DAR: John Trumbull

Tobias Lear: Tobias Lear served as personal aide and private secretary to George Washington from 1786 to 1799. He was present at the First President’s death and controversially handled Washington’s papers after his passing. In 1801, Lear went into diplomacy at the appointment of President Jefferson, then joined the War Department.

Elias Boudinot: Statesman Elias Boudinot served as New Jersey’s delegate to the Continental Congress. After the Revolution, he served as its Congressman and then was appointed Director of the U.S. Mint.

John Trumbull was an artist known for paintings of people and events in the American Revolution. Serving in the Continental Army in the early months of the conflict, he went on to create famous history works and portraits of his era’s leading figures and critical moments from the war.

Studies taken from the pages of American Spirit Magazine. Learn more about Phyllis Wheatley and the Brewster Sisters.

His decision went against his family’s and his country’s wishes, but it turned out to be a fortuitous one for the Patriots. Lafayette played a key role in securing America’s independence from England and won the hearts of Americans, who would lovingly refer to the Frenchman as “our marquis” long after he returned home. But while some worry that the marquis has faded from modern America’s consciousness, his admirers hoped to revive Lafayette’s memory with events surrounding his 250th birthday. The international celebration focusied the spotlight on one of the most revered heroes of the American Revolution. We

Legal scholar and teacher George Wythe influenced such figures as Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall and James Monroe with his brilliant mind and Enlightenment views on government and the law. He was delegate to Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence. In 1806 he died at age 80, potentially poisoned by his own grandnephew.

George Mason was an important Virginia statesman known for his writing of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which called for guaranteed liberties for the people and served as a model for the American Constitution and Bill of Rights. It was the lack of a Bill of Rights, among other issues, that motivated Mason to famously decline to sign the original Constitution.

The Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in New York honors over 15,000 Americans who were held captive on British ships during the Revolution. Twice as many soldiers died in these conditions than in the battles of the Revolution, mostly of disease, starvation, and violence. After falling into disrepair in the 1930s, the Monument has since been restored and was rededicated in 2008.

Members of the Oneida American Indian nation served as scouts, guides, and soldiers in New York during the Revolution, including critically in the Battle of Saratoga. They earned recognition from the Continental Congress for their support. Despite promises to protect their land and autonomy, colonists took over their lands after the end of the war, pushing the Oneidas onto reservations.

In the earliest years of the U.S. government, the man whom many considered the second-most powerful man in the nation was neither a landowning Southern gentleman nor an experienced Northern statesman. Instead, the unofficial title belonged to Caribbean-born Alexander Hamilton. His career followed a steep trajectory as he progressed from George Washington’s trusted aide-de-camp to co-author of the Federalist Papers to the first Secretary of the Treasury. This ascent from obscurity to an intensive involvement in the formation of the new government provoked discord.