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In Woodstock, an American patriot gave one of the Revolution’s most stirring speeches — and it might have been in German.
It’s one of the most stirring stories of the Revolutionary War. But is it true?
The “tall form” of Peter Muhlenberg ascends the pulpit of a church in Woodstock, wearing his clerical robes. It is 1776, and the 13 colonies have been at war with Great Britain since the powder flash of Lexington and Concord the previous April.
Muhlenberg, a Lutheran who is also ordained in the Anglican church, is a respected community leader in Dunmore (now Shenandoah) County, and has recently been appointed colonel of the 8th Virginia Regiment.
“The rude country church was filled to overflowing with the hardy mountaineers of the frontier counties” who had come to hear their “beloved pastor” deliver his farewell sermon, according to an 1849 biography by Henry A. Muhlenberg, a family member.
Echoing Ecclesiastes, chapter 3, Peter Muhlenberg proclaimed, “There is a time to pray and a time to fight, and that time has now come!” Casting off his robes to reveal a uniform, he “stood before them a girded warrior; and descending from the pulpit, ordered the drums at the church-door to beat for recruits.” Nearly 300 frontier men enlisted that day, according to Henry Muhlenberg.
Did this really happen? Elyse Luray of the PBS show “History Detectives” could find no contemporary accounts of him wearing a military uniform under his robes. She concluded that the famous story, at least the disrobing part, could be a myth concocted in the mid-19th century to highlight the patriotism of German-Americans.
Others say it could be plausible, even if some details are wrong.
Michael Cecere is a retired American history teacher who lives in Williamsburg. A Revolutionary War reenactor, he has written a biography of Muhlenberg.
In an article he wrote for the Journal of the American Revolution, Cecere cites an 1823 memoir by Dr. James Thacher, a Revolutionary War surgeon. In a 1778 diary entry, Thacher relates that Muhlenberg “entered his pulpit with his sword and cockade, preached his farewell sermon, and the next day marched at the head of his regiment to join the army, and he does honor to the military profession.” (A cockade is a rosette of ribbons worn on a hat.)
Cecere has never taken issue with the story of Muhlenberg standing before his congregation with a robe over military garb. On the other hand, “most of the pictures have him in a nice blue regimental uniform, which he is going to wear as a general as he gets promoted,” Cecere said. “But he was a colonel then. And I think he was probably wearing the uniform of the Virginia soldiers in 1776, which is a hunting shirt. He had a sash. I don’t know if he wore a sword in church.”
A stained glass window in Muhlenberg Lutheran Church in Harrisonburg depicts the Fighting Parson at the pulpit, wearing church robes, right hand pointing up, other hand clutching a sword, as the fired-up parishioners rise to their feet.
Peter Muhlenberg’s 1770s log church in Woodstock no longer exists; it probably stood in the intersection of Main and Court streets, said Susan Walls, docent with the Shenandoah County Historical Society and greeter at the visitor center in the Shenandoah County Historic Courthouse.
Standing in front of the courthouse are a bust of Muhlenberg and a statue commemorating the famous call to arms.
Walls said it is “fairly credible” that Muhlenberg removed his robes to reveal his uniform, and also believes he gave the speech at several churches.
Another question is whether Muhlenberg spoke in German or English. Cecere said English is “most likely.” Historian Gabe Neville said his guess is English.
Lisa Minardi, executive director of Historic Trappe, a Muhlenberg and German history center in Pennsylvania, said her guess is German. “I’m not sure it is possible to say for certain,” Minardi said.
What no one disputes is that German-Americans from the Shenandoah Valley, including Peter Muhlenberg, played an important role in wresting control of the 13 colonies away from King George and placing it in the hands of the emergent American people.
From north to south, the valley of the Shenandoah stretches from Harpers Ferry, where the river joins the Potomac, to Front Royal, where the North Fork and South Fork converge, to the headwaters of the South Fork’s tributaries near Stuarts Draft. The long ridge of Massanutten Mountain divides the valley for much of its length.
For thousands of years Native Americans lived, farmed, hunted and fished in the valley. At the time of European contact, the valley seems to have been depopulated for reasons not fully understood. The Iroquois used it as a hunting ground and corridor for war parties, the Great Warrior Path.
On Sept. 5, 1716, according to a state historical marker at Swift Run Gap, where U.S. 33 crosses the Blue Ridge, Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood led a group of adventurers into the valley. Spotswood later bestowed souvenir golden horseshoes on his companions, who entered Virginia history as the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe.
Next to the historical marker is a bronze plaque affixed to a boulder, inscribed with a poem by Gertrude Claytor (1888-1973) mythologizing Spotswood’s exploit. After almost 90 years of exposure to sun, rain, wind, snow, and hail, the letters are still legible:
WE STUMBLED ON, PAST SCARP AND JAGGED BOULDER,
AND DOWN THE WET RAVINES, AND UP AGAIN WE FOUGHT,
UNTIL ONE DAWN WE STOOD UPON A TITAN’S SHOULDER,
AND SAW — BEYOND THE BLUE UNCHALLENGED HILLS
THAT BORE NO TRACE OF SORROW OR OF WARS —
THE SHENANDOAH, DAUGHTER OF THE STARS.
In coming years German-Americans would help make the scenic valley, sheltered between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, a fruitful land of prosperous towns and well-tended farms. Yet the “daughter of the stars” would know both war and sorrow.
In the 17th and 18th centuries Germany was a patchwork of principalities. The lower classes suffered from war, economic deprivation and religious persecution. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, welcomed religious dissenters, and large numbers of Germans arrived beginning in the later 17th century.
John Weaver is a doctoral student at West Virginia University who studies the Revolutionary period.
“It was very difficult for someone who was not a member of the nobility to own land, in their own name, in Europe,” he said. Germans wanted land more than anything, and it could be had in North America. They were willing to risk the Atlantic crossing and conflict with Indians in order to get it.
“But all the good Pennsylvania lands [were] snapped up pretty quickly,” Weaver said. By the 1740s Pennsylvania land was getting expensive, and the colonists were confronting Native Americans like the Delaware. “And so, wanting to keep the peace and wanting to get cheaper land, a lot of people start to move down the Shenandoah Valley from … Pennsylvania.”
The valley was settled from north to south. Germans settled the lower (northern) part, while Scots-Irish were the majority in the upper (southern) half. They came down the Great Wagon Road, today’s U.S. 11, “the Oregon Trail of colonial times,” said historian Gabe Neville.
“The Shenandoah Valley, in particular, must have reminded them of their Rhineland homes,” according to hottelkeller.org, the website of the Shenandoah Germanic Heritage Museum. “The green hills and mountains and the swiftly flowing streams made it possible to raise their livestock, grow wheat, barley and oats and build mills just as they did in Europe. They were quick to reestablish their churches and communities, frequently giving them names from the Old World. The German language was used well into the nineteenth century in churches and schools and even longer in the homes.”
Germans generally got along with the Anglo authorities to the east. But religious differences caused friction. “There’s no separation of church and state in the 18th century,” Weaver said. The Church of England was the established (government-sanctioned) church in Virginia, and the Germans were mostly Lutheran or Reformed (Calvinist). These “dissenting Protestants” were allowed, “but they have to pay a special tax … to support the Church of England,” Weaver said.
Peter Muhlenberg was born in 1746 in Pennsylvania. He gained a smidgeon of military experience before following his father into ministry. In the late 1760s he was ordained in the Lutheran church.
The growing German population in Beckford Parish, Dunmore (later Shenandoah) County needed a pastor, and the bilingual Muhlenberg was called. Virginia law required him to be ordained in the Church of England, so in 1772 he was ordained by the bishop of London.
As colonial-British tensions rose toward the boiling point in the early and mid 1770s, colonists chose sides. Many Germans in the Shenandoah Valley supported the revolution for the same reasons Anglo-Americans did, including the much-resented royal prohibition on acquiring western land. (See previous article on the Proclamation of 1763.)
Gabe Neville of Fairfax is a historian who created a website devoted to Muhlenberg’s 8th Virginia Regiment.
Muhlenberg “became the leader of the community in a lot of ways, spiritual and otherwise,” Neville said. “He was young and virile and had a little bit of military experience.” He was a delegate to the Second Virginia Convention, and was in St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 23, 1775, when Patrick Henry demanded liberty, or death.
At the Fourth Convention in Williamsburg, delegates decided to raise a regiment from western Virginia, where much of the population was German and Scots-Irish.
“The Virginia Convention’s real goal in calling the regiment ‘German’ may have been to ensure that it was German-led,” Neville writes on his website, 8thvirginia.com. “The Irish were regarded as wild, insubordinate, and radical.”
Muhlenberg was appointed colonel, Abraham Bowman (German, despite the Anglicized name) from Strasburg, lieutenant colonel, and Peter Helphenstine from Winchester, major.
Of the men serving in the 10 companies of the “German Regiment,” perhaps one-third were German, Neville said.
The Germans and the Scots-Irish of the 8th Virginia, though they differed in religion, were both shaped by the frontier.
“The conflict with the Indians in Virginia’s west extended from the French and Indian War all the way to the War of 1812,” Neville said. “Men lived their entire lives in that context. A good definition for frontier is a zone of conflict between where Indians dominated and where European settlers were encroaching. So the Shenandoah Valley by the time of the Revolution wasn’t really the true frontier. It was sort of the previous generation’s frontier. But there were still memories and culture connected with that, and a lot of frontiersmen traveled through there on their way to the frontier. The true frontier was more like Hampshire County [in present-day West Virginia, west of Winchester]. But those men were handy with rifles. They were used to conflict, they had a strong dislike for Native Americans, and they made good soldiers.”
Muhlenberg himself was a hunter.
Carrying rifles and wearing fringed, linen hunting shirts, they were a “uniquely American kind of soldier,” Weaver said. They valued a well-made rifle decorated with carved wood and engraved metal, a frontier status symbol.
Most Continental soldiers carried a smoothbore musket with a mounted bayonet, Cecere said. Lines of soldiers fired mass volleys to break the enemy’s ranks, and if that failed, charged with bayonets.
Rifles, with grooved barrels, took longer to load, but were more accurate. Western enlistees used them for hunting and brought them into Continental service.
“They were almost like sharpshooters or snipers, in a sense,” Cecere said. “These guys could shoot at 250, 300 yards and hit a man-sized target easily, versus 100 yards for a musket. But when … the British closed up on them, the rifleman were more at a disadvantage because they didn’t have bayonets.” So the British changed tactics. When the redcoats heard the high, sharp crack of rifle fire, they charged with bayonets before the frontiersmen could reload.
The contribution of the 8th Virginia Regiment to the war was “quite important,” Neville said.
“Frequently divided and detached, they seem to have served everywhere: Charleston, White Plains, Trenton, Princeton, Short Hills, Cooch’s Bridge, Brandywine, Saratoga, and Germantown,” Neville writes on 8thvirginia.com.
Only a few dozen of the original 680 enlisted men were still with the regiment at the end of their two-year stint.
“They shivered through the winter at Valley Forge [1777-78] where they were discharged in the spring,” according to Neville’s website. “Some reenlisted, but most did not. Many of the original recruits, in fact, were by then dead or severely debilitated from two years of frost-bite, malaria, smallpox, malnourishment, musket balls, bayonets, and imprisonment after capture. A contingent of reenlisted veterans and new recruits served at the Battle of Monmouth [1778] before the regiment was folded into the 4th Virginia and ceased to exist.”
Some Germans kept fighting.
Muhlenberg and the Prussian Baron von Steuben led the Virginia militia against the British at the battle at Petersburg in 1781. At the battle of Yorktown, Muhlenberg commanded a brigade in Lafayette’s division. Steuben commanded another division.
Muhlenberg’s legacy
- Muhlenburg County, Kentucky, is named in his honor.
- There are statues or busts depicting Muhlenberg in Woodstock, Washington, D.C., and at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which is named after his father.
- One of Pennsylvania’s two statues in Congress is that of Muhlenberg (see above).
- After Muhlenberg left Congress in 1801, President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as supervisor of the revenue in Pennsylvania and later put him in charge of customs collections in Philadelphia, a position he held until his death in 1807.
There’s another important way that the German Regiment contributed to the new country. “At the start of the Revolutionary War, we were very truly 13 different colonies with very different cultures,” Neville said. The postwar years were a struggle for unity. The differences between Lutherans and Episcopalians, and between Germans and English, loomed larger than they do now. “Having a multi-ethnic, multi-religious regiment, and a multi-ethnic, multi-religious Continental Army contributed a lot to national unity, and the veterans of the army said so. So having a German from Pennsylvania leading a Virginia regiment, kind of a big deal.”
As time passed, stereotypes labeling Germans as miserly shifted to a perception of Germans as thrifty and hardworking, Weaver said.
Muhlenberg served in the First Congress as a representative from Pennsylvania and was briefly a U.S. senator.
The Germans that many Virginians remember from the Revolutionary War chapters of their history textbooks were Hessians, mercenaries from Hesse and other German principalities who fought for the British.
Those who sided with the Americans have been largely forgotten, said Weaver, partly due to the hostility of the World War period, and partly because memories of those early immigrants were displaced by later-arriving Germans.
When most Americans think of what Germans gave to America, they think of Christmas trees. And beer.