OK, I see what you mean…It’s North The O is very small in every word.
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That’s what I read first too. But then what revolutionary war would that have been? So I changed my mind to North, looks more like it too.
IMHO the S in “south America” is the same letter/glyph as in soldier immediately above.
What war in the south? Texas vs Mexico of course.
Texas was an independent republic 1836-1845 (it became a US state in Dec 1845), one Mr Houston its president in 1842. The successful Texas Revolution of 1835 resulted in the treaties of Velasco and the republic of Texas as de facto independent. Mexico kept claiming it but was too weak to put that into action. The US-Mexico war that would culminate in the occupation of Mexico City in 1847 had yet to take place but that doesn’t mean there was peace all over, far from it.
The Smithsonian Magazine says
(note that the letter to be deciphered mentions “the 25, day of March 1842”)
… in early March 1842, 700 Mexican troops under General Rafael Vasquez crossed the Republic of Texas borders, and by March 5 occupied San Antonio, about 80 miles from Austin. Officials declared martial law; many families left for somewhere safer.
In the aftermath of the attack, [president] Houston feared the worst in what was to come. Letters to his fiancée express true concern of not only Mexican attack, but that Comanches would burn and destroy the city – and crucially its archives - as well. Houston felt strongly that Austin was not a safe place for the republic’s capital.
As he wrote on March 24, 1842:
“The destruction of the national archives would entail irremediable injury upon the whole people of Texas…Should the infinite evil which the loss of the national archives would occasion, fall upon the country through his [the President’s] neglect of imperious constitutional duty, he would be culpable in the extreme, and must justly incur the reproach of a whole nation.”
Lambert says that he will be eighty five years old on the 25th day of March 1842. It goes on to elaborate where he was born (Maryland) and the various states he has lived in. That puts him in his 20s for the American Revolution (North, throwing off colonial rule) of 1765-1783.
Plus, look at the N at the end of line 4, paragraph 2.
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It definitely looks more like an S than an N to me but he would be 85 on March 25th 1842 (not 1942😉) which makes Roxi’s theory about the Mexican/Texas war wrong.
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Just to finish taking this totally OT, Lambert at 85 (!) would have been a minor celebrity as one of the few survivor-fighters against the Redcoats. My father’s mother and father were descended from two signatories of the Declaration of Independence, which was about as close to dreaded royalty as it came in Revolutionary America. Ironically, the US started their own class system, although they pretended everyone was equal. The charade continues.
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No, it really is not, and in any case that’s a lower case s, quite different from upper case. We don’t have any upper case S to compare with, but none of the lower case ones have the opening serif, all starting with the upstroke. The upper case Ms and As all have the slight down and up opening; I already pointed out the comparison with the two upper case Ms - exactly the same as those but with just one upstroke instead of two.
In addition the third letter does not match with any other u such as in court, but is identical to every other r we find.
So I’m convinced it’s the Revolutionary war in North America.
It might look like an S, but it’s not connected at the bottom like all of the others. It says he appeared in person in Dearborn County in the State of Indiana. State is capitalized and clearly connected at the bottom. What looks like South is not connected, so I think it’s an N.
Not very complicated either, I’d just need a bit of time to get the patterns of this particular handwriting. (as for the Swiss-Germans and their thing for the “Schnüerlischrift”, I can confirm it’s true. I am the designated person at our school to write every greeting card etc for the teachers)