Because I’m still following the covid-19 stay-at-home order for Pennsylvania, I won’t be making any pilgrimages to historic sites this Memorial Day weekend. But I didn’t want to let the day pass unnoticed, so I’ve thought back to a visit I made three years ago to the then-new Museum of the American Revolution, one of my favorite places in the Philadelphia. In those days before social-distancing, I’d plenty of company, too, including many families with children. In 2017, I thought there had never been a more urgent time in American history to learn about our country's founding, and how the responsibilities that were granted to citizens in 1776 are equally important for us. In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, those responsibilities as citizens have only grown.
Part of the Museum's observation of the Memorial Day weekend was a quiet reminder that not all those who gave their lives for the Revolution did so in battle. Only a few blocks away from the Museum is the site of a mass grave where Continental soldiers were buried by the British then occupying the city. In 1777, John Adams described his visit to the site in a letter to his wife Abigail:
"I have spent an Hour, this Morning, in the Congregation of the dead. I took a Walk into the Potters Field, a burying Ground between the new stone Prison, and the Hospital, and I never in my whole Life was affected with so much Melancholly. The Graves of the soldiers, who have been buryed, in this Ground, from the Hospital and bettering House, during the Course of the last Summer, Fall, and Winter, dead of the small Pox, and Camp Diseases, are enough to make the Heart of stone to melt away. The Sexton told me, that upwards of two Thousand soldiers had been buried there, and by the Appearance of the Graves, and Trenches, it is most probably to me, he speaks within Bounds....Disease has Destroyed Ten Men for Us, where the Sword of the Enemy has killed one." *
Adams was right. While the actual figures for the war are difficult to pin down today, it's estimated that approximately 8,000 Continental soldiers were killed in battle between 1775-1783, while another 17,000 died from diseases such as small pox, typhus, dysentery, and typhoid, often as British prisoners of war in the notoriously unhealthy prison ships. Later victims of the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic (an epidemic that killed roughly ten percent of the Philadelphia’s population) were also buried in the area.
Today the site of the potter's field lies beneath Washington Square, a tidy, tree-shaded park filled with babies in strollers and well-behaved dogs. The square is dominated by a monument, built in the 1950s, and dedicated to the tomb of the unknown Revolutionary War soldiers buried there. The monument includes a statue of George Washington, and a quotation from his Farewell Address, delivered when he stepped down from the presidency and ended twenty years of service to his country. That quotation is worth considering today, too: “The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and success.”
Three years ago, in return for a small donation, the Museum offered visitors red and white carnations to take to the Square to honor the thousands of unknown soldiers and sailors buried there. As I stood before the monument with my carnation, I thought of those long-ago men and boys and likely a few women, too, and of the families and sweethearts who never knew what became of them, beyond that they never returned home. Perhaps there was no "glory" to their deaths, whatever that may mean. Yet still they made the greatest sacrifice possible so that, 240 years later, this place could be a peaceful park filled with children. A single carnation doesn't begin to be enough thanks, does it?
* John Adams letter to Abigail Adams, 13 April 1777, from the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Click here to see the entire original letter plus a transcript.
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