Book Review: Gabriel Neville, The Last Men Standing: The 8^th Virginia Regiment in the American Revolution (Warwick, UK: Helion and Company, 2025).  $55.  460 pp.

Regimental histories can be dry recitations of facts piled one on top of another to amass a complete source of information about a military unit and its actions.   Alternatively, they can be narratives full of colorful characters and exciting events, but from necessity such histories often leave much out as a distraction from the heartbeat of a story.  Given those challenges, Gabriel Neville has done something remarkable in writing the history of the 8^th Virginia Regiment in The Last Men Standing.  He has collected an immense amount of material, which could easily overwhelm a narrative, but presents it over time as the story of the 8^th Virginia unfolds.  By organizing many of the facts in a series of charts, tables, and illustrations rather than integrating them into the text, Neville ensures that the story moves along without being buried in minutia.  It is an impressive accomplishment.

Virginia’s 8^th Regiment was raised in Virginia’s near frontier, a vast tract of land that today starts in northeastern Tennessee and runs to the northeast, through the Shenandoah Valley, West Virginia, and southwestern Pennsylvania all the way to Pittsburgh.  The men were first or second generation immigrants, largely German or Irish, who had originally flocked to the British colonies in order to carve out a path free of Europe’s stagnating stratification.  The regiment’s most famous member was its colonel, Peter Muhlenberg, the famous “fighting parson” who legend has it completed a sermon and then marched off to war directly from the pulpit.  (Neville explores the legend and its embellishments.)  

Sometimes known as the “German regiment” given its large population of Germans, the 8^th had the distinction of being the only Virginia regiment initially armed with rifles.  Most of the regiment fought under Washington across New Jersey in 1776 and early 1777 and then throughout the Philadelphia campaign, including the battle of Monmouth.  Some, however, were siphoned off to help defend South Carolina and were engaged at Sullivan’s Island in July 1776.  It is as if the regiment was everywhere at once.  Skilled riflemen were always in demand.  At the same time, The Last Men Standing relates events associated with recruiting, promotions, transfers, organizational adjustments, command relationships, and so on.  This can create a storytelling problem.  Because so many things are happening at the same time, a reader can get easily confused.  But, if we persist, The Last Men Standing becomes an immensely rewarding read.

Neville tackles the challenge by telling the regiment’s story from the bottom up.  We meet future recruits as boys and begin to understand their experiences growing up.   He moves forward by widening the aperture to address the communities in which they lived as tensions grew with the mother country, their experience as recruits, the organization of the regiment as Virginia mobilized for war, and their experiences of combat.   A conventional regimental history might have ended when the regiment disbanded and an epilogue describing or profiling the fates of individuals soldiers and officers.   Neville goes beyond that.  Several remained in service, either as Continentals or militia.  Rather than epilogue, he continues the story by exploring how the veterans moved on with life.  They shared some commonalities, primarily bounty lands in Kentucky.  Remarkably, Neville has visited many of the Kentucky homesites for these accomplished veterans and tracked more than a few of them to their graves.  The entire volume is blessed with a generous number of maps and illustrations that help tell the tale.

It’s clear from the get go that The Last Men Standing is a labor of love.  Those familiar with Neville’s website, the 8^th Virginia, which has since involved to cover Virginia at war, will not be surprised at the volume he has produced from years of research.   It’s a top-notch book that honors the men who helped win a war and belongs in your Revolutionary War library.