ping
His surname was Cummings and he was a sergeant in his regiment at the time of the battle. He was from Athol (later Phillipston) Massachusetts, and his grave is not identified, although I believe it to be in the cemetery adjacent to the town green in Phillipston. There is a base with the surname on it, ut the headstone is missing or buried.
The fact that his grave is missed on Memorial Day and July 4th has always bothered me...
The British casualties, while heavy, are often exaggerated and overstated -- many of the 800+ wounded would return to service. The biggest blow wasn't even the loss of 100+ commissioned officers. It was the realization that the Americans weren't Ribbonsnakes, but Rattlesnakes.
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Recessional of the Sons of the American Revolution:
“Until we meet again, let us remember our obligations to our
forefathers who gave us our Constitution, the Bill of Rights,
an independent Supreme Court and a nation of free men.”
Dr. Benjamin Franklin, when asked if we had a republic or a monarchy, replied "A Republic, if you can keep it."
What a great poem.
Hard to believe I had not read it before.
My Grandkids will know it, if it is up to me.
The poem scans the same as Poe’s “Raven.”
Thanks for posting.
Ping
However, I find it odd that we devote so much attention to commemorating military defeats. Besides Bunker Hill, we commemorate Pearl Harbor Day; the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001 is now Patriots Day, and each winter, we remember the Alamo.
I would like to see us devote more effort to commemorating our military victories--like Yorktown, Derna, Lake Champlain, Chapultepec, Manila Bay, Château Thierry, the Philippine Sea and Grenada.
I am saving bits and pieces of history/lit for my grandsons' homeschooling. They are presently ages 2 & 5 so it goes into a folder for a bit later. The boys are already started in their "formal" home education and daughter has them memorizing all sorts of things. There is no TV so they memorize significant stuff like a whole Q&A series of observations starting iwith the Pythagorean theorum and going on to "other Greek mathematicians" and on from there.I say this poem is to be saved for later years but I bet it is first memorized, at least in part immediately. Small children don't learn much reason and logic, their brains are not ready yet, but they are like little data banks being filled. With a TV in the house they get filled by advertising jingles and the like. It is better to fill them with useful data so that when they are able to reason about stuff they have a bank of facts about which to cogitate. A 3 or 4 year old is able to memorize math facts even though not yet able to use them but when he reaches, say age9, the traditional age for times tables in public school, they are already there and he is able to figure with them. His arithmetic ability will be way ahead of schedule. Add in a lot of history facts and later he simply knows stuff that in public school would never even be presented. He recognizes things he runs into incidentally and gets interested in learning more.I have watched this process in now older kids. It does kind of ruin them for Public School if they are then pushed into that system. Most, not all, but most teachers can't deal with them. They aren't right with the schedule and they know things that are supposed to disappear in history.