e
present biography.

Oliver's father was John Glazier, a Massachusetts Lancastrian, born in
1739. John Glazier was the son of William Glazier, born about the year
1700, his ancestry being respectively of English and of Scotch
extraction. Oliver himself, however, was born in the town of Lancaster,
in the province or colony of Massachusetts, May twenty-third, 1763.

Hence the blood of Norman, of Saxon and of Celt, that had forgotten the
animosities of race and mingled quietly in the veins of his ancestors,
had become purely American in Oliver, and though but little over
fourteen years of age, we find him doing yeoman service upon the
ramparts of Bunker Hill.

That he performed well his part in the struggle for liberty, is evident
from the fact that he appears upon the rolls as a pensioner, from the
close of that memorable contest until the time of his death.

Mr. Frank Renehan, in a sketch contributed by him to an elaborate work
which was published by the New York and Hartford Publishing Company in
1871, comments as follows upon the coincidence of Oliver Glazier in 1775
and Willard Glazier in 1861--both being at the time of entering service
comparatively boys in age, enlisting for the defense of their country:
"The former, though then but fourteen years of age, participated with
the patriots in the battle of Bunker Hill, and to the last contributed
his young enthusiasm and willing services to the cause he had espoused;
thus giving early testimony of his devotion to the land of his adoption
and of fealty to the principles of popular government involved in the
struggle for American independence. So remarkable an instance of
ancestral fidelity to the interests of civil liberty could not but
exercise a marked influence upon those of the same blood to whom the
tradition was handed down, and here we find our subject, a scion of the
third generation, assisting in 1861 on the battlefields of the South, in
maintenance of the liberty his progenitor had contributed to achieve in
1775 on the battlefields of the North! This is not mentioned as a
singular fact--history is replete with just such coincidences,--but
merely for the purpose of suggesting the moral that, in matters of
patriotism, the son is only consistent when he imitates the example and
emulates the virtues of his sires."

In this eloquent passage occurs an error of fact. Oliver Glazier while
in the patriot army was _not_ fighting for the "land of his adoption."
As