“Be assured that I most sincerely lament your present situation, and esteem it a peculiar loss to the United States that you are, at this time, unable to render your services in the field. I most sincerely thank you for the kind expressions of your good wishes, and earnestly hope that you may soon be restored to that share of health which you may desire, and with which you may again be useful to your country in the same eminent degree as has already distinguished your conduct.”
Within two weeks’ time from the date of that cordial letter, Cornwallis surrendered his army, the war of the Revolution had been fought to a finish and the military life of Daniel Morgan was ended.
To his estate in Clarke County, Virginia, which he proudly called “Saratoga,” he now retired; and there he spent his declining days. For two years, in obedience to the call of his people, he served them in the Congress of the nation; but, as he had been most warlike in time of war, in time of peace he preferred the quiet shades of private life. On the sixth day of July in the year 1802, in about the sixty-seventh year of his age, he passed out at Winchester, in Virginia, and there lies his dust in an humble grave.
Mr. President, the dust of Daniel Morgan is noble dust. Saving alone those of the commander-in-chief, his services to his struggling country are the most remarkable in the annals of the war. From the valley of the Hockhocking in 1774, he pledged himself to the services of his brethren of Boston and marched his riflemen six hundred miles to their relief. Into the hardships of the Canadian Campaign he led the van; and three times before Quebec he guided his men to the fire-fringed heights with the courage of a demi-god. To him belongs the chief glory of Burgoyne’s surrender; and at the Cowpens he won what Bancroft affirms was “the most astonishing victory of the war.” His life was a succession of sacrifices for his country. Measure his services as you may—in number, in value, or in brilliancy—they are not surpassed by those of any officer of the Revolution, saving always the unapproachable Washington. In fifty contests with the enemy he participated—eight of them being general engagements—and in those in which he was charged with the responsibility of command, he was either successful or achieved results which were equivalent thereto. His patriotism was proof against British allurements when he was a ragged prisoner of war; and his sense of honor repelled the temptations of a superior brother-officer in the hour of victorious exultation. Into every danger where wartime duty called him, he “fought a good fight”; in spite of every wile of the seducer, “he kept the faith”; into the quietude of private life he carried the praises of the whole army and the plaudits of the civil representatives of his country. But he did not escape calumny. He paid the inevitable penalty which success entails, and paid it with the smile of scorn and the noble silence of conscious rectitude. The American people, as yet, have no Madeleine, no Valhalla, no Westminster, wherein repose the ashes of their mighty dead. But when that national mausoleum comes, as come it ought and come it will, to it in some future generation the dust of Daniel Morgan will be tenderly borne and in honor inurned beneath its vaulted halls. Meantime, he sleeps yonder at Winchester amidst the lovely hills of Old Virginia, and, “in honored rest,” sleeps well well—
“His truth and valor wearing.”
No marble pile marks his resting place. He needs none! Congresses may, his countrymen never will, forget his devotion to the Republic. On the portals of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the stranger who would behold the monument of its architect, Sir Christopher Wren, is admonished in stately Latin to “look around him.” Si quaeris monumentum, circumspici! Ye who would behold the monument of Daniel Morgan, lift your eyes to the towering dome of your country’s Capitol and consider all that it represents! Read the Bill of Rights incorporated in the charters of your commonwealths, and reflect upon the inalienable prerogatives it preserves to eighty millions of freemen! Study the constitution itself and realize with Gladstone that it is “the most wonderful work ever struck off in a given time by the brain and purpose of man!” Ponder those blessings of liberty which, in their full flower and fruition, every American enjoys tonight! And when ye have done this, remember that Daniel Morgan was of the fathers by whose blood and spirit they were established. Sublimer than effigies of brass, more enduring than granite shafts, are these memorials of the men of the old heroic days. Upon the rights of mankind are they founded, and they will remain even unto the last day of recorded time. And when Time shall be no longer—when, in the ultimate convulsion of nature, the archangel-trumpeter shall sound his summons for the living and the dead to render final accounting of their stewardship—before the Judge of the Nations in the group of immortals who blazed the way for the glory of the American Republic, will stand the tall Irish chieftain of the Virginia Riflemen, “with a countenance like the lightning and in raiment as white as snow.”
ST. BRENDAN, AMERICA’S FIRST DISCOVERER. HOW A LEARNED AND ADVENTUROUS IRISHMAN AND SIXTY MONKS OUTSTRIPPED COLUMBUS BY NEARLY TEN CENTURIES IN HIS QUEST OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE—A GRAPHIC AND CONVINCING TREATISE.
BY THOMAS S. LONERGAN, NEW YORK CITY.
During all historic time, the Irish have been noted for their love of adventure and travel, and had commercial intercourse with the leading ports of Europe and Asia for centuries before and after St. Patrick’s time, which is proof that they had sailing vessels of no mean order. The conversion of the Irish people to Christianity, in the fifth century, is unique in the annals of Christendom, because it was accomplished by one man and without the shedding of a single drop of human blood—but the discovery of America by Irish monks in the middle of the sixth century is still a mooted question, notwithstanding the historical researches of Irish, French, German and American scholars, which prove that St. Brendan was the first discoverer of this western hemisphere. His expedition was essentially a religious undertaking, as well as the fulfillment of a well-known prophecy.
St. Brendan was born in the year 484, at a place now called Tralee, in the County of Kerry, Ireland. He was the son of Finnlogha, of the race of Ciar, son of Fergus. He was educated by his relative, the Bishop of Erc, who was head of a local monastery at Kerry. When a child, young Brendan was placed in charge of St. Ita, at Killeedy, in the County of Limerick, where he remained for five years, after which he returned to Bishop Erc’s monastery, and began his ecclesiastical studies with marked ability. He was sent from there to St. Jarlath’s College of Tuan for the purpose of studying the laws and rules of the saints of Ireland, with the injunction to return to Bishop Erc for holy orders, and in due course of time he was ordained.