- Title: Daniel Morgan
- Author: Johnson, Fry & Co.
- Date: c.1861
- Condition: A crisp steel engraving on a very clean sheet. Superb.
- Inches: 8 1/4 x 10 3/4 [Paper]
- Centimeters: 20.95 x 27.30 [Paper]
- Product ID: 308729
From Frontier Rifleman to Master Battlefield Tactician
Steel-engraved portrait from National Portrait Gallery of Eminent Americans, after a painting by Alonzo Chappel. A fine steel engraving printed on wove paper, issued as part of Johnson, Fry & Co.’s ambitious patriotic series celebrating notable figures in the nation’s political and cultural history.
Daniel Morgan (c. 1736–1802) was one of the Continental Army’s most gifted battlefield tacticians, rising from an ill‑educated teamster in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to a brigadier general whose name is inseparable from the American victory at Cowpens. Hardened in the French and Indian War as an “Old Wagoner” hauling supplies for the British, he carried into the Revolution both physical scars and a deep resentment of British authority, channeling that experience into leadership of “Morgan’s riflemen,” a corps of frontier marksmen famed for their hunting shirts, long rifles, and unnerving accuracy. Morgan and his riflemen distinguished themselves in early northern campaigns and played a crucial role at Saratoga, where their ability to target officers and exploit wooded terrain helped break British General Burgoyne’s advance.
Morgan’s masterpiece, however, came in the Southern campaign at the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, where he used a layered deployment of militia and Continentals, feigned retreats, and disciplined fire to shatter Banastre Tarleton’s British force in the Carolina backcountry. The victory at Cowpens badly damaged Cornwallis’s striking arm, set up the chain of events that led to Yorktown, and earned Morgan a gold medal from Congress as well as a permanent place in Revolutionary memory. After the war he served in the militia and in the U.S. House of Representatives before retiring, his later life marked by chronic pain from wartime injuries but also by the recognition that his blend of frontier toughness and tactical creativity had made him one of the Revolution’s indispensable commanders.