Person:Daniel Bedinger (2)

He is unknown today, but he was one of the great heros of the American Revolution.

Daniel Bedinger was a 14-year-old Virginia farm boy. When his two older brothers left to join Washington's army, Daniel had to stay behind, tending chickens and the fields. But a year later he ran away to join his brothers. He walked the long miles from Virginia to New York City, where the young American army had assembled at Fort Washington.

On Novemeber 14, 1776, the British attacked. Daniel fired his heavy musket seventeen times that day, shouting, "Take that, you bastards!" But the British and their Hessian hirelings came in wave after wave, and the Fort could not be held. Daniel saw his brother lose a finger and his friends die all around him. Finally, Daniel himself was captured.

Imagine how that fifteen-year-old boy must have felt. They locked him aboard a stinking ship in New York harbor. It was full of rats and crawling lice and swarming flies. Daniel had only three ways out: •Join the British army •Wait for a prisoner exchange that might never come •Or die of disease and starvation.

Daniel did not join the British army. He waited and survived. He endured the misery of the blackened hold, the rotten food and the brutish guards, and when they finally did exchange him, 52 of the 79 prisoners in Daniel's company had died.

That fifteen-year-old boy was lucky to be alive.

So what did he do? Did he rejoin Washington's army and face death again? Or return to the farm -- to the peace, the quiet, and the safety? What would you have done? Would you have quit?

Daniel didn't quit. He resumed the fight and was commissioned for his bravery. Then, eight months later, in the battle of Brandywine, the Redcoats captured him yet again. This time he spent two years in harsh confinement.

And even that was not the end.

Exchanged once more, Daniel, now a wizened veteran of 20, fought with General Morgan at the Battle of the Cowpens in South Carolina. He helped smash Tarleton's army and started the Redcoats on the road to Yorktown.

How proud he must have been on that day of final victory.

Source: Steve Dasbach

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mysouthernfamily/myff/d0031/g0000099.html#I61313