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After years of research, the complete history of the 8th Virginia Regiment will finally be published this spring. Gabriel Neville’s book The Last Men Standing: The 8th Virginia Regiment in the American Revolution is scheduled for release on May 31. The book will be the first of its kind, focusing on the actual Revolutionary soldiers from their childhoods to their last days on the frontier. Every identifiable man who served in the regiment is listed.
​​The 8th Virginia Regiment was unique in the Continental Army, and its story has never been fully told. This is a book that was once thought impossible to write.
​The regiment is famous for its first colonel, the “fighting parson,” Peter Muhlenberg. However, there is much more to the story than the well-known story of Muhlenberg’s final sermon. The 8th Virginia was multi-ethnic, and its very existence tied north with south and east with west in a way that contributed meaningfully to national unity. About 800 men signed up to fight early in 1776. By the end of the war, only a few of them remained.
Their story is different from the usual narrative. They were Western men who cared more about Kentucky and Ohio than the tax on tea. They were the original pioneers, setting cultural precedents that became fixtures in Western movies: fringed shirts, long rifles, migration trails, Conestoga wagons, Indian fighting, dueling, and buffalo hunting. To go west, though, they first had to fight in the east.
George Bancroft called them "one of the most perfect battalions of the American Army." Major General Charles Lee called them “a most excellent regiment” and chose them first for Continental service “in preference to any other.” Two of its men rose from private to general over the course of their full military careers.
"I fought in our Revolutionary War for liberty."
—Sgt. John Vance
The Virginia Convention initially intended the 8th Virginia to be a "German Regiment." It raised several companies in the Shenandoah Valley, where thousands of Germans had migrated along the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania. Thousands of Scotch-Irish immigrants had come the same way, and they enlisted in equal measure. One 8th Virginia man, Sergeant John Vance, declared, "I fought in our Revolutionary War for liberty."
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​Frequently divided and detached, the regiment’s men served almost everywhere: Charleston, White Plains, Trenton, Princeton, Short Hills, Cooch's Bridge, Brandywine, Saratoga, Germantown, Valley Forge, and Monmouth.  They suffered, and many died from frostbite, malaria, smallpox, malnourishment, musket balls, bayonets, and cruel imprisonment. Their numbers dwindled until only a few remained to help corner Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown. Victorious, those who survived turned west to build the America we know.
 
The Last Men Standing includes over a hundred color and black-and-white illustrations, twenty maps, and an appendix listing every identifiable man who served. It will be published by Helion & Company and is now available for pre-order. It is available at Amazon and other retailers, or from The Fort Plain Museum at a generous discount.
"...one of the most perfect battalions of the American Army."
—George Bancroft