General John Stark and the Words That Outlived the Man

In the summer of eighteen hundred and nine, a very old man named John Stark sat at a desk in Manchester and declined an invitation. His former comrades were gathering in Bennington, Vermont, to mark the thirty-second anniversary of the battle there, a fight in which Stark had led New Hampshire militia against Hessian mercenaries in the service of the British Crown, and in which his side had won decisively. Stark was too frail to attend.

So he sent a toast instead. The words he wrote that day were: Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils.

It was a sentiment with roots in the French Revolution, where the phrase had circulated in the seventeen nineties. Stark had likely absorbed it from the political air of a revolutionary era. But the specificity of the man, the moment, the state gave the words a weight they had not carried before.

Stark was the most decorated New Hampshire soldier of the Revolution. He had fought at Bunker Hill in seventeen seventy-five, survived the winter at Valley Forge alongside Washington, and crossed the Delaware on Christmas night seventeen seventy-six in a night attack that changed the course of the war. He had been at almost everything.

The Battle of Bennington on August sixteenth, seventeen seventy-seven was one of the turning points of the Saratoga campaign. Stark's militia, fighting outside the regular Continental Army command structure, killed or captured roughly nine hundred Hessian and loyalist troops. The victory helped convince France that the American cause was worth backing.

New Hampshire adopted Live Free or Die as the official state motto in nineteen forty-five, the year the war Stark would have recognized, a war for survival against autocracy, finally ended. His toast appears on every license plate in the state. He died in eighteen twenty-two, one of the last surviving generals of the Revolution, ninety-three years old, in the house where he had been born.