What does the phrase "hardly a man is now alive"

By saying "hardly a man is now alive that remembers that famous day and year " (im not sure if this is the quote your referring to but it's the only one that makes sense) he was referring that most of the people from 1775 had died by 1860, or that the events of the revolutionary war had been largely forgotten.

A saying from Paul Revere meaning " don't you remember the war that we fought and how it was such a cost"!