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Joseph Hanks had four brothers. The youngest of them was Alexander Hanks, whose birthdate (December2, 1734) and parentage appear in the North Farnham Anglican parish records. As a young adult, he appears once on a voting list, once on a list of a road surveyor's attendants, and once as a witness to a mortgage. Being illiterate, he could only sign his name with a capital letter "A".
During the summer of 1776, just after the American Declaration of Independance by the Continental Congress, Alexander Hanks responded to the call for soldiers to join Washington's Continental Army by enlisteing in a company of eighty Northern Neck men. Their company commander, Capt. Burgess Ball, a well-to-do planter from a plantation farther down the Rappahannock River in Lancaster County, had to arm and supply the company with his own funds. Eventually, he had to sell his plantation in order to pay his debts. (After the war, he married General Washington's niece, and became a close confidant of Washington during the first president's final years.
The company of ill-equipped, inexperienced soldiers was ordered north by General Washington to join the rest of the army defending the harbor and city of New York from and impending British invasion. As many know, the army made a badly failing effort to hold the area, losing repeatedly to the British enemy's disciplined columns in engagements on Long Island. The exasperated Washington sometimes chased his frightened infantrymen on horseback, in his attempts to keep them from turning tail and running rather than fighting.
But in Harlem Heights on the northern end of Manhattan island, the American troops finally stood up to the enemey. On Septemberr 16 they stood their ground, using the rocky wooded terrain to their advantage. Eventually, it was the British who fled, with the Continentals in hot pursuit. It was a small but signal victory for Washington-his first.
Captain Burgess Ball's company had only one fatal casualty that day-Private Alexander Hanks. His muster roll does not say whether he died in combat that day, or from wounds recieved in earlier fighting, or from accident of illness. But there can be virtually no doubt that this fallen soldier was the 41-year-old brother of Joseph Hanks, and the uncle of his little daughter Lucey Hanks, of Richmond County. The brother of Joseph is the only Alexander Hanks known to be of record in the Northern Neck during the 1760's or 1770's; and the demise of Alexander Hanks of Richmond County is confirmed by a court record of July 6, 1778, when his debt to a local merchant, Hudson Muse, was cancelled by the court due to his death.
The muster roll for Captain Ball's band of revolutionaries coverin the period from August, 1776 through May 31, 1777, has survived, and is in the National Archives. It is a sad and moving document. For, while Alexander Hanks wass the company's only foot soldier or officer to die on the day of the Battle of Harlem Heights, the days of half of the rest of the company were numbered. By May 31 of the following year, a total of 42 of the 80 were dead, including 36 of the company's original 56 privates.
Lincoln, while still a young man, detailed in his 1838 speech at the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, with great sensitivity, the suffering brought on by the Revolutionary War.
At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son of a brother, a living history was to be found in every family-a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds recieved, in the midst of the very scenes related-a history that could be understood by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.
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