Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life
Winner of the 2018 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award for Biography
Winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award, Honorable Mention
On January 17, 1781, at Cowpens, South Carolina, the notorious British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton and his legion were destroyed along with the cream of Lord Cornwallis’s troops. The man who planned and executed this stunning American victory was Daniel Morgan. Once a barely literate backcountry laborer, Morgan now stood at the pinnacle of American martial success.
Born in New Jersey in 1736, he left home at seventeen and washed up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. There he worked in mills and as a teamster, and was recruited for Braddock’s disastrous expedition to take Fort Duquesne from the French in 1755. He learned to read, married, became a landowner, a slaveowner, and a father. A Captain of Virginia Militia, when Congress called for riflemen to join the siege of Boston in 1775, Morgan organized a select group of riflemen and headed north. From that moment on, Morgan’s presence made an immediate impact on the battlefield and on his superiors. Washington soon recognized Morgan’s leadership and tactical abilities. When Morgan’s troops blocked the British retreat at Saratoga in 1777, ensuring an American victory, he received accolades from across the colonies.
In Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, the first major biography of this iconic figure in sixty years, historian Albert Louis Zambone presents Morgan as the quintessential American everyman, who rose through his own dogged determination from poverty and obscurity to become one of the great battlefield commanders in American history. Using social history and other advances in the discipline that had not been available to earlier biographers, the author provides an engrossing portrait of this storied personality of America’s founding era—a common man in uncommon times.
“The audio book of Daniel Morgan sounds as good as I’d hoped. It’s probably not an exaggeration to say that the book was written to be listened to, and Tom Taverna is worth listening to.”
—Al Zambone, author of Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life
“Daniel Morgan, Virginian”—delivered May 23, 2019, at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, VA
“Daniel Morgan gives substance to the legends and mythology surrounding the American Revolution…He was a self-made man who could never have risen through the ranks of the British army and yet played a critical leadership role in two of the most decisive battles of the war: Cowpens and Saratoga. Elegantly written, Al Zambone has not only produced an original new account of his military career but has successfully placed him in the context of his times and integrated his biography into the wider world of Revolutionary and Early Republican America.”
—Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy, author of The Men Who Lost America
“Albert Louis Zambone’s evocative and engaging book illuminates the interplay between the Revolutionary War and the larger American Revolution, which transformed Daniel Morgan’s life and the society he inhabited. Daniel Morgan is important and crisply written and not to be missed.”
—Lorri Glover, author of Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution
“Daniel Morgan has been long overdue for a new biography, and Zambone has given us a tour-de-force. His volume is exhaustively researched, elegantly written, and deeply revealing—by far the best biography we have of this fascinating yet enigmatic member of the founding generation. A wonderful book.”
—Mark Edward Lender, coauthor of Fatal Sunday: George Washington, the Monmouth Campaign, and the Politics of Battle
“This welcome reappraisal of the dramatic life of one of America’s finest military leaders places Daniel Morgan squarely in the context of his times. Rugged and defiant, Morgan was also a clever and innovative officer whose influence on the American military ethos reaches right down to today.”
—Edward G. Lengel, author of General George Washington: A Military Life
“Roughhewn backwoodsman Daniel Morgan, known as the ‘Old Wagoner,’ was truly a front line hero of the American Revolution. Think of the invasion of Quebec in 1775, the battles of Saratoga in 1777, and his classically brilliant victory at the Cowpens in 1781 during the Southern campaigns. Morgan constantly provided invaluable martial leadership during the Revolutionary War. Albert Zambone’s new biography beautifully captures the old wagoner’s action-packed military adventures and life story. A gem of a book.”
—James Kirby Martin, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor of History at the University of Houston, author of the award-winning Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero
“In his riveting biography of Daniel Morgan, a home-grown military genius who left an indelible mark on America’s Revolutionary War, Albert Zambone provides a thrilling account of a world in upheaval as seen through the eyes of the canny though unlettered Morgan. With his frontier riflemen and tactical brilliance, Morgan did as much to beat the British as any American soldier except Washington, and inhabits these pages with a rough grace and compelling charm.”
—David O. Stewart, author of George Washington: The Political Rise of America's Founding Father