raising money, supervising construction, and handling a host of other mundane details, such as deciding what to do with salvageable parts from the 1718 meetinghouse (it voted to give Parsippany the pulpit, the seats from the gallery, and the windows and glass). Because money was so tight, building the replacement was no easy task. Construction dragged on for years, and the parish board struggled to complete the project.⁴⁰

      In April 1758 it appointed a new four-person board to again try to raise enough money to finish the meetinghouse. Seven years later, the parish board gave the go-ahead to plaster the building. Two years later the church was still unfinished. Green was not pleased with the slow progress or with how the meetinghouse itself was shaping up. The money shortage meant that the congregation was relying on temporary seating and not pews; it also meant that the seating arrangements were haphazard. People sat wherever they wanted. In 1769, Green asked the board to reconfigure the church interior so that pews would replace the “common seats” in the west gallery and in an unfinished section. Jacob had several goals in mind when he made this proposal. Two were seemingly routine. The congregation would assign pews so that people would know where to sit, and it would charge rent, thus raising badly needed revenue for the church. But he also wanted to improve discipline and encourage piety within families: families would sit together in cordoned-off pews (thus promoting unity) and parents could better keep an eye on their children (thus promoting order). In taking this position Green was once again showing his traditional, even aristocratic mien. In New England and elsewhere, the renting of pews reinforced the traditional order of colonial society: the wealthy and the powerful sat in front, in the choicest seats; the less well-off sat in the back or the gallery. Church seating, as a result, reinforced society’s gradations, and it helped to maintain order. The elite led; followers followed. Jacob shared this view, and he saw pews as an important aid in building the kind of congregation he wanted. Green felt so strongly about the need for pews that he volunteered to pay for them himself—a startling offer since Green felt he was badly underpaid. The board accepted his offer, although it promised to reimburse him later.⁴¹

      To aid his efforts to raise standards among members, Green donned the cloak of a teacher. It was a task he performed daily. Green preferred meeting with congregants in private meetings, where he posed questions to them “and [would] hear them answer . . . as they thought proper.” On other occasions Green encouraged members to submit questions to him, which he treated as an opportunity to deliver a lecture: “At these meetings I thought it proper to speak upon some things, and in a manner, that would not have been proper for the pulpit.” He also encouraged discussion among attendees. Green worked hard to establish a rapport with his membership. He made a point of visiting every single family early in his pastorship, devoting two days a week to this task: “When I came to the house, and the family was collected together, I first prayed with them; and then I began with the youngest, and so proceeded on till I came to the heads of the family—asking questions and discoursing, according to their several capacities.”⁴²

      Prayer was an important part of these private meetings as well, and Green set aside at least one day a month for such sessions, “when my elders and I have, by turns, prayed and sung, &c. These days I have found useful in keeping up some sense of religion.” Green demanded a lot from his membership—and from himself. He understood that he led by example; as he put it, “I have been very sensible that my own personal religion was of great importance to myself, and to others.” He thus fasted at least once a month: “On these fasting days, I used to write my wants, or the things that I would, for each day, bear particularly on my mind before God.” He would then mediate on these wants and write out a series of resolutions.⁴³

      One evangelical tool Green had little use for was the revival. This was somewhat surprising, given his support of the Great Awakening, his belief in evangelism, and his assertion in his 1770 tract that one way to end all the arguing over admission standards was to spark a revival of religion and create more qualified applicants for the church. Yet in the prewar years, Green led only three revivals: in 1756, 1764, and 1774, and most can be traced to personal causes. In 1756, Jacob’s first wife, Anna Strong, died, and to assuage his grief, Jacob threw himself into his work. “I was for a twelve-month after that event remarkably stirred up, quickened and engaged,” he explained. “I prayed and preached with an increased sense of divine things.” The impetus for the 1774 revival came from another unfortunate development: Green suffered an “apoplectic fit” (in the words of his son Ashbel) so serious that his family and congregation feared he would die. The crisis produced soul-searching within both Jacob and church members. Although seemingly close to death, Jacob retained “perfect possession of his intellectual faculties,” Ashbel said. He asked his eldest daughter to read from the gospel of John, which “produced in him a kind of holy rapture.” Meanwhile, when doctors warned that Jacob might not make it through the night, neighboring ministers and the Hanover congregation gathered to pray for his life. Their intercession, according to Ashbel, produced miraculous results: “The man who expected to be in eternity before morning—an expectation in which physicians as well as friends concurred—was in the morning, free from almost every threatening symptom of his disease.” A relieved Jacob turned the episode into a lesson on God’s goodness, and he pressed on with the revival. “In this sickness, I had remarkable views of divine things, and received uncommon tokens of favour from my people, who were then full of religion,” Jacob recalled.⁴⁴

      But overall, this most serious of men was uncomfortable with the histrionics of the revival, and pressing outside obligations kept him from feeling the spirit. Instead, the sermon remained Green’s primary teaching tool and his preferred medium for bringing people to Christ. The sermon was the high point of the service, and it provided a forum for Green to inculcate religious and educational values to his parishioners. As his daybooks and sermon notes reveal, he put a tremendous amount of thought into the sermon. In a typical week, according to his diary, he delivered at least two of them—one on Sundays in Hanover, and one during the week at other Presbyterian churches in Morris County or at members’ houses. Often he gave a series of sermons on one theme that could last six weeks or more. Green wrote his weekly sermons on scraps of paper—some in Weston’s shorthand, others in partial sentences. These sermons were more than outlines, though. Throughout his forty-five-year career in the ministry, Jacob never possessed the confidence to speak extemporaneously as a George Whitefield would. Yet the meticulous

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