DNA IDs Forgotten Soldier as Smithsonian Scrubs 'American History'

DNA testing has finally identified a Maryland teenager who died fighting the British at the Battle of Camden, exposing the disgrace of a woke cultural elite that tears down monuments while the actual bones of our founders' generation lie forgotten in unmarked graves.

Pvt. John Pumphrey was an orphan who gave his life for a country that forgot him for 246 years, a sharp contrast to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History—which actively scrubbed the words "American history" from its mission statement to appease left-wing activists. What we choose to remember matters.

According to CNN, archaeologists surveying the South Carolina battlefield in 2020 found human bones protruding from the ground. Fourteen sets of remains were eventually recovered; twelve were Continental soldiers. Most were left where they fell in 1780, abandoned to wild animals and the scorching heat after British Gen. Charles Lord Cornwallis routed patriot forces. Pumphrey, buried under a thin layer of dirt, was cataloged simply as "Camden 9B." His headstone read: "UNKNOWN. REV WAR. BATTLE OF CAMDEN. AUG 16 1780."

Forensic genealogists refused to let him stay unknown. Allison Peacock, founder of FHD Forensics, took the case, calling it "America’s oldest John Doe." After extracting DNA from the petrous bone behind his ear—a delicate structure that preserved autosomal, X, and Y chromosome data—her team uploaded the results and got 20,000 matches to work with. One maternal match, retired federal agent Russ Hudson, helped trace the remains to the young orphan from Maryland’s Anne Arundel County.

While ordinary Americans and private forensics companies worked to restore a forgotten soldier’s name, the taxpayer-funded institutions tasked with preserving our history are doing the exact opposite. The New York Post reported that the National Museum of American History—which gets 62% of its funding from taxpayers—holds no major exhibit dedicated to the Founding era, George Washington, or the American Revolution. Museum Director Anthea Hartig admitted to axing the phrases "infinite richness" and "American history" from the mission statement to, in her words, "get out of the 'America First' mentality."

Instead of honoring the founders, museum staff are ordered to tie exhibits to left-wing fixations like gender/sexuality, climate change, and economic inequality. It is the same rot spreading across the country's cultural institutions: the National Park Service tried to tear down a statue of William Penn in Philadelphia, and New York's Natural History Museum removed a statue of Theodore Roosevelt to appease BLM activists.

We have the technology to put a name to a 246-year-old skeleton, but the bureaucrats running our museums want to erase the names of the men who built this country. The question isn't whether we can remember our history—it's whether the institutions we fund will ever be forced to.