In 1776, Revolutionary War hero Anthony Wayne described the fields surrounding his encampment at Fort Ticonderoga as an "ancient Golgotha or place of skulls — they are so plenty here that our people, for want of other vessels, drink out of them whilst the soldiers make tent pins out of the shin and thigh bones of Abercromby's men."
These same fields were witness to General James Abercromby's ill-fated attack on French-held Ticonderoga years earlier in 1758, resulting in a bloody battle that killed over 600 British and American troops during the French and Indian War. Abercromby's army retreated immediately after the battle, leaving the bodies of their fallen comrades to be devoured or decay and their bones to bleach in the sun.
Eighteen years later those soldiers' bones had been reduced to banal utensils for the Revolutionary army.
Almost 50 years later a Saratoga farmer claimed that "our plows are constantly striking against cannon balls or dead men's bones, or turning up grape shot or bullets." On a slow day he had unearthed "only a skeleton" on the grounds of a great American victory.
As we pause to reflect on the sacrifice of past and current veterans, and to honor those men and women serving in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, Ticonderoga and Saratoga remind us just how far we have come in caring for our veterans. Today, we leave no American bonefields behind.
The nation did very little to remember veterans or the places where they fought, bled and sometimes died. By 1860 only nine monuments stood on the sacred ground of American battlegrounds, out of 16 memorials proposed before the Civil War. And it took on average nearly 30 years to complete them. The United States, it seems, preferred to forget its fallen soldiers and to not commemorate their sacrifice.
Attempts to pass simple pensions for veterans faltered, as only those who had lost a limb or were fully disabled received compensation immediately after the Revolutionary War. In 1828, a more generous pension law provided little solace to a 70-year old veteran who had already passed through the hardest times of his life, with few years left to enjoy the government's largesse.
Today we take it for granted that our veterans are treated well, and rightly so. Their service and sacrifice has helped to maintain our freedom and is worthy of thanks. Fallen heroes who have died overseas are greeted at Andrews Air Force Base by an honor guard and given full military funerals. Nearly every hamlet, village, town, city, county or state commemorates its veterans with a monument or solemn ceremony on today's observance of the national holiday.
But lest we forget, the United States did not always extend such respect to its soldiers. The fact that in 2012 we cannot conceive of leaving a fallen soldier's body behind, much less march away from the decaying corpses of hundreds of unburied men, shows how far we have come. We should both honor those men and women in uniform, as well as commemorate their fallen fellow veterans in battlegrounds all across our great land. As a nation we should be proud that we uphold Abraham's Lincoln's inspiring vision of "mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave."
The writer is associate professor of History at Niagara University and author of "Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic" (Cornell University Press, 2012).