Daniel Morgan

Daniel Morgan, c. 1794

Portrait by Charles Willson Peale

QUICK FACTS
BORN:
1736 in New Jersey
  DIED:
6 July 1802 in Winchester, Virginia
Buried at Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Winchester, Virginia

Daniel Morgan, American soldier in the militia, of Welsh ancestry, was born in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, in the winter of 1736. In 1753 he settled in Virginia.

In June 1775, soon after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, he was commissioned a captain of Virginia riflemen, and he marched his company to Boston in 21 days. In the winter of 1775 he accompanied General Benedict Arnold to Canada, and in the assault on Quebec (31-Dec-1775) he and his riflemen penetrated the city, where he was hemmed in and was forced to surrender. He was discharged on parole on 7 August 1776. On 12 November he was commissioned colonel of the 11th Virginia and soon afterwards he was released from his parole.

In the summer of 1777 he was engaged in minor skirmishes in New Jersey, and early in September joined General Horatio Gates, then engaged in the campaign against General Burgoyne. At the first battle of Saratoga (19-Sep-1777) he was, until Arnold’s arrival late in the day, the ranking officer on the field; and in the second battle (7-Oct-1777) also took a prominent part. Morgan rejoined Washington in November near Philadelphia. In March 1779 he was commissioned by Congress colonel of the 7th Virginia; but in July, suffering from poor health and dissatisfied because Congress did not advance him further in rank, he resigned from the army and retired to Virginia.

After the Battle of Camden (16-Aug-1780), however, he joined Gates (then in command in the South) at Hillsborough, North Carolina, and on 1 October took command of a corps. On the 13th of the same month Congress tardily raised him to the rank of brigadier general. In January 1781 Cornwallis and Tarleton attempted to entrap him, but at Cowpens (17-Jan-1781) he defeated Tarleton and then escaped from Cornwallis into North Carolina.

In December 1793 he was commissioned major general of Virginia militia, and in November 1794 commanded troops sent to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. He was a Federalist representative in Congress in 1797 - 99. Daniel Morgan died in Winchester, Virginia, in 1802.

ADAPTED FROM:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 ed.

 

Categories
Congressman
General
Militia
Slaveholder
Virginia

Virtually all modern accounts of the Revolution begin in 1763 with the Peace of Paris, the great treaty that concluded the Seven Years’ War. Opening the story there, however, makes the imperial events and conflicts that followed the war — the controversy over the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act crisis — into precursors of the Revolution. No matter how strenuous their other disagreements, most modern historians have looked at the years after 1763 not as contemporary Americans and Britons saw them — as a postwar era vexed by the unanticipated problems in relations between the colonies and metropolis — but as what we in retrospect know those years to have been, a pre-Revolutionary period. By sneaking glances, in effect, at what was coming next, historians robbed their accounts of contingency and suggested, less by design than by inadvertence, that the independence and nationhood of the United States were somehow inevitable.

— Fred Anderson
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754 - 1766 (2000)