The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age by S. Scott Rohrer (review)

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• The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age by S. Scott Rohrer
• Daniel Diez Couch (bio)

The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age
s. scott rohrer
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022
248 pp.

In many ways, S. Scott Rohrer claims, British loyalism in the colonies during the eighteenth century remains an untold story. Despite canonical studies by scholars including Robert M. Calhoon, Catherine S. Crary, and Mary Beth Norton, as well as more recent studies by Maya Jasanoff and Phillip Gould, Rohrer finds an unexplored, and important, story of loyalism in the figure of Thomas Bradbury Chandler, the Anglican minister at St. John's in Elizabeth Town, New Jersey. Rohrer makes a convincing case throughout The Folly of Revolution: Thomas Bradbury Chandler and the Loyalist Mind in a Democratic Age. He situates Chandler as a major theological and political node in a network of colonial Anglican ministers, explaining Chandler's education, ideological formation, mission to further Anglicanism in the colonies, and resistance to American independence. For Rohrer, Chandler's life and worldview constitute an "alternative vision" that "has receded from historical memory" (3). Indeed, even as The Folly of Revolution provides a finely detailed biographical study of Chandler's life, it simultaneously tracks the broader intellectual milieu, with particular attention to the eighteenth-century debates surrounding Anglicanism and evangelicalism, as well as republicanism and monarchism. In many ways, for Chandler, the problems of evangelism and republicanism were one and the same. Rohrer's study does an admirable job of examining a range of intellectual traditions through the lens of Chandler's life and learning.

The Folly of Revolution begins by unfolding a central question for Chandler throughout much of his career: "How could social and political order [End Page 481] survive when subjects had the right to challenge authority?" (4). Beginning with his schooling at Yale, where Chandler rejected the Congregationalism of his youth, Rohrer takes us through the minister's meticulously monarchical positions, the most vital of which was his goal of establishing an Anglican bishop in America. He became friends early in his life with Samuel Johnson, one of the chief Anglican ministers in the colonies, a man who fought fiercely for the creation of a colonial episcopate. Chandler took up this cause when Johnson no longer could. In support of his position, Chandler "did not look to the ancient world for guidance," unlike many other American intellectuals, instead opting to examine late seventeenth-century Royalist thought (12). Chandler, Rohrer reveals, carefully studied the parliamentary quarrels that scholars such as Edmund S. Morgan have revealed as so central to the crucible of revolutionary American thought. Unlike the Patriots, however, Chandler took the High Church monarchical side, particularly in the cases of the nonjurors who refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary and the Bangorian controversy, two proceedings that deeply shaped Chandler's worldview. As Rohrer chronologically tracks forward through Chandler's life as the book progresses—successively examining his early life and schooling, his push for the Anglican episcopacy, his counterrevolutionary sentiments, and finally his exile and return to the United States—he simultaneously delves into the past that shaped the Anglican minister's religious and political positions. In this way, Rohrer's study provides an important means of understanding how seventeenth-century British history mattered for loyalists, not just Patriots.

The details of the past matter for understanding Chandler's perspective, a point that shows Rohrer's sensitivity to Chandler's own identity as a historian (The Folly of Revolution primarily relies on records of Chandler's library for its reading of his intellectual background). When Parliament deposed James II in 1688 and replaced him with William and Mary, a group of nine Anglican bishops refused to take an oath to the new sovereigns, explaining that "Parliament, acting on behalf of the people, cannot place someone on the throne. Such a thing was unnatural, and against all reason, in a divinely ordered universe" (73). Chandler concurred with this sentiment. In his historical studies Chandler sided with the so-called nonjurors and was alarmed by British republican thought...