The Revolution's Last Men by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594165955
Publisher: Westholme Publishing

4

Alexander Milliner

1st New York Regiment

IN EACH VETERAN’S STORY RELATED BY REV. HILLARD THERE ARE factual errors of the sort that can be attributed to the fading memories of aged men. It is clear that Rev. Hillard did little or no research to corroborate the stories he heard, instead accepting them as fact regardless of apparent discrepancies. In most cases he can be excused for this: his work had a clear purpose, and it was not as a history book but as a memorial. The book was a monument not to young men serving in the American Revolution but to the centenarians who had survived for so long.

In spite of this caveat, it is difficult to accept Rev. Hillard’s memoir of Alexander Milliner. From the first paragraph, it contains inaccuracies so blatant that it is hard to imagine how they could have been accepted at face value. And yet that is what was done by Rev. Hillard and generations of historians who followed, propagating a life not just misremembered but in many ways impossible. In at least one case Rev. Hillard discounted factual information from a credible source in favor of what he had learned during his visit with Milliner. Perhaps it was out of reverence for the veterans who had witnessed the nation’s birth, or perhaps it simply suited his purpose. Like the other soldiers’ chronicles, though, after the facts are separated from the fiction there remains a fine story, one that deserves telling and that may have more in common with the old man’s clouded recollections than is initially apparent.

The first discrepancy is the most blatant and lays the foundation of doubt about what follows. Although he does not quote Milliner directly, Rev. Hillard claims that Milliner was born in March 1760, putting the veteran’s age at 104 when he visited Milliner in 1864. This would not be implausible in and of itself; a man born that year was an ideal age to be a soldier in the American Revolution. But Milliner was not an ordinary soldier; the cachet of his service is that he was a drummer boy, an iconic figure of the war, too young to tote a musket but determined to beat a drum for his country. And yet, just one sentence after giving Milliner’s age, Rev. Hillard wrote that he was “too young at the time of his enlistment for service in the ranks.” Were the age of 104 correct, Milliner would have reached 16 years of age in 1776.

Not all drummers of the era were boys; many adults played that instrument for the army well into middle age, training and tutoring the young ones.1 Milliner’s own words, though, dwell on the fact of his youth when he was in the army. Rev. Hillard wrote that General Washington would “come along and pat him on the head, and call him his boy,” something difficult to imagine had Milliner been 16 in 1776 and 23 when the army disbanded in 1783. Milliner’s own pension deposition in

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