Free America's Secret Aristocracy by Stephen; Birmingham

“The World War One plaque lists twenty University Club members who were killed in that war, which America was in only for a very short period of time. The World War Two plaque lists only eight members killed, or less than half, even though we were involved in that war for a much longer time. I like to think it is because World War One was the last war that was fought by gentlemen.”
    Other explanations for this discrepancy come to mind—more modern medical techniques, for example. Or the fact that World War II came at the end of the Great Depression, during which many gentlemen gave up their club memberships as a matter of economic necessity. But Mr. Reese’s explanation is the aristocratic one, the nostalgic one, theromantic one, the proud one from a descendant of proud old families, and it has a certain piquancy and charm. Aristocracy, after all, is also a frame of mind.
    In retrospect, the American Revolution often seems like a gentlemanly sort of war. Henry H. Livingston, for example, notes that “at least eight known members of the family fought in the Battle of Saratoga, and only one of these was an enlisted man. The others were all officers.” Looking back, that war—during much of which John and Sarah Jay were out of the country on one sensitive mission or another—also seems like the last war in the history of the world in which everyone managed to conduct himself gloriously. Nothing about it seemed entirely real. If a man didn’t feel like fighting in it, and could afford to do so, he could hire someone else to fight—and die—for him and still be counted as a patriot. In New York, in particular, which had always been a stronghold of Toryism, it was hard to take the whole thing seriously, at the war’s outset, at least. New Yorkers hadn’t really wanted a revolution anyway, and so when war began, wealthy families simply moved to their country places to be out of the line of fire. The Revolution was simply something to have done with, to get through, a probably unnecessary nuisance. Of course it was all quite different in Boston, where Revolutionary passions burned.
    From a distance, in the beginning, the war seemed as quaintly exciting as a good game of chess, the red-coated British soldiers no more than toys made of tin. There was no question that the patriots would win in the end, and in the meantime—in New York, at least—nobody harbored any really hard feelings against the poor British or poor old George III. But the war had a certain glamour. It was a war fought dashingly on horseback, a war of flintlocks and rapiers and snuffboxes and muskets and whiskey and coonskin caps.
    It was not long, however, before the harsh realities of the war became clear, and the American Revolution became a six-and-a-half-year period of terrible suffering and deprivation, during which thousands of young men would die or be mutilated, and the ordinary staples of life—sugar, salt, corn, and milk—would become so scarce as to be nonexistent, and children would die of starvation. At the war’s end, women and children who had fled the cities to be out of the path of the fighting would return to their city mansions to find their homes looted or gutted by the British and precious familyheirlooms stolen or destroyed. Out of the war would come tales of bravery and heroism, of luck against all adversity, as well as tales of brutality and betrayal.
    Mrs. John King Van Rennselaer tells a tale that she admits may be a legend, though it has passed down through her family with specific names attached to the participants and so may be true. William Alexander, the sixth earl of Stirling, who had renounced his estates overseas to serve the Revolutionary cause, had sent his wife and children to his country house, The Sycamores, in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, to wait out the war. And soon, as other women were doing, Lady Stirling (who was Sarah Jay’s aunt) had turned the