Followers

Friday, May 29, 2020

The Lord's Patriot



A Mighty Fortress


The connection between the fighting man and armies with religion goes back to the earliest times. Biblical armies sacrificed to their God/gods and invoked divine protection and intervention to help in battle. The Iliad provides many examples of this from a Greek perspective. Roman legions had their totems and even placed them in a special tent that served as a field temple when making camp each night. The various barbarian tribes invoked their gods as well. The tradition carried into the Christian era. Priests and monks accompanied the knights into battle.

 Roman legionnaires worshiped their standards
 - the eagle chief among them



By the eighteenth century, the idea of military chaplains began to approximate modern usage. And since the American cause was predicated on preserving God-given rights of men and the British cause the God-given authority of the king, things religious and military mixed with politics. The new nation recognized the need for “spiritual firepower.” So on 29 July 1775, Congress established the Chaplain Corps at the request of General George Washington. There would be one chaplain for each regiment in the Continental Army. Receiving a captain’s pay, they would attend to the spiritual, emotional, and even physical well-being of the troops.

Chaplains were established early in
the American Revolution


A Life for God


But our patriot pastor would not be one to join the corps. His road was quite different. John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg was born in Trappe, Pennsylvania on 1 October 1764, the son of German immigrants Heinrich (Henry ) Melchior Muehlenberg (Muhlenberg) and Anna Maria Weiser. The elder Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister, became quite prominent in protestant circles and was known as "the Patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America" for his role in organizing the Lutheran churches.

Henry Muhlenberg was the patriarch
of the Lutheran Church in America


Valuing education, his father sent him to the Academy of Philadelphia. Muhlenberg then sent three of his boys, John Peter, Frederick Augustus, and Henry Ernst, to the University of Halle in Germany in 1763. But John Peter had a restless streak and eventually left Halle to work as a clerk in a counting-house in the Hanseatic city of Lubeck. Not receiving the training promised, he left and joined a German dragoon regiment for a short time.


Halle University



John Peter returned to America in 1767 to study Theology in Philadelphia. In 1768 John Peter Muhlenberg was ordained a Lutheran minister. Muhlenberg first served as assistant rector for the congregations of Zion and St. Paul’s Churches in New Jersey. In 1769, he became the pastor at Bedminster. During this period, he met and married Anna Barbara “Hannah” Meyer, the daughter a successful potter. The marriage would prove to be a happy one for they would raise six children together.


Henry Muhlenberg founded Philadelphia's
 Old Zion Lutheran Church

The Patriot Pastor


Muhlenberg migrated south to the Shenandoah Valley where he opened up his own congregation of German immigrants in the town of Woodstock in Dunmore County, Virginia. At that time, the valley included a mix of German, English and Scots-Irish settlers. But the Old Dominion was Anglican country, so in 1772 Muhlenberg sailed to England where he was ordained in the Episcopal Church, although he maintained his connection to his Lutheran church. 

Muhlenberg was inspired by Patrick Henry's famous speech


Life in Virginia put John Peter in contact with many of the movers and shakers who would propel the colony towards rebellion, chief of whom was Patrick Henry. Muhlenberg supported the ideals of liberty and often preached about them. This put him at odds with his brother, Fredrick Augustus, himself a pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in New York City. The two maintained an increasingly heated correspondence during the run-up to the rebellion.

Local Committees of Correspondence were
crucial in building the rationale for resistance
and the network for insurgency and rebellion



Virginia’s march from political discontent to insurgency and then open rebellion swept Muhlenberg along with it. As the path to rebellion quickened its pace, he became a member of the local Committee of Correspondence. His activism got him a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1774. All the while he maintained his church affiliations.

From Cleric to Colonel


His military experience came in handy and in early 1776 he was appointed a colonel in the new Continental Army. Prior to marching off to war, Muhlenberg gave a farewell sermon based on Ecclesiastes 3:1. His final words reportedly were, “There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away. There is a time to fight, and that time has now come.” At that, he tossed off his clerical robes, revealing his military uniform and encouraging his congregation to support the patriot cause.


From the Holy Spirit to the Spirit of 76


Colonel Muhlenberg’s first task was to recruit soldiers for the 8th Virginia Continental Line. The unit was raised from several counties in western Virginia. In early 1776, Charleston was threatened by a British invasion, so the regiment marched south to support the famed South Carolina Colonel William Moultrie. The British were driven off in the famed siege that made the palmetto tree famous.

The Prodigal Brother


Meanwhile, his brother Frederick Augustus had an epiphany of sorts. Following the Battle of Brooklyn Heights, the British bombarded and invaded New York City. Frederick Muhlenberg's church was burned and his family had to flee the city. This turn of events brought Frederick to the cause of liberty and he was elected as a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1779. He would go onto prominence in Pennsylvania and national politics, serving as the first Speaker of the House under the new constitution.

The once Tory Frederick Augustus would
become an unlikely first Speaker of the House


The Sound of the Drum

By 1777, Colonel Muhlenberg was back north with his regiment, which was now part of Washington’s main Continental Army at its Morristown cantonment. Noted for his steady hand, attention to detail, and the troops, Muhlenberg was promoted to Brigadier General and assigned to Nathanael Green’s division, where he fought at Brandywine and Germantown. At Germantown, he led the column that penetrated deep into the British right flank and came close to securing an improbable victory in the dark and fog.


Muhlenberg's brigade penetrated deep into the
British flank at Germantown



When the Continental Army emerged from the harsh winter at Valley Forge it was retrained and re-outfitted – an army that could now take on the British on equal terms. Muhlenberg led forces in the ensuing Monmouth campaign and was then attached to Major General Anthony Wayne’s division in New Jersey and later during the famed storming of the British fortifications at Stony Point, New York in the summer of 1779.



Stony Point

Defense of the Old Dominion


By 1780, things were heating up down south again, so Brigadier General Muhlenberg was dispatched to Virginia where he was in command of all militia forces in the state. Unfortunately, the militia was greatly weakened and he had to raise new troops, find equipment and organize them, all in the face of British naval and land threats. He managed to skillfully employ his militia to delay and contain the British around Portsmouth. Placed under General Friedrich von Steuben’s command, Muhlenberg would play a key role in foiling the British attempt to split Virginia at the seams.


British General Benedict Arnold
terrorized Virginia


In 1781, the infamous American traitor, British general Benedict Arnold was heading up a ruthless raid along the James River, threatening Richmond and Petersburg and torching everything in sight. Muhlenberg commanded the brigade of militia that successfully delayed British forces under General William Phillips near Petersburg, Virginia in April 1781. 




Muhlenberg's brigade supported
Lafayette in his defense of Virginia
When Washington dispatched the Marquis de Lafayette with a division, he was put in command of a brigade – this time Continental Line troops.  Lafayette’s division played a key role in screening Cornwallis’s advance from North Carolina and forcing the desperate British column down the Virginia peninsula to the “safety” of Yorktown. During the Yorktown siege in October of that year, his brigade supported Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Hamilton’s famed bayonet assault on Redoubt Number 10, which helped seal Cornwallis’s fate.

Muhlenberg supported the legendary assault on
Redoubt Number 10



From Parson to Politico

Like so many of his peers, Muhlenberg resigned from the Continental Army in September 1783 as the terms of the Treaty of Paris were bringing the eight-year struggle to a close. By then he had attained the rank of (brevet) major general, as high as anyone could rise, being that George Washington was the only lieutenant general in the Continental Army.

Brevet Major General John Peter Muhlenberg



As with so many of our first patriots, Muhlenberg’s war experience was just the beginning of his service to the new nation. Popular with the German residents in and around Philadelphia, Muhlenberg began a career in politics both long and distinguished. He became a member of the state supreme executive council, serving as vice president under Benjamin Franklin. He also served three terms in Congress and in 1801 was appointed (no elections then) a US senator. He gave up his senate seat when President Thomas Jefferson named him customs inspector for Philadelphia.

A Steady Hand


The struggle for independence was won on the backs of the soldiers. But those soldiers needed leaders who were steady - militarily, politically, and spiritually.  Leaders they could trust.  It is the nation’s good fortune to have enough of those leaders to stay the course of an eight-year struggle.  John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg was one of those essential leaders. Neither a “bad-ass” nor flashy, his steady hand helped form the moral, ideological, military, and political grounding of the nation.  He died at Grey’s Ferry outside Philadelphia on 1 October 1807. He is a little-known first patriot today but was arguably the most prominent German-American of the era.

Muhlenberg Statue in
the Capitol



Muhlenberg is memorialized by many statues and monuments. Perhaps the most famous is in the capitol itself. His tombstone reads, “He was Brave in the field, Faithful in the Cabinet, Honorable in all his transactions, a Sincere Friend and an Honest Man.”

Monument in Philadelphia


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