The Reverend Jacob Bailey, Maine Loyalist: For God, King, Country, and for Self by James S. Leamon (review)

Jacob Bailey (1735–1808) was the first Anglican minister to serve a congregation (1760–79) in the District of Maine at Pownalborough (Dresden). A native of Rowley, Massachusetts, and a talented member of a poor Congregational Church family, he was supported by the local minister who aided his admission to Harvard College with the class of 1755. In common with other eighteenth-century Anglican ministers of the region educated at Harvard or Yale, he served as a schoolmaster before his conversion and voyage to London for ordination.

The circumstance surrounding Bailey’s appointment as a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Pownalborough rather than to a congregation in a town in Massachusetts or Connecticut is unclear. Perhaps Sylvester Gardiner—the prominent Boston physician, merchant, and lead investor of the Kennebeck Proprietors in Pownalborough and an active Anglican—had petitioned Thomas Sherlock, bishop of London, for the appointment of a minister to the young settlement. He had undertaken a similar request while a vestryman in 1748 at King’s Chapel in Boston on behalf of the Reverend Charles Brockwell of Salem.

Two unyielding and personal controversies marked Bailey’s nearly two-decade ministry on the eastern frontier, which were initiated by his Harvard classmates Charles Cushing (the local sheriff) and Jonathan Bowman (a judge). The first issue was the effort by the two men to establish a Congregational Church in the community. Perhaps they reasoned that because the Congregational Church was established in Massachusetts, it should be extended to Maine, which was a civil jurisdiction of the Bay Colony. But the issue also may be interpreted as a lingering and divisive popular link in the chain of criticism of the Anglican Church that was launched in New England by Increase Mather in the 1680s and continued in successive decades by such ecclesiastical leaders as his son Cotton, Jonathan Mayhew, and the radical politician Samuel Adams. Bailey’s presence renewed the familiar objections to the presence of the Anglican Church, including the use of the Book of Common Prayer as merely the Roman missal in English, questions regarding the essential purpose of the missionaries of the London-based Society, and the prospect of an appointment of an American bishop.

Pownalborough’s parson was a visible representative of the old order that prompted New England settlers to flee England in the 1620s and 1630s. But the changed civil circumstances of the 1770s led to the second contentious issue in dispute. Because Bailey was a minister of the English Church, he was a target for disparagement by opponents of imperial policies. The members of the local Committee of Public Safety authorized by the First Continental Congress subjected him to examination to determine whether he was a patriot or Loyalist. Bailey’s vulnerable position was shaped by a sense of moral duty. On the occasion of his ordination in London, he was required to swear an oath of loyalty to the supremacy of the Crown and parliament. In the drift of increasing civil protest, he could not and would not forfeit that obligation. The diligent parson’s congregation loyally and firmly supported him during the turbulent proceedings, but finally in 1779 Bailey and his family sought political refuge in Nova Scotia.

More than two centuries after Bailey’s death in Annapolis, Nova Scotia, an accomplished scholar of Maine’s early history has deftly revisited Bailey’s life and career. The foundation of this excellent work is an extraordinary and extensive cache of Bailey’s personal papers, unpublished essays, and poems that are deposited in several libraries. It is at once an admirable first-class biography and an informative glimpse of the impact of disruptive affairs on the lives of individuals who embraced a minority view on civil issues. The book also...