09/29/2026
Full speech from Col. William P. Boswell given at the William G. Pomeroy Foundation America 250 — Revolutionary War Pomeroy Patriot Marker Dedication ceremony on Sunday, September 27th, 2026.
Thank you for the kind introduction, Jason Miller, and thank all of you for the opportunity to make a few brief remarks today.
Fortunately, my uniform still fits. Our patriot ancestors didn’t always have uniforms, and they didn’t much care about how they fit, even if they did have them. Our French allies were better equipped but they had more experience in such matters, plus more style – elan, I think French Consul Berlat would say.
They also didn’t have drycleaning, central heat, or AC. Laundry was done in a stream. They lived in their uniforms in heat and cold.
I’ve often heard it said that at times you could smell an army before you ever saw it coming. Certainly, the 1700s wasn’t a time for the faint of heart or faint of nose.
(As an aside, when I was stationed in Germany during the 1970s, many of the Germans I met could not understand why Americans showered every day instead of once a week like normal people, and why we were obsessed with deodorant. In fairness, they also couldn’t understand why a grown man would order a glass of milk with lunch, as many of our troops did.)
What our ancestors did care about was establishing the right to govern themselves as they saw fit, rather than rely upon the often not so good will of Great Britain, some 4,000 sea miles away.
Britain was creating an empire at that time.
In fairness they did it rather effectively and it lasted for the better part of two centuries.
But empires rely upon a central core emanating from the home country, and what is good for that central core isn’t always good for everyone else, especially when they are looked upon as a source of wealth to the core.
The American colonists came to that conclusion early. Only in the 20th century did the remainder of the British Empire choose a separate path and doing so later created a different dynamic for themselves.
Why is that?
What WE did is leave the British Empire with violence. The other parts of the Mother Country largely did not. They left mostly with mutual consent and many of them took not only British law, as we did, but decades of British ways of doing things: think Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, to name a few.
I think that difference is important because we were young enough and raw enough to fight with each other, largely with ideas at that time, because we’d already used violence against the British.
Those competing ideas within the newly-enfranchised American States, not yet a country, framed our Constitution and the balance of powers it envisioned. More importantly, it also gave us a Bill of Rights.
You may disagree with me, and other countries certainly have constitutional provisions regarding the rights of their citizens, mostly modeled upon what we did, but I will argue that we are the only nation that began with a Bill of Rights – rights which we specified as natural rights, not rights granted by government.
Our greatest right, in my opinion, is the right free speech, which also is a part of the American culture. It is our greatest treasure.
Look north to our friends in Canada, look
east to the United Kingdom. They do not have a First Amendment, and free speech is not so very free these days in either country.
That said, even in the United States there are those among us who find free speech uncomfortable and would limit it to minimize discomfort. Well, it often is uncomfortable - and it’s supposed to be.
A free people cannot have constructive discourse on public matters without discomfort. Different ideas often clash and discussion of different ideas is often the only way to reach compromise.
But attempts to suppress discourse and different ideas in the US ultimately break upon the colossal rock that is the First Amendment. I hope, and we all should hope, that such attempts always will founder on that immutable barrier.
Turning back to those who fought to give us these freedoms we cannot honor them enough.
In a small way what we do here today recognizes their sacrifices. But in a larger sense it is emblematic of the sacrifices our other men and women in uniform for the past 250 years have made and to this day make to keep our freedoms intact.
Freedom is not a one-time thing to be defined at a moment in history. It must be a constant goal, and indeed a struggle, or it will be lost and relegated to the status of an historical footnote, assuming those in power permit such radical footnotes.
So, join me in celebrating what those interred here did to give us what we now have, and pray with me that we and those who follow us will always be willing to make the same sacrifices in the years to come to preserve what they created and what we hold dear.
Winston Churchill was once invited to speak at his alma mater, Harrow School, in October 1941, during the darkest days of WWII, to give a speech. It was very, very brief.
His final words, which people now remember as the only words he spoke that day at Harrow, were “Never give in. Never give in. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, in nothing great or small, except to convictions of honour or good sense.” And then he sat down.
Our ancestors never gave in, nor should we. Never, never, never.
Thanks to them and thanks for listening to me. It was my honor to serve in the military for 34 years and my honor to be here today.
Pennsylvania Society: Sons of the American Revolution
National Society of the Sons of the American Revolution
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