Aeternum

Happy Veterans Day. Here's a strange piece of American history: there were veterans of the Revolutionary War who lived long enough to be photographed. Some of them were still alive during the Civil War. In 1864, with the Civil War raging, a Connecticut minister named E. B. Hillard set out to find the last surviving soldiers of the Revolution. By then almost all of them were gone. The war had ended 81 years earlier. Using pension records, Hillard tracked down a handful of very old men still receiving Revolutionary War pensions. He interviewed them and had them photographed. In 1864 he published a small book called The Last Men of the Revolution, with their pictures and stories. All of them claimed to be around 100 years old or older. Think about what that means. These men had been alive during the reign of King George III. They'd seen Washington. And now they were sitting for photographs, a technology that didn't even exist when they were young, while Lincoln was president and Union and Confederate armies were fighting. One of them was Lemuel Cook of New York. He said he'd enlisted as a teenager and served in the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons, a cavalry unit. He claimed he was at Yorktown and saw Cornwallis's army surrender. He kept his discharge, which he said was signed by George Washington himself. He died in 1866. Historians generally consider him one of the last verified veterans of the Revolutionary War. Some of the others had shakier claims. Age records in the 1700s were spotty, and some of the men may have been younger than they said, or served in ways that were hard to confirm. Memory at 100 is also not a perfect source. But the photos are real. You can find them today. Old faces, deeply lined, staring out from 1864. The last living link to the war that created the country. The pensions outlasted the soldiers. Many veterans married much younger women late in life, and their widows kept collecting Revolutionary War pensions for decades after the last soldier died. Some widows were still on the rolls into the early 1900s. So today, remember the veterans of every American war, including the first one. The men in those photographs had fought for a country that didn't exist yet. They lived long enough to watch it fight to survive.