Jacob Bailey (author)

Bailey was born in Rowley, Massachusetts, and was educated at Harvard College, ranked at the bottom (by social order) of the class of 1755, which notably also included John Adams.

He started his career in the ministry as a Congregational preacher in New Hampshire but converted and became an Anglican clergyman in 1760, through his connection with Dr. Silvester Gardiner, a prominent Massachusetts physician, businessman, and landowner.

Bailey's congregation was a mix of mainly German Lutheran and French Huguenot immigrants, who were often at odds on matters of religion with the area's Yankee Congregationalists.

"Behold the vaunting hero," Royal Gazette and the Nova-Scotia Advertiser (Halifax), 11 Dec. 1798, and "Observations and conjectures on the antiquities of America," Mass.

Three of Bailey's poems are printed and discussed in Narrative verse satire in Maritime Canada, 1779–1814, ed.