It recently occurred to me that the amount of time between the Treaty of Paris and the Battle of Fort Sumter was 78 years, well within the plausible lifespan for a 21st-century human. Are there any historical records of persons known to have been alive both in 1783 and in 1861?
It’s probably impossible to say that no such person ever lived, of course. Medicine being what it was, I doubt that octagenarians were thick on the ground back then, which would reduce the chances of such a person existing; but it’s kind of fascinating to think that someone might have seen the effects of both these events in a single lifetime.
Seems that most people around for 1861 were very young in 1783 so they probably didn’t know much about what was going on when they were kids except what they read in books or were told by older relatives. I guess if somebody lived to be over 95 they could have fought in the Revolution and lived to see the Civil War.
I believe the last WW I veterans in the US died within the last 10 years or so. Or maybe there is still 1 or 2 left.
Octogenarians were certainly possible, as witnessed by John Adams. If you could get past all the childhood diseases, smallpox, Indian wars, etc, a human life span hasn’t changed much.
I have no idea about the answer to the OP question, but it does remind me of one of my favorite Mark Twain stories:
It’s quite likely there were a few. Of the people born in the American colonies around 1770, and hence remembering the revolution as teenagers, a few would have survived to the their mid 90s and so have seen the Civil War. One such person is the composer Ebenezer Child, born in 1770 and died in 1866.
According to Wikipedia, there were several veterans of the Revolutionary War alive at the time of the Civil War and even after:
These are just the veterans; there would have been many more younger individuals who would have been able to remember the Revolution even if they didn’t fight in it.
We tend to get distracted by claims that the average person lived to be 43 or some such in that era. That’s only true if you include the large numbers of children who died. If you included only the people who lived past puberty, the aging curve is mostly similar to today. Mostly similar, because it does decrease faster than today so that you don’t get as high a percentage of the population living to extreme ages.
Even so, the outliers would be far past the mere 78 year mark. Six of the previous 15 presidents before Lincoln made it that long. So did three of their wives. They aren’t representative of the population because they hardly worked themselves to death but medical care in general was so nonexistent by today’s standards that money didn’t give them much of an advantage.
Let’s see what happens if we try to base it off today’s demographics.
There are supposedly around 80,000 centenarians in the U.S. today. Today’s population is just about 10 times that of 1860. If the proportion were the same that would make 8,000. Say that only one-fourth as many lived that long because of poorer medical care. That’s still around 2,000.
Because that number falls so fast, the number over 78 is much, much higher. I can’t find any exact up-to-date numbers but based on the last census that has to be at least 10,000,000 today. Divide that by ten and you get 1,000,000. Take a fourth and you have 250,000.
That’s probably far more than you expected, but even small percents of large number are large numbers.
An interesting personal note. When I was young, there were still some Civil War veterans who showed up during Decoration Day (now Memorial Day). Very old, but a lot of us youngsters were faxcinated by some of their stories.
What really blew my mind, though, was the fact that one or two said their grandfathers had fought in the Revolution. What a young country we live in!
Amanda Jones, the daughter of a former slave, voted for Obama in the 2008 election. She was born in 1898, which made her about eight when the last Revolutionary war widow died. I can’t find any information on Mrs. Damon’s husband, but he was certainly old enough to have fought in the Revolutionary war.
His name was Noah Damon. He was born in 1759. He enlisted in Milton, Mass, in 1775, and served for 5 years. They married in 1835, when she was 21 and he was 76. By all accounts, she had a pretty rotten life, living most of her days in poverty, barely surviving on her sewing and nursing, and his small pension.
Richard Rhodes’ “History of the Atomic Bomb” tells of Henry Stimson (Defense Secretary during the Manhattan Project) listening to his grandmother relate conversations she had with George Washington when she was a little girl.
Without looking anything up: if she was born in 1770 and lived 100 years, and he was born in 1860, that makes him 85 when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Sure it wasn’t great-grandmother?
So, she could have been born in 1790, talked to GW as a precocious nine year old, and been 77 (as Mr. Moto said, Stimson was born in 1867) when her grandkid was born.
One President qualifies – barely. Martin VanBuren was born in 1782, during the last year of the Revolutionary War, and died in 1862, in the second year of the Civil War.
Let’s look at it another way. The last Revolutionary War veteran died in 1869 at the age of 90. My grandfather was born in 1882 and lived to be 102. He died two years after my daughter was born. She’s 26, and there’s only a 13-year gap between her great-grandfather and a Revolutionary soldier.
As an aside, Stimson is a hero to my Japanese wife, who was a schoolgirl in Kyoto during WWII. And also to many of that generation in Kyoto, as he was responsible for stopping the plan to drop te first atomic bomb on that city. As it was the cultural and artistic center of Japan, and did not have any significant manufacturing, he insisted that it should be spared and preserved.
It had never been bombed for this reason, and the powers that be felt it would be a significant example for that very reason, as the destruction would be all from one bomb. Osaka, only about 20 miles away was a big manufacturing city, and was bombed all to hell. My wife could see the flames after a bombing raid from Kyoto.
Also, of course, Gion was the geisha district in Kyoto, and we all wanted that preservee.
So I think it’s possible.