Most Americans today would probably still recognize the stirring words from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn”: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,/ Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,/ Here once the embattled farmers stood,/ And fired the shot heard round the world.” Most of us are still aware that those embattled farmers won for us the freedoms we too often take for granted today.
But how many of us are aware of the extent to which faith motivated those farmers to leave their families and homes and risk their lives for a cause that most would have considered hopeless at the time? How many are aware of the extent to which preachers actively participated in our War for Independence — and not just rhetorically from the pulpit, though the great sermons on behalf of the freedom fight provoked many parishioners to action? How many are familiar with the phrase “Black Regiment”?
That phrase encapsulates what Colonial America possessed in its War for Independence that is sadly lacking today. The Black Regiment is a moniker that was given to the patriot-preachers of Colonial America. They were called the “Black Regiment” owing to the fact that so many of them had a propensity to wear long, black robes in the pulpit.
So influential were the patriot-pulpits of Colonial America that it was said by Prime Minister Horace Walpole in the British Parliament, “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.” In fact, America’s War for Independence was often referenced in Parliament as “the Presbyterian Revolt.” And during the Revolutionary War, British troops often made colonial churches military targets. Churches were torched, ransacked, and pillaged.
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