On 2 November 1783 George Washington released his Farewell Order to the Philadelphia newspapers for distribution to the men of the Continental Army. He thanked the officers and men for their assistance and, no doubt pushing back memories of the empty regiments, the suffering of his men, and the protests of his officers, asked:

As he concluded, Washington urged the veterans to remember these connections as they transferred to civilian life. Civilians they would no doubt become for, despite Washington's desire for a peacetime force, by June 1784 the Continental Congress had discharged all its men except 25 at Fort Pitt and 55 at West Point.

Nonetheless, the memory of the war remained as a significant vehicle for veterans to interpret their lives. Men remembered the war in their own ways, whether through their clothes, titles of address, friendships with other veterans, or spoken and written recollections. Civilians, too, had their own memories of the sufferings and celebrations of the war. As time passed, memories overlapped and interlinked. Veterans named their children after military champions, inscribing the history of the war onto their own families. The heroes of the past would become the leaders of the future American Republic. Yet the awareness of a distinction between military and civilian communities persisted. Decades after the war people still remembered how Simeon Lyman ‘was called Sergeant Lyman by his comrades after his return from the army’. Even more tellingly, in a comedy composed by Royall Tyler, a veteran officer, and first performed in 1787, a character named Colonel Manly confessed that ‘my old brother-soldiers are dearer to me’ than those ‘who were not in the field in the late glorious contest’, for ‘Friendships made in adversity are lasting; our countrymen may forget us, but that is no reason why we should forget one another.’