Bethesda Presbyterian Church: Where Camden's War Dead Still Rest

Camden, South Carolina was the most strategically important inland town in the Revolutionary War's Southern theater, and the white-columned church you are passing now holds the remains of one of the war's most beloved foreign volunteers.

On August sixteenth, seventeen eighty, an American force of roughly four thousand troops under General Horatio Gates met the British army of Lord Cornwallis outside Camden. The battle was a catastrophe for the American side. Gates's inexperienced militia collapsed almost immediately; Gates himself rode away on horseback and did not stop for sixty miles. The Continentals who stayed and fought were overwhelmed. Among those who refused to flee was Johann de Kalb, a German-born French general who had crossed the Atlantic to join the American cause. De Kalb took eleven wounds fighting back-to-back in the wreckage of the American lines and died three days later. He was fifty-nine years old.

The Presbyterians of Camden had established their congregation before the war began. The British burned their first sanctuary when they occupied the town in seventeen eighty. A second was built, then a third. The present sanctuary was designed by Robert Mills, the South Carolina-born architect who would go on to design the Washington Monument, and it was completed in eighteen twenty-two in the confident Greek Revival style of the early republic.

Mills also designed the monument in front of the church dedicated to de Kalb. It stands there still, a tall obelisk above the grave of a European soldier who died fighting for a country that was not yet a country, in a cornfield outside a small South Carolina town.

In nineteen eighty-five the church and the monument together were designated a National Historic Landmark. Camden preserves more Revolutionary War sites per square mile than almost any town in America, and this is their anchor.