Last Men of the (American) Revolution

-This article also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.  The palm-sized photographs capture their weathered faces: six men with flowing silver hair and deeply etched wrinkles, clutching canes for support — the last survivors, perhaps, of the Revolutionary War. Beginning in the early 1800s, the U.S. government established a pension system for veterans of the Revolution. As the years passed, federal budget reports showed an ever-dwindling number of them to be still alive and receiving payments. By 1864, eight decades after the Revolution’s end, only a dozen or so veterans survived. That realization sparked another: The time to record the firsthand stories of these men was now, before they, like their comrades, passed into history. So, two Connecticut brothers — photographers Nelson and Roswell Moore — tracked down the known survivors, by that time down to six: William Hutchings, Daniel Waldo, Adam Link, Alexander Millener, Lemuel Cook and Samuel Downing. The Moore brothers captured their portraits as cartes de visite, small albumen prints mounted on cards intended for wide distribution. The Moores didn’t, however, record the veterans’ stories. Enter Elias Brewster Hillard, a Connecticut clergyman who set out to interview the six men and publish…

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