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By Root 1359 0

that day. He wrote that “it was a most animating and encouraging discourse, delivered with spirit and warmth; he gained the most strict attention of almost every hearer present and was universally admired as an orator and divine.” In it, the minister tried to be hopeful for his soldier audience, reading from the eighth verse of Isaiah: “Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, here am I, send me.” Many people came up to the minister afterwards and congratulated him on his powerful sermon. Robbins shrugged off the praise, telling them, “May I be more concerned to please God and less to please men.” Robbins’s return seemed to infuse some life and hope into the deathridden camp. The minister now prayed with the men every single morning and in the afternoon as well. He toured the different hospitals at Crown Point each day and, when he entered a large ward, asked the sick and infected soldiers there to pray along with him. He either stood or knelt, Bible in hand. He led dozens of men in prayer, sometimes a hundred in a large ward, especially the overburdened smallpox ward. Then, if the men seemed strong enough, he encouraged them to join him in singing loud and rousing religious hymns that could be heard throughout the fort and from great distances beyond its high walls.

Two days later, the minister was ordered to Fort Ticonderoga, ten miles south on the same western side of Lake Champlain. Ticonderoga was in need of chaplains. Late in the afternoon, he landed on the shore near the fort and walked directly to a small garrison hospital, one of several, to visit and comfort the sick. Most were smallpox victims. Robbins put off dinner and asked officers to call several regiments of men together for a special sunset prayer service. He dined much later after leading hundreds of men in prayer and song on the parade ground of the fort.

The following morning the energetic Robbins returned to Ticonderoga’s west hospital, a large facility, and planned to spend the morning visiting men in all of the other medical facilities, too. That plan was scuttled by the misery he felt as soon as he walked into the west hospital and saw more than one hundred men there and the terrible condition that most of them were in. He was stunned. “Never was such a portrait of human misery as in these hospitals,” he wrote in his journal. He asked the men to pray with him in the large, open ward. His sermon began with a phrase that he felt himself as he looked out on the groaning, diseased patients. “Be ye therefore sober and watch unto prayer,” he began.

That night he was back in the fort’s hospitals, seeing patients in their beds and leading hundreds of wounded and dying men in two prayer services. He felt that he needed all of his resilience, and the hand of God, to continue. He noted, “Applied myself to my duties. Indeed, it is too much, but I am carried along.”

The pain that the chaplains felt, that all of the men of God felt, at Fort Ticonderoga and elsewhere in the Revolution, was very personal. They found themselves face to face with dying men every day and every night. They were there to comfort them as they prepared to leave the earth, to hear their last words, and to make promises to send their possessions to their loved ones. It was hard.

Several times over the next two days, Rev. Robbins found himself emotionally wrought. On Tuesday he was summoned to visit the son of Colonel Mann, a teenaged soldier who was dying and desperately sought some kind of religious comfort. On Wednesday he went to see his and Dr. Beebe’s friend, Colonel Reed, who had been battling smallpox for over a week. Reed, covered with the pus-filled explosions, looked and sounded pathetic. “Fear he won’t live,” Robbins wrote after a visit in which he tried to console Reed.

It was a grueling day for the minister. He made his daily rounds of the hospitals and conducted four different prayer services, some with the loud singing of hymns and some just solemn prayers. By nightfall, he was fatigued and emotionally spent.