Live Free or Die: John Stark and the Toast That Became a Motto

John Stark was born in Londonderry, New Hampshire, in seventeen twenty-eight. When he was eight years old, his family moved to Derryfield, which was then a small farming settlement on the Merrimack River. He grew up there, hunted the surrounding forests, and was once captured by Abenaki raiders as a young man.

He spent time among them and later said it was among the most formative experiences of his life. When the Revolution came, Stark was already a skilled woodsman and a veteran of the French and Indian War. He led the First New Hampshire Regiment at the Battle of Bunker Hill in seventeen seventy-five.

Two years later, at the Battle of Bennington in August of seventeen seventy-seven, he commanded a force of New Hampshire and Vermont militia against a British detachment that was foraging for supplies ahead of Burgoyne's larger army. In an afternoon's fighting, his men surrounded the British position and routed it, killing or capturing most of a detachment of several hundred men. Stark called it the hottest engagement I have ever witnessed, resembling a continual clap of thunder.

The victory helped set the conditions for Saratoga, the turning point of the war. Stark retired after the war to his farm in Derryfield, by then renamed Manchester. He lived to ninety-three years old, an extraordinary span for the era.

In eighteen oh nine, too frail to travel, he sent a written toast to a reunion of his old comrades: Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils. He was eighty-one years old. In nineteen forty-five, New Hampshire adopted those first four words as its state motto.

Stark is buried in the park that bears his name, here along the Merrimack.