Ashbel Green and the American Revolution

Rev. Ashbel Green (1762-1848) was a Presbyterian pastor in Philadelphia, a chaplain of the US Congress from 1792 to 1800, and the president of Princeton College from 1812 to 1822. But when the American Revolution broke out at Lexington and Concord, he was a 12 year old in New Jersey. He later wrote of how at the time, boys of ten to fifteen - too young to join the militia - formed units of their own and trained with fife and drum and wooden guns. Green himself was a leader of one these units.

This training proved to be important, since Green first served in the militia during his fifteenth year on an occasion in which the boys and old men were called out for sentry duty. When Ashbel Green turned 16, he became a regularly enrolled member of the militia and became an orderly sergeant. He was called out several times, including for the battles of Connecticut Farms and Springfield in 1780 when he was 17.

Ashbel Green’s father, Jacob Green, was a Presbyterian pastor. While reluctant to leave his pastoral duties for any amount of time, he served as a member of the provincial congress that formed the constitution of New Jersey in 1776 and the chairman of the committee that produced the original draft, having written an anonymous tract arguing for American independence earlier that year. He returned home to his family and flock as soon as the work of the state’s constitution was done.

In 1840, Ashbel Green wrote the following to his son about differences between the American Revolution and the French Revolution (I have inserted the paragraph breaks):

“MY DEAR A.—I have always been impatient, not to say vexed, when I have heard our national revolution and that of France, represented as similar. It is doubtless true, that our revolution had an influence, and a powerful one, in producing that of France. But the agencies, and what may be called the materials, of those two revolutions, were as different as can well be imagined. 

The leaders in our revolution were good men, as well as great men. If there were a few infidels among them, as no doubt was the fact, they were obliged to conceal their infidelity, because it was unpopular. Our people, speaking comparatively, were an intelligent, moral and religious people. They had been brought up under free institutions, and had the habits and ideas which are produced by such institutions. My quotation also from Mr. Jefferson, shows, that in Virginia, a day of humiliation, fasting and prayer, was acceptable to the people at large, and highly influential. This was still more, far more the case with the population of the eastern and middle provinces. In the most of these provinces, days of fasting and prayer were no novelty — they had been of frequent occurrence. The influence of the clergy, moreover, both in and out of the pulpit, was great and commanding; and it was all exerted against the unrighteous claims of Britain. It is also well known, that the old Continental Congress recommended days of religious observance, both for fasting and prayer, and for thanksgiving. Our army, too, had chaplains, to whom the commander-in-chief gave every facility which military operations would permit, for performing the duties of their sacred office. After the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, there was a special religious service, for thanksgiving to Almighty God for the success he had granted to the united arms of America and France. On that occasion, General Washington directed that the whole army not on special military service, should attend; and he exhorted them, in general orders, to give their attendance with all the seriousness and devout feelings suited to the solemnity. 

Of all this, there not only was nothing, in the origin and progress of the French revolution, but something infinitely worse than nothing; that is, there was the absence of all good and the presence of much evil. An irruption took place of the most ferocious and infernal passions that human nature has ever exhibited. The leaders of this revolution, with no exception known to me, were destitute of every thing like religion, or genuine morality. They talked, indeed, of morality, but they openly professed to abhor religion; unless, after the extermination of every semblance of Christianity, the worship of a harlot, in the guise of the goddess of reason, might be called their religion. Many of the leaders, as every body knows, were avowed atheists. Mr. William Bradford, the successor of Randolph, as Attorney General of the United States, and who died in 1795, told me, that Mr. Jefferson said in his hearing, that before he left France, atheism was table-talk with the bishops; and this was a considerable time before the evil reached its height. The populace of France, before the revolution, had been greatly oppressed by their superiors, both civil and ecclesiastical; and had grown up in servility, and the most brutish ignorance. Hence, when their former restraints were removed, and their passions became excited, they raged like infuriated demons. Every enormity of revenge, cruelty, murder, and savage barbarity, reigned in triumph. These enormities are of too recent a date to be unknown to the present generation. They have filled volumes; and I only advert to them generally, to show that those who proclaim a similarity between our revolution and that of France, are justly chargeable with an intolerable misrepresentation and absurdity. As to chaplains in the French armies, he who should have mentioned it, would first have been laughed to scorn, and then condemned to the guillotine. Their priests were sacrificed by hecatombs.”

This letter can be found in The Life of Ashbel Green (1849). This book, and other writings by and about Ashbel Green, can be found online here: Ashbel Green (1762-1848).