1 of 3

Everyone agreed: profanity, drunkenness, neglect of the Sabbath, and disrespect for the clergy were widespread among Continental soldiers. This contrasted sharply with the high moral ground upon which the war was being fought, and Christian Revolutionaries deplored the contrast.

Devout soldiers and chaplains were also troubled by the false bravado toward death, which they interpreted as sinful hardening. At one New York prison camp where the mortality rate was particularly steep, a visitor found men “preparing to lay down for the night … most of them, laughing and bantering each other with apparent pleasantry about which of them would be dead the next morning. One would say, ‘I am much stouter than you, and I will have your blanket.’ ‘No,’ would be the reply, ‘I am much heartier than you and stand the best chance of seeing you carried out feet foremost.’ ”

Historian Charles Royster has said, “To be a good chaplain was even more difficult than to be a good company grade officer.” Royster, professor of history at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, is author of “A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783” (University of North Carolina, 1979). In one chapter, from which this article is excerpted with permission, he talks about the challenging work of Revolutionary War chaplains.

The conscientious chaplain had two main duties: “divine service”—two Sunday sermons, as well as prayers and addresses on special occasions—and private worship or consolation with soldiers, especially the sick and the dying. In their hospital visits, the chaplains did almost as much good for the soldiers as the doctors could and much more than the officers. Chaplain Ebenezer David said, “I have ever found the chaplains’ visits taken well by the sick.”

The journals and memoirs of doctors, officers, and enlisted men record few visits by junior officers to their sick men. Captain Alexander Graydon probably spoke for many of them when he explained why he had avoided the imprisoned Continentals in New York City, who faced a choice between pestilence and enlistment in the British army: “I once, and once only, ventured to penetrate into these abodes of human misery and despair. But to what purpose [should I] repeat my visit when I had neither relief to administer nor comfort to bestow? What could I say to the unhappy victims who appealed to me for assistance or sought my advice as to the alternative of death or apostasy? … I rather chose to turn my eye from a scene I could not meliorate, to put from me a calamity which mocked my power of alleviation.”

Many chaplains probably followed a similar course, but others visited the sick daily, joked or prayed with them, and listened to monologues like that of a “very sick youth from Massachusetts,” who asked Ammi Robbins “to save him if possible, said he was not fit to die, says, ‘I cannot die. Do, sir, pray for me. Will you not send for my mother? If she were here to nurse me, I could get well. O my mother! How I wish I could see her! She was opposed to my enlisting, I am now very sorry. Do let her know I am sorry.’ ” Robbins said he “endeavored to point him to the only source of peace, prayed, and left him,” and then commented, “he cannot live long.”

Chaplains also helped do generals’ work in sermons and addresses. Commanders required soldiers to attend divine service; one punishment for absence was digging up stumps. State militia Colonel Benjamin Cleaveland, a former Continental Army officer, wanted prisoners of war as well as soldiers to attend services; so the loyalist Lieutenant Anthony Allaire heard “a Presbyterian sermon, truly adapted to their principles and the times—or rather, stuffed as full of republicanism as their camp is of horse thieves.”

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help