Cleaveland, John

Cleaveland, John a Congregational minister, was born in Canterbury, Conn., April 11, 1722. He was expelled from Yale College for attending a Separatists' meeting, but his degree was afterwards given to him, and his name appears as a graduate of 1745. He was installed pastor over a newly-organized church in Chebacco, Feb. 25, 1747; acted as chaplain at Ticonderoga in 1758; served in the same capacity at Cambridge in 1782, and in New York in 1776. He died April 22, 1799.' His church at Chebacco was formed by a secession from Mr. Pickering's, who refused to allow Whitefield to preach in his pulpit. Mr. Pickering issued a pamphlet soon after Mr. Cleaveland's organization, to which he replied in A plain Narrative by the new Church. He also published Chebacco Narrative rescued from the Charge of Falsehood and Partiality (1748); an Essay to defend some of the most important Principles in the Protestant Reformed System of Christianity, more especially Christ's Sacrifice and Atonement, against the injurious Aspersions cast on the same by Dr. Mayhew, in a Thanksgiving Sermon (1763), which elicited from Mayhew a sharp rejoinder in A Letter of Reproof to John Cleaveland; Justification of his Church from the Strictures of the Rev. S. Wigglesworth, of the Hamlet, and the Rev. Richard Jaques, of Gloucester (1765); with several other controversial pamphlets and a few sermons. — Sprague, Annals, 1, 458; Alien, Am. Biog. Dictionary, s.v.