Battle of Jfort mtlasbinaton 
 
 ST. rAUL~S CHAPE'., TxlNT^Y PARiSH. MEW YORK 
 
 Fc" Fort Wasliingtcn ChapUr 
 
 au^hters of the American Revolution 
 
 The Fanwood Prhss, 
 1914 
 
lEx IGtbrtB 
 
 SEYMOUR DURST 
 
 When you leave, please leave this book 
 
 Because it has been said 
 "Sver'thing comes t' him who waits 
 
 Except a loaned book." 
 
 Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Libr^^ry 
 Gift of Seymour B. Durst Old York Libr^^ry 
 
DEIvIVKRRD ON THE IJSTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE Q 
 
 Battle of fort Masbington 
 
 AT 
 
 ST. PAUL'S CHAPEL, TRINITY PARISH, NEW YORK 
 
 By Rev. WM. MONTAGUE GEER, S.T.D., Vicar 
 
 For Fort Washington Chapter 
 
 Daughters of the American Revolution 
 
 1^ *% 
 
 The Fanwood Press. 
 1914 
 
Digitized by 
 
 the Internet ^ 
 
 Archive 
 
 
 
 in 2013 
 
 
 
 http://archive.org/details/addressdeliveredOOgeer 
 
ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 
 
 EMBERS of the Fort Washington Chapter of the 
 Daughters of the American Revolution, you are most 
 welcome in St. Paul's Chapel for the celebration of 
 the one hundred and thirty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of 
 Fort Washington. This Chapel ought to, and doubtless does, 
 seem like home to you, because in yonder pew, as you know, 
 George Washington worshipped from 1789 to 1791, of which 
 the tale is told very briefly in his diary in his own handwrit- 
 ing as regularly as Sunday came round, "Went to St. Paul's 
 Chapel in the forenoon;" and, immediately after his inaugura- 
 tion as First President of the United States, on April 30, 1789, 
 George Washington, with both Houses of Congress, came in 
 procession to this Chapel, where an appropriate Service was 
 held by Bishop Provoost, Chaplain of the Senate, and a solemn 
 Te Deum was sung. 
 
 There is one other important reason why your Chapter 
 should feel at home in St. Paul's Chapel. This is the neigh- 
 borhood in which the buildings stood where so many of the 
 prisoners, taken captive in the Battle of Fort Washington, suf- 
 fered the tortures of most cruel imprisonment — the long, low, 
 
4 
 
 annlvcraarie Hi)6rc00 
 
 two-story structure, which stood in what is now City Hall 
 Park, near Murray Street, the Sugar House on what is now 
 Liberty Street, and the Middle Dutch Church on the corner of 
 Cedar and Nassau Streets. Here are the streets on which the 
 feet of those heroes might have walked to freedom, if they 
 had been willing to save their lives, which they were not will- 
 ing to do, by enlisting under the British flag ; and the riug- 
 ing of the bell of this Chapel must often have been heard by 
 those prisoners, reminding them, in their dreadful captivity, 
 of God, of Christ, of liberty, and of home. There is a sense 
 then, in which the vicinity of St. Paul's Chapel, put now to 
 strange and interesting, if not always inspiring, uses, to you 
 should be holy ground. 
 
 The time limitations of a service held here at mid-day are such 
 that it will be impossible to give any detailed account of the 
 Battle of Fort Washington ; but details are not called for in this 
 presence, because they are probably more familiar to you than 
 those of any other of the chief battles of the Revolution. But by 
 way of reminder, and for the benefit of others who are present 
 and welcome at this Service, some mention should be made of the 
 most important facts. 
 
 The Battle of Fort Washington was preceded by some of the 
 gloomiest hours of the Revolution. It marked the darkest day 
 of American History, the midnight of American Liberty ; and 
 the rising of the day-star of hope in the hearts of the Colonists 
 
5 
 
 seemed indeed far away. The Fort had been constructed most 
 carefully and with great skill. It was manned by not far from 
 three thousand soldiers, and the duty of this little'^army was to 
 keep the enemy from taking possession of Manhattan Island. 
 Noble and heroic was the struggle that was made in defense of 
 the fort. But, well aware of the importance of the position, Sir 
 William Howe (as history tells us) " attacked the fort with the 
 strongest army which up to that time had ever left the shores of 
 Great Britain, while the soldiers in the fort consisted, with the 
 exception of the Maryland Regiment, mostly of untrained farm- 
 ers, poorly supplied, and serving practically without pay." This 
 army had suffered from mutiny among its junior commissioned 
 officers, from desertions and treachery, shameful waste of 
 provisions, deplorable inattention in some camps to decency and 
 cleanliness ; but history also tells us that *' these were the small 
 shadows on a broad picture of unselfish devotion to duty, and 
 that no more heroic devotion has ever been recorded than that 
 exhibited by these plain enlisted soldiers and militiamen." It 
 was, however, the will of the God of battles that, one hundred 
 and thirty- eight years ago to-day, those three thousand troops 
 under Magaw, one of the greatest heroes of the Revolution, after 
 doing all that lay in the power of men to do, surrendered to 
 overwhelming numbers of the enemy ; but not until five hundred 
 Hessians had bought the victory with their lives, and de- 
 fense was no longer possible. Prisoners of war they were 
 
called, but really, as the writer says, " they were executed, most 
 of them by slow torture on the English ships ; and so the black- 
 est page in English History was written." But Americans 
 tinder Washington were on guard during those midnight hours. 
 Their diminished army was chased by the enemy from the Hud- 
 son to the Delaware, and across the Delaware to Pennsylvania ; 
 but shortly afterward they appeared before the British at Trenton 
 and won a great victory, taking one thousand English soldiers 
 prisoners of war. Seven days later Washington attacked 
 Princeton and won the day, defeating Cornwallis, capturing 
 many prisoners. Then followed Saratoga in a few months, 
 and the downfall of Bargoyne. After that came the winter 
 at Valley Forge, followed with alternate defeat pnd victory 
 by Camden, King's Mountain, Eutaw Springs, and finally 
 Yorktown. "The news" (in the words of the historian) 
 ** was sent by swift messengers to every corner of the American 
 nation which had just been born ; it was carried as fast as 
 horse and rider could go — the news that America was free." 
 If the brave soldiers in Fort Washington had only known it, 
 how comforted they would have been by the cry, "It is indeed 
 midnight but all is well!" for all was in the hand of God, who 
 was on his throne of love and power. Proud, indeed, ought the 
 descendants of such men to be. 
 
 Time must be cruelly economized in order that two facts of 
 interest to us to-day may not be ignored or forgotten. We are 
 
7 
 
 thinking and talking in the House of God, of the heroism of 
 American soldiers one hundred and thirty-eight years ago, 
 while, incredible as it may seem and appalling as it certainly 
 is, the greatest war the world has ever known is raging among 
 the Nations of Europe. We are talking in this House of God 
 about the Battle of Fort Washington, while the only real 
 world-war the world has ever known is in progress on the 
 other side of the water. Let us give some thought to these 
 facts, because it surely must be true that, since God is " nearer 
 to us than breathing, closer than hands and feet," we cannot 
 think of him as not sustaining a most intimate relation to 
 battles fought by his children, who are losing their lives by 
 hundreds of thousands. The present war is on too colossal a 
 scale to admit of the Moral Governor of the universe being 
 eliminated from U in our thoughts. 
 
 Time-limitations make it impossible to do more than submit 
 a few general principles, which call loudly but in vain for 
 elaboration. First--The war-gate is God's private entrance 
 into national life which man cannot close, not even with the aid 
 of peace-conferences, multiplied treaties, Hague-tribunals, and 
 peace banquets at the Waldorf-Astoria at ten dollars a plate. 
 Nor is what Chesterton well calls "plutocratic pomposity" of 
 the slightest value in matters of such high importance. 
 
 If the antithesis of war were peace and simple old-fashion- 
 ed living, with the husband and father at the plough, the wife 
 
8 
 
 and mother at the spindle, and the children morally and 
 spiritually cared for ; and if these condition prevailed all over 
 the world, it would be well nigh impossible to pass from peace 
 to war. But in these days this is not at all the kind of peace 
 which is the opposite of military warfare. There are many 
 kinds of antitheses of military warfare. One ^oes by the 
 name of peace, but is really industrial warfare, which has its 
 own ways of making widows and orphans, necessitating child- 
 labor, manufacturing multi-millionaires in large numbers, in- 
 creasing the army of the unemployed and of underpaid women 
 and girls, many of whom are forced to choose between starvation 
 and immorality. These evils are easily stated, but it is difficult 
 to see how they can be remedied, for no dependence can be 
 placed upon socialism, which would only make matters worse 
 than they are. But what we are interested in, in considering in 
 the House of God the subject of war, is the fact that it is easy 
 to pass from a state of industrial warfare, full of such abomina- 
 tions, to a ^tate of military warfare, which after all is only 
 full of other kinds of abominations, without God showing Him- 
 self specially interested to prevent man having his own way in 
 the matter. 
 
 This becomes clearer to our minds, I think, when we remember 
 that God cannot be greatly moved by the fact that men die on 
 the battlefield, by the thousand or hundreds of thousands, 
 because men are dying all the time by His fiat, and leaving 
 
Bnnivecearc U^^tces 
 
 9 
 
 widows and orphans behind them ; and no man dies on the battle- 
 field who would have escaped death if there had been no fighting- 
 And when among the other real opposites of war you find 
 luxury and extravagance, also the results of industrial warfare, 
 leading on to greater and greater moral laxity, expressing itself in 
 an increasing number of divorces, in immoral fiction and a corrupt 
 drama, it becomes still easier to believe that God is not as 
 interested as well-to-do men, who have staked their all on peace, 
 wish He were in preserving peace among the nations. The 
 artist Leighton goes so far as to say that ' * the arts of luxury are 
 more deadly than the arts of war." The case becomes clearer 
 still when we find that the religion of the Incarnate Son of God, 
 Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world, is being more and more 
 dispensed with and pushed one side, in all the strata of intellectual 
 life, from our colleges and universities down to our de-Chris- 
 tianized Public Schools, and in all the strata of social and 
 industrial life, from our multi-millionaires (some of them 
 possessors of hundreds of millions of dollars), down to the 
 unemployed classes, perhaps the saddest men in God's world 
 to-day, whose numbers seem to be daily on the increase. If time 
 permitted, more light could be thrown on what we have reason 
 to believe is God's evident willingness that man should put a 
 torch to a kind of civilization which man himself had made, and 
 which is in very serious measure wholly unacceptable to God ; 
 and that is just what is going on in Europe at this moment, for 
 
to 
 
 we are plainly told that God is a jealous God, that He is "a 
 consuming fire. " Well may we cry, " O God, wherefore art 
 Thou absent from us so long ; why is Thy wrath so hot against 
 the sheep of Thy pasture?" " Look upon the convenant ; for 
 all the earth is full of darkness and cruel habitations." 
 
 And there is another ignored or forgotten principle. It seems 
 natural for man to think that the farther away in time we move 
 from the Cross of Jesus Christ, the safer we are in turning our 
 backs upon it ; but surely exactly the opposite of this must be 
 true. The farther away we move in time from Calvary and the 
 Open Tomb, the more is expected from us in heartfelt devotion 
 to His religion ; and it is because the nations have been giving 
 less and less instead of more and more devotion, that they are 
 to-day suffering, as Cardinal Farley I believe truly says, from 
 Divine Vengeance ; because no real, safe and continuous progress 
 is possible, independently of the religion of Jesus Christ the Son 
 of God. 
 
 Shortly before the war I heard some one say, ' * It seems as if we 
 are on the edge of great things ;" and we were, but not the great 
 things the speaker had in mind, which were communicating with 
 the alleged inhabitants of Mars, and with departed spirits, to- 
 gether with other marvels ; whereas, the great things we proved 
 to be on the edge of were the most appalling sorrows the world 
 has ever known. Our pride, like the pride of the builders of the 
 Tower of Babel, had to have a fall ; and it is safe to prophesy 
 
anniversary BDDrcss 
 
 11 
 
 that if what are called civilization and culture are restored to the 
 world by the labors of man in the year two thousand, and if they 
 are at that time as independent of the religion of Jesus Christ as 
 they are to-day, the Divine Vengeance will fall more heavily 
 upon the world then than it is falling now. It ought to be far 
 more evident than it is that the very nature of God, as revealed 
 to us in both the Old and New Testaments, is, under certain con- 
 ditions, to be a God of peace ; and it is equally His nature, under 
 other conditions, to be a God of war, " at whose word the stormy 
 wind ariseth." Men are too apt to carry themselves, like the 
 sailors written of in the Acts of the Apostles, as if the south 
 wind would always blow softly, instead of preparing for the tem- 
 pestuous wind, called Euroclydon, which is now upon us. To 
 try to avoid war with an exceedingly undeveloped idea of God's 
 relation to war is to invite war. All nations should be wedded 
 to peace, " not unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, discreetly, 
 advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God," lest the marriage 
 degenerate into divorce, which is descriptive of European 
 conditions to-day. 
 
 But it may be asked, Why take time at this Service for such 
 a line of thought as this? Let me give two reasons in con- 
 clusion. The first is that warning may again be uttered that 
 our conditions in this country are not such as to inspire con- 
 fidence that we can depend upon God to save us from the 
 same kind of sorrows which the European nations are bear- 
 
12 
 
 Bnnlvcraarig HOOrcee 
 
 ing, or, not impossibly, greater sorrows Are we exalting the 
 religion of Jesus Christ in this country ? We certainly are 
 not ; and there are many other most unfavorable conditions, 
 too numerous to mention now. They are perfectly familiar 
 to you, and we have reason to believe that they are wholly 
 unacceptable to God ; for nations as well as individuals, as is 
 again being proved to us, can be brought for judgment to the 
 bar of Divine justice. 
 
 The second reason is because these facts and principles 
 about God's relation to war help to give wise emphasis to the 
 desirability of maintaining such organizations as the Daughters 
 of the American Revolution. The saints who stand highest 
 on your calendar are those mentioned in the eleventh Chapter 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the thirty fourth verse, who 
 "quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, 
 out of weakness were made strong (as our American soldiers 
 were after the defeat at Fort Washington), waxed valiant in 
 fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens." How thank- 
 ful we ought to be that soldiers are numbered among the 
 Saints of God in that wonderful Chapter! These are not the 
 times when we can afford to allow the soldier-spirit to die 
 out of the hearts of our young men ; although it has been 
 seriously proposed that the subject of wars shall be taken out 
 of our school books, and the sport of firing off firecrackers shall 
 be forbidden to boys, lest the love of war be bred within them. 
 
Hnntvcraar^ B&£>jce«0 
 
 13 
 
 The opposite of the soldier-spirit is far too apt to be effeminacy, 
 love of luxury, intemperance and immorality. Some soldiers 
 may indeed make a bad record for intemperance and immorality, 
 but the evil terminates with themselves and often with death. 
 In civil life, intemperance and immorality exert a most corrupt- 
 ing influence over the young life of the nation. 
 
 And lastly, as a nation we are set in the midst of so many and 
 great dangers, although we are disposed to think we are not, that 
 while we love our neighbor we must not only not tear down our 
 fences; we must make them strong for self -protection, far strong- 
 er than they are now Evidently these are days when seemingly 
 impossible things take place ; and we cannot tell what God has 
 in store for our country. The great Oriental Nations have yet 
 to express themselves, they have yet to demand " their place in 
 the sun," and to back their demands with overwhelming num- 
 bers. What that may mean to us, in the future near or remote, 
 God only knows; but to belittle the honorable office of the soldier 
 and not to give both soldiers and sailors, in proportion to our 
 wealth, full advantage of all that modern science offers them, in 
 the way of a reasonably full equipment for offensive and 
 defensive action, seems to be unwisdom raised to a high degree. 
 
 For these and other good reasons, therefore, Daughters of the 
 American Revolution, you, like ail similar organizations which 
 have held Services in St. Paul's Chapel (I close as I began), are 
 most welcome here, and the benediction of God in Christ Jesua 
 
14 
 
 our Lord is most fervently invoked upon you and upon all 
 patriotic Societies. 
 
 On behalf of those heroes of the American Revolution now 
 in the Paradise of God whose descendants you are, we are glad 
 to offer the prayer : " Let light everlasting shine upon them, O 
 Lord, and grant unto them eternal rest ; " and give us, we be- 
 seech Thee, their love of country, their devotion to duty. We 
 ask all in the name and for ihe sake of Jesus Christ our Lord, 
 Amen.