Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life by Albert Louis Zambone (review)

In Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life, Albert Louis Zambone takes a fast-moving, narrative-driven approach to Daniel Morgan, an often overlooked Revolutionary Virginian “of humble origins who wished to be recognized as a gentleman” (p. xv). In Zambone’s telling, Morgan’s life “amounts to an outline for how to get ahead in colonial America” (p. xvi). Morgan’s life was indeed an “outline” for white men’s success in an America defined by unfreedoms and inequality: he killed and displaced Native Americans for his extensive land-holdings in the Ohio Valley region; exploited the labor and firepower of African Americans in his bid for military prowess and genteel status; and continuously negotiated mercurial lines of hierarchy, gender, and honor during his scrabble to the top of Virginia’s powerful gentry. Curiously, however, Zambone pays little attention to the diversity of the American experience, and he does not engage with the equally diverse historiographical discussions surrounding Revolutionary America’s various peoples.

African Americans receive sparse consideration in the story of a man who prospered in a region that relied on enslaved people for its economic success. Zambone mentions Morgan’s “agricultural wealth” as well as the sixteen enslaved black people in Morgan’s will, but the author misses several opportunities to dive into the contradictions between slavery and freedom with which Morgan—a man so dedicated to defending “honor as well as liberty itself”—must have grappled (pp. 14, 235). For instance, the thousands of African Americans who served with Morgan in the American Revolution go unmentioned, while Morgan’s decision to take two free black men as his permanent slaves after the victory at Cowpens, South Carolina, is noted without further analysis.

Native Americans, furthermore, serve as elusive, violent characters. In the description of Morgan’s experiences in the French and Indian War, Natives are only present insomuch as they might cause the Virginia ranger “to be killed, wounded, or scalped” (p. 31). They disappear during the American Revolution, only to reemerge as the final obstacle to America’s “settlement of the Ohio valley . . . [and] all of Washington’s hopes for the future” of the region (p. 281). Never mind that Native warriors like Little Turtle and Blue Jacket had spent the last fifty years warding off British, French, and now American invaders—when the Ohio Valley tribes defended their land from General Arthur St. Clair’s forces in 1791, “[t]he fighting was savage” as one thousand Americans were caught in a “killing zone” just after they “had stacked their guns and lined up to get their morning meal” (p. 280). Zambone explains how the Native Americans executed all who were left behind (including an old friend of poor Morgan), capping off the description of St. Clair’s defeat with President George Washington’s rage-filled exclamations of his army being “‘hacked, butchered, tomahawked, by a surprise’” (p. 281).

Nevertheless, Zambone provides a riveting account of Daniel Morgan’s raucous exploits. Chapters that delve into the minutiae of battles will delight fans of military history (his chapter on Morgan’s defeat at the siege of Quebec is quite well written). Yet, in tackling “the history of Morgan’s place and his era, particularly as it influenced him and others around him,” Zambone’s work leaves unanswered questions, especially regarding nonwhite actors, women (Morgan’s wife and daughters receive only brief mention), and deeper historiographical developments (p. xix). Morgan—apt to self-aggrandize with false claims such as “Old Morgan was never beaten!”—would have probably preferred to ignore more unflattering investigations (p. 107). But this was necessarily Morgan: a man whom George Washington described in 1792 as “No head. Health gone. Speculator” (p. 282).