John Peter Gabriel Mühlenberg was an American Lutheran minister and a brigadier general in the Continental (American revolutionary) Army. He also commanded the infantry at the battle of Yorktown and was a congressman for several terms.
Background
John Peter Gabriel Mühlenberg was born on October 1, 1746, at Trappe, Pennsylvania, the eldest of the eleven children of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg and his wife, Anna Maria Weiser. As a boy he displayed frontiersman-like traits, natural enough in a grandson of John Conrad Weiser but perturbing to his father.
Education
After learning a little Latin at the Philadelphia Academy, he was sent to Halle in 1763, with his brothers Frederick and Gotthilf, to be educated at the Waisenhaus or, at the discretion of its director, Gotthilf August Francke, to be apprenticed to a merchant.
Francke ill-advisedly bound the high-spirited, quick-witted youth for a term of six years to a petty Lübeck grocer.
Career
When Mühlenberg could endure his situation no longer, he absconded, joined the 60th (Royal American) Regiment of Foot, and as secretary to one of the officers, a friend of his father, returned to Philadelphia and was discharged early in 1767.
He then prepared for the ministry with Carl Magnus von Wrangel, provost of the Swedish churches on the Delaware, preached in various pulpits with more than ordinary approval, and in February 1769 took charge, as his father's assistant, of the Lutheran churches at Bedminster and New Germantown,
New Jersey.
In 1771 he accepted a call to the German Lutheran congregation at Woodstock, Virginia, and, in order to secure the privileges of a clergyman of the Established Church, went to England and was ordained priest, April 23, 1772, by the bishop of London. William White was ordained at the same time. Apparently Mühlenberg never received Lutheran ordination, and his status as a Luthero-Episcopalian is of considerable interest. His grandnephew, William Augustus Mühlenberg, may well have had this precedent in mind when he proposed in 1853 that Episcopal ordination, under certain circumstances, be conferred on ministers of other denominations.
Mühlenberg began work at Woodstock in the late summer or early autumn of 1772, and was soon the leader of the community. He was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1774, associated with the leaders of the Revolutionary party, and was made chairman of the committee on public safety for Dunmore County.
In January 1776 he preached his farewell sermon, and at the close of the service cast off his clerical gown, revealing beneath it the uniform of a militia officer. He raised and commanded the 8th Virginia Regiment, composed largely of Germans from the Shenandoah Valley, and gave a good account of himself at the battle of Sullivan's Island in June 1776.
On February 21, 1777, he was commissioned brigadier-general in the Continental Army and ordered north to Morristown, New Jersey. On September 11 his brigade and Weedon's bore the brunt of the fighting at Brandywine, and on October 8 he distinguished himself again at Germantown. He was stationed at Valley Forge that winter; was in charge of the second line of the right wing under Greene at Monmouth Court House, July 28, 1778; was with Putnam's division on the North River later in the year; and during the winter, while Putnam was detailed for other duties, commanded the division.
He was in winter quarters at Middlebrook, New Jersey, 1778 - 1779, and the next summer supported Anthony Wayne in the assault on Stony Point.
In December 1779 Washington sent him to Virginia to take chief command in that state, but heavy snowfalls and impassable roads prevented him from reaching Richmond until March.
In December Major-General Von Steuben succeeded to his position, and Mühlenberg became Steuben's second-in-command. He was engaged in most of the numerous but indecisive actions at this stage of the war, was in charge of the troops on the south bank of the James when Cornwallis was bottled up at Yorktown, and on October 14, 1781, he commanded the American brigade that stormed one of the two British redoubts. In this action Alexander Hamilton, as senior colonel of the brigade, led the advance force.
At the close of the war, on September 30, 1783, Mühlenberg was brevetted major-general. He had proved himself a courageous, level-headed officer, strict in discipline, but vigilant for the welfare and comfort of his men, and possessed of marked executive ability.
After settling his affairs at Woodstock, he removed in 1783 to Philadelphia and made two journeys to Ohio and Kentucky to attend to the military bounty lands assigned to him and several of his friends, among them Von Steuben. His health had been permanently impaired by the war, and he was uneasy about his finances.
A political career, however, was opening to him, for among the Germans of his native state he was a hero second only to Washington. He was elected to the Supreme Executive Council of the state in 1784, was vice-president of Pennsylvania, Franklin being president, 1785 - 1788, and was influential in securing the early adoption of the Federal Constitution. Up to this time his inclinations had been toward the Federalists, but in 1788 the Republicans nominated him and his brother Frederick for congressmen-at-large, and they were triumphantly elected.
Mühlenberg was thus a representative at large in the First Congress, 1789 - 1791, and a representative for Montgomery County in the Third and Sixth congresses, 1793 - 1795 and 1799 - 1801.
In 1790 he was a member of the state constitutional convention. As a presidential elector he voted for Jefferson in 1796 and again as a member of the House of Representatives in 1801. He was president of the German Society of Pennsylvania in 1788 and 1801 - 1807.
On February 18, 1801, he was elected to the United States Senate but resigned a month later in order to accept the appointment as supervisor of revenue for Philadelphia. From 1802 until his death he was collector of customs for Philadelphia. John Peter Gabriel Mühlenberg died on October 1, 1807, at his suburban home at Gray's Ferry on the Schuylkill (now part of Philadelphia) and was buried beside his father at the Augustus Church at Trappe.
Achievements
Politics
In his political views Peter Mühlenberg was a thorough Jeffersonian, but Jeffersonianism in him, as in its author, was not incompatible with a fundamentally aristocratic temper.
Personality
In person Peter Mühlenberg was tall, active of body, strikingly handsome, and courtly in manners.
Connections
On November 6, 1770, Peter Mühlenberg married Anna Barbara Meyer of Philadelphia, who bore him four sons and two daughters and died a year before him.
Major General, 8th Vice-President of Pennsylvania, Member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's at-large district, Member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 4th district, United States Senator from Pennsylvania