Daniel Morgan, who had just arrived from Virginia with his riflemen, was
a native of New Jersey, of Welsh descent. Moving to Virginia at an early
age, he had won a great reputation for bravery and readiness of resource
in the wild campaigns of the Seven Years' War. He was a man of gigantic
stature and strength, and incredible powers of endurance. In his youth,
it is said, he had received five hundred lashes by order of a tyrannical
British officer, and had come away alive and defiant. On another
occasion, in a fierce woodland fight with the Indians, in which nearly
all his comrades were slain, Morgan was shot through the neck by a
musket-ball. Almost fainting from the wound, which he believed to be
fatal, Morgan was resolved, nevertheless, not to leave his scalp in the
hands of a dirty Indian; and falling forward, with his arms tightly
clasped about the neck of his stalwart horse, though mists were
gathering before his eyes, he spurred away through the forest paths,
until his foremost Indian pursuer, unable to come up with him, hurled
his tomahawk after him with a yell of baffled rage, and gave up the
chase. With this unconquerable tenacity, Morgan was a man of gentle and
unselfish nature; a genuine diamond, though a rough one; uneducated, but
clear and strong in intelligence and faithful in every fibre. At
Cambridge began his long comradeship with a very different character,
Benedict Arnold, a young man of romantic and generous impulses, and for
personal bravery unsurpassed, but vain and self-seeking, and lacking in
moral robustness; in some respects a more polished man than Morgan, but
of a nature at once coarser and weaker. We shall see these two men
associated in some of the most brilliant achievements of the war; and we
shall see them persecuted and insulted by political enemies, until the
weaker nature sinks and is ruined, while the stronger endures to the
end.
[Illustration: NATHANAEL GREENE]
[Illustration: SILHOUETTE OF JOHN STARK]
[Sidenote: John Sullivan]
[Sidenote: Nathanael Greene]
[Sidenote: Henry Knox]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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