Every morning, weather permitting, I drive the six miles from my house in Trenton to Washington Crossing State Park and walk the paved drives that cut through the historic site. They connect picnic groves, parking lots, a nature center, an outdoor amphitheater, and a visitors’ center whose small museum houses Revolutionary War artifacts. I enjoy this daily walk, a meditation, if you will, up and down hills and across streams as my movement sends deer and rabbits scattering into the safety of the roadside verge. Sometimes, if it’s not too muddy following a rain or snowstorm, I walk along a trail, a remnant of the Continental Lane, a rough-cut path through the woods leading from the Delaware River to Bear Tavern Road. This is the route Washington took after crossing the icy river on Christmas night 1776—the same route my fifth great-grandfather, John Stark, trod with his New Hampshire regiment of volunteer soldiers.
I feel connected to him whenever I walk that path, and sometimes I believe I can sense the presence of the other twenty-four hundred men under Washington’s command as they made their way to Trenton to rout the Hessians barracked there. As a kid, I’d listened to my grandfather tell stories about General John Stark of New Hampshire. Stark was a colonel when he crossed the Delaware River on that Christmas night and fought alongside Washington at the Battles of Trenton and Princeton. My grandfather would also tell me about Stark’s role at Bunker Hill and his victory at Bennington.
One of my favorite tales, however, involved a twenty-something Stark and a friend, Amos Eastman, who were abducted by Abenaki warriors while checking beaver traps. The warriors made both men run a gauntlet while chanting phrases in Abenaki. Eastman was battered by sticks and clubs as he ran, while Stark grabbed a club from the first warrior in line and proceeded to knock down each man he passed on his way through the punishment.
Those stories stay with me on my walks, especially now, as the long Fourth of July weekend dawns and I take time to consider notions of freedom and war. I reflect on my own role, now more than fifty years ago, as a pacifist who fulfilled two years of service to his country as a conscientious objector during the military misadventure of the Vietnam War. I also pause to ponder the tug-of-war between supporting and opposing US military engagement that has continued since Vietnam, in operations with catchy names like Urgent Fury (Grenada, 1983), Just Cause (Panama, 1989), Desert Storm (Iraq, 1991), Restore Hope (Somalia, 1992–93), Deliberate Force (Bosnia, 1995), Allied Force (Kosovo, 1999), Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan, 2001), Iraqi Freedom (Iraq, 2003), Odyssey Dawn (Libya, 2011), and Epic Fury (Iran, 2026). And if the past is prelude to the future, I’m sure that somewhere deep in the Pentagon, someone is sitting at a computer using a word- or phrase-generating app to come up with a list of new public-friendly terms for yet-to-be-named armed conflicts. In fact, the Pentagon reportedly already has one waiting: Operation Sledgehammer.
Through it all, I keep coming back to General John Stark, especially his final remarks to the “brave sons of liberty” who fought beside him at the Battle of Bennington on August 16, 1777. In 1809, Stark, nearly 81 years old and in poor health, was asked to attend a gathering of his former soldiers to commemorate their victory thirty-two years earlier. He could not endure the journey from Derryfield, New Hampshire, to Bennington, Vermont. Instead, he penned a letter and included a toast to be read to his men at the gathering. Stark closed his letter with these words: “I shall remember, gentlemen, the respect you and the inhabitants of Bennington and its neighborhood have shown me, until I go to the country from which no traveler returns.” The toast followed: “Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.”
Stark’s words, Live Free or Die, emblazoned on New Hampshire’s license plates, were something I was proud of as a descendant. But the phrase also haunted me, especially when I was requesting conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War. I wondered whether Stark would have opposed that war as I was doing. I also wondered whether, by taking a stand against all wars, I was opposing my ancestor’s role in the Revolutionary War. In a deep sense, his actions in 1776 made it possible for me to exercise my right to oppose the war and become a conscientious objector in 1970.
The phrase officially became New Hampshire’s state motto in 1945. Stark’s toast lives on as a misunderstood slogan, the title of a Die Hard sequel, an episode of The Sopranos, a National Geographic television series, and a chant in the halls of the Capitol on January 6 and during COVID anti-mask protests. With each utterance of Live Free or Die, its meaning keeps shifting. I can only wonder what Stark—Rogers’ Ranger, Bunker Hill veteran, and victor at Bennington—would think about his words today, and whether his sentiment has held true over time.
Banner photo: Durham boats similar to the ones used during Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware, Christmas 1776.
Inset photo: General John Stark, engraving after a painting by Alonzo Chappel (1828–1887). Johnson, Fry & Co., New York, c. 1862.
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