David Bannister Morgan

David Bannister Morgan was born in 1773, came to Louisiana in 1803 and served in the territorial legislature, the constitutional convention and the state legislature before becoming surveyor general for Louisiana and Mississippi. On the west bank on January 8, 1815, he split his Kentucky and Louisiana militia between two positions a mile apart, and a British force under Colonel William Thornton routed about 700 of them. A court of inquiry under William Carroll found the retreat not reprehensible. American forces reoccupied the positions on January 9. Morgan died in Covington on July 15, 1848.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Cabildo — steps away
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — steps away
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park — steps away
  A National Park Service unit created in 1994 to tell where jazz came from, with free programs and a visitor center in the French Quarter and park land inside Louis Armstrong Park.
• Congo Square — 0.4 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.

More markers nearby

• The Cabildo — steps away
• Don Bernardo de Galvez — steps away
• Upper Pontalba Building — steps away
• Faulkner House — steps away