Little else was owed to common soldiers-not even honor.įollowing British practice, Congress provided modest pensions for men disabled in service. Officers, in their view, might have been motivated by enlightened patriotism, but enlisted men had served for pay. Cultural traditions inherited from Britain, where common soldiers were held in low regard, shaped the way many post-war Americans thought about veterans. The American republic owed its existence to them, but Americans found it difficult to acknowledge that debt, much less honor their service. Those who survived the war became America’s first veterans-the world’s first veterans of an army of free men. As many as twenty-five thousand men were disabled by disease, wounds, or injuries sustained in service. Records are too fragmentary for us to be sure. The total number of soldiers who died from disease may exceed fifty thousand. At least seventeen thousand soldiers died of disease or in accidents. About seven thousand were killed in battle. Between eighty and ninety thousand of them served in the Continental Army, an all volunteer army of citizens. Over a quarter of a million American men served in the armed forces that won our independence. Speech of Representative Henry Hubbard, 1832.A Pensioner of the Revolution by John Neagle, 1830-see also the museum database file on A Pensioner of the Revolution.how the treatment of Revolutionary War veterans in the 1820s and 1830s reflected and shaped the development of a more democratic society.how to use primary source documents to reconstruct the experiences of common solders of the Revolutionary War, using pension records to learn about their service and their post-war lives and.
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