Sixty-three years later, when he was 80, Joseph McJunkin remembered these words with their remarkable combination of informality and decision. It was part of the reason men like young McJunkin trusted Daniel Morgan. It was somehow reassuring to hear him call Lt. Col. William Washington, commander of the American cavalry and second cousin to Gen. George Washington, “Billy.” It was even more reassuring to hear him call Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, commander of the British army that was coming after them, “Benny.”
Adding to this reassurance was 45-year-old Daniel Morgan’s appearance and reputation. He was over six feet tall, with massive shoulders and arms, toughened from his youthful years as a wagonmaster in western Virginia. In his younger days he had been one of the champion sluggers and wrestlers of the Shenandoah Valley. His wide volatile face could still flash from cheerfulness to pugnacity in an instant. In the five years of the Revolution, Morgan had become a living legend: the man who led a reckless assault into the very mouths of British cannon on the barricaded streets of Quebec in 1775, whose corps of some 570 riflemen had been the cutting edge of the American army that defeated the British at Saratoga in 1777.
The victor at Saratoga, Gen. Horatio Gates (top) came south in July 1780 to command the Southern Department after the main Continental army in the South was surrendered at Charleston. Charles Willson Peale shows Gates at 49 with an open face and a steady gaze.
A month later he himself was routed at Camden by Cornwallis. Cornwallis was only 45, two years after Yorktown, when he sat for Gainsborough. Both generals are portrayed in their prime.
Daniel Morgan, Frontiersman
He was a giant of a man, 6 feet 2 inches, with a full face, blue eyes, dark hair, and a classic nose. As a youth in western Virginia, he had drifted into wagoneering along the roads of the frontier. His education was slight. Good-natured and gregarious, he was, like his companions of the road, rowdy and given to drink, gambling, and fighting. In time, he married, settled down, went into farming, and became a man of substance in his community.
He was already a hero of the Revolution when he took command of Greene’s light troops in late 1780. His rifle corps had fought with distinction at Quebec (1775) and Saratoga (1777). But after being passed over for promotion, unfairly he thought, he retired to his Virginia farm. When the South fell to British armies in 1780, he put aside his feelings and welcomed a new command.
Morgan was at home in the slashing, partisan warfare in the South. At Cowpens the mixed force of regulars and militia that he led so ably destroyed Tarleton’s dreaded Legion, depriving Cornwallis of a wing of swift-moving light troops essential to his army’s operation.
