Free Mission at Nuremberg by Tim Townsend Page B

E. Gibson, an ordained minister of the Religion-Philosophical Society of St. Charles, Illinois, received President Abraham Lincoln’s somewhat reluctant approval as the first female chaplain, serving with the First Wisconsin Heavy Artillery. Among the thirteen hundred chaplains in the Confederate army was the first Native American chaplain, Unaguskee, who served with a Cherokee battalion in North Carolina.
    In May 1861, the army ordered its commanders to appoint chaplains approved by their state governors. But soon complaints of uneducated, unprepared, or unethical chaplains surfaced, prompting Congress to create legislation requiring chaplains to be ordained. It also barred anyone “who does not present testimonials of his present good standing with recommendations . . . from some authorized ecclesiastical body.” It was the first step toward ecclesiastical endorsement so central to today’s Chaplain Corps.
    When the War Department issued General Order 126 on September 6, 1862, requiring chaplains to be mustered into service by an officer of the Regular Army, it did not address age limits. Chaplain Charles McCabe of the 122nd Ohio Volunteers referred to a colleague, then sharing his prison cell, as “Father” Brown, not because the chaplain was a Catholic priest, but because he was eighty years old.
    Americans fought the Civil War in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, the Christian revival movement that began in the late eighteenth century and set the stage for the evangelicalism that dominated war chaplaincy. “Evangelism [was] more than ever before the chaplain’s first responsibility,” according to one historian.
    The misery of the war was surely a factor, too. After the Battle of Chancellorsville, which lasted one week in the spring of 1863 and resulted in thirty thousand dead, the chaplain of the Twenty-Sixth Alabama Regiment reported “100 converts a week for several weeks.” That kind of carnage, perhaps, contributed to a softer evangelical sell by chaplains in tune with men traumatized by constant violence. Their sermons were less animated than those of the revivalists of the past. Less “emotional,” according to historian Herman Norton. “Holy barks, shouts, jerks and other such accomplishments which had typed American revivals since Jonathan Edwards were virtually absent.” Chaplains were preaching to men fighting a harrowing war “who could not be scared into religion.”
    The fervor of religious services among Confederate forces in the winter of 1863–64 earned the season a nickname: “The Great Revival.” The revival reached its height in the Army of Greater Virginia where soldiers were “converted by the thousands every week,” according to Norton. Revivals in Dalton, Georgia, were “glorious” and “had no parallel.” “In the coldest and darkest nights of the winter, the crude chapels were crowded and at the call for penitents, hundreds would come down in sorrow and tears.” Forty-five thousand were converted in the Confederate army over four years of war.
    When the Civil War was over, the Chaplain Corps shrank. Some chaplains did missionary work within the army for their churches during this quiet period, and officials moved to make some changes to the evolving military chaplaincy. The Act of April 21, 1904, created a grade structure and promotion policy among army chaplains and determined that all chaplains, regardless of rank, would be referred to only as “Chaplain.” In 1909, the War Department created the position of chaplain assistant—an enlisted man who could help the chaplain with his duties.
    A year before the United States entered the First World War, the National Defense Act authorized one army chaplain for each regiment of cavalry, infantry, field artillery, and engineers, a total of 85 chaplains. But by the time the country declared war on Germany in April 1917,