Revolutionary Ancestory

MacDonald’s own great-6 times-grandfather was the Reverend James Caldwell, a Presbyterian minister who was a hero in the American Revolution and mentioned several times with gratitude by George Washington.

Caldwell was born in 1734 in Virginia but his family moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he grew up and went to Princeton, then the College of New Jersey.  After the Revolution began, he became known as the Rebel Reverend, or the Fighting Parson. The British killed his wife in cold blood, MacDonald said, in their home during the battle of Connecticut Farms, New, when they were searching for him.  

MacDonald had the club spellbound as he recounted the acts of bravery of his “great” grandfather. There is a plaque on a boulder in Springfield, New Jersey, commemorating the battle there when Caldwell tore out pages of hymn books published by the English clergyman Isaac Watts, for the riflemen to use for wadding for their cartridges, while they were defending the town.  “Give ‘em Watts, boys!” he shouted, in a Revolutionary equivalent of the World War Two song about the clergyman helping the gunners, “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”

After a heavy exchange of fire in Connecticut Farms and tree to tree fighting in the woods, the British were prevented from following and attacking Washington who had withdrawn to Morristown, and the British were forced to retreat. That was the last invasion of the British into New Jersey and marked the end of the war in the Northern colonies. 

Caldwell helped win that battle, an action that prolonged the Revolution until the American troops could consolidate their victories.  After that the British concentrated on a Southern campaign.  The French finally brought its navy to blockade the Virginia ports, which caused the final British surrender, three years later, in Yorktown.

Caldwell’s own life was cut short fifteen months later, in 1781 when a sentry who had been bribed by the British shot him, in a successful assassination plot.  Caldwell left nine orphaned children whom George Washington helped to find homes.  One was adopted by the young French General Lafayette and taken to France.  Another was taken by a family in South Carolina, and that explains the middle name of John Caldwell Calhoun, the fiery Senator.   One more, obviously, was the ancestor of our speaker.  “Good things happened to the kids,” MacDonald said.

MacDonald’s research into his ancestry has given him an inspirational subject which gives him the opportunity to travel around the country, speaking to clubs like our Rotary. As good Rotarians, we were exhorted to live our “service above self” motto by living for our country and our children.