Chauncey Lee
Chauncey Lee was an American Congregationalist preacher and writer who ministered in churches across New England and New York for nearly 50 years, though he was most associated with the church at Colebrook, Connecticut.
Born in Salisbury, Connecticut in 1763, Lee was a Patriot and Federalist who believed divine providence would guide America's independent destiny. As part of this, he wrote an accountancy book in 1797, which proposed decimalized weights and measures and includes an early sketch of the dollar sign ; he also penned a moderately popular poetic rendition of the Book of Job. His prominence extended to delivering the election sermon for Connecticut in 1813. A New Divine in the tradition of Edwards and Emmons, Lee vocally opposed the separation of church and state and dismayed New England's disestablishment in the 1810s. His views were increasingly at odds with the emerging liberal Taylorist movement, and he died without a post in 1842, aged 79.
Early life, education and legal career
Chauncey Lee was born in Salisbury, Litchfield County, Connecticut, on November 9, 1763. He was the ninth child fathered by the popular preacher Jonathan Lee of Coventry, and the first by Jonathan's second wife, the also-widowed Love Brinckerhoff. At the time, most New England provinces, including Connecticut, had the established religion of Congregationalism. However, Jonathan was a New Light evangelist who opposed the Saybrook Platform of government because it forbade irregular preaching. Thus, he founded and served as first minister of a church at Salisbury that, with the town's support, broke communion with the ecclesiastical county council. By contrast, Love's father was John Graham of Edinburgh, an austere preacher in Southbury who served as the registrar for Litchfield County's consociation. Both Graham and Lee were pamphleteers and served as chaplains for the colonial troops during the expeditions against Crown Point in the French and Indian War.Jonathan graduated from Congregationalist Yale College in 1742 and personally prepared his and other neighborhood boys to attend as well, with supplementary education in classics, prosody and arithmetic. On July 3, 1780, Chauncey passed the entrance exam delivered directly by President Ezra Stiles and formally matriculated. He studied at Yale four years and joined the Connecticut Alpha of Phi Beta Kappa in 1784. After graduating, Lee began reading law under John Canfield, a politician and deacon at Sharon, Connecticut. Lee's fellow student was John Cotton Smith, the 23rd Governor of Connecticut. In 1788, Lee was admitted to the bar of Litchfield County and opened a private practice in Salisbury.
Preachership
Lee disliked law almost immediately, and, despite being recently married, he closed his office to learn theology under the moderate New Divine Hopkinsian minister Stephen West, of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. On June 3, 1789, Lee was licensed to preach by the ministerial association of Litchfield County and filled for a time ad interim in Salisbury the vacancy left after his father's death the previous year. Lee served there ably and there was a movement to seat him on a permanent basis, but Lee was apparently personally ambivalent.Vermont and New York
Instead, Lee joined the swarm of Connecticuters moving to Vermont for cheap land, including his father-in-law, Revolutionary War Green Mountain Boys Captain Joshua Stanton, who was from Burlington. Lee sold the 35 acres of Connecticut land he inherited and preached independently for a while before being ordained as pastor of Sunderland on March 18, 1790. Sunderland then had two Congregational churches on opposite sides of the town, and allocated a lot of land to support whichever pastor was the earliest to settle there. That year both churches had a vacancy and raced to install a pastor first, but their ceremonies were held so close that both made competing claims to the land. Only after long deliberation in the County Court was it found that Jacob Sherwin, of the south side, had beaten Lee by two minutes. The protracted dispute had discredited both parishes, and Lee resigned after about five years due to the low salary. He spent the remainder of 1796 in Burlington, taught school as the first principal of Lansingburgh Academy near Troy, New York from 1797 to 1798, and then preached in Hudson, New York before returning in the autumn of 1799 to his home town of Salisbury.File:American_Accomptant_Dollar_Sign.png|thumb|right|Lee's proposed notation for the mill, cent, dime, dollar and eagle. The ''American Accomptant was one of many textbooks after 1792 teaching the new "federal arithmetic" as accountants transitioned from using pounds, shillings and pence to the decimal-based U.S. system.
During this itinerant time, Lee began to write. He had already some misgivings about the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1789, namely that it has "not the smallest recognition of the government being of God". However, his first works at Lansingburgh reflected the idea of American exceptionalism. First, he published a pro-Administration oration for the town's 21st Fourth of July celebration, wherein he declared that God had electrified the Patriot cause and independence was "manifest the distinguishing favor and goodness of Heaven", and predicted that by 1847 there would be millions of Americans in fifty states. Also in 1797, Lee produced a guide for teaching schoolchildren practical, and in some cases distinctly American, methods of arithmetic. However, The American Accomptant'' only sold one edition, as Lee's demand that Congress follow the innovation of decimal coinage by introducing all-decimal "American weights" never caught on. Lee did, however, propose the use of an "S" with two diagonal marks to represent the dollar, which endures as an alternative rendering of the dollar sign.
Service at Colebrook
On February 12, 1800, Lee succeeded the younger Jonathan Edwards as pastor in Colebrook, Connecticut—in this post he stayed the longest, nearly twenty-eight years, and was most associated. He gained repute as an evangelist who employed serious but clear and striking language. He was chosen to deliver the 1813 Connecticut election sermon before the General Assembly, in which he invoked the Lord's Prayer to say, "religion is the only sure foundation of a free and happy government. It is the great palladium of all our natural and social rights... if God be not in the camp, we have not reason to tremble for the ark". This speech would be cited in 1874 by the unsuccessful campaign for an amendment to the preamble that recognizes the primacy of God.Most of his works Lee published at Colebrook, including a poetic paraphrase of the Book of Job entitled "The Trial of Virtue", with annotations and commentary. This was his most known work, and the one "most esteemed by himself"". Lee also published funeral orations and collections of sermons and hymns he composed for revival meetings.
Lee was intelligent and musical and worked supplementarily as an inspector of schools and a tutor, including for his son, Chauncey Graham. He also rendered aid to the son of his late friend Timothy Todd, the future Massachusetts minister John Todd. Todd wrote Lee while he was a penniless and sickly student at Yale, trying to get letters of recommendation for a free coach-ride to see his sisters in Malone, New York, rather than walking all the way from New Haven. In response, Lee not only furnished him the letters, but also his home to stay, money for the road and the care of their family physician. So grateful and pathetic were Todd's replies that their correspondence was unwittingly published in 1821 to encourage charitable donations to the American Education Society. In 1823, Lee was made an honorary Doctor of Divinity by Columbia College.
Marlborough and final days
Through his career, Lee's views crystallized around the teachings of Nathanael Emmons, and as a conservative Calvinist, he vigorously opposed the "New Haven theology" of Nathaniel William Taylor. Though witty and humorous off the pulpit, Lee's sermons carried an evangelical urgency. In 1818, after Smith was defeated by the Toleration Party and Connecticut finally disestablished, Lee believed New England Congregationalism to be imperiled. His final work, Letters from Aristarchus to Philemon, recalled the Calvinist–Arminian debate and denounced the men "of great pretensions to reasoning powers", whose "specious and flattering doctrines" were becoming popular over the likes of Edwards and Hopkins.On January 31, 1827, Lee resigned from Colebrook "in consequence of representations that he had lost his influence with the young people of the parish." On November 18, 1828, he was installed as pastor of the church in Marlborough, Connecticut, but here too due to the "discouraging state of things among his people" and his declining health he resigned on January 11, 1837. Lee moved in with his eldest daughter, Abigail Eliza, in Hartwick, New York and died after a brief illness aged 79 on November 5, 1842.
Marriages and children
Lee was thrice married. As a poor, young lawyer, he clandestinely wed Abigail Stanton, daughter of the judge Joshua Stanton of Burlington, Vermont, which caused Mrs. Abigail Sacket Stanton to disown her daughter. Abigail's only brother was Joshua Stanton, Jr., who served as a county judge and representative of Colchester to the Vermont General Assembly.With Abigail, Lee had four children, of whom three survived:
- Abigail Eliza, the wife of Daniel Beebe of Guilford, New York
- Chauncey Graham
- Chauncey Graham, a Connecticut pastor
- Theodore Stanton, who allegedly deserted his wife and children to marry a much younger woman, and later claimed to have served as a Colonel in the Texas Revolution
- Juliet Love, the wife of physician Gardner M. Dorrance of Attica, New York
- Frederick Albert, a dry goods merchant
- Oliver Harrison, a dry goods-turned-metal merchant