‘The Chosen People of God’: Presbyterians and Jeffersonian Republicanism in the New Jersey countryside

This essay grounds the ideals associated with Jeffersonian republicanism in a specific place and cultural milieu in the post‐revolutionary years. Jeffersonian agrarianism, with its emphasis on the virtuous fanner, was a practical means by which rural Presbyterians sought to order their early national lives, but only when fused with understandings of human happiness drawn from non‐agrarian moral traditions. The links between agrarianism, republican politics, and Presbyterian moral thought are explored through a close and careful study of one community of Jeffersonian Presbyterians in southern New Jersey.