Jacob Green's Revolution is, essentially, an intellectual biography. The details of Green's early life are covered in the first four pages of chapter 1; and after a brief outline of his early religious and philosophical influences, he applies to Harvard by the ninth page. As R. Scott Rohrer takes us through Green's life, events are covered largely for the purpose of providing context for Green's religious and philosophical views. Rohrer does an effective job of acquainting the reader with Jacob Green's mindset, priorities, and desires. By the end, we know what Green thought and taught on a fairly wide range of issues. By Rohrer's account, Jacob Green had a very active intellect, a burning piety, a concern for societal and church life, and no hesitation about persuading others to see things his way.

Jacob Green was a Presbyterian pastor who spent most of his life in and around Morris County, New Jersey. Rohrer's primary objective is to present Green as a reformer and to trace his reform efforts in several diverse areas. The one-word chapter titles focus attention on specific aspects of Green's reform efforts and provide an effective organizational method for the discussion. As a pastor, Green was driven by concern for purity in the church. This concern motivated his push for tighter standards for church membership and baptism. Although he went through periods of doubt as a young man, Green emerged a committed Calvinist who earnestly promoted belief in Calvinist theology and church government. As a father, Green's “overriding concern” was “to raise good Christians who would lead exemplary lives” (79). His reform here was to call people in a rapidly changing culture back to conventional methods of child rearing. At one time or another, Green held four other jobs besides pastor. His experiences in these other occupations influenced his future reform ideas—particularly in blending religious belief and Enlightenment principles. In unfolding Green's role as a polemicist, Rohrer delves into the complicated arguments of the day regarding the central tenets of Calvinism and shows Green's solutions to difficult problems as published in two tracts. In keeping with the theme of reform, Rohrer explains how Green's views and the tracts expressing them were designed to purify society.

The chapters on Green as revolutionary and as politician are, as one might expect, related. Rohrer suggests that Green “wholeheartedly embraced the independence movement” because it “meshed perfectly with the causes he had been pursuing since the early 1760s” (128). Rohrer argues that Green was heavily influenced by his Enlightenment training at Harvard and by John Locke. Green wrote a pamphlet supporting independence that had some influence in New Jersey. It was filled with Lockean “rights” language. Green's ultimate goal was to free Americans to reform their ways—a moral revolution. Possibly due to the popularity of Green's pamphlet, he was elected to New Jersey's Provincial Congress and became a politician. Roher writes, “He saw his task as twofold: he wanted to ensure that New Jersey broke away from the rule of King George III, and he wanted a republican government to take the Crown's place” (150). Green chaired the committee to write New Jersey's first state constitution, but the extent of his contribution is the subject of debate. The final document contained some of Green's political preferences, but also some elements that he strenuously opposed. Green had the opportunity to witness firsthand the effects of the war that he promoted. Green as “host” cared for the suffering—soldiers and Loyalists alike—and had his concerns for the need to moralize society reinforced by the bad behavior of his fellow Americans.

As the war dragged on, Green as crusader targeted slavery and currency reform to halt the devaluation of the American currency. The latter was a moral issue to Green because it particularly hurt the poor and enriched speculators. His plan may have been influential in the formation of the Congress's eventual program; its scheme was “strikingly similar” to his, but no one credited him (207). Late in the war, Green took on the role of dissenter in the Presbyterian community. He so opposed the exertion of authority by its organs that he withdrew from his region's Presbytery and Synod. Here, Rohrer suggests, Locke and the American Revolution influenced Green's thinking on church governance and against centralized authority. Ever the reformer, Green started his own localized association of churches and pushed to make ordination “fairer and more democratic” (234), but these reforms did not outlive him. By Rohrer's determination, Green's final role was that of disciplinarian. For this last reform, Green focused on his own church and on one final revival to promote proper behavior and moral discipline—especially among his congregation's youth.

Jacob Green's Revolution is well-researched. Rohrer produces an abundance of primary evidence from Green's sermons and pamphlets and from the reminiscences of Green's best-known son, Ashbel. It is an interesting, well-written account of the efforts of one man in one colony to make a difference in revolutionary America. On that score, the record is something of a mixed bag, however. The title of the book hints at a broad, sweeping, “revolutionary” level of reform—something like an American Gandhi—but Green's influence was almost exclusively limited to his immediate surroundings and to a colony so small that 291 votes put him in the Provincial Congress. Jacob Green clearly had significant influence in New Jersey, but not the United States as a whole. Rohrer tries to broaden the scope by ending each chapter with a brief comparison of Green to the well-known Loyalist minister Thomas Bradbury Chandler, but the Chandler snippets are too brief and never quite work. The relevance of each is unclear and a connection between Chandler and Green is never really made. Readers interested in intellectual biographies of pastors, early American church history, or New Jersey history will find Jacob Green's Revolution worth their time. Those seeking compelling history of the American Revolution should look elsewhere.