A salute to America at 250, and to every generation that has served it
This year our country turned 250. As Veterans Day comes around in this anniversary year, I've been thinking about what it means that America is still here, and about the people who kept it here.
For most of us, "the people who served" can feel like names in a history book. Over the past months I set out to learn whether that was true for my own family. I went back through muster rolls, pension files, town histories, gravestones and the letters my family saved. What I found humbled me.
Someone in my family has answered the call in every generation for nearly four hundred years. They stood watch in the first colonial towns before there was a United States. They fought at Bunker Hill and marched with George Rogers Clark. They guarded the prisoners from Yorktown and held the line at Chickamauga. In our own time they kept the tankers, the Black Hawks and the jets ready to fly, from the Cold War through the Gulf War. One of them, my cousin Amanda, is serving right now.
This is their story, in order, from the first one I can find to the one still wearing the uniform. It is my salute to them, to every veteran, and to the country they gave so much to build and keep.
Before there was a country, 1637–1763
The American tradition of the citizen soldier is older than the nation itself. In the first New England towns there was no standing army. Every able man from sixteen to sixty kept a musket and powder in his house, drilled on the town green, took his turn at night watch, and turned out when the alarm gun fired. My earliest ancestors lived that way.
The first I can find is Capt. William Hedge, my 10th great-grandfather. Family histories place him in the Pequot War of 1637, a hard and tragic campaign that ended in the burning of the Pequot fort at Mystic. The war was a struggle over land and trade in the Connecticut River valley. The Pequots were then the strongest nation in southern New England and controlled much of the region's fur and wampum trade, and English settlers pushing in from Massachusetts wanted both. After two English traders were killed, Massachusetts sent a force in 1636 to burn Pequot villages and crops. The Pequots struck back at the English fort at Saybrook and the new town of Wethersfield, and in May 1637 Connecticut declared war. At dawn on May 26, 1637, about ninety Connecticut and Massachusetts men under Capt. John Mason and Capt. John Underhill, with hundreds of Mohegan and Narragansett allies, surrounded the palisaded Pequot village on the Mystic River in what is now Connecticut. It was the first major war of New England, and one of its darkest days. William Hedge later settled on Cape Cod and by 1659 was captain of Yarmouth's militia company, responsible for training its men and calling them out in danger.
The year 1643 brought the colonies together in their first union for common defense: the United Colonies of New England, joining Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven. The colonists felt surrounded and alone. They feared a Native alliance against them after the Pequot War, the Dutch to the west and the French to the north, and with civil war breaking out in England they could expect no help from home. Each colony promised men and money if any member was attacked. It was the first union of English colonies in America. Three of my 10th great-grandfathers appear in that year's records. William Hedge, the same Pequot War veteran, now settled on Cape Cod, was enrolled on Plymouth Colony's list of men able to bear arms. John Barnes of Plymouth was the town's surveyor of arms, going house to house to make sure every man was armed. Matthew Bridge of Cambridge joined the company that is now the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts, the oldest chartered military organization in the Americas. Three men in three towns, each helping build the militia that would defend New England for the next century, and each starting a family tradition of service that their sons would carry on.
In 1655, on the Severn River in Maryland, Thomas Marsh, my 11th great-grandfather, fought for his Puritan neighbors in a battle some historians call the last of the English Civil War. It was a fight over who would govern the colony. That spring an armed force loyal to Maryland's proprietor, Lord Baltimore, marched on Providence, the settlement on the Severn where Thomas and his neighbors had made their homes. Like the militiamen all through this story, he turned out when his neighbors and leaders called. On March 25, 1655, the settlers drove off the attackers, but Thomas was wounded and died of his wounds, giving his life on this continent more than a century before there was a United States. In his day, as in England's own civil war, religion and politics were tangled together.
Then came King Philip's War in 1675 and 1676, the deadliest war of colonial New England. It was a war over land: the Wampanoag leader Metacom, whom the English called King Philip, and his allies rose against the settlers who had been spreading onto their lands for fifty years. It touched nearly every branch of my family, and families went to it together: brothers beside brothers, fathers beside sons. Lt. John Livermore, my 10th great-uncle, marched in its opening campaign. His brother Samuel, my 9th great-grandfather, stood guard in Watertown, whose militia marched out to relieve the town of Sudbury. William Ballard of Andover, also my 9th great-grandfather, served at nearly sixty, and his son John, my 9th great-uncle, served in a company whose captain fell at the Great Swamp Fight. In April 1676 a young Andover cousin, Joseph Abbot, was killed defending his family's farm, the first of his town to die in the war. Two months earlier and farther west, my 10th great-grandfather John Ball, who had left Watertown for the frontier town of Lancaster, held his ground when several hundred warriors struck at dawn on February 10, 1676. His house was overrun before his family could reach the garrison, one of the five homes the town had fortified with heavy walls and loopholes so that neighbors could shelter and fight from inside. He was killed with his wife and youngest child, and two of his children were carried into captivity. The same morning my 9th great-grandfather John Prescott, Lancaster's founder, saw the garrison that bore his name attacked, and his grandson Ephraim Sawyer was killed defending it. Matthew Bridge Jr., my 10th great-uncle, followed his father into the militia and served that year too.
That same year, 1675, Maryland had its own war. Thomas Lamar, my 9th great-grandfather, had come from France and settled in Maryland, where every free man from 16 to 60 had to keep a gun and turn out when the alarm came. That autumn, Maryland and Virginia militia besieged a fort of the Susquehannock people on Piscataway Creek, just south of where Washington, D.C., stands today. We don't know whether Thomas marched, but at 34 he was just the age the colony counted on. His son Thomas Lamar II, my 8th great-grandfather, grew up while mounted rangers patrolled the Potomac frontier. His grandson John Lamar I, my 7th great-grandfather, carried the family south to the Georgia frontier near Augusta, where he was of militia age during the Cherokee War of 1760–61. Generation after generation, the Lamars lived at the edge of settlement, where serving in the militia was simply part of life.
When war with France came in 1689, the first of nearly a century of wars between the two empires, Watertown's militia had another of my ancestors among its officers. Lt. Nathan Fiske, my 9th great-grandfather, was the company's sergeant and then its lieutenant, drilling the men, keeping the watch and choosing who would be pressed for the frontier. He served in the same town company the Livermores had stood in through King Philip's War. In Watertown, as in every New England town, the same families took their turns on the watch, generation after generation. In 1690, after French and Native raiders burned Schenectady and other frontier towns, Massachusetts struck back at the heart of New France. Matthew Bridge Jr. sailed with Sir William Phips's fleet of more than thirty ships and some 2,300 militiamen against Quebec. The attack failed, and storms and smallpox killed hundreds on the way home, but it was the colonies' first great expedition against Canada, and to pay its soldiers Massachusetts printed the first paper money issued in the American colonies. A generation later the frontier had moved west into Worcester County, and so had the family. A Keyes cousin, Maj. John Keyes of Shrewsbury, served as captain and then major of militia there in the 1720s, when raiders struck nearby Rutland in August 1723 and killed its minister and two boys. For the rest of that war, towns like his sent armed scouting parties to patrol the woods for raiders and kept families sheltering in fortified garrison houses, and as the town's militia captain, he was the one who raised the men and kept the watch.
Not every family answered the call with a musket. Thomas Hall and Hannah Hibberd, my 8th great-grandparents, were Quakers who married at the Darby Meeting outside Philadelphia in 1729. Quakers believed war was wrong and refused to bear arms, and Pennsylvania, founded by the Quaker William Penn, had no required militia in their lifetime. Theirs was service by conscience. Their descendants carried the family west to the frontier, where the choice was harder: in the 1780s, their grandson James Hall, my 6th great-grandfather, was living on the Kentucky frontier, where every settler of fighting age belonged to the militia. He died there before 1785.
A century later, as Britain and France fought for the continent, the family was still in the ranks. Capt. John Abbot of Andover, my 6th great-grandfather, commanded his town's militia in 1754. With the French and Indian War beginning, his job was to keep Andover's men trained and armed and to fill the town's quotas of soldiers for the campaigns against the French at Nova Scotia, Crown Point and Lake George. In 1755 John Swearingen, my 6th great-grandfather, served with the Maryland troops when General Braddock marched west with a young George Washington on his staff. Braddock's army crossed the Potomac at the Swearingen family's own ferry.
The birth of a nation, 1775–1783
When the colonies took up arms for independence, my family was there from the first summer to the last prisoner guard, in at least seven of the original thirteen colonies.
William Bales, my 5th great-grandfather, stood at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, with Col. James Reed's New Hampshire regiment. They held the rail fence on the American left, an ordinary farm fence of posts and rails that ran from the hill down to the Mystic River. They stuffed it with fresh-cut hay to make a rough wall, crouched behind it to keep the British from marching around the hill along the riverbank, and broke the British charges until their powder ran out. Up the slope from them, the earthwork redoubt on Breed's Hill, a small square fort of packed dirt with walls about six feet high, was commanded by a cousin, Col. William Prescott of Pepperell, my 2nd cousin 8 times removed through the Prescotts of Lancaster. His men had dug it through the night and threw back two British assaults before their ammunition gave out on the third. Cousins held the redoubt and the rail fence on the same hill that day. That same December his neighbor and my other 5th great-grandfather, William Abbot, marched to Winter Hill to hold Washington's lines around Boston through the winter. He went out again in 1777 for the Saratoga campaign, when New England's militia poured into New York to help trap a British army invading from Canada, a victory that brought France into the war on America's side, and again in 1780 when the French army landed in Rhode Island. The Keyes brothers of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, answered too. Thomas Keyes, my 6th great-uncle, served in the Massachusetts company that turned out on the Lexington Alarm, the call that raced from town to town on April 19, 1775, after Paul Revere and the other riders galloped through the night to warn that British troops were marching on Lexington and Concord, and the first shots of the Revolution were fired.
Not all of their courage was on the battlefield. In June 1776, a month before the Declaration of Independence, New Hampshire asked every grown man to sign a pledge to oppose the British "at the Risque of our Lives and Fortunes, with Arms." Had the war been lost, that list would have named every signer a rebel. In the town of Wilton, New Hampshire, ninety-seven men signed and only two refused. Among the names are William Abbot, William Bales, three of William's brothers, two Ballards and two Keyes brothers. When I read that list, I saw my family deciding together, in one small town, to become Americans. In Andover, Massachusetts, my 6th great-grandfather Capt. John Abbot, past seventy and too old to march, served on the town's Committee of Safety. When royal government collapsed, committees like his kept the towns running: they gathered powder and supplies, raised and equipped the men who marched, enforced the boycott of British goods and kept watch on Loyalists.
In Virginia, Charles Duncan, my 6th great-grandfather, answered the call in Culpeper County. Culpeper's men were already famous. In 1775 they formed the Culpeper Minute Men, ready to march "at a minute's notice," under a white flag showing a coiled rattlesnake with the words "Liberty or Death" and "Don't Tread on Me." They didn't invent the rattlesnake: Benjamin Franklin had drawn the colonies as a snake in 1754, and the yellow "Don't Tread on Me" flag we know today was designed by Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina and first flown in early 1776. But theirs was one of the first such flags carried into battle, at Great Bridge near Norfolk in December 1775, the first Revolutionary battle fought in Virginia. Charles served in the Culpeper militia under Capt. James Browning, and Browning was his wife's family name, so he may have marched with his in-laws. His father, William Robert Duncan III, my 7th great-grandfather, then in his eighties, is also honored as a patriot of the Revolution.
Up the coast in Maine, then part of Massachusetts, Lt. Isaac Hall, my 6th great-granduncle, sailed with the Harpswell company on the Penobscot Expedition of 1779. The British had built a fort at what is now Castine, Maine, and Massachusetts sent about 40 ships and 1,000 militiamen to drive them out, with Paul Revere himself commanding the artillery. The siege failed. When British warships arrived, the Americans burned their own fleet and walked home through the woods. It was the worst American naval defeat until Pearl Harbor. Isaac survived it and lived until 1815.
In New Jersey, the war came right to the door of John Schooley, my 5th great-grandfather. His family lived near Middlebrook and Bound Brook, where Washington's army camped in the hills in 1777 and again through the winter of 1778–79. John served in the New Jersey militia, and fifty years later, as an old man in Ohio, he received a pension for it. His daughter Hannah was born at Middlebrook the year after the war ended, and she married into the Reeders, another New Jersey family who helped settle the country around Cincinnati.
The Reeders brought another patriot story into the family. Rev. John Gano, my 6th great-granduncle and brother of my 6th great-grandmother Susannah Gano Reeder, was a Baptist preacher who went to war as a chaplain. He stood steady under fire at the Battle of White Plains in 1776, marched with the troops into the wilderness of western New York in 1779, and at the end of the war George Washington chose him to offer the prayer that marked the peace. A family tradition says he even baptized Washington, though historians doubt it. Two of Susannah's sons, Joseph and William Reeder, served as privates in the Revolution, and Gano's son Daniel served as a captain in Col. Lewis Dubois's New York regiment, the same regiment as his cousin Joseph Reeder: uncles, nephews and cousins all answering the same call.
Out on the western frontier, the thin edge of settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains where colonial farms met the hunting grounds of the Shawnee, Delaware and Mingo nations, John Swearingen, my 6th great-grandfather, helped form the West Augusta committee at Pittsburgh. When news of Lexington and Concord reached the frontier in May 1775, the backcountry settlers met there and chose the committee to stand with Massachusetts, rally the frontier behind the American cause, organize its militia, gather supplies and keep watch on Loyalists, and he was named to it. His son, Lt. Van "Kentucky Van" Swearingen, my 5th great-grandfather, marched with George Rogers Clark in 1778 to capture Kaskaskia and win the Old Northwest for the new nation. Kaskaskia was a French village on the Mississippi held by the British, and from their fort at Detroit the British were sending Native raiding parties against the Kentucky settlements. Clark's small force took the town without firing a shot, struck at the source of the raids, and gave the United States its claim to the lands that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, Lt. Adam Strohecker, my 5th great-grandfather, was in camp at Newtown, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware River from Trenton, in the cold January after Washington's victories at Trenton and Princeton. Lt. Jacob Kissinger, my 6th great-grandfather, took his commission in 1777, the year the British marched on Philadelphia. As a lieutenant of Berks County militia, his job was to muster, drill and supply his company's men as Pennsylvania called them out in turns to reinforce Washington's army, guard its supplies and screen the countryside against British foraging parties through the winter of Valley Forge. Conrad Walters Jr., also my 6th great-grandfather, helped build and garrison a frontier fort in 1776: Fort Liberty, a log stockade on Capt. Thomas Gaddis's homestead two miles south of present-day Uniontown in southwestern Pennsylvania, where settlers could take shelter from raids.
In the South the war was long and cruel. After the British captured Savannah in 1778, Georgia's patriots had no army left to protect them, so many fought on as partisans: small bands of mostly mounted militia who struck by surprise with raids and ambushes against the British and their Loyalist neighbors, then melted back into the countryside. Capt. John Lamar II, my 6th great-grandfather, who had raised a company of 42 men at Augusta on August 30, 1775, four months after Lexington, to serve Georgia's revolutionary Committee of Safety, and later served as a captain of Georgia militia, was one of them. In the same struggle, Capt. Sherwood Bugg, my 7th great-grandfather, led a troop of dragoons in Jackson's Georgia Legion. Dragoons were soldiers who rode to battle and could fight in the saddle with sabers and pistols or dismount and fight on foot, and Lt. Col. James Jackson raised his legion in 1781 to drive the British out of the Georgia countryside. On November 2, 1781, Jackson led about 140 men in a raid on British posts along the Ogeechee River near Savannah. British cavalry struck back, and Sherwood, at sixty-one, was captured with five of his men. He was held on a British prison ship at the mouth of the Savannah River until near the end of the war. He made it home, starved and sick, and died a few days later.
After Yorktown, thousands of British and German prisoners had to be guarded. Elder Levi Ashbrook, a Baptist preacher and my 7th great-grandfather, stood guard over them at Winchester, Virginia, with his nephew. That same year Lorentz Fix Jr., my 5th great-grandfather, guarded more than a thousand German and British prisoners at the camp outside Reading, Pennsylvania. They were Burgoyne's men, the army surrendered at Saratoga four years before, when my 5th great-grandfather William Abbot had marched with the New Hampshire militia that helped trap them. So the same army links both sides of my family: on my father's side, one 5th great-grandfather helped capture it; on my mother's side, another stood guard over it.
When the fighting ended, the work of building a country began. In 1783 William Abbot helped write New Hampshire's constitution, which is still in force today. Ten years later, at his death, he had a newborn son, Isaac. Isaac's son, my 3rd great-grandfather Sgt. David Sears Abbot, would answer Lincoln's call in 1864, nearly ninety years after Bunker Hill, as a 44-year-old farmer who signed on for a hundred days and wore a sergeant's stripes in the 135th Ohio, guarding the railroad that fed Washington. His story comes later in this post.
Westward with the republic, 1780–1860
The young country grew west, and my family went with it, still serving at every new edge.
Conrad Walters Jr., my 6th great-grandfather, took his family down the Ohio to Phillips' Fort in Kentucky about 1780 and helped defend it through the border wars. Family tradition says he was once captured and released, and that his father, my 7th great-grandfather Hans Conrad Walters Sr., died at the fort in 1792. In Georgia, Capt. John Lamar II was still answering the call. His service ran at least sixteen years, from the company he raised at Augusta in 1775 to the rolls of Col. Dooley's militia battalion in 1791. In 1790, local histories say, he built a log fort on a high hill near the Hudson River, in what is now Madison County. It stood at the edge of Cherokee country and gave settlers a refuge if trouble came. Its great logs were cut with gun ports, and one still bore the carved date "1790." No fighting there is known. The fort was still standing in 1942, and the crossroads community around it still carries the name Fort Lamar.
Edward Lynch, my 5th great-grandfather, came from Ireland to Philadelphia as a boy of about fifteen. In the family's own words, he "joined up with Anthony Wayne and fought seven years." Gen. "Mad Anthony" Wayne was a Pennsylvania hero of the Revolution, famous for storming the British fort at Stony Point in 1779. After the war, the young nation nearly lost the Ohio country. A confederacy of Native nations destroyed two American armies there, in 1790 and 1791. The second defeat, under Gen. Arthur St. Clair, remains one of the worst in the Army's history. In 1792 Washington called Wayne back to build a real army from scratch: the Legion of the United States, recruited largely in Pennsylvania. Wayne drilled it for two years, won the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, and secured the treaty that opened Ohio to settlement. In 1796 the Legion became the regular U.S. Army. An immigrant teenager helped build the army that still defends us.
In the next generation, Maj. Ezra Bales, my 5th great-uncle, followed his father, Capt. William Bales, into the militia and rose to major in the New Hampshire militia. In those years the young country kept only a tiny standing army, so the town militia was its real defense. Every able man from 18 to 40 was enrolled, drilled on muster days and kept his musket ready. As a major, Ezra was the third-ranking officer of his regiment. When war with Britain came again in 1812, New Hampshire called its militia out to guard Portsmouth and the coast. Then, in 1832, a young man named Abraham Lincoln was elected captain of a company of Illinois volunteers in the Black Hawk War. That spring the Sauk leader Black Hawk led more than a thousand Sauk, Meskwaki and Kickapoo people, families included, back across the Mississippi to reclaim homelands in Illinois. Those lands had been signed away in a treaty they disputed. Illinois called out its militia. The short, tragic war ended that August at the Battle of Bad Axe in Wisconsin, where many of Black Hawk's people were killed trying to recross the river. Lincoln saw no battle, but he helped bury the dead, and years later he wrote that being chosen captain by his neighbors gave him more pleasure than any success he'd had since. Lincoln was my second cousin, five times removed, and he did not go alone. His cousin John Hanks, who later carried the famous fence rails that made Lincoln "the Rail Splitter," served with the Illinois volunteers in that war too. On the Lamar side, Mirabeau B. Lamar, a cousin from the Georgia Lamars, went west to Texas just as American settlers there rose against Mexico. He joined the Texan army as a private. After a daring rescue under fire the day before the Battle of San Jacinto, he was given command of the cavalry. On April 21, 1836, he led them in the eighteen-minute battle that captured Mexico's president, Santa Anna, and won Texas its independence. Lamar went on to become vice president and then, from 1838 to 1841, the second president of the Republic of Texas. He founded its new capital at Austin and set aside land for public schools and a university, which earned him the title "father of Texas education." His presidency also brought harsh campaigns against the Cherokee and Comanche, and heavy debts. Texas joined the United States in 1845, and when war with Mexico followed, Lamar fought under the American flag at Monterrey in 1846. In one lifetime he helped carry the country's border to the Rio Grande.
To preserve the Union, 1861–1865
When the nation came apart, the grandsons and great-grandsons of Revolutionary soldiers answered Lincoln's call. Four of my direct ancestors served the Union.
On November 21, 1861, the twins Elisha and Elijah Lamar, my 3rd great-grandfather and my 4th great-uncle, enlisted together in the 49th Indiana. Born in 1841 in Spencer County, Indiana, they grew up near Little Pigeon Creek, where Lincoln himself had grown up. They came from a long line of frontier militiamen. Their grandfather Samuel Lamar, my 5th great-grandfather, lived in Kentucky during the Indian wars of the 1790s, when every man from 18 to 45 was enrolled. Even their home county was named for a militia captain, Spier Spencer, killed at Tippecanoe in 1811. Brothers who had done everything together, they signed up on the same day, in the same company. They marched side by side from Cumberland Gap to Vicksburg. They held the Gap in 1862 and made the hard two-week retreat through the mountains when it was cut off. Then came five battles in six months: the failed assault on the bluffs at Chickasaw Bayou, where their regiment lost 56 men; the capture of Arkansas Post; and Grant's spring drive at Port Gibson, Champion Hill and Big Black River Bridge. After that came the siege of Vicksburg itself, with its bloody assaults of May 19 and 22, until the city surrendered on July 4, 1863. Elijah died of pneumonia in July 1863 at St. Louis, weeks after Vicksburg fell, and lies at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. He never fell in battle. Like about two of every three Union soldiers who died in the war, he was taken by disease, far from home, after surviving the siege. His twin went on without him. Elisha re-enlisted and served nearly four years, coming home a corporal with an injury he carried the rest of his life.
Pvt. James William Swearingen, my 3rd great-grandfather and Kentucky Van's grandson, enlisted in the 82nd Indiana in the summer of 1862. That New Year's he was at Stones River in Tennessee, where for three freezing days, December 31 to January 2, the two armies lost nearly a third of their men killed, wounded or captured. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the war for its size. The Union held the field, and the victory came just as the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, giving the North hope after a winter of defeats; Lincoln wrote that the country could hardly have lived over a loss there. Nine months later James was at Chickamauga in Georgia, the largest battle in the West and second only to Gettysburg in its toll. On September 20, 1863, the Confederates broke through the Union center and much of the army fled. James's regiment fought its way back to Snodgrass Hill and was the first of its division to form there. That line held until nightfall and covered the army's escape to Chattanooga, earning Gen. George Thomas the name "Rock of Chickamauga." James was discharged for disability that December.
In 1864 Sgt. David Sears Abbot, my 3rd great-grandfather, was a 44-year-old Ohio farmer when he answered the call for "Hundred Days Men." That spring the governors of Ohio and four other Midwestern states offered Lincoln some 85,000 men who would serve for just one hundred days. They would take over guard and garrison duty behind the lines, freeing battle-hardened veterans for Grant's and Sherman's great campaigns of 1864. Ohio sent more than 35,000 men from its National Guard, many of them farmers and older men like David who left their fields at planting time. He guarded the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in West Virginia and was on the line when Jubal Early's Confederates struck that July. Early, a Virginian and one of Robert E. Lee's corps commanders, had been sent north with about 15,000 men. His mission was to clear the Shenandoah Valley and threaten Washington itself, hoping to pull Grant's troops away from the siege of Petersburg. On July 3, his cavalry hit the regiment's posts. At North Mountain Depot, two of its companies, fewer than 200 men, held out for about three hours before they were surrounded and forced to surrender. About 166 were sent to Confederate prisons, including Andersonville, and only about half of them came home. David's Company E was posted elsewhere on the line and fell back with the rest of the regiment to hold Maryland Heights above Harpers Ferry. A week later Early's army reached the edge of Washington, where Lincoln himself came under fire at Fort Stevens before the Confederates withdrew. David was the grandson of two Revolutionary soldiers: William Abbot, who held Washington's lines at Winter Hill, and Capt. William Bales, who stood at the rail fence at Bunker Hill. Eighty-nine years after Bunker Hill, their grandson stood guard to preserve the Union they had fought to create.
Another Ohioan in the family answered Lincoln's call too. Capt. Nathaniel Reeder, my 3rd great-granduncle, had already given his country twelve years in the U.S. Navy, under a commission signed in the days of President Andrew Jackson. When the Civil War came, he was about fifty, and he went again, this time as captain of Company D of the 35th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. He was the brother of my 3rd great-grandmother, Mary Caroline Reeder. A generation later his niece, Ella Follon, married Sgt. David Sears Abbot's son Alvin, so two families that each sent a man to save the Union became one.
In October 1864, Confederate General Sterling Price invaded Missouri with about 12,000 cavalry in a last great bid to seize the state for the Confederacy and shake Northern faith in Lincoln weeks before the 1864 election. When he turned west along the Missouri River toward Kansas City, Kansas braced for invasion. Only a year earlier, Quantrill's raiders had burned Lawrence and killed nearly 150 men and boys, and no one doubted what could happen again. Gov. Thomas Carney called every able man in Kansas to arms. Nearly 20,000 militiamen answered, most of them farmers who left their harvest to march for the border. William Tucker of Wabaunsee County, my 4th great-grandfather, was enrolled among them, likely in the regiment raised from Wabaunsee and Riley counties. The militia dug in along the Big Blue River east of Kansas City, guarded the fords and river crossings, and stood beside the volunteer regiments of Gen. Samuel Curtis's Army of the Border. On October 22 they bought precious time in a hard fight on the Big Blue, where one militia regiment was overrun and lost dozens killed and captured. The next day at Westport, the largest battle ever fought west of the Mississippi, Curtis's army, militia and all, held Price in front while Union cavalry struck him from behind. Price's army broke and fled south along the state line, and the last Confederate threat to Kansas was over. More than eighty years earlier, William's great-grandfather, Elder Levi Ashbrook, had stood guard over the prisoners from Yorktown.
Eighty years after Lorentz Fix guarded prisoners at Reading, his great-grandson John Robert Fix, my 3rd great-uncle and brother of my 2nd great-grandfather, enlisted in July 1861 and gave four full years to the 20th Indiana, one of the hardest-fighting regiments in the Army of the Potomac. In March 1862 his regiment pulled drowning sailors from the surf at Hampton Roads after the Confederate ironclad Virginia destroyed two wooden warships. The next day they watched the Monitor fight her, the first battle between ironclads, which changed naval warfare forever. That summer they fought through the Seven Days before Richmond, then at Second Bull Run, where their colonel was killed, and at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. On July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg, they held the Rose Woods near Devil's Den against Longstreet's assault on the Union left. They lost their colonel again and nearly a third of their men, but they bought time for the line behind them to hold. Then came the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and ten months in the trenches at Petersburg, the long, grinding campaign that finally broke Lee's army. John stayed to the end and came home in July 1865. Another kinsman, John Hanks, my first cousin six times removed and Lincoln's own cousin, was 59 when the war began, too old to enlist. He went anyway. In 1861 he signed on as wagon master of Company A, 21st Illinois Infantry. That was the regiment Ulysses S. Grant had just been given, his first command of the war and the first step on the road to commanding all the Union armies. For about two years John kept the regiment's wagons of food, ammunition and baggage rolling through Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi. In that time his regiment fought at Stones River and Chickamauga, the same fields where James Swearingen fought. Rheumatism finally forced his discharge in 1864. A lifelong Democrat, John had carried the famous rails into the 1860 convention for his cousin, not his party. Now he followed that cousin's war down the supply roads.
Into the American century
For almost three hundred years, nearly every war my family fought was fought close to home, on our own frontiers and our own fields, for our own towns and our own Union. The twentieth century changed that. When the United States entered the Great War in April 1917, Americans were called by the millions to fight an ocean away. The country built a national army almost from nothing, drafting 2.8 million men and training them in vast new camps across the land, and nearly two million crossed to France. America had stepped onto the world stage, and it would never step off. The sons and grandsons of farmers who had guarded frontier forts and railroad bridges would now be sent wherever the world needed them.
In the summer of 1918, Elmer Falk, my great-grandfather, left the small town of Alma, Kansas, and was inducted into the Army at Kansas City. He trained at Camp Funston with Battery F of the 28th Field Artillery, learning to handle horse-drawn guns for a war in France. Family tradition says he played in the band, and one of his daughters kept his bugle. Most likely he was Battery F's bugler. In an army without radios, the bugle was the battery's voice. It sounded the day from Reveille to Taps and carried orders across the noise of drill and battle. In horse-drawn artillery, the bugler rode beside the battery commander to sound his signals, so Elmer spent much of his time in the saddle with the officers. A family letter recalls he was once thrown from his horse while riding with them, and he refused to go to the hospital. Influenza was the other enemy that year. Camp Funston had seen one of the first recorded outbreaks of what became the Spanish flu, back in March 1918, and that fall a far deadlier wave swept through the crowded Army camps. The pandemic would kill an estimated 50 million people worldwide and some 675,000 Americans, and more American soldiers died of disease, mostly flu and pneumonia, than in battle. Elmer caught it and was sick for two weeks just before the Armistice. He was one of the lucky ones who recovered. The war ended before his division sailed. In 1942, at 49, he registered again in the "old man's draft" of World War II, ready if his country needed him.
Elmer's story is the bridge in my family between the old wars and the new. He trained with horses. His grandson would go to war with jet tankers.
A new kind of service
After World War II, service changed again. For the first time, America kept a large standing military in peacetime, through the long watch of the Cold War. In 1973 the draft ended, and from then on everyone who served chose to. The National Guard, heir to the old town militias my ancestors drilled in, became a front-line force that could be sent anywhere in the world within days. The muskets, horses and bugles gave way to jet tankers, satellites, computers and secure networks. The tools would be unrecognizable to William Bales at the rail fence in 1775, but the oath is much the same. The most recent chapters of this story aren't in any archive. They're the people in my life: the cousins I grew up with, the uncle I looked up to, and my cousin Amanda, whom I watched grow up to become an airman and an amazing woman.
On the Lamar side, my cousins Craig and Curtis Beadle both enlisted in the 1980s, as the Cold War was ending, and made the military their careers. Like me, they descend from Cpl. Elisha Lamar, the Civil War twin who marched to Vicksburg; he was their great-great-grandfather. Craig served in the Army as a mechanic on Black Hawk helicopters, the workhorse of Army aviation. He spent years in Germany, where American soldiers stood guard through the last of the Cold War, served in Desert Storm, and finished his years back in the States in Georgia. His brother Curtis chose the Air Force. He became a crew chief, the airman responsible for keeping an aircraft ready to fly. His work took him to Las Vegas and to the Air Force's famously secret test site in the Nevada desert, Area 51. More than 150 years after Elisha came home, his family was still in uniform.
My uncle, Ron Falk, Elmer's grandson, served more than thirty years in the Air Force, starting in Hawaii during the Vietnam War. He spent many years with the 190th Air Refueling Group of the Kansas Air National Guard, the "Kansas Coyotes," at Forbes Field in Topeka. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the Coyotes' first tanker took off from Forbes within days, and the 190th was the first unit to arrive in Saudi Arabia for Desert Shield. Through Desert Storm, the Coyotes formed the core of the largest air refueling wing ever assembled, keeping our fighters and bombers in the air.
Ron wasn't the last Falk at Forbes. My cousins Josh and Jared Falk, his nephews, carried the family's service into a new century. The 2000s brought a different kind of service: the nation was at war far from home, and Guard units like theirs were called on as never before. Josh and Jared each gave about twenty years to the same wing, and for several years uncle and nephews served there side by side. It is one of my favorite things in this whole story: three Falks, two generations, one Kansas unit.
Service is part of my own household, too. My husband, Michael Crince, served in the Air Force in the early 1990s, in a communications unit at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska. Offutt was home to the command that oversaw America's nuclear forces, where reliable communications mattered as much as any aircraft. A generation later, Amanda is doing the same kind of work.
And today, my cousin Tsgt Amanda Stansbury, Ron's granddaughter, is serving in the Oklahoma Air National Guard with the 138th Fighter Wing at the Tulsa Air National Guard Base. The wing flies F-16 Fighting Falcons, and its federal mission is to maintain combat-ready forces that can deploy and support military operations anywhere in the world. Amanda works with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which provides the communications and network systems the Department of Defense relies on worldwide. That work keeps our troops informed and safe. She is the first woman in my family to serve, and she carries nearly four hundred years of family service forward. Amanda, and every one of you serving right now: thank you. We see you.
What it means to me
When I started this, I expected to find a soldier or two. I found a thread that runs through my family for almost four centuries, through every war this country has fought for its life. It runs through farmers and merchants, a preacher, an Irish immigrant boy, a pair of twins, a Kansas bugler and the first woman in my family to serve.
Not all of that service was done with a musket. Some of my ancestors served by feeding and supplying the soldiers. William Robert Duncan III, my 7th great-grandfather, was nearly ninety when he gave food and goods to Virginia's troops in the last hard years of the Revolution, and he is honored as a patriot for it. In the War of 1812, Nathaniel Reeder, my 4th great-grandfather, and his brother-in-law kept the Kentucky volunteers marching north through Cincinnati supplied from their store. Some served through public life. His father, Daniel Reeder, my 5th great-grandfather, stood for election to the first legislatures of the Northwest Territory and the new state of Ohio. Some served by faith, like the chaplain John Gano, and some by conscience, like my Quaker Halls, who would not bear arms at all. It all counts.
Most of them were not famous. They were ordinary people who took their turn at the watch, signed their names when it was dangerous, marched when they were called, and came home to plant their fields, if they came home at all. Some, like Thomas Marsh, Joseph Abbot, Sherwood Bugg and Elijah Lamar, did not. That is how this country was built and how it has been kept: not by a few heroes, but by generation after generation of ordinary people who decided it was worth it.
In this 250th year, I am prouder than ever to be an American, and prouder still to come from people who served it. My love for this country isn't abstract. It has names, and now I know them.
This Veterans Day, if you have a veteran in your family, ask them their story and write it down. If you know someone serving now, thank them. And if you're wearing the uniform today, know that you stand in a line that reaches back to the first watch fires on these shores.
To every veteran, past and present: thank you. You are the reason we have a 250th birthday to celebrate.
A note on the research: These stories come from muster rolls, pension files, colonial and town records, published histories, gravestones and family papers, gathered in my family's service book. Where a story rests on family tradition rather than a record, I have said so. If you share any of these ancestors, I'd love to hear from you.