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Stories of Revolutionary War veterans revealed in new retirement project

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Tunis Cole was clearly proud of his service in the war and his role in the fight for American freedom.

And the Revolutionary War veteran hoped he could have some financial security in his old age. So Cole wrote to the US government asking for a pension made possible by a series of laws passed in the 19th century.

“…Having been encouraged to do so, (Cole) prays the government to consider favorably his claims and grant him something to relieve his wants and give him comfort in this autumn of his earthly existence, that he may open his eyes close in gratitude to a nation to whose altar of Liberty he devoted many of the best years of his youth…”

Cole’s 1848 pension application, like the applications of thousands of other veterans, was written by hand – sometimes by the vets themselves, sometimes by their widows, sometimes by friends who helped the elderly farmers and traders who had taken up arms for their new country .

Because the day’s data was not always reliable or consistent, many veterans had to add details to prove their service: their units, their deployments and leaves, their comrades and commanding officers, the places where they fought, even the horrors where they fought . witnessed.

Now, nearly 250 years later, Americans are hearing a new call to take up arms. Citizen archivists are needed to transfer original pension applications from the nation’s first veterans into a massive database – and to help reveal their extraordinary and untold stories.

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‘America’s First Veterans’ and the Nation’s 250th Anniversary

The joint effort between the National Park Service and the National Archives focuses on the approximately 2 million pages of handwritten Revolutionary War pension applications that have already been scanned and digitized. Organizers want a database that can be searched by battles, by names, by dates and more.

Retirees’ applications can be as short as a few pages or as long as 100 pages, Suzanne Isaacs and Nancy Sullivan, community managers at the National Archives, told USA TODAY. There are about 83,000, Isaacs said, and the NPS and the Archives are really just at the beginning of what will likely be a multi-year project.

So far, 52,360 pages have been transcribed and 1,602 pensions completed, according to Jason Wickersty of the National Park Service.

The target? To have as many documents as possible transcribed by citizen volunteers before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, so that National Park Service guides can include some of the stories in their tours of historic sites and so that historians and genealogists can gain insight into searchable database with information.

“It’s a huge project,” Isaacs said. “But these are America’s first veterans,” men who can offer a glimpse into everyday circumstances. Their widows’ accounts also offer a glimpse into life on the home front, Sullivan said. Some vets couldn’t write, so they dictated their stories to others, signing the applications with an “X” or other mark.

Black soldiers and Native Americans also served, and their stories will help the Park Service tell a much more complete story, Wisckersty said.

Isaacs and Sullivan, archivists but not historians, said they learned a lot, even in the early stages of the project.

‘A particularly revealing snapshot’ of soldiers’ lives

Wickersty is the National Park Service’s liaison for the pension project and one of the people who came up with the idea of ​​using volunteers to transcribe accounts. As a New Jersey native originally interested in the Civil War, he realized he was surrounded by Revolutionary War history. He turned his attention to that war and, working with fellow NPS coordinators Joanne Blacoe and Cris Constantine, as well as Isaacs and Sullivan, began transcribing.

After the War of 1812, a crisis brewed among America’s first veterans, and many of them fell into poverty as they grew older, he said. President James Monroe, himself a veteran, backed the first service-based pension in 1818. Between 1818 and 1836, four major pension laws would be passed to expand access to more veterans and their dependents. After an initial lump sum, enlisted soldiers received $96 annually and officers received $240.

Pensions were intended for veterans in need, and in 1820 pension rolls were declared invalid to keep out wealthy vets. Within months, most veterans reapplied but were required to provide proof of their financial status. Therefore, the second round of applications included not only the vets’ experiences during the war, but also lists of possessions (down to individual pieces of furniture and household items in some cases). cases), family members and dependents, information about their health and more.

“This is a particularly revealing snapshot of America’s first veterans in their 60s, how hard the strain was on their bodies and how little they improved in their position,” Wickersty said. “Most of the veterans were afflicted with rheumatism, and a number owned nothing but the clothes they wore and a single smoking pipe.”

An 1832 law opened entry to militia members, and not just those who had served in the Continental Army. But because militias typically did not issue discharge papers, veterans had to give oral testimony and provide witnesses, making their accounts even more detailed. Retirees were paid pro rata depending on their rank and length of service, ranging from $20 for a private who had served six months to the highest paid retiree, William Gamble of New Jersey, a major who was paid $600 a year.

The 1832 cohort of retirees, Wickersty said, extends “the story of the American Revolution beyond the places where it was fought, and shows how mobile the revolutionary generation was as the United States expanded westward.”

‘Paperwork done in their own words’

Isaacs said veterans without discharge papers — whether lost or never existed — provide the most detail. “It’s a lot, and it’s paperwork done in their own words. They will mention names, talk about their visit to General Washington or Lafayette, talk about what they saw.”

Isaac Quigley was in Burlington County, New Jersey, in 1778, when he served. But by the time he filed for a pension in the 1840s, he was living in Michigan. Some veterans moved as far west as Missouri and Mississippi.

Later changes in the law also expanded the eligibility of widows, so applications continued: one widow, Sarah Shephard, was still required to pay money when she died in 1863. Four years later, her son Ezekiel, an officer in the Union regiment in West Virginia, hired a man. lawyer to claim the money, and his lawyer had to prove that neither Ezekiel nor his mother had supported the Confederacy.

Sarah Martin, who lived on the front lines in Middlesex County, New Jersey, while her husband served, wrote about British soldiers storming into her home and threatening to shoot her and her son if she did not feed them. She wrote that her house was plundered several times by British troops during the war.

“This was life for her, living in fear of the knock on the door,” Wickersty said. “Is it her husband coming home, or someone threatening to burn down her house and kill her children?”

Some widows, Sullivan said, were unsure of their exact wedding dates or did not have access to their church’s records, in part because they had moved or their pastor had died. So they tore pages from their family Bibles, often the only written record many families kept of their ancestry, and included them with their application.

Wickersty has transcribed a veteran’s account that highlights a little-known piece of history from one of the United States’ most famous historical sites: Samuel Waples was captured during the Battle of Germantown and held captive in a long room on the second floor of Independence Hall – then the Pennsylvania Statehouse, site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence – during the British occupation of Philadelphia in 1777. (He did not stay there long and escaped shortly after his capture.)

These are just some of the stories they are uncovering, and they hope that more volunteer transcribers and civilian archivists will uncover more stories like this, stories that aren’t always heard by generals or historians.

“It’s really cool to have people be a part of it,” Wickersty said. “How many times can you say you’ve worked on something that’s part of the National Archives?”

Contact Phaedra Trethan via email at [email protected], at X (formerly Twitter) @wordsbyphaedra, or on Threads @by_phaedra

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