under Lord cornWallis. When Cornwallis, hemmed
in by Colonial forces, finally relented and surrendered
his army, it was Lincoln, not Washington, who accepted
his sword in a ceremony on 19 October 1781. The war
was over.
On 31 October 1781, less than two weeks after the
historic victory at Yorktown, the Continental Congress
named Lincoln as secretary at war, a post he held until
October 1783 (and which, with the enactment of the
Constitution in 1787, later became secretary of war).
Following Lincoln’s resignation, he returned to Hing-
ham, where he was elected president of the Massachu-
setts Society of the Cincinnati, a veterans’ organization.
He speculated in land in Maine, but when the economy
went down, he nearly went into bankruptcy.
In 1787, Lincoln was placed in command of the
Massachusetts militia again, this time to put down an
internal insurrection. A farmer in Massachusetts, Daniel
Shays, had led a group of hundreds of farmers angered
by high taxes and foreclosures against their farms into a
revolt against the central government. At first, “Shays’s
Rebellion” was ignored, but when the rebels’ forces
closed the courts in Springfield, Massachusetts, Lincoln
and his 3,200-man militia were sent to put them down.
Shays and his troops, hearing that the militia was com-
ing for them, attacked the Springfield arsenal, which was
lightly defended; nonetheless, a small force was able to
drive Shays’s army back. The commander of this force,
former congressman William Shepard, sent word to Lin-
coln to rush his forces to Springfield. Lincoln responded
by dispatching first another small force and then the
remainder of the militia on 27 January 1787. He then
took the battle to the rebellious farmers, defeating them
easily and ending the uprising.
Lincoln resigned his commission as head of the mi-
litia on 10 June 1787, and he was elected as lieutenant
governor of Massachusetts that same year. He served as
a member of a 1788 state convention to vote on a new
state constitution, and in 1789 he was named as the col-
lector of the port of Boston, a post he held for nearly 20
years. Returning home to Hingham, Lincoln died in the
home of his birth on 9 May 1810 at the age of 77. He
was buried in the town two days later.
References: Nelson, Paul David, “Lincoln, Benjamin,” in
American National Biography, 24 vols., edited by John A.
Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1999), 13:673–674; Mattern, David Bruce,
A Moderate Revolutionary: The Life of Major General Ben-
jamin Lincoln (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University,
1990); Mattern, David Bruce, Benjamin Lincoln and the
American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Car-
olina Press, 1995); Cavanagh, John Carroll, The Military
Career of Major General Benjamin Lincoln in the War of
the American Revolution, 1775–1781 (Ph.D. dissertation,
Duke University, 1969).Lucan, George Charles Bingham, third earl of
(1800–1888) British commander
George Charles Bingham was born in London on 16
April 1800, the eldest son of Richard, the second earl of
Lucan, and his wife Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry,
the third Earl Fauconberg of Newborough. He was
educated at the prestigious Westminster School, and at
the age of 16 he entered the English army as an ensign
in the 6th Regiment of Foot. Two years later, he was
transferred to the 3rd Foot Guards, and in 1820 he was
promoted to lieutenant in the 8th Foot. By 1825, he
had been promoted to the rank of major and joined the
17th Lancers. He volunteered to fight with the Russians
against the Turks in the Balkans (1828–29) and served
as a member of Parliament from County Mayo in Ire-
land from 1826 to 1830.
In 1839, Bingham succeeded his father as the earl
of Lucan, and a year later he was elected as a representa-
tive peer of Ireland. During his service in Ireland, he
worked to improve the lives of tenants on his estates
there, although he showed little consideration for their
privations during the Irish potato famine.
With the outbreak of the Crimean War (1854–56),
Bingham, now the earl of Lucan, wanted to serve, even
though he had limited military experience. Regardless,
he was given the command of the cavalry division, of
which one-half was the Light Brigade, commanded by
James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh earl of Cardigan,
who was also Lucan’s brother-in-law. Despite this tie,
both men hated each other, and their military relation-
ship reflected this. Lucan complained on more than one
occasion that Cardigan ignored his orders and went past
him to the commander of English forces in the Crimea,
Lord raglan. At Balaclava on 25 October 1854, Raglan,
looking at the battlefield from a high hill, ordered Lucan
to capture some guns being moved by a small Russian
force off to a flank. Lucan, down in the valley, could only
see straight up the valley ahead of him at the guns in the0 lucAn, geoRge chARleS binghAm, thiRD eARl oF