Duché, Jacob

DUCHÉ, JACOB. (1738–1798). Chaplain of Congress. Pennsylvania. Son and namesake of a former mayor of Philadelphia, Duché was born in that city on 31 January 1738. He graduated from the first class of the College of Philadelphia in 1757, spent the next year at Cambridge, and returned with the orders of an Anglican minister. Rector of two churches, he became a popular preacher and respected essayist. In 1759 he had married Elizabeth, sister of his friend and classmate Francis Hopkinson. In 1774 the first Continental Congress named Duché its chaplain after his sermon at its first session moved many members to tears. Though he had initially supported independence, he came to believe it was a grave error and resigned his position in October 1776, asking that his $150 salary be used for the relief of widows and children of Pennsylvania officers. A year later he wrote Washington a long letter urging him to give up the hopeless struggle and to use force if necessary to see that Congress revoked the Declaration of Independence. Washington promptly forwarded the astounding letter to the delegates at York.

The letter, which damned the Continental Congress as a collection of "Bankrupts, attorneys, men of desperate fortunes" and the Continental army as made up of "undisciplined men and officers, many of whom have been taken from the lowest of the people, without principle, without courage," was widely circulated and published in Rivington's Royal Gazette on 29 November 1777 (Van Doren, Secret History, pp. 40-41). Duché found himself cursed by Patriots as a traitor and sailed in December 1777 for England, where he became a popular preacher, published two volumes of sermons, and in 1782 was named secretary and chaplain of the Asylum for Female Orphans in Lambeth Parish. The state of Pennsylvania confiscated his property but left his family enough money to join him. In 1783 Duché read the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg and almost immediately became his leading English exponent. In 1792 Pennsylvania repealed its exclusion law that had denied Loyalists the right to return to the state. Duché and his family immediately sailed to Philadelphia, where he lived until his death on 3 January 1798.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Van Doren, Carl. Secret History of the American Revolution. New York: Viking, 1941.

                              revised by Michael Bellesiles