On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress voted to establish the Continental Army, the first national military force of the nascent United States of America. This article, first published one day before the 250th anniversary of the event, pays tribute to the countless American patriots who have served their nation in the military, who have risked, and very often lost, their lives in defense of their country. Our way of saying thanks is to recount the brief stories of the first Americans to die in some of the nation’s most important wars.
 
War of Independence
The first soldier to die in the War of Independence on the Patriot side was Isaac Davis, the captain of a Minuteman company from Acton, Massachusetts. Davis had commanded his company since November 1774, and was known to train his men with an unusual zeal to make them equal to British Regulars. He also placed great emphasis on having proper equipment: his company was one of the few where almost everyone had a bayonet, and had the men’s powder horns, which slowed down reloading and were better suited for hunting, replaced with cartridge boxes.
 
On the morning of April 19, 1775, as the Battle of Concord was unfolding, the Acton Minutemen gathered at Davis’s home, making paper cartridges in preparation. Some were joking about getting shot at by the British; Davis, unusually somber, chided them and reminded them that some of them would soon be killed. They moved out at 7 a.m., Davis telling his wife to “take good care of the children.”

The company reached Old North Bridge at 9 a.m., joining several other militia companies. Some 500 Patriots led by Colonel James Barrett gathered on a hill, looking at the 100 English soldiers guarding the bridge to Concord. The militiamen saw smoke from the town’s direction, and thought the English were burning it down. (In fact, the English were only burning some gun carriages they found.) Barrett decided to assault the bridge, placing Davis’s company in the front as they had bayonets and a higher rate of fire thanks to their paper cartridges.
 
The company got some 75 yards (69 m) of the bridge when they received some warning shots, one of which wounded their fifer. A disorganized English volley followed. Davis was shot through the heart and died immediately, along with Private Abner Hosmer. The provincials then returned fire with their own volley, which forced the English to immediately flee. Isaac Davis died seconds before he could witness the first victory of his company.

Civil War
There are multiple candidates for being the first soldier to die in the Civil War, depending on one’s interpretation. The first soldier to die, albeit not in battle, was Private Daniel Hough. The Union-held fort of Fort Sumter, located in the mouth of Charleston Harbor, came under heavy Confederate artillery bombardment from the coast at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, in what became the first military action of the war. With no way to fight back, all the fort’s defenders could do was expend their own, very limited ammunition, then hunker down. The bombardment lasted until 1 p.m. the next day, when a shell knocked down the fort’s main flagpole. Not knowing whether the flag came down deliberately or not, the Confederates sent a delegation to inquire. The defenders agreed to evacuate (not “surrender”) the fort, on the condition they would be allowed to fire a 100-gun salute to the U.S. flag, a condition the Confederates granted.

The ceremony was cut short by a lethal accident. Hough was assigned to the 47th gun, but a spark set off a cartridge prematurely. The gun exploded; the detonation tore off Hough’s arm and killed him almost instantly; mortally wounded another man, Edward Galloway, and wounded another four. The salute was continued to the 50th gun then cut short.
 
The first soldier to die in combat in the Civil War was militia Private Thornbury Bailey Brown from Virginia. On May 22, 1861, Brown and one Lieutenant Daniel Wilson went from Grafton to Pruntytown (both in Virginia) to recruit volunteers for the Union cause. On their way back in the evening, they found a bridge guarded by a three-men picket; the men were from the Letcher Guards, another militia company, but one with Confederate sympathies. The pickets ordered the recruiters to halt. Brown, possibly acting on the order of Wilson, responded by raising his pistol and firing it, nicking the ear of Daniel Knight, one of the Confederates. The three men returned fire and shot him dead, making him the first soldier in the Civil War to be killed by the enemy.

There are two accounts of the event, however, which cast a slight doubt on Brown’s death having occurred “in combat.” According to these accounts, Brown had once turned Knight over to the sheriff for stealing a cow, and Knight had sworn revenge. It had therefore been argued that the incident was a revenge killing, and not technically a part of a Civil War combat action.
 
The first officer to die in the war (a distinction more meaningful back then than today) was Union Colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth. A law clerk by trade, Ellsworth was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois, and has worked with and studied under the future president. Lincoln, who was 6 ft 4 in (193 cm), once called 5 ft 6 in (168 cm) Ellsworth "the greatest little man I ever met."

In May 1861, James W. Jackson, the ardent secessionist proprietor of the Marshall House inn in Alexandria, Virginia, hoisted a Confederate flag atop his establishment. The flag was big enough that President Lincoln and his cabinet could see it through a field glass from an elevated spot in Washington, D.C. On May 24, Ellsworth (the commander of a volunteer regiment recruited from New York volunteer firefighters) and seven other soldiers entered the inn. Elsworth went upstairs, climbed onto the roof via a ladder, and cut the flag down. He was taking the flag out of the building when Jackson attacked him from a dark passageway, discharge one barrel of his shotgun into Ellsworth’s chest, killing him instantly. His second shot, aimed at another soldier, missed, and he himself was shot and repeatedly bayoneted the next moment by a soldier who received the Medal of Honor (The Medal of Honor) for this action. “Remember Ellsworth!” became a Unionist slogan, and many parts of the inn were removed by collectors.

The last Civil War-related “first death” is the death of the first Confederate soldier (and also officer), Virginia militia captain John Quincy Marr. Marr’s rifleman company was occupying the village of Fairfax, when, in the very dark early hours of June 1, 1861, he was warned of an approaching Union cavalry force. He set up his men in two lines in a clover field. A unit of horsemen soon appeared and some of Marr’s men fired on them, but the riders turned out to be Confederate soldiers fleeing from the Union cavalry. In the dark, some of the cavalrymen managed to get between the infantry and the Union cavalry, preventing most riflemen from shooting. At some point in the confusing situation, Marr saw cavalrymen near him, called out for them to identify themselves, and was shot dead by what turned out to be some of the Union forces. Marr’s death was not noticed in the dark, and his body was only found in the morning. Marr died a captain by mistake: he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel almost a month earlier, but the papers were sent to the wrong location, and he never got them.

The skirmish only had two fatalities: Marr and a Union private called Saintclair. If Private Brown’s May 22 death described above does not count a “proper” combat death, then Saintclair counts as the first Union soldier to die in combat with the Confederacy.
 
World War I
The first U.S. soldier to die in World War I was Private Joseph William Guyton, a former farmer, plumber and oil well driller born in Michigan. Guyton did not volunteer to serve; he was drafted. He had the legal option of refusing to go as he only had a daughter but no son to carry on his name, but he was too proud to do so and entered service.

Around midnight on May 24, 1917, he was manning a machine gun on the frontline somewhere in the Vosges mountains in the region of Alsace, which was a part of Germany at the time (it’s in France today).  Following orders, he fired bursts from his gun intermittently. After one such burst, the Germans responded in kind with a barrage of machine-gun fire; Guyton was hit in the temple by a bullet and died immediately. He received the French Croix de Guerre, and after the war, President Warren G. Harding place a wreath on his coffin during a ceremony held for all the American soldiers who died in Europe during the war.
 
Tragically, Guyton’s entire family soon followed him in death. His wife died a few months after him, succumbing to the global influenza epidemic. Their orphaned daughter Olivia died of pneumonia in 1922.
 
Our article on the first American soldiers to die in some of the nation’s major conflicts will continue with Part II soon.