The Curious History of the Purple Heart

The Purple Heart is known among servicemen as the “medal no one tries to earn,” yet hundreds of thousands have been awarded. It is the oldest military decoration still in use in the world, having been established by Gen. George Washington at a moment when he feared losing his army to mutiny or revolt, yet for a century and a half it was all but forgotten, only to be reborn in the 1930s. It was born for the first time 225 years ago today.

By the summer of 1782, most of the fighting in the American Revolution—apart from continued hostilities between the British and French navies in the West Indies—had come to a halt. British diplomats had begun peace talks in Paris with John Jay and Benjamin Franklin, who would later be joined by John Adams. “We are now advanced,” Washington wrote, “to that critical and important crisis when our hands are to be tried at the arts of negotiation.” Until the adversaries signed a treaty, Washington had to hold his army together in case the negotiations failed. To keep the men occupied, he suggested a number of projects: Soldiers should “bring a degree of elegance” to their tents, for example, and try “cutting, cocking, or adding such other decorations as they think proper” to their hats.

Washington knew well the frustrations inherent in the “art of negotiation,” as he had spent the better part of seven years begging the Continental Congress for funds. With the war now winding down, many soldiers faced being discharged without so much as a dime to their names. Some had not been paid once during six years of service. The general feared what might become of “such a Number of Men . . . about to be turned into the World, soured by penury and what they call the ingratitude of the public, involved in debts, without one farthing of Money to carry them home, after having spent the flower of their days, and many of them their patrimonies, in establishing the freedom and Independence of their Country, and suffered every thing human Nature is capable of enduring on this side of death.”

Under the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, Congress could not levy taxes; any military funding had to come from the individual states. But between fall 1781 and May 1782, the national superintendent of finance didn’t receive enough money from the 13 state legislatures to cover a single day’s expenses. Mutinies brewed in the ranks, including one in Connecticut that had to be suppressed by executions. In lieu of payment, Washington searched for a way to reward his bravest and most loyal men. Normally, he would have promoted them, but higher ranks required higher salaries, and Congress could not even begin to compensate the forces at their current positions.

Instead, on August 7, 1782, Washington established the first general decoration in the American army. Any non-commissioned officer or soldier who had served honorably for more than three years would receive a narrow fabric strip (today called a hash mark) for his left sleeve; more than six years earned him two. In his general orders from Newburgh, New York, that day, Washington also described a second, more restricted award. “The General ever desirous to cherish virtuous ambition in his soldiers, as well as to foster and encourage every species of Military merit, directs that whenever any singularly meritorious action is performed, the author of it shall be permitted to wear on his facings over the left breast, the Figure of a Heart in Purple Cloth, or Silk, edged with narrow Lace or Binding. Not only instances of unusual gallantry, but also of extraordinary fidelity and essential service in any way shall meet with a due reward. . . . The road to glory in a patriot army and a free country is thus open to all.”

The Badge of Military Merit, as the award came to be called, was only the second decoration for bravery in the world available to non-commissioned officers and enlisted men. (Russia’s Cross of St. George predated it by 13 years.) In most European armies, medals went to nobles and generals; the rank-and-file were rewarded for heroic deeds with inscribed weapons or, in rare cases, titles and land.

Washington had directed that “before this favour can be conferred on any man, the particular fact, or facts, upon which it is to be grounded must be set forth to the Commander in chief accompanied with certificates from the Commanding officers of the regiment and brigade to which the Candadate for reward belonged, or other incontestable proofs.” (Four days later, he elaborated on what constituted military merit: “A soldier who has once retired from the field of glory forfeits all pretentions to precedence from former services; and a man who has deservedly met an ignominious punishmt. or degredation cannot be admitted a Candadate for any honorary distinction, unless he shall have wiped away the stain his reputation has suffered by some very brilliant achievement, or by serving with reputation after his disgrace the number of years which entitle other men to that indulgence.”) A review board was to assemble September 9 to examine the applications for the Badge of Merit. No record exists of the group’s having ever met.

The next March, Congress received word that the British and American envoys in Paris had signed preliminary articles of peace. Congress ratified their agreement on April 15, and Washington ordered a ceasefire on April 19, eight years to the day after the guns first sounded at Lexington and Concord. With enlistments dwindling, officers deserting, and the Army sure to be disbanded soon, Washington hurried to award the Badge of Merit before his Continentals all disappeared into civilian life. He ordered five officers to evaluate the candidates “as soon as possible.” Less than a week later, the new board returned with the names of two Connecticut sergeants: Elijah Churchill and William Brown.

Churchill, an Enfield native with the 2d Continental Light Dragoons, had led a successful raid against a British supply cache at Fort St. George on Long Island in November 1780; a year later he was among the first to bayonet their way through the defenses at Fort Slongo, Long Island, to capture its stockpiles. Brown, as a member of the 2d Connecticut, led the advance assault on Redoubt No. 10 at Yorktown—“a forlorn hope,” according to the review board, which he conducted with “great bravery, propriety and deliberate firmness.”

Washington personally awarded the badges—small hearts of purple-sprigged silk edged in silver thread, purportedly designed by Pierre L’Enfant, who would later plan the city of Washington, D.C.—to Brown and Churchill at his headquarters in Newburgh on May 3, 1783. Certificates authorized the recipients to “pass and repass all Guards and Military Posts as fully and amply as any Commissioned Officer whatever” and to receive salutes. On June 10, Washington presented a third badge to Daniel Bissell, Jr., another sergeant with the 2d Connecticut. Bissell had posed as a deserter in British-held New York City from August 1781 to September 1782, gathering valuable intelligence on enemy troop movements and strategy.

And that’s where the official chronicle ends. In his original orders, Washington had directed that each recipient’s name be “enrolled in the book of merit which will be kept at the orderly office.” The book, if it ever existed, seems to have become a casualty of the haphazard storage of records in the nineteenth century. Although no other documentation exists, it’s unlikely that Washington awarded only three Badges of Merit, and all to Connecticut residents. For one thing, a fourth badge later turned up in a New Hampshire barn. In the 1920s, an officer of the New Hampshire Society of the Cincinnati found a dust-covered, moth-eaten Continental Army uniform coat hanging limply from a peg in a Deerfield stable. On the left breast was a heart-shaped silk badge, believed by experts to be a genuine Badge of Merit. The original owner is unknown, but he could not have been Churchill (whose badge is in a New York State museum), Bissell (whose badge was destroyed in an 1813 fire), or Brown (whose badge was stolen in 1924 and had a different design).

By the end of June, two thirds of the Continental Army had disbanded. The delegates signed the final peace agreement in September, and Washington resigned on December 13. He wrote that his original order establishing the Badge of Merit was “to be considered as a permanent one,” but the pressures of nation-building seem to have defied him. The award lapsed into disuse after the Revolution, apparently forgotten among the struggles of a new republic.

Decades passed, and America found itself embroiled in an even bloodier conflict. By September 1861, five months into the Civil War, the Chicago Tribune was calling for the reinstatement of the Badge of Merit, or “some such honorary reward for good service,” to boost Union enlistment. In response to the pervading sentiment, Congress established the Medal of Honor ten months later. During World War I, the Army created another reward for bravery, the Distinguished Service Cross. In 1927, the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Charles Summerall, petitioned Congress to “revive the Badge of Military Merit,” but his bill didn’t get anywhere. His successor, Douglas MacArthur, had more luck.

On February 22, 1932—Washington’s two-hundredth birthday—the War Department issued General Order No. 3, which decreed that “the Purple Heart established by General George Washington at Newburgh, August 7, 1782, during the War of the Revolution, is hereby revived out of respect to his memory and military achievements.” The flurry of activity surrounding Washington’s bicentennial had rallied support for MacArthur’s efforts to reestablish the medal, now officially called the Purple Heart. An enamel pendant bearing a bronze profile of Washington replaced the eighteenth-century cloth patch. MacArthur directed that the award be bestowed on World War I soldiers who had committed a “singularly meritorious act of extraordinary fidelity and essential service.”

Army regulations clarified his instructions. In addition to heroism in combat, “a wound which necessitates treatment by a medical officer and which is received in action with an enemy, may, in the judgment of the commander authorized to make the award, be construed as resulting from a singularly meritorious act of essential service.” Thousands of veterans applied for Purple Hearts in the years before World War II. At the time, only soldiers were eligible; President Franklin Roosevelt opened the medal to sailors and Marines in 1942. Until September 1943, the Purple Heart continued to be granted as both a decoration for those injured in action and an award for meritorious service. After Congress established the Legion of Merit, however, the Purple Heart was reserved specifically for wounds.

Since then, the ever-evolving logistics of warfare has inspired addendums to the list of the eligible. Members of peacekeeping forces and prisoners of war, as well as victims of terrorist attacks, may now receive Purple Hearts. “It is the only decoration which is completely intrinsic in that it does not depend upon approval or favor by anyone,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs. “It goes only to those who are wounded in battle, and enemy action alone determines its award." Nevertheless, the decoration became the center of a political maelstrom in 2004 when allegations surfaced that the Democratic candidate for President, the Vietnam veteran John Kerry, had received the first of his three Purple Hearts for a superficial wound. The Navy’s chief investigator found that “the awards approval process was properly followed” and the senior officers who awarded Kerry the medals “correctly followed the procedures in place at the time.”

Because the Purple Heart is often conferred by commanders in the field, reliable statistics on the overall number of recipients do not exist. The figure must total in the hundreds of thousands, however. The Purple Heart may be the award no one tries to get, but few turn it down. “It is a true badge of courage,” MacArthur wrote, ”and every breast that wears it can beat with pride.”