The eldest son of Benjamin Tupper, Anselm enlisted in the fight for independence during 1775, while only eleven years old, achieving the rank of lieutenant before his seventeenth birthday.

His childhood was brief, as he enlisted in May 1775 at the young age of eleven, shortly after the Battles of Lexington and Concord,[2][3] likely being one of the younger soldiers in the fight for independence.

[3] As described in Chaffin's History of the Town of Easton, Massachusetts, It is interesting to think of this Revolutionary soldier, not yet twelve years old, engaging in all the toil, hardship, and peril of war, and never flinching until his country's independence was achieved.

[9] Subsequently, on April 7, 1788, Anselm Tupper and a group of American pioneers to the Northwest Territory, led by Rufus Putnam, arrived at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers to establish Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory.

He is buried with his father and many other American Revolutionary War soldiers and pioneers at Mound Cemetery in Marietta.