The fallen

If anything, New England's reputation is as a place suspicious of wars, and even of those who fight them. More than a century before the Vietnam War, New England elites were protesting the Mexican-American War - Henry David Thoreau even got himself tossed into jail for a night. In recent decades, New England politicians and voters have generally been more skeptical of military interventions than their Southern and Western counterparts. Some of the region's best-known universities have banned the Reserve Officers' Training Corps from their campuses.

But, in fact, New Englanders have always fought in the nation's wars, sometimes in great numbers, and they continue to fight - and die - in Iraq and Afghanistan. In so doing, they're not only serving their country, but also carrying on a distinct regional military tradition that stretches back through the world wars of the 20th century and the Civil War to the Revolutionary War, and, beyond that, to the earliest days of the colonies. Massachusetts was founded as an outpost on the edge of the British Empire, and up into the 18th century the region remained a sort of frontier zone. For most of that time, without British troops to protect them, the colonists had to rely on militias for defense (and, just as often, for aggression) in intermittent but brutal warfare with Native Americans and the French.

So New England, a place with a deeply martial strain in its history, has much to commemorate on Memorial Day. "We were founded as something of a military beachhead in the 17th century," says William M. Fowler Jr., a history professor at Northeastern. "Our town commons are littered with war memorials."

And according to historians, what distinguishes our military tradition is the fact that it's here that the much heralded ideal of the citizen soldier has come closest to reality. To a striking extent, New England's military heroes have in fact been men who treated military service as a duty rather than a career. Even in an era of professional soldiering, that idea still has a hold.

Memorial Day was born in the wake of the Civil War. Various towns claim to have been the first to celebrate it, but the national holiday was created by an army general, and future US senator, named John Logan. In an 1868 general order, he set aside a day for "strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion." The date, May 30th, was chosen to ensure a plentiful supply of flowers, and the graves to be decorated, Logan made clear, were those of the Union dead. (Southern states celebrated their own, separate memorial days and didn't recognize the national holiday until after World War I.)

In the years after the Civil War, New England cities and towns took especially seriously the duty to commemorate the war dead - the resulting memorial building boom created not only the obelisks and statues ubiquitous in parks and village greens, but grander examples like Harvard's Memorial Hall. There were plenty of names to put on the monuments: Massachusetts alone lost nearly 14,000 men in the war. The state had been the first to respond to Lincoln's call for volunteers, and one of those, Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence, was the war's first casualty, killed by a mob of Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore as the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment transferred between trains on its way to Washington, D.C.

There was something else distinct about New England's Civil War heroes: unlike most of the officers who led the two contending armies, they were not professional soldiers. This was in large part a legacy of the Colonial era and of the Revolutionary War, a conflict that began in New England and was touched off in large part by militias politicized by pro-independence revolutionaries like Paul Revere. Some of the Americans' best known victories in that war - at Concord and Fort Ticonderoga, among others - were won by militia fighters like the Massachusetts Minutemen and Vermont's Green Mountain Boys.

But what had started out as a necessity rose to become a political ideal. Militias tied citizenship itself to self-defense, an idea dear to the hearts of the Founding Fathers, who were deeply suspicious of the British Army and the unaccountable power it represented. Perhaps because it had been founded by religious dissidents, this suspicion had a particular staying power in New England. So while in the South, there was already a well-established professional military tradition by the 19th century - with young sons of the planter aristocracy being sent to Virginia Military Institute and West Point - New England, which in other realms led the country's professionalization and mechanization and industrialization, still celebrated a more amateur military.

The New England soldiers who made names for themselves during the Civil War reflected that. There was Robert Gould Shaw, the young scion of an abolitionist Boston Brahmin family who led the 54th Massachusetts volunteer infantry - among the first, and by war's end the most storied, of the Union army's black regiments. There was Joshua Chamberlain, the Bowdoin professor who led the 20th Maine at the Battle of Gettysburg, gaining acclaim for the daring and unorthodox "right wheel" bayonet charge by which his troops repulsed a potentially decisive Confederate attack during the battle's second day. And there was George Stannard, a teacher and foundry operator whose brigade of Vermonters flanked and cut down Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, effectively ending the battle.

Shaw, famously, died in battle, leading the assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina, but Chamberlain and Stannard both retired from the military, as generals, soon after the war's end. Crippled by injuries - including the loss of his right arm - Stannard served briefly as a customs inspector before being appointed doorkeeper of the US House of Representatives, a post he held until his death. Chamberlain served four terms as governor of Maine, then became president of Bowdoin. At the age of 70 he volunteered for service in the Spanish-American War, but was rejected because of health problems caused by one of his Civil War wounds.

The military is today a very different institution than the one Shaw, Stannard, and Chamberlain served in. Warfare is more complex, more specialized, more mechanized and more bureaucratic, and requires a level of professionalization unimaginable in their day. But the citizen-soldier ideal is still embodied, not only in the National Guard, but in the young men and women from Worcester, from Rutland, from Hampstead or South Portland who volunteer for active duty, hoping to serve and fight, then someday to take off their camouflage and come back. As has always been the case, not all of them will.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.