DANIEL MORGAN: Ranger of the Revolution

by North Callahan ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Covering in part the same ground as the author's excellent Henry Knex. Washington's General, this carefully documented book should serve as the definitive biography of a spectacular and oddly neglected hero of the American Revolution. Like that ""Ranger"" of the Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Daniel Morgan, ""Ranger of the Revolution"", was a frontiersman who loved a fight, was often in trouble, and was a master of military tactics. Born in Pennsylvania in 1736, desperately poor and with little education, he worked as a boy as a teamster on Blue Ridge trails in Virginia. A huge man with a violent temper, he was with Washington in the French and Indian War in 1758, and in 1775, at the outbreak of the Revolution, organized his own band of picked riflemen to join Washington in Cambridge. Under Benedict Arnold he marched in the abortive attack on Canada, suffered great privations, and was captured at the defeat at Quebec. Returned to New York from the Quebec prison, he recruited his ""Morgan's Rangers"", fought at Saratoga and in other engagements, and in January, 1781, at the Cowpens, South Carolina, defeated the British under Tarleton in one of the decisive battles of the war. After the war Morgan, crippled with rheumatism, retired to Winchester, Virginia, emerging to help put down the Whiskey Rebellion and to go to Congress; he died in Winchester in 1802 at the age of 66. Although uneven in style and over-fictionized, this careful study of a brilliant general is an important addition to American military annals and will appeal to students and teachers of Revolutionary War history; armchair historians and casual readers may find it heavy going.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1961

Categories: NONFICTION