Give 'Em Watts, Boys: The Story of Reverend James Caldwell

When they ran out of wadding paper for their muskets, he instructed they grab hymn books...very specific hymn books.

The American Revolution had its generals, its guns, and its gritty frontiersmen who slept in the dirt and prayed with blood still on their hands. But buried beneath the headlines of Valley Forge and Yorktown is a man with a Bible under one arm and a pistol on his belt, who thundered from the pulpit on Sunday and marched with the troops on Monday. His name was Rev. James Caldwell, and he didn’t come to this war to play chaplain like a religious mascot. He came to make tyranny bleed.

James Caldwell was not a man of moderation. He was a man of conviction—Presbyterian, postmillennial, black-robed, pistol-packing conviction. Born in 1734 and forged in the theological fire of old-school Calvinism, Caldwell came out of Princeton with more than a diploma. He came out with a calling to preach Christ as King over kings, and to remind the powers that be that they held their scepters on borrowed time. He pastored in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, but he didn’t just lead a church—he led a movement. The man saw the Redcoats as more than soldiers. He saw them as agents of Caesar who had crossed the Rubicon and dared to muzzle the bride of Christ.

BLACK ROBES AND BLACK POWDER

While other pastors issued vague calls for “peace,” Caldwell took a different route. He looked his congregation in the eye and told them that if the British were going to come for their Bibles, their pulpits, and their God-given liberty, they better be ready to give an answer—with Scripture if possible, and with musket fire if not. And he didn’t just talk. When the fighting broke out, he signed up as a chaplain in the Continental Army and marched alongside the men he had discipled, carrying the Word of God in his satchel and a flintlock ready at his hip. He was a preacher who didn’t just believe in sin—he believed in judgment. And if George III wanted to play Pharaoh, then Caldwell was ready to call down plagues.

The British hated him with a religious fervor. They called him a black-robed traitor, a firebrand, an agitator. And they were right. He was a traitor—to tyranny. He was a firebrand—lit by the Spirit and aimed at the redcoat ranks. He was an agitator—because Christ had come not to bring peace but a sword, and Caldwell swung it with every sermon, every prayer, and every shot. The man didn’t believe in neutral ground. He believed in sheep and wolves, and when he saw wolves in red uniforms burning churches and hanging patriots, he didn’t form a committee. He loaded his gun.

GIVE 'EM WATTS

Then came the Battle of Springfield in 1780. The Americans were nearly out of wadding—musket ammo was worthless without paper to pack the powder and ball. The British were advancing. Things were bleak. That’s when Caldwell, already battle-worn and bloodied from the war, ran into a local church, tore through the pews, and started grabbing up hymnals—specifically the works of Isaac Watts, the great Calvinist hymnist whose lyrics hit like cannon fire. Caldwell returned to the line, flinging hymnbooks into the hands of soldiers and shouting those immortal words, “Give ’em Watts, boys! Put Watts into ’em!”

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