An address delivered before the Society, copy for which was received too late for publication in Vol. VIII of the Journal.
BY HON. JOSEPH T. LAWLESS, NORFOLK, VA.
Mr. President and Fellow Members:
By the grace of your invitation, I have the honor of addressing this Society a second time. With the invitation was coupled the admonition that I should devote myself to the subject which our distinguished President has just announced. Deeply distrusting my ability to discharge the commission to your entertainment and within the limitation of time the occasion prescribes, but taking courage from your desire to have recorded the facts of unwritten history as they affect the objects of this organization, and relying upon your patience to hear, though your interest should wane, I have come tonight in obedience to your summons to speak of the most unique figure in the annals of American Commonwealths. The place of his birth unknown even to himself—his parentage wrapped in an oblivion which he steadfastly refused to penetrate—a farm laborer in the Valley of Virginia in 1755—a teamster in the British army in the French and Indian war—he advanced without the aid of adventitious circumstances to the command of an army of his compatriots and fought and won at the Cowpens the battle which made possible the triumph at Yorktown!
All this, indeed, did Daniel Morgan. But he did more. He conquered his own weaknesses, and scorned the allurements of unworthy preferments. He overcame the excesses of youthful appetite; he flouted the proffered temptations of a commission in the royal army of Great Britain while a ragged prisoner of war amidst the snows of Quebec; and in the hour of his subsequent glory on the field at Saratoga, he disdained the persuasions of Gates to join the “Conway Cabal” and remained loyal to Washington and to the liberties of his country.
With his lineage unknown, his birthplace unestablished, his advent unheralded, and his history but sparsely written, no man can speak with certainty of the race from which he sprung. But if there be aught distinctive in racial characteristics; or aught indicative in that accent of human speech which makes the Irish brogue sound as music on the ear, Daniel Morgan was of that race which has ennobled Celtic history, and the lullaby which first soothed him into sleeping was the crooning of a mother’s voice that spake the Irish tongue. But, my countrymen, whatever his lineage and wherever the place of his birth, tonight, on the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of his greatest battle, when we have assembled in New York’s banquet hall to honor his memory and to make better known a renown which should be as firmly established as the liberties of his country, we may well pause to trace the course of those wonderful activities which have no parallel in Revolutionary lore.
The earliest, and perhaps his sole biographer, James Graham, declares he was of Welsh extraction, and that he went to Virginia from the banks of the Delaware. This declaration is based on a manuscript prepared for the biographer by Dr. William Hall, of Winchester, who knew General Morgan in his lifetime and attended his bedside during his last illness. The uniform refusal of Morgan to discuss his parentage and the resultant uncertainty which surrounds his racial extraction, entitle such a statement on the part of a person who was his friend in life to consideration and respect. But I submit a statement of another person who knew him during life to substantiate the belief which exists in Virginia that he was of Irish blood.
The grandmother of Colonel Charles Triplett O’Ferrall, a late Governor of that Commonwealth, lived near and knew Daniel Morgan. During a close association at Richmond, Governor O’Ferrall frequently told me anecdotes of him which he learned from the lips of his grandmother, who in her early life saw much of Morgan and was present at his funeral. In reciting some of these anecdotes the Governor would imitate the Irish brogue which appeared to distinguish the accent of Morgan. Born within a few miles of Morgan’s home, O’Ferrall lived in the Valley all his life and for twelve years represented that District in the House of Representatives of the United States. Three times in that body he introduced a bill having for its object the erection of a monument to mark the grave of Morgan. No citizen gave more thought to the personality of the man and his career as a soldier than did Governor O’Ferrall. In his published memoirs he closes the last chapter with a tribute to him and expresses the hope that some successor in Congress from the Valley District will be able to persuade Congress to mark his lowly grave. “I had set my heart on its passage,” he says, on page 358; “every emotion of my soul was aroused in its behalf. I had carefully studied the hero’s life and character and it read like a romance to me.” Concerning Morgan’s brogue, he could not have been misinformed by his grandmother. Res ipsa loquitur. Himself of Irish extraction and as game a cavalryman as ever drew a blade, who can doubt that it was because of the blood that ran in Morgan’s veins, scarcely less than his services to his country, that impelled O’Ferrall to so interest himself in his career?
When about the age of seventeen, in the year 1753, a tall, raw-boned boy, calling himself Daniel Morgan, “turned up” near the village of Winchester in Virginia. There was nothing about him to excite the good opinion of those frontiersmen, except his willingness to work. He had scant acquaintance with the three R’s. His writing was barely legible; his reading, painful to everybody who heard—especially to himself; his knowledge of the simplest principles of arithmetic, was small; his manners were rude; and his conversation so unpolished as to class him with the humblest order of men. The only occupation he understood was that of a land-grubber and rail-splitter, and it was at these hard tasks that he sought employment. He found it. And such was his strength and his industry that no man engaged Daniel Morgan to clear a piece of new land or to split white-oak rails for a snake-fence and ever regretted his contract! Within a year he became a wagoner for Nathaniel Burwell, Esquire. In a little more than two years his industry and thrift enabled him to purchase a wagon and team of his own; and then—a forerunner of the Wells Fargo—he established an express between the Valley and points beyond the Blue Ridge, east of the Range.
As his fortunes improved, there came improvement in his mind. His manners, too, changed. The raw-boned boy of seventeen had developed into the man of twenty-one, and with the development came a reputation for great physical strength and a courage that was dauntless—great virtues, always, on the frontier. With these qualities he coupled a natural wit, a quick intelligence, a manliness, and a frankness of manner which won the admiration of his sturdy neighbors.