America’s First Chaplain: The Life and Times of the Reverend Jacob Duché by Kevin J. Dellape (review)

Jacob Duché, a member of a prominent Philadelphia merchant family and Anglican minister, is primarily remembered by historians for his eloquent prayer delivered at the opening session of the First Continental Congress in September 1774 in Philadelphia. Three years later his initial enthusiasm for the revolutionary cause had diminished and dramatically changed. He expressed his revised sentiments and an extensive and cogent plea in a letter to General George Washington. It is Duché’s initial encounter with national affairs and his abrupt change of opinion that is the subject of this intensively and diligently researched and engagingly written book.

A member of the first class of eight graduates of the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania) in 1757, Duché traveled to England the next year and was admitted as a Pensioner at Clare Hall in Cambridge University. His attendance was brief as he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England by Edmund Keene, bishop of Chester, on March 11, 1759. Returning promptly to Philadelphia, he was appointed an assistant minister at St. Peter’s Church and quickly demonstrated an eloquent preaching style in the pulpit. Three years later he returned to London for ordination as a priest by Thomas Secker, archbishop of Canterbury, in the chapel at Lambeth Palace on September 12, 1762. For the next twelve years, he honed his preaching manner in Philadelphia and earned deserved adulation from his congregation and the wider audience of the city’s civic, educational, and religious leaders. Among the ranks of local preachers he was the obvious candidate to invite to open the First Continental Congress session in September 1774, with a petition for divine guidance in the assembly’s proceedings.

The delegate charged to recruit Duché to open the Congress with a prayer was the sly, scheming, Massachusetts radical political leader and strategist Samuel Adams, who had his own agenda for the meetings and was no friend of the Church of England in New England. In a series of newspaper articles published in the Boston Gazette newspaper in 1768 he had honed his attack on the Anglican Church. Adams raised anew the condemnation of the presence of the English Church and episcopacy in the region that was launched by Increase Mather in the 1680s and recited regularly by subsequent generations of Congregational Church leaders. In 1772 he enlisted the clergy of the Massachusetts Congregational Church to speak from the pulpit in support of the radical political leaders’ objections to English policies. For Adams, the presence of Duché at the Congress delivering a prayer to an assembly of colonial radical partisans critical of England’s imperial administration would be a significant display of manipulative political cleverness. Yet Duché was not alone among English parsons in early America objecting to the government’s policies after 1763 to London ecclesiastical officials, but he was the most visible and prominent Philadelphia clergyman to do so. His eloquent and dramatic opening prayer on behalf of the Congress’s purpose and deliberations earned the admiration, applause, and respect of Adams’s second cousin and fellow delegate: the Boston lawyer John Adams.

Within a year after the first session of the Congress Duché began to entertain uncertainties regarding the drift of colonial civil objections to England’s imperial policies. Perhaps he became aware of Adams’s critical newspaper essays regarding the New England English Church and finally recognized the duplicitous character of his recruitment. But he was also distressed by the unsettling military consequences of the War for Independence in 1776 and 1777 and its impact on the Philadelphia community. Three months after the Declaration of Independence, Duché abruptly and boldly resigned his position as chaplain of the newly independent congress. His letter to Washington proposed and pleaded for a new and more conciliatory and peaceful...