How could an eighteenth-century Anglican minister pray a prayer valorizing the colonial cause against England early in the move toward the American Revolution and then turn and condemn that very cause in a letter to George Washington after the war had begun? In his biography of Jacob Duché, Kevin Dellape, an adjunct instructor of history at Saint Francis University, takes up this question as well as other historiographical questions related to individuals and their support (or rejection) of the War of Independence. Based on the archives of Christ Church where Duché presided and the collection of papers of the Duché family stored in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, along with an extensive examination of various other archival collections, newspapers, and other primary sources, Dellape uses the life of Duché to contend that the Pennsylvanian experience of the Revolution was not as democratic as previously thought, that the Anglican clergy had...

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