EASTON, MARYLAND — Tench Tilghman was born on Christmas Day, 1744, at Fausley, his father's plantation on a small creek that feeds the Miles River, two miles from the courthouse town. He was the eldest of ten children of James Tilghman, a lawyer who would remain loyal to the Crown, and Anne Francis Tilghman. That household is the first fact a life of him has to carry. The father kept the king. The son did not.

He learned his letters on the place and then with the Rev. John Gordon, rector of St. Michael's Parish. In 1758, at fourteen, his grandfather Tench Francis took him to Philadelphia and put him into the College and Academy there, the school that became the University of Pennsylvania. He took his degree in May 1761 and went into trade with an uncle, Tench Francis Jr. The house prospered for a few years and dissolved in 1775, as the quarrel with Britain closed over the city.

That summer Congress named him to a commission sent to the Six Nations to keep the Iroquois out of the coming war. In 1776 he took a captaincy in a Pennsylvania company of the Flying Camp. By August he was at Washington's elbow as volunteer aide and secretary. He meant to serve out the year. He stayed seven. He drew no regular pay until May 1781, when Washington secured him a lieutenant colonel's commission and, at Tilghman's request, had it dated from April 1, 1777, so he would not outrank two fellow aides already on the schedule. He was in the field from Trenton through Yorktown. Mount Vernon still calls him the commander-in-chief's most loyal aide, serving from August 1776 to November 1783.

The ride is the scene that made him.

When Cornwallis asked for terms in October 1781, Washington chose him to carry the official news to Congress. He left the York by water, crossed to the Eastern Shore, and turned north on roads he had known since boyhood. The country that had raised him became the last stretch of the war. Somewhere in those hours the message ceased to be a general's dispatch and became the thing the city was waiting to hear. He reached Philadelphia in the small hours and hammered on the president's door. Congress voted him a horse and a sword on October 29. The sword reached his widow after he was dead.

In June 1783 he married his cousin Anna Maria Tilghman, youngest daughter of Matthew Tilghman of Rich Neck. They kept a house on Lombard Street in Baltimore and had two daughters: Anna Margaretta, born May 24, 1784, and Elizabeth Tench, born October 11, 1786, six months after her father died. In 1784 he went back to trade as Tench Tilghman & Co., in partnership with Robert Morris of Philadelphia — the financier, son of the Oxford merchant.

He died April 18, 1786, in his forty-second year. He was buried first at St. Paul's in Baltimore. On November 30, 1971, the remains were lifted and laid in the family plot at Oxford Cemetery, under a vault lid that still calls him Washington's aide and "a good man." Washington, writing to James Tilghman after the death, said that once he had come to know the son's worth, "no man could be more esteemed."

Easton holds the birthplace. Oxford holds the stone.

Sources: Maryland State Archives life of Tench Tilghman; Mount Vernon digital encyclopedia; Samuel Harrison, Memoir of Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman (1876). The hour he reached Philadelphia is unsettled — one standard account puts him at the president's door at three in the morning on October 22; the National Park Service Yorktown note puts the arrival in the early hours of the 24th. The Archives place the death in Baltimore.