Daniel Morgan
A Revolutionary Life
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A Major New Biography of a Man of Humble Origins Who Became One of the Great Military Leaders of the American Revolution
On January 17, 1781, at Cowpens, South Carolina, the notorious British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton and his legion had been destroyed along with the cream of Lord Cornwallis’s troops. The man who planned and executed this stunning American victory was Daniel Morgan. Once a barely literate backcountry laborer, Morgan now stood at the pinnacle of American martial success. Born in New Jersey in 1736, he left home at seventeen and found himself in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. There he worked in mills and as a teamster, and was recruited for Braddock’s disastrous expedition to take Fort Duquesne from the French in 1755. When George Washington called for troops to join him at the siege of Boston in 1775, Morgan organized a select group of riflemen and headed north. From that moment on, Morgan’s presence made an immediate impact on the battlefield and on his superiors. Washington soon recognized Morgan’s leadership and tactical abilities. When Morgan’s troops blocked the British retreat at Saratoga in 1777, ensuring an American victory, he received accolades from across the colonies.
In Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, the first biography of this iconic figure in forty years, historian Albert Louis Zambone presents Morgan as the quintessential American everyman, who rose through his own dogged determination from poverty and obscurity to become one of the great battlefield commanders in American history. Using social history and other advances in the discipline that had not been available to earlier biographers, the author provides an engrossing portrait of this storied personality of America’s founding era—a common man in uncommon times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zambone, a Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Rockefeller Fellow and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking, establishes himself as a gifted popular historian with this nuanced and engrossing look at the life of the soldier and colonial politician Daniel Morgan. Zambone traces the arc of his subject's life to show how Morgan successfully "fought his way upward through the social hierarchy" from laborer to congressman. As a teenager, he worked for a farmer, then became an overseer and eventually an entrepreneur, county militia captain, and member of the gentry. He commanded a company of riflemen accompanying Benedict Arnold on the march to Quebec in 1775, assuming command after Arnold was shot. Morgan's skill as a military man and his innovative tactics led to more military responsibilities; Zambone plausibly credits him with "two of the truly decisive victories of the Continental Army," the Battles of Saratoga in New York in 1777 and the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina in 1781. Zambone is careful to avoid speculating on gaps in the record and diligently reviews primary documents, such as store ledgers listing quotidian purchases. The result a look at a consequential but now-obscure figure who came from, as Zambone puts it, "the often-silent ranks of the colonial poor" will fascinate readers.
