One event dominated his coming-of-age years—as it did the lives of everyone else in that region during that era: the American Revolution. Eaton watched and listened as the rebellion grew from whispered indignation to loud protest, from boys throwing stones at Redcoats to men drilling militias on the commons. At that impressionable age, he soaked in the rising passions of defiance. William saw a messenger galloping to inform Mansfield about the Boston Tea Party. In the family kitchen, his father explained to him how Parliament had passed the “Coercive Acts,” which closed Boston harbor and revoked the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter until Boston repaid the English East India Company for the tea thrown overboard. The British Crown hoped to isolate the troublemakers in Boston; instead, in a parade of defiance, town after small New England town rallied to Boston’s side.
In many of the colonies, such as New York, neighbors stood divided, as tens of thousands of Tory Loyalists supported England (Bainbridge’s family in New Jersey, for one, was Tory), but in Eaton’s Mansfield, the town was fiercely rebellious, with its local Sons of Liberty ready to pound renunciations out of any Loyalists foolhardy enough to express their opinions.
On October 10, 1774, at a town meeting, the residents of Mansfield voted to issue a forceful resolution, complaining about the “unConstitutional and oppressive measures which have justly alarmed British America.” They then vowed, in words that still have a certain ring: “We should, as Men, as Englishmen and as Christians to the utmost of our ability, maintain and hand down to our Posterity—FREEDOM—that sacred Plant of Paradise—that Growth of Heaven—that Freedom which is the grand Constitution of intellectual Happiness, and for the enjoyment of which our Fathers exchanged their seats of Pleasure and of Plenty to encounter the numerous Savages, perils and difficulties of an inhospitable Wilderness.”
To William, this wasn’t rhetoric, this was their communal taunt aimed at the oppressive lords of England.
Then, the following year, the “shots heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord ignited the conflict. Eaton overheard firsthand tales of Tryon’s brutal raids on the Connecticut coast, when drunken cursing British soldiers were said to have threatened colonial mothers: “Shall we bake your baby into a pie?” Eaton, at age fifteen, reckless and patriotic, ran away from home to join the Continental Army, but instead of dodging bullets, he was dodging dishrags; he found himself waiting tables for the officers in Major Dennie’s Connecticut Brigade. Thomas Paine’s classic line “These are the times that try men’s souls” is followed by a less well-remembered sentence. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country.”
Young Eaton clearly wanted to be a year-round patriot; he re-enlisted for a new three-year hitch in the Connecticut Brigade. Private Eaton drilled in 1782 before General George Washington, who would become Eaton’s demigod. (He later wrote embarrassing doggerel celebrating the commander in chief.) Eaton saw enough combat to receive a leg wound, although no details have survived of the incident. When General Washington’s victorious armies were disbanded in 1783, Eaton left as a sergeant.
The leg wound must have healed quickly because Eaton soon was judged far and away the fastest runner at Dartmouth College. A fellow alumnus, in a brief sketch, remembers Eaton giving a rival a “two-rod” head start, then catching up to him, somehow leapfrogging over him and beating him in the race.
From his army discharge to his graduation seven years later from Dartmouth, a picture emerges of a poor farmer’s boy, relentlessly pursuing his education despite numerous financial setbacks. The parents of his classmates paid their bills. He, on the other hand, wrote to the president of Dartmouth College, requesting permission to drop out for a semester to earn money. “I have no resource but industry and oeconomy, have not rec’d six shillings assistance since I have been at College, nor do I expect any.” He tutored, took odd jobs, and displayed a persistence he would show all his life.
One time, unable to afford stagecoach fare back to school, he plunked a staff over his shoulder with a bag of trinkets to sell and walked 175 miles from Mansfield, Connecticut, back to Hanover, New Hampshire. Dartmouth in those days graduated about thirty students a year, and the three full-time faculty members specialized in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, rhetoric, arithmetic, philosophy, civil and ecclesiastical history, natural and political law.
One of Eaton’s classmates described him as likable and a bit unusual. “He was odd, precise in his language—full of decision—sometimes a little morose . . . suffered bouts of melancholy.” (All his life, in periods of lull, he would gravitate toward gloom and anger, while in moments of action, his bullheaded optimism would tow others along.) As for his academics, in his Classical Studies, Eaton favored tracts on war, devoting himself to memorizing passages from Caesar’s Commentaries or Xenophon’s Retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks. Eaton also showed a certain wit . . . well, rather a certain collegiate wit circa 1790.