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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis guy ... this is the guy.
Samuel Whittemore joined the Revolution on April 19 1775 at the age of 80. Oiled his guns, muskets, sharpened his sword, and went to Concord ... where he was shot in the face by British regulars, stabbed with a bayonet, and beaten to the edge of death, but not before he killed three of the bastards.
He recovered, and lived another 18 years.
We make 'em tough up here in New England. Happy Fourth of July.
daleanime
(17,796 posts)linuxman
(2,337 posts)You have to figure a guy that old probably is going to act like he's on borrowed time. Never underestimate old people. Old age, treachery, and experience beats youth, eagerness, and brashness more often than not.
This example is from the Civil War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Burns
virgogal
(10,178 posts)D Gary Grady
(133 posts)Do a web search for "old age and treachery" and you'll find lots of T-shirts, bugs, wall plaques and so on with variations on "Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill" (with "overcome" often replaced by "beat," "defeat," "win over," or some other variation). I've seen these around at least since the 1980s when my office mate at Duke had one.
(Eek. I just realized I'm as old now as he was then. I guess I'll have to order one of my own.)
virgogal
(10,178 posts)mythology
(9,527 posts)virgogal
(10,178 posts)GeoWilliam750
(2,519 posts)Not only is it kind of rude to bet against old people, but one doesn't win a lot anyway.
malthaussen
(17,066 posts)... only lived to be 50, but he kinda-sorta defines "tough sumbitch" for me. Not to mention "Crazy bastard."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Bohemia
-- Mal
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)louis-t
(23,199 posts)That's 'sturdy stock'.
Snotcicles
(9,089 posts)irisblue
(32,829 posts)just dayum
Ilsa
(61,675 posts)Hate to get on his bad side.
Bless him.
zeemike
(18,998 posts)At that age he should have been easy pickings for the professional soldier.
marble falls
(56,358 posts)riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)Adrahil
(13,340 posts)irisblue
(32,829 posts)snort
(2,334 posts)roguevalley
(40,656 posts)Without you it would have failed. Thank you, Germans who joined us too. We were an amazing moment in the world that far.
Britain, I love you to death. London feels like home to me and my roots are deep there. But we had to go. I hope you don't bear a grudge. God knows we love ya.
My country is a good place but deserves better. Thank you, patriots, for doing the impossible and making it inevitable. I hope that the newest patriot in my pantheon, Bernie Sanders can do the same. Happy Fourth of July, America and all her friends.
Me, from Alaska.
calimary
(80,693 posts)London feels like home to me, too. Visited there when I was in high school. I cried like a baby when we left. Couldn't stop. Didn't really know why. Just bawled! Never had that reaction about anywhere else I've visited.
roguevalley
(40,656 posts)eating raspberries out of a champagne flute in the National Gallery ... SNIFFLE! I think I'm actually homesick.
calimary
(80,693 posts)Flirtatious dude with wavy sandy-blond hair behind the counter. Cutest thing I EVER saw! Still remember.
Adrian Forracker - wherever you are... (and I apologize for misspelling your last name!)
awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)they bankrolled us.
roguevalley
(40,656 posts)war and died penniless.
calimary
(80,693 posts)Still In Wisconsin
(4,450 posts)ARE some tough people. I'm a Wisconsin boy but my dad was a proud New Englander. Boxed, played football at Syracuse, and spent the rest of his life pissing off Republicans.
Happy fourth to you too.
angrychair
(8,593 posts)Mr.Whittemore has my humble respect. A tough bird in a tough world.
kydo
(2,679 posts)That sword he is pictured with was a French sword that he was proud of. When asked how he came to have a French sword he remarked "The previous owner died suddenly."
One cool dude. Glad he was an American!
appalachiablue
(41,052 posts)them like this anymore, no wonder they survived in those times!
Samuel Whittemore, American Revolutionary Patriot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Whittemore
WillyT
(72,631 posts)DebJ
(7,699 posts)orpupilofnature57
(15,472 posts)Drunken Irishman
(34,857 posts)Warpy
(110,907 posts)I knew one of his descendents years ago and can see him developing into another tough old fart.
You survive 80 New England winters, you've proven you're going to be damned hard to kill.
bvar22
(39,909 posts)...and he kept getting up and fighting.
We got the hell out of there."
---Perhaps a British Report of the Incident
merrily
(45,251 posts)LiberalElite
(14,691 posts)pansypoo53219
(20,906 posts)D Gary Grady
(133 posts)Last edited Sun Jul 26, 2015, 08:13 PM - Edit history (2)
This gives me an excuse to throw in a bit of trivia: Life expectancy is of course better now for all age cohorts, but especially for the very young. Benjamin Franklin and both his parents lives into their 80s, as did a surprising number of ancient Greek writers and philosophers. More than 2000 years ago the author of the 90th Psalm perceived 70 or 80 years to be a normal lifespan.
Prior to the 20th century, life expectancy at birth (that is, average age of death) was depressingly low, probably in the 30s for most cultures, but that was in large part because of the high death rate in infancy and childhood. Better hygiene, medicine, and especially vaccines have drastically reduced the number of deaths among the very young. Those developments have helped us older goats as well, but less dramatically. Even today, one's chance of dying in the next year is lowest at age 10 or so and higher both before and after.
Another surprise: One's statistical chance of dying in the next 12 months doubles about every eight years as we age, but it doesn't exceed 50% until you reach 107 for men or 109 for women. (But even though we're more likely than not to survive each previous year, eventually our luck runs out.)
For more, see this NPR report and a table from the Social Security Administration:
http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/01/08/260463710/am-i-going-to-die-this-year-a-mathematical-puzzle
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
merrily
(45,251 posts)in childbirth, often not much more than children themselves.
Both give the false impression, if only a mathematical average is given.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)to a Boston mother and an Alabama father. Lived in Tuscaloosa until I was four, then moved to Boston, where I lived until August 2013 (with a brief 2-year stint in San Francisco). All told, I've spent about 40 years in New England. After my parents split when I was still very young, I spent large chunks of my summers between Mobile, Montgomery, Birmingham and Decatur where my grandparents lived. Served as a page in the Alabama Senate when I was 13, where I fell in love for the first time with a girl ironically named Paige.
I don't believe I ever said I was born there. My connection, however, runs deep:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/853:my-alabama
Thespian2
(2,741 posts)Happy Fourth to my New England neighbours...from Prince Edward Island...
Solly Mack
(90,740 posts)swilton
(5,069 posts)Vermont leads.
ThoughtCriminal
(14,010 posts)heaven05
(18,124 posts)SOLDIER.
UTUSN
(70,496 posts)fromVT
(266 posts)KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)writing greatly usually, but wish to point out that the 3 British soldiers who were killed were human beings too, with family and loved ones who missed them just as much as Mr. Wittemore's likely would have mourned his demise.
To summon the better angels of your nature this morning, please allow me to part with a poem by Thomas Hardy:
Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like just as I
Was out of work had sold his traps
No other reason why.
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.
WilliamPitt
(58,179 posts)On 29 May 1780, Tarleton, with a force of 149 mounted soldiers, overtook a detachment of 350 to 380 Virginia Continentals led by Abraham Buford. Buford refused to surrender or even to stop his march. Only after sustaining heavy casualties did Buford order the surrender. Tarleton ignored the white flag and mercilessly massacred Buford's men. In the end, 113 Americans were killed and another 203 captured, 150 of whom were so badly wounded that they had to be left behind. Tarleton's casualties were 5 killed and 12 wounded.[10] The British called the affair the Battle of Waxhaw Creek, while the Americans called it the "Buford Massacre", "Tarleton's Quarter", or the "Waxhaw Massacre."
In recounting Tarleton's action at the scene, an American field surgeon named Robert Brownfield wrote that Colonel Buford raised a white flag of surrender, "expecting the usual treatment sanctioned by civilized warfare". While Buford was calling for quarter, Tarleton's horse was struck by a musket ball and fell. This gave the loyalist cavalrymen the impression that the rebels had shot at their commander while asking for mercy. Enraged, the loyalist troops charged at the Virginians. According to Brownfield, the loyalists attacked, carrying out "indiscriminate carnage never surpassed by the most ruthless atrocities of the most barbarous savages." Tarleton's men stabbed the wounded where they lay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banastre_Tarleton#American_Revolutionary_War
Common practice.
Bastards.
KingCharlemagne
(7,908 posts)the term 'guerrilla,' the British were conducting their own proper guerre sale upon American soil. No one ever said that guerrilla wars were clean, sanitary affairs. Thus has it always been and thus shall it always be. (See Iraq 2003-09 for the latest iteration).
I only wish to remember the humanity of the casualties on both sides and not to lose it in a gush of nationalism.
Thanks for your OP and response about Tarleton, whom I had learned of many years ago but forgotten in the intervening years.