Daniel Morgan(c. 1736–1802)

Daniel Morgan was born about 1736 in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, into a family of Welsh descent, and left home as a teenager to make his own way on the Virginia frontier. He worked as a wagoner, a sawmill hand and a farm labourer in the Shenandoah valley, won a hard local fame as a wrestler and a brawler, and during the French and Indian War drove a supply wagon for General Braddock's army. A dispute with a British officer earned him a sentence of several hundred lashes, a punishment he survived and afterwards spoke of with grim humour. He came out of those frontier years a big, plain-spoken, physically formidable man who knew the long rifle and the woods better than almost any soldier of his generation.

When the Revolution began in 1775 he raised a company of Virginia riflemen and marched them to the siege of Boston, then north with Benedict Arnold's column on the terrible wilderness march to Quebec. In the assault on the city on the last night of 1775 he led his men over the first barricade and pressed on into the lower town until, with Arnold wounded and the supporting columns broken, he was surrounded and forced to surrender. Exchanged the following year, he raised a corps of picked riflemen and led them to Saratoga in 1777, where their accurate long-range fire helped break the British attacks at Freeman's Farm and Bemis Heights and contributed to the surrender of Burgoyne's whole army, the turning point of the war in the north.

Late in 1780, with the war in the south going badly, he was promoted brigadier-general and sent to the Carolinas under Nathanael Greene. Greene divided his small army and gave Morgan a flying column with orders to harry the British in the back country. Lord Cornwallis sent his fast and feared cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton to run Morgan down, and on 17 January 1781 the two forces met at an open grazing ground in the South Carolina uplands known as the Cowpens.

What Morgan did there is studied still. Knowing his militia would not stand long against regulars, he made their weakness part of his plan: he posted them in two thin lines forward with orders to fire two volleys and then fall back, deliberately, behind the hill. Tarleton saw the militia retreat, took it for a rout, and threw his men forward in a disordered charge straight onto Morgan's steady Continental line waiting on the rise. As the British came on, the militia re-formed and returned, the Continentals turned and fired at close range, and the American cavalry swept round both flanks. In something under an hour Tarleton's command was destroyed: the larger part of it killed, wounded or taken, with light American loss. It was a double envelopment of the kind soldiers dream of and almost never achieve, and it broke the back of British power in the Carolina back country and set the campaign on the road that ended at Yorktown.

His health, worn down by the frontier and the war, forced him to leave the army soon after, and he returned to his farm near Winchester in the Shenandoah valley. He served a term in Congress and died at Winchester on 6 July 1802. The Morgan name carries his memory as the rough frontier rifleman who out-thought a professional cavalryman on an open field and won, in under an hour at the Cowpens, the most perfectly executed small battle of the American Revolution.