The Reverend Jacob Bailey, Maine Loyalist

Book excerpt: The Reverend Jacob Bailey was a missionary Preacher in Pownal borough (now Dresden), Maine, who refused to renounce allegiance to King George III during the American War of Independence. Relying largely on Bailey's unpublished journals and voluminous correspondence, James S. Leamon shows how Bailey absorbed many of the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment but also the more traditional conviction that family, society, religion, and politics, like creation itself, should be orderly and hierarchal. Such beliefs led Bailey to oppose the Revolution as unnatural, immoral, and doomed to fail. Reverend Bailey's persistence in praying for the king and his refusal to publicize the Declaration or Independence from his pulpit aroused hostilities that drove him and his family lo the safety of Nova Scotia. During his time in exile, he wrote almost obsessively: poems, dramas, novels, histories. Though few were ever completed, and even fewer published, in one way or another most of lm writings depicted the trauma he underwent as a loyalist. Leamon's study of the Reverend Jacob Bailey depicts the complex nature and burdens of one person's loyalism while revealing much about eighteenth-century American life and culture. Book jacket.