Remember those who laid down their life so we could enjoy liberty, freedom and hope

Joseph Wheat was born during French and Indian War. He died in 1836 at the age of 77 and is buried in the small cemetery at the North end of Canaan Street, in Canaan New Hampshire. The inscription on Wheat’s headstone marks his vocation in life as a clergyman and also pays tribute to his commitment, at the age of 16, to seven years of service to his country. Wheat turned 16 in 1775.

Just inside and to the left of the southernmost entrance to the Canaan Street cemetery, and not far from Wheat, lies Timothy Tilton. Dr. Tilton was born in 1776, one year after Wheat’s enlistment in the Continental Army.

Tilton was an early abolitionist and is buried directly across the road from the now vacant site of the school he helped found in 1834, the Noyes Academy, the first integrated, coeducational school for higher learning in the United States.

Tilton died in December, 1836, at age 60, sixteen months after the Noyes Academy was wrenched from its foundation by an angry mob and dragged by many teams of oxen a half mile to where it was left to rot near what is now Canaan’s town beach. Within sight of Tilton’s headstone are homes where black students were housed during their term at the Academy, including that of George Kimball, where, after having wrecked the school, the mob gathered to drive the Academy’s black students away. 19 year old Henry Garnet, a Noyes Academy student and fugitive slave, fired a shotgun blast over the heads of the men who had gathered there causing the mob to flee. Following the school’s destruction, the black students who had attended the Academy, departed to Oneida, New York and other towns where similar educational opportunities had begun to emerge.

At the base of Timothy Tilton’s headstone are the carved words, “The slave’s friend.”

William Tilton was born in St. Albans Vermont in 1834, the year the Noyes Academy was established. His grave lies a bit inside and to the left of the main entrance to Enfield, New Hampshire’s Oak Grove Cemetery. William Tilton died in 1910, one year shy of the 50th anniversary of his enlistment into the Union army, in Hanover, New Hampshire on October 5, 1861. Tilton was mustered into the 7th New Hampshire Regiment as a Private on November 6, 1861 and mustered out as a Sergeant on December 27, 1864. William Tilton received the Congressional Medal of Honor for “Gallant conduct in the field,” during the Richmond Campaign, in Virginia, in 1864.

Four other Civil War recipients of the Medal of Honor, John W. Boutwell, Carleton N. Camp, Nathaniel C. Barker and Francis Goodall, are buried in nearby Upper Valley towns.

The end of the Civil War initiated the formal abolition of slavery through the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in1865, the assertion of rights of citizenship through the 14th amendment in1868, and the prohibition of race, color or previous servitude as a bar to vote through the 15th Amendment in1870.

Today, the entire world knows that the prospect for true freedom and expression of individual rights has only ever existed in America. In America, the promotion, growth and preservation of freedom is due to a deeply ingrained understanding of the importance of continuity in the pursuit of the ideal. Previous generations teach the importance of liberty and the behavior necessary to sustain it.

My father was born in 1910, the year that William Tilton died.

My father’s father, was one of five sons brought to America from Poland by their father to prevent their conscription by either the Russian, Austrian or German armies. When the youngest son, John, while serving as an American soldier in World War I, died in France 11 days before the Armistice, his father was asked what he thought of America now. “At least he died for freedom,” he replied.

147 years, minus a day, from the day that William Tilton mustered into the Union Army, Barack Obama walked onto the stage at Grant Park in Chicago to accept having been elected America’s first black President. Founding idealists, abolitionists, Union soldiers, southern reconstructionists, freedom riders and a lot of bloodshed had provided for that moment.

On this Memorial Day in particular we ought to take extra time to remember and thank all those across so many generations who, like Wheat, the Tilton’s, George Kimball and John J. Wyszomirski, worked and sacrificed to provide Americans with liberty, individual freedom, aspiration and hope.