Many of us in our Morrison h2 group descend from one of the three Morrison brothers (William, John and James) who went off to war together and were fortunate enough to all return together. The three served in the Virginia 6th Regiment from late 1775 until their honorable discharge March 16 1778. I have not looked at every single one of the documents available for all three brothers on Fold3, but every pay roll that I viewed showed all three of the brothers being paid for that time period.
I will show some of the slides I had prepared for our Morrison h2 zoom Meeting in March 2023. We became so engrossed in our discussion of yDNA and all things Morrison that we did not end up talking about the Revolution. It was a good evening.
The first slide just gives a place to start with the Boston Tea party:
English Parliament responded to the Boston Tea Party in 1774 with the Intolerable Acts, or Coercive Acts, which, among other provisions, ended local self-government in Massachusetts and closed Boston's commerce. Colonists up and down the Thirteen Colonies in turn responded to the Intolerable Acts with additional acts of protest,
And most importantly what we would now call patriots, responded as a group by Convening the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia which petitioned the British Monarch for repeal of the acts.
The First Continental Congress also coordinated British resistance in the fall of 1774.
By spring 1775 the British monarch had failed to respond to the petition and
the Second Continental Congress met in the Pennsylvania State House (now
Independence Hall) in early May 1775. By June 14, 1775 the Second Continental Congress had agreed
to raise troops from 12 of the colonies and to provide help to Boston. The troops
would be under the command of General George Washington. The convention
also agreed to encourage counties to form militias.
The two counties of Berkeley and Frederick in Virginia were tasked with raising the troops allotted to
Virginia to send to Boston for the aid of Boston. It is clear by looking at the map that these troops were the closest to Philadelphia and thence to Boston of any troops in Virginia.
Since this next information does not affect our Morrison brothers you probably wonder why I am adding this to the blog post. I bought a book about Virginia's Continentals. Virginia's Continentals are not the men who served in the militia nor were they minutemen. These are the men who volunteered to fight with Washington and were paid $6.25 per month. They were not volunteers. They were members of the Continental Army. This is indeed the status of our Morrison brothers.
Among the very first pages in the book, the author explains this about the men from Berkeley and Frederick Counties: The arrival of the continental rifle companies (these men from Berkeley and Frederick Counties) in late July and early August sparked a wave of excitement among the New England troops outside Boston. Riflemen were largely unknown in New England and their appearance and reputation made quite an impression. Surgeon's Mate James Thatcher of Massachusetts described these men as
Remarkably Stout and hardy men; many of them exceeding six feet in height. They are dressed in white frocks or rifle-shirts and round hats, These men are remarkable for the accuracy of their aim; striking a mark with great certainty at two hundred yards distance. At a review, a company of them, while on a quick advance, fired their balls in objects of seven inches diameter at distance of two hundred and fifty yards. They are now stationed on our lines, and their shot have frequently proved fatal to British officers and soldiers who expose themselves to view, even at more than double the distance of common Musket shot.....scores of troops armed with muskets join in, firing smoothbore weapons which were far less accurate than the rifles. When some of the New England troops marched to Quebec, there were three rifle companies and ten musket companies.
Mid October, in Virginia Colonel Henry assigned the fifteen companies of Regulars who had gathered or were on there way to Williamsburgh to their respective Regiments. The author names the captains of each company and the counties from which their men came, This is on pages 16-17-18. Our Morrison brothers would have been in Captain William Campbell's company from Pittsylvania District made up of Pittsylvania, Botetourt, Bedford, Fincastle Counties. The authors says that Green's, Campbell's, and Gibson's companies were the rifle light infantry. Although it is likely that a number of men in the remaining five companies also carried rifles, most carried smoothbore muskets and the companies were designated as line companies.
So the information given in the two separate places in the beginning of the book would tell us that indeed William, James, and John were in an elite group within the Virginia Continentals. It is not surprising that these men from the frontier area of Virginia brought their rifles and knew how to use them. And that the rifles were an important part of the fight against the British.
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