War & Peace Quote by Daniel Morgan

Morgan isn’t arguing policy so much as staking out a moral perimeter: there are lines a soldier can’t cross without turning himself into a thief with a uniform. The phrasing borrows the rhythm of a commandment - ox, ass, manservant, maidservant - a catalog of “property” that reads like scripture and, more pointedly, like an inventory. He’s compressing the whole logic of invasion into a petty crime: meddling. Not conquering, not liberating, not “projecting power,” just putting your hands where they don’t belong.

That’s the intent: to reframe offensive war as illegitimate by default, not merely risky or expensive. Morgan, a revolutionary-era fighter who knew what violence looks like up close, is drawing a sharp distinction between defending your own and raiding someone else’s. It’s also a subtle shot at the romantic myth of the honorable campaign. Once you’re on someone else’s land, the practical reality of war becomes requisition, looting, forced labor, sexual vulnerability - the quiet predations that follow armies as reliably as smoke.

The subtext is complicated, and revealing. He condemns “meddling” with another man’s property while casually listing human beings alongside livestock, reflecting the era’s moral architecture: a fierce instinct for personal autonomy existing beside an unexamined acceptance of slavery and servitude. That contradiction doesn’t cancel the statement; it exposes what “rights” meant in his world, and why the rhetoric of liberty could be both bracing and brutally bounded.

In context, this reads like a soldier policing the ethics of force from the inside: an early American voice insisting that legitimacy in war begins not with victory, but with restraint.