re: Photographs of American Revolutionary War Patriots

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Weird question, but in the early days of photography, it was common to take pictures of the recently deceased because you needed to sit still for so long. Some of the first few pics look like they might be corpses. Are they?

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Nope.

During the Civil War, a Connecticut minister named E. B. Hillard went on a quest to collect the reminiscences of the Revolutionary War veterans still alive. They had fought as teenagers and lived a century or more, into the age of photography.

So Hillard traveled to their homes, nearly all west of their birthplaces, interviewed them and took pictures of them and their houses. He compiled them into a book called The Last Men of the Revolution, published in Hartford in 1864.

The pictures come from that book.

Some tough old lookin’ cusses, there. Baws one and all.

I've been fascinated by the Revolutionary War lately. Everything from the crossing of the Delaware to the siege of Yorktown.

It's crazy how we were almost done with before the crossing. I guess Washington technically didn't have much to lose with the crossing but the surprise attack on the Hessians was a major turning point.

On YouTube they have the whole George Washington miniseries that played on CBS in the 80s. Overall, pretty good. The acting is average and the historical accuracy isn't far off. Production has some cheesy 80s feel to it but that's about it on negatives.

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He was an apprentice blacksmith in Boston working on the night of December 16, 1773 when a group of young men rushed into the shop, grabbed ashes from the hearth and rubbed them on their faces.

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Behold: tOrigin of blackface

They actually look young for those at their age. Never knew about that, thanks for sharing

fricking whitewalkers ....

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There are a large segment of Americans who view these men as evil. Sad.

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The bulk of the modern Democratic Party views these men as evil. On a side note, I began my Chief Petty Officer indoctrination in Yorktown, VA, in 2017. One of my fellow selectees was a Culinary Specialist from California. As part of our training, we went to the site of the Battle of Yorktown. This selectee had no idea of the significance of the Battle of Yorktown, and when people were taken aback by here lack of knowledge, her response was: I'm from California. They don't teach us this shite."

This is in Arlington, Massachusetts

Samuel Whittemore

Damn, ole Sam Whittemore was a bad mofo.

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People now assume that the entire populace decided to break from England all at once and that is very much not the case.

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Yep. In many ways it was like a civil war. Loyalists and Patriots were both American colonists. It was only the British soldiers who were from England.

Even Tory militia who were uniformed soldiers were American-born, just like the patriot's organized militias.

And the patriots didn't agree on what should be done. Many wanted to simply make peace with Britain again. People didn't really talk about independence at first. It wasn't until Thomas Paine's pamphlet "Common Sense" that people really started considering independence from Britain.

Even loyalists were split in their ideas. Many thought the British did treat the colonists unfairly even though they still supported the crown. Many thought the rebels were a bunch of hooligans and disagreed with their tactics of harassing people and businesses. People had all kinds of different combinations of feelings about the situation in colonial America.

It was a complicated time politically and people had all different motivations and allegiances. But you're right, most people don't know that. Most people think of it in black and white terms and assume there were clear divisions. That wasn't the case.