Guilford County NcArchives Biographies.....McBride, John 
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Nancy Poquette npoq@hotmail.com May 26, 2006, 3:12 am

Author: Eli Caruthers

From Eli Caruthers’ The Old North State in 1776, volumes I, and II, page 122:

	“When General Greene was taking his troops across the Dan [River], he 
had a common soldier from Guilford County, by the name of John McBride, who had 
charge of the boats, or some portion of this. McBride, now about twenty-three 
or twenty-four years of age, was a blacksmith, and after getting clear of his 
apprenticeship, had spent a year or two in Fayetteville, where he had probably 
learned to manage such water craft on the Cape Fear, and for this reason, we 
presume, he had the honor of boat captain given him on the present occasion. He 
was a small man of slender proportions, below the medium height, and of a 
character which might have admitted the playful sobriquet of ‘Big Business.’”

“The last one who entered the last boat was a large man, a little over six feet 
high, and of a very strong muscular frame. As he stepped in, he told McBride to 
go forward to the other end, and guide the boat to the landing, intending, as 
it appears from the sequel, to manage that end himself. The order was given, 
not in an austere or supercilious manner, but with the grave and firm tone of 
one who had been accustomed to command, and who felt that he had a right to be 
obeyed. McBride felt a little piqued that his prerogative should be thus 
unceremoniously encroached upon by a perfect stranger, and rather pertly 
replied,’ Go and do it yourself, for if I may judge from your appearance, you 
are much abler than I am.’ The big man said nothing, but very deliberately 
taking him with his left hand by the nape of the neck, and with his right hand 
by the seat of his breeches, hoisted him up above the heads of the men in the 
boat, and carried him along to the front end, where he set him down, and 
said, ‘Now do you sit there and guide this boat to the landing.’”

“Then he returned to the stern and carried out his original purpose. McBride, 
though he looked and felt as if he ‘couldn’t help it,’ was obliged to be quiet. 
He kept trying to swallow the resentment which was all the time rising in his 
throat; but he could think of no way by which he might show his spunk, without 
subjecting himself to the danger, if not the absolute certainty, of being 
thrown into the river or handled more roughly in some other way. He did try, as 
he said afterwards, to run the boat below the landing, but the big man at the 
other end was so much stronger, that he brought it up to the right place in 
spite of him. After they all got out on the high ground, and were preparing for 
the encampment, he saw the big man, who had treated him so cavalierly in the 
boat, standing by himself with his arms folded and apparently absorbed with his 
own thoughts. Thinking that he could not let the affair pass altogether 
unnoticed, and judging this to be the most favorable opportunity he would have, 
he stepped up to him with as much of a manly air as he could assume and 
said, ‘I should like to know, sir, who you are, that you take such liberties 
with people you never saw before!’ And the big man very meekly and 
condescendingly replied, ‘I am General Morgan, sir.’ Poor McBride felt ‘as if 
he could have crept through an augur-hole,’ and after making an awkward and 
half-uttered apology, went away to assist his messmates in fixing their tent.”


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