To George Washington from Colonel Daniel Morgan, 5 January 1778
From Colonel Daniel Morgan
Radner meeting [Pa.] 5th Jany 1778
Sir
General Potter Militia he tells me, will all leave this place today, which will leave this post very weak,1 General Polaskey sent for all the horse that was with me to join their rigts, I did not think it advesable to send them before I aquinted your excellency, As none has Come to reliave them, and without Horse we should be very liable to be surpris’d—I have two butchers that Come out of Philadelphia to buy Cattle two men who sold them Cattle and Sheep under guard and two that broke Goal at winchester and two more that was in Company with them would be glad to know what to do with them. sixty of the enemies horse Com out yesterday as far as the black horse and took one of the three men that took the butcher and the Cattle sellers.2 I am your Hble sert
Danl Morgan
ALS, DLC:GW. The docket, in John Laurens’s writing, reads: “Answd—Capt. Lees Troop to furnish the necessary Videttes for the guard of Col. Morgans Detachment—The Culprits mentioned in the Letter to be sent under proper guard & with the necessy Evidence to the Adjut. General.” GW’s reply to this letter has not been found.
1. On 7 Jan. the Pennsylvania supreme executive council placed Lt. Col. John Lacey, Jr., in command of the Pennsylvania militia covering the northern approaches to Philadelphia between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, promoting him to the rank of brigadier general two days later and directing him to command in the absence of Brig. Gen. James Potter, who had been given leave to visit his family (, 11:396, 398; , 1st ser., 6:168). Potter wrote Thomas Wharton, Jr., from Radnor Quaker Meeting House on 28 Dec. 1777: “My Brigade is near Breacking up, they will be all discharged about the fifth of nixt month but about one hundred men” (ibid., 142). A detachment was sent to relieve Morgan on 12 Jan. (see the general orders of that date).
2. The Black Horse Tavern, which was frequently a scene of skirmishes between American and British patrols, stood on the Lancaster Road about five miles northwest of Philadelphia and one mile east of Merion Quaker Meeting House, in what is now Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The tavern was owned by William Stadelman, Sr., from the 1750s until his death in 1777, when it passed to his son William Stadelman, Jr. (d. 1834). The building was demolished in 1911.