George Morgan (157)

George Morgan (14 February 1743–10 March 1810) was a merchant, Indian agent, agriculturalist, colonizer, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. Born in Philadelphia, he apprenticed with traders Baynton and Wharton, becoming a partner by age twenty. After the French ceded claims to the interior in 1763, Morgan established firm stores at major trading posts throughout 1765–66 and became the chief justice of the region’s civil court (1768). But competition and overextensions of capital demanded withdrawal, and while they received about 2,800 square miles of land as a result of the Treaty of Ft. Stanwix (1768) in the early 1770s—which Morgan and Wharton organized into the Indiana Company—the Revolution forestalled their plans. Morgan was a natural choice for a Congressional appointment as an Indian agent at Ft. Pitt (1776), where he made maintaining Indian neutrality his primary aim. The manifold complications of managing supply and purchasing across multiple unincorporated territories necessitated Congress appoint him the deputy commissary general of purchases in the Western Department (1777) with a commission as colonel. He gauged the best path to peace was honesty and fair dealing; the betrayals of such principles by individuals and federal action alike embittered him to the point of resignation and retirement to quiescent farm life in 1778. Morgan’s “Prospect” farm enabled him to pursue his own forays into scientific agriculture in this second act, leading to his election as a founder of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (1785). Short letters and essays on his experimentations appeared in multiple publications: among them, he discovered that yellow-bearded wheat resisted the Hessian fly, developed a prodigious beekeeping operation, and even won a gold medal for his clever plans for a farmyard. Morgan could not resist the offer of Spanish consul and APS member Don Diego de Gardoqui to found the New Madrid colony in Missouri (1788–89), but Spanish intransigence on self-rule and religious freedom doused his enthusiasm, and he abandoned the colony (1791). A new farm, “Morganza” (f. 1796) outstripped Prospect in experimentation, but is perhaps most famous for becoming the site where Aaron Burr, who visited Morgan en route to New Orleans, tipped his conspiratorial hand. Morgan’s letter to President Jefferson initiated Burr’s undoing. Morgan died at the farm in 1810. Brother Dr. John Morgan was also an APS member, as was mercantile partner Samuel Wharton. (PI)