Sometimes historical research changes what we know. Sometimes it changes the questions we are asking.
A few days ago, an email arrived from Emma Rocha, Exhibitions and Collections Associate at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, containing scans from the museum’s Samuel West collection. Among them was a ninety-eight-page handwritten account of West’s life. The manuscript was written after West’s death, but its author had access to materials much closer to West himself, including letters and memoranda. Early in the manuscript, the writer explains that he had even been permitted to copy notes West had made in an old pocket book.
I began working through the manuscript page by page, looking for names, dates, quotations, and anything that might add another piece to the story. About a quarter of the way through, I came across something I thought I already knew.
Samuel West had gone to war.
At least, that was how I had understood the story. Modern biographies of West often describe him as having served as a chaplain with the Continental Army during the Revolution. It seemed entirely plausible. West was an ardent supporter of the American cause, and clergy had long accompanied New England troops into the field. I had repeated the description myself without giving it much thought.
But the manuscript did not call him a chaplain.
Describing what happened after the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, West’s biographer wrote that he “set out to join the American army” and do what he could:
“as a minister of God, in the camp to keep up their courage.”
That phrase stopped me.
The writer was composing this account after the Revolution. He knew what a military chaplain was. Yet he did not say West was appointed a chaplain, assigned to a regiment, or commissioned into military service. He said West went into the camp as a minister of God.
Then, almost immediately, the manuscript offered something better than the biographer’s recollection. It offered West himself.
“A considerable part of the battle I saw myself”
On July 15, 1775, West sat somewhere in the American lines at Roxbury and wrote home to his wife, Experience Howland West.
The letter survives here because the biographer copied a substantial portion of it into the manuscript. West told Experience about events unfolding around Boston. On the preceding Tuesday night, American troops had crossed to Long Island in Boston Harbor, removed livestock, and captured seventeen prisoners. The following day they returned in ten boats and burned buildings on the island while British ships and boats pursued them. West was not repeating something he had merely heard afterward.
“A considerable part of the battle I saw myself.”
The next day he watched American soldiers digging fortifications within range of the British. The Regulars fired repeatedly upon them, apparently without effect. West responded as a New England minister might be expected to respond. He looked beyond the military event toward Providence:
“Must not we acknowledge the hand of God in all this?”
This is a different Samuel West from the man I first encountered in the printed Election Sermon of 1776. There, West reasons carefully from first principles about God, human nature, government, liberty, and resistance. Here, almost a year earlier, we encounter him watching the Revolution happen in front of him.
And the letter becomes almost cinematic at the end. It is Saturday morning, July 15. West is writing while the sounds of the siege continue around him:
“The Regulars have been all this morning, & are now while I am writing, firing platoons.”
For a moment, the distance of 250 years disappears. Samuel West is sitting at Roxbury. The British are firing while his pen is moving across the page.
And he is writing home.
After recounting soldiers, boats, cannon fire, death, danger, and Providence, his thoughts return to Dartmouth and to Experience:
“My dear creature, I pray God to be with you & keep you from all evil.”
Ministers in the Camp
That letter sent me looking more closely at what West was actually doing there.
On May 25, 1775, several weeks before Bunker Hill, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress addressed precisely the problem of providing religious ministry to the rapidly forming army. It recommended that ministers throughout the colony, with permission from their congregations, attend the army in the towns where it was encamped, thirteen ministers at a time.
That is an important distinction.
Massachusetts was not simply creating thirteen permanent regimental chaplaincies. It was asking the settled ministers of its churches to leave their congregations temporarily and go into the camps. Evidence from other clergy suggests that such service could operate in rotations, allowing ministers to spend a period with the army before returning to their parishes.
Then, on July 29, the Continental Congress formally provided for chaplains in the Continental Army, the date the United States Army Chaplain Corps recognizes as its institutional beginning.
West’s letter from Roxbury was written two weeks earlier.
None of this means there were no military chaplains before July 29. Colonial and provincial forces had employed chaplains long before the Revolution. But it does mean that we should be careful about imposing the later institutional structure upon the confused and rapidly changing world of the summer of 1775.
And suddenly the biographer’s choice of words made much more sense.
West had gone into the camp as a minister.
“Five Sabbaths and a fast”
There is another piece of evidence, and this time it comes directly from West.
On October 11, 1775, West wrote to George Washington about an unrelated matter involving a horse that had been taken and sold. In explaining why friends believed he deserved compensation, West casually mentioned the service he had already performed:
“I had preach’d in the camp five Sabbaths and a fast, and expected no reward for my Services…”
That one sentence tells us quite a bit.
West’s ministry with the army was not a single visit after Bunker Hill. Five Sabbaths and a fast represents a substantial period of preaching among the troops, whether continuously or through more than one stay. Indeed, Washington’s secretary, Joseph Reed, subsequently indicated that West expected to return to the army.
But once again, notice West’s language.
He does not tell Washington that he had served as a chaplain. He says that he had preached in the camp.
That matters because historical recovery requires us to resist the temptation to make the past fit neatly into categories that became clearer later.
So far, I have found no commission appointing Samuel West as a military chaplain. I have found no regimental assignment, no payroll entry, and no military service record. His name does not appear where I would expect to find a formally serving Massachusetts soldier or chaplain. Absence from those records does not prove that no appointment ever existed, and another document may someday change the picture.
But that is not where the evidence presently leads.
The evidence tells us something both simpler and, I think, more interesting.
Samuel West was a minister in the camp.
Before the Pulpit at Watertown
This discovery also changes how I am beginning to understand what happened the following year.
On May 29, 1776, Samuel West stood before the government of Massachusetts at Watertown and preached the Election Sermon that first led me into this research. I originally encountered that sermon as a theological and political argument. West’s defense of resistance to tyranny fascinated me because of the intellectual path by which he arrived there.
Now I know something I did not fully appreciate when I first read it.
The man preaching about resistance had already seen the war.
He had watched American boats pursued by British vessels. He had stood close enough to military operations to write, “A considerable part of the battle I saw myself.” He had watched soldiers labor under British fire and wondered aloud whether Providence had protected them. He had preached to the troops for five Sabbaths and a fast.
By the time West stood before the General Court in May 1776, the Revolution was not an abstraction to him.
And yet that may be the most revealing thing of all about his Election Sermon. West had war stories. He could have told them. He could have described what he had seen at Roxbury. He could have appealed to fear, anger, courage, sacrifice, or patriotism.
He did not.
Instead, he went back to first principles.
He began with God.
Perhaps experience had not given West his principles so much as it had tested them. The ideas he brought into the pulpit at Watertown had passed through the camps at Roxbury first.
There is another story from those months that I have deliberately left out of this one. While Samuel West was moving in and around the American army, George Washington faced a disturbing problem involving an intercepted letter written in cipher. The author was Dr. Benjamin Church, a man West knew from Harvard.
Samuel West would help break the code.
But that is a story for another day.
For now, I am content to leave Samuel West where I found him in those newly scanned pages from New Bedford: not with a title that later historians have given him, but with the words chosen by the man who first recorded the story.
Samuel West went “as a minister of God, in the camp to keep up their courage.”
Sources and Notes
New Bedford Whaling Museum, Samuel West manuscript collection. Mss42, S-g 1, Series H, S-s 3, Volume 1. Manuscript biography/memoir of the Rev. Samuel West, including copied memoranda and correspondence. The essay draws especially on the section describing West’s service “as a minister of God, in the camp,” and the copied letter from West to Experience Howland West, Roxbury, 15 July 1775. Scans supplied by Emma Rocha, Exhibitions and Collections Associate, New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Samuel West to George Washington, 11 October 1775. Autograph letter signed, George Washington Papers, Library of Congress; published in The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 2, ed. Philander D. Chase (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), 142–144; Founders Online, National Archives. West states that he had “preach’d in the camp five Sabbaths and a fast” and expected no reward for his services. The editorial note also records Joseph Reed’s 17 October reply indicating that West was understood to propose returning to the army.
Massachusetts Provincial Congress, resolution of 25 May 1775. Resolution recommending that ministers of the several religious assemblies within the colony, with leave of their congregations, attend the army in their several towns, thirteen at one time while the army remained encamped. Quoted and discussed as context for temporary ministerial service in the camps.
United States Army, history of the Army Chaplain Corps. Official Army historical materials identify 29 July 1775 as the establishment date of the Army Chaplain Corps, when the Continental Congress authorized chaplains. This institutional date is used to distinguish West’s documented presence at Roxbury on 15 July from the later formal Continental Army chaplain structure.
Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War. State compilation consulted for evidence of formal military service. No entry for Samuel West corresponding to the Dartmouth/New Bedford minister has been identified in the present research. Absence from this compilation is treated as supporting context, not conclusive proof that no formal appointment existed.
Online References
Founders Online: Samuel West to George Washington, 11 October 1775
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-02-02-0136
United States Army: Army Institute of Religious Leadership set to celebrate 250 years of chaplains
https://www.army.mil/article/282439/army_institute_of_religious_leadership_set_to_celebrate_250_years_of_chaplains
United States Army: Fighting the Good Fight of Faith: 250 Years of Sacred Service of the United States Army Chaplain Corps
https://www.army.mil/article/285634/fighting_the_good_fight_of_faith_250_years_of_sacred_service_of_the_united_states_army_chaplain_corps
