I broke his mouth, which closed the business.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 399. On General Daniel Morgan.

Cowpens was Morgan’s last fight. But when Cornwallis’s army was ravaging parts of Virginia, Morgan took the field once more at the behest of Lafayette, who asked him to raise a force of riflemen and come to his aid. Morgan, who liked the young Frenchman, never hesitated and joined Lafayette’s command on 7 July 1781. Morgan and General Anthony Wayne tried to corner Tarleton during one of his raids, but Benny had had quite enough of Morgan and went far out of his way to avoid him. The excessive activity brought on a severe attack of sciatica, and Morgan soon was forced to return home, where he apparently came close to dying.

Morgan’s great will to live served him well, however, and he survived and the years were good to him. His daughters Nancy and Betsy gave him nineteen grandchildren, upon whom he doted and to whom he told war stories in language one of them remembered as “powerful and graphic.” A non-martial adventure sometime in the mid-1780s resulted in the birth of a son, Willoughby Morgan. The boy’s mother is unknown, and Morgan never wrote to him or to our knowledge spoke of him and left him out of his will. The boy resembled his father physically and took after him in compiling a distinguished combat record in the War of 1812. He became a career soldier, attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, and died in 1832. In 1782 Morgan completed a personal monument that still stands eleven miles from Winchester. The handsome two-story stone house, today privately owned, he called “Saratoga.” Tradition has it that it was built by Hessian prisoners of war.

He engaged in business activities locally and with Eastern merchants. And of course he speculated in land. By 1795 he owned 250,000 acres in various states and territories. At the same time he saw to the good education of his daughters and entertained old army friends who visited him at Saratoga—such familiar names as John Eager Howard, Horatio Gates, and, above all, his closest “old sword,” Otho Holland Williams. They were opposites, Williams a frail man, well educated, cultivated, but they truly enjoyed each other’s company.

Like most who claw their way from the bottom of the heap, Daniel Morgan craved respectability, and he attained it, along with honors and distinctions enough to please any man. But there was always something of the Old Waggoner in him, and he remained pugnacious to the end. In 1794, during the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, Major General Daniel Morgan led part of the Virginia militia against the rebels. The distinguished Hero of the Revolution wrote to Light Horse Harry Lee, then Governor of Virginia, that at Parkinson’s Ferry on the Monongahela River he “was obliged to give the tavern keeper where we lodged a knock on the mouth, for selling whiskey to the soldiers for a dollar a gallon—these sales he kept up nearly all night, and when I told him his fault, he began to treat me with indignity, and I broke his mouth, which closed the business.”

Morgan was not cut out to be a congressman. He was elected to the House in 1797 and was a staunch, even rigid Federalist. His most memorable statement during his short political career was his description of the party of Jefferson as a “parsell of Egg sucking dogs.” He was too ill to run for reelection in 1799.

It is as a soldier that he must be judged, and only one conclusion can be reached: he was an exceptional field commander, and as a battle captain he would have had few superiors in any age. All the necessary attributes were his: command presence, coolness under fire, uncommon inspirational qualities, and the ability in critical situations to “think on his feet.” Contemplation of his military career gives fresh meaning to that word charisma. Add his tactical brilliance and you have a commander of rare gifts.

By the turn of the new century the illnesses that had plagued him in the waning years of the Revolution wracked him once again and persisted. In the final months of his life he became feeble, but the spirit and the will that marked this uncommon man of the common people never died. According to the son of the attending physician, the following conversation took place between Morgan and Doctor Conrad.

“General Morgan, if you have any worldly matters to be settled, I think it is my duty to inform you of the importance of attending to them. I know you have faced death in battle and I presume it will not be a cause of alarm or surprise to you.”

Doctor Conrad presumed too much. “Doctor, do you mean that I am about to die?”

“I do.”

“Why, won’t I live some time, a month or so?”

“I think not, sir.”

“Well, a week?”

“I don’t think you can possibly last a week.”

There was a long silence.

“Doctor, if I could be the man I was when I was twenty-one years of age, I would be willing to be stripped stark naked on the top of the Alleghany Mountains, to run for my life with the hounds of death at my heels.”

Daniel Morgan died on 6 July 1802, aged sixty-seven, surrounded by family and friends. The epitaph on his long-lost gravestone expressed the honors due him but was commonplace. His unofficial epitaph, by his old friend and comrade in arms, Light Horse Harry Lee, best described the Hero.

“No man better loved this world, and no man more reluctantly quitted it.”