Faces of the founding

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JENNY ROUGH, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Jenny Rough.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: The World History Book.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, one remarkable collection connects the nation’s founding generation with those who lived through its greatest internal conflict.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher has the story.

EMMA EICHER: The Civil War signaled one of the first threats to break up the United States since the American Revolution.

So, Connecticut native Elias Brewster Hillard set out to write a book that might preserve unity and shared origins.

He traveled to interview the last living men of the Revolutionary War.

DON HAGIST: He was sparked with the idea that we need the voices of these men because they created this great nation.

Don Hagist is the managing editor of the Journal of the American Revolution.

HAGIST: He's trying to write a book about how important the American Revolution was and the unification was, that that war characterized, because he wants to bring people back together.

In his book, The Last Men of the Revolution, Hillard recorded detailed interviews of six veterans and placed photographic portraits beside each account. The format made it a rarity when it was published in 1864.

Although Hillard hoped the book would achieve some significance, the first editions fell into obscurity.

HAGIST: It didn't get a whole lot of recognition at the time.

Hagist says the pictures were key to eventually finding public recognition.

HAGIST: There aren't very many photographs of people from that time period. So I think they're captivating because they bring us a sense of an era that we don't have visual ways to connect with.

The book gained renewed attention in the 1950s after Life Magazine reprinted the photos. Some early readers took the veterans’ accounts as fact.

Hagist became familiar with the book and published a follow-up in 2016, called: The Revolution’s Last Men.

It was a book of corrections and reexamination of history.

HAGIST: What we were expecting was to just have the 1864 book with maybe some additional footnotes and things in it freshen it up.

But in his research, Hagist discovered that Hillard’s interviews were fraught with timeline errors.

HAGIST: Some of the men's ages are not right in the book from 1864—off by a few years. Most of them served later in the war than the original book suggests.

Hagist had to untangle the truth from archives and military pension records.

In one example, Hillard claimed that veteran Alexander Milliner was at the battles of Saratoga, Brandywine, and the siege of Fort Stanwix.

HAGIST: Well, all of these things were taking place at approximately the same time in very different parts of the country. There's no possible way that one person could have been in all three of those things, and yet, that's what it says in the book.

Hillard’s background might have influenced the inaccuracies. Hillard was a lifelong pastor, not a biographer.

HAGIST: He doesn't have any particular training in interviewing people and being discerning about listening to what they're saying. He's not a historian of the revolution. This is the only book related to history in any way that he wrote.

The declining memories of the men—all of them around 100 years old—may also account for some of the contradictions.

HAGIST: It may be that the men themselves also misremembered some things.

But the book got other things right: like the portraits themselves. Photographer Nelson Augustus Moore snapped the originals—and made four separate exposures during each session. Hillard later followed up with his own interviews.

HAGIST: At the time the book was printed in 1864, there was not a technique for putting a photographic print directly onto paper.

For the first editions, each picture was pasted by hand onto the pages using a type of tissue paper called silver albumen. And since there were four originals to choose from:

HAGIST: Every single 1864 copy contains some different mix and match of the four exposures of the men. Because for each man, they print out four pictures, they cut them out, and they put one in one book and one in another…

Hagist says these photographs are what make the biography stand the test of time.

HAGIST: The photographs themselves really almost have a life of their own. It's the photographs that capture everybody.

Even with the mistakes, The Last Men of the Revolution still accomplished what other biographies didn’t.

HAGIST: And as much as I can sit and say, ‘Oh, Elias Brewster Hillard, he wasn't a writer. He wasn't a journalist. This book has all kinds of mistakes in it.’ He did it, he published the book. And that's why we have this set of photographs in particular that is so well remembered.

The book didn’t achieve much popularity during Hillard’s lifetime. After decades of ministry, he died in 1895.

But 160 years later, the book serves as a reminder of where we came from and introduces Americans to the men who united the country.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.

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