John Stark: The Man Who Coined "Live Free or Die"

The motto on every New Hampshire license plate, "Live Free or Die," was written not for a flag or a proclamation, but for a dinner the author was too old to attend.

John Stark was born in Londonderry in seventeen twenty-eight, the son of Scotch-Irish settlers. His education in wilderness came early: captured by the Abenaki as a young man, he spent time as a captive before being ransomed, an experience that seems to have settled something in his character rather than broken it. When he returned he joined Rogers' Rangers, serving under Robert Rogers in the brutal raiding campaigns of the French and Indian War. By the time the Revolution began, he was a man who had already seen what real danger looked like.

At Bunker Hill in seventeen seventy-five, Stark held the rail fence on the American left, directing a withering fire that stopped the British advance on that flank. He fought under Washington at Trenton and Princeton. But his signature moment came in August of seventeen seventy-seven, at the Battle of Bennington, when he led a force of New Hampshire and Vermont militia against a detachment of Burgoyne's army. "We beat them today or Molly Stark sleeps a widow," he reportedly told his men before the charge. They routed the British entirely. The victory contributed directly to Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga two months later, the turning point that brought France into the war.

In eighteen hundred and nine, veterans of Bennington invited Stark to their reunion. He was eighty-one and too ill to travel. He sent a written toast instead. It read: "Live free or die. Death is not the greatest of evils."

He died in eighteen twenty-two at ninety-three, the last surviving general of the American Revolution. New Hampshire made his words its motto in nineteen forty-five.