Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History
Benson Lossing, Ed.

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Caldwell, James 1734-

Clergyman; born in Charlotte county, Va., in April, 1734. Graduating at Princeton in 1759, he became pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Elizabethtown in 1762. Zealously espousing the revolutionary cause, he was much disliked by the Tories. Appointed chaplain of a New Jersey brigade, he was for a time in the Mohawk Valley. In 1780 his church and residence were burned by a party of British and Tories; and the same year a British incursion from Staten Island pillaged the village of Connecticut Farms, where his family were temporarily residing. A soldier shot his wife through a window while she was sitting on a bed with her babe. At that time Mr. Caldwell was in Washington's camp at Morristown. In the successful defence of Springfield, N. J., June 23, 1780, when the wadding for the soldiers' guns gave out, he brought the hymn-books from the neighboring church and shouted, “Now put Watts into them, boys.” In an altercation at Elizabethtown Point with an American sentinel, he was killed by the latter, Nov. 24, 1781. The murderer was afterwards hanged.