Peter Francisco and the Cannon

Peter Francisco was found on a Virginia wharf as a small boy in 1765 and taken in by a local judge. By sixteen he stood six and a half feet tall. He enlisted in the 10th Virginia Regiment in 1776 and was wounded at Brandywine, Monmouth and Stony Point.

The scene belongs to Camden, August 16, 1780, where Gates's army broke and ran. As the guns were about to be overrun, Francisco is said to have lifted a cannon barrel of more than a thousand pounds onto his shoulder and carried it off the field. At Guilford Courthouse the next March he reportedly cut down eleven men with a broadsword.

These are the stories the men who served with him told, and the record cannot check every one. He died in Richmond in 1831.

He comes straight at the viewer, mid-stride, the gun barrel balanced on his shoulder like a fence rail. The painter gives the weight to the body — the set of the jaw, the cords in the forearm, the fringed hunting shirt pulled tight across the back. The muzzle is the closest thing to the eye.

Everything else runs the other way. Redcoats advance under their flag, a horse bolts, a drummer lies in the grass. He is the only man on the field walking toward the guns.