Last Men of the Revolution

The palm-sized photographs capture their weathered faces: six men with flowing silver hair and deeply etched wrinkles, clutching canes for support — the last survivors, perhaps, of the Revolutionary War.

Beginning in the early 1800s, the U.S. government established a pension system for veterans of the Revolution. As the years passed, federal budget reports showed an ever-dwindling number of them to be still alive and receiving payments.

By 1864, eight decades after the Revolution’s end, only a dozen or so veterans survived. That realization sparked another: The time to record the firsthand stories of these men was now, before they, like their comrades, passed into history.

So, two Connecticut brothers — photographers Nelson and Roswell Moore — tracked down the known survivors, by that time down to six: William Hutchings, Daniel Waldo, Adam Link, Alexander Millener, Lemuel Cook and Samuel Downing.

The Moore brothers captured their portraits as cartes de visite, small albumen prints mounted on cards intended for wide distribution. The Moores didn’t, however, record the veterans’ stories. Enter Elias Brewster Hillard, a Connecticut clergyman who set out to interview the six men and publish a book recounting their wartime experiences.

The results weren’t precise history. Hillard was neither journalist nor author, as historian Don Hagist noted, and the veterans he interviewed all were at least 100 years old, with fuzzy memories of long-ago exploits. Still, the publication of Hillard’s book, “The Last Men of the Revolution,” in 1864 made the veterans minor celebrities — boosted by the inclusion of the Moores’ striking photographs.

As it turned out, the six weren’t quite the last men of the Revolution. The publicity, Hagist found, drew other veterans into the public eye — one of whom, Daniel Frederick Bakeman, outlived all the others on the pension rolls.

Today, the six veterans in those photographs live on at the Library: The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds Hillard’s book, and the cartes de visite are preserved in the Prints and Photographs Division.