Once again, here's Tyler Putnam.

There are other really heartbreaking cases where it didn't work out.

So there's an incredibly rare surviving letter from an African-American Revolutionary War soldier.

We have very, very few firsthand accounts of black soldiers in the Revolutionary War.

We know that hundreds and thousands of them served, but not a big document source base.

The reason this letter survives, this letter home from a soldier during the Revolutionary War, was that it was sent into the federal archives by his widow as part of her application for a pension.

And her way of proving that her late husband had served in the war was sending a wartime dated letter from camp that she had received to Washington.

Here's Tyler with more on how early Americans learned how to love their country, and more importantly to our story, how to love veterans too.

Here's Tyler Putnam, Senior Manager of Gallery Interpretations at the Museum of the American Revolution.

You know, when you're studying the Revolutionary War, often you are beholden to one of two source bases.

So one is the material record, the objects that survived, the archaeology that we can dig up.

And that can be very, very broad.

And the other is the documentary record.

And those documents are the product of people who could write or people who were worthy of being written about.

And that is a really broad slate of people in the 18th century.

Here's Tyler once more to set the scene for us.