If Ferguson had taken aim and fired at the officer who turned his back and rode away, there is no telling how the American Revolution would have turned out.

On September 11, 1777, an army of 12,500 British troops who had recently landed at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay marched through Pennsylvania toward the patriot capital of Philadelphia. Covering their flank, a detachment of green-clad British marksmen hid in the woods along Brandywine Creek, near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and kept a lookout for American forces led by General George Washington. Suddenly a cavalry officer dressed in the flamboyant uniform of a European hussar rode into view, followed by a senior American officer wearing a high cocked hat.

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Captain Patrick Ferguson, a 33-year-old Scotsman reputed to be the finest shot in the British army, commanded the British marksmen, who were equipped with fast-firing, breech-loading rifles of Ferguson’s own design. He whispered to three of his best riflemen to creep forward and pick off the unsuspecting officers. But before the men were in place, he felt disgust at the idea of such an ambush, and ordered them not to fire. He shouted to the American officer, who was riding a bay horse. The American looked his way for a moment, and turned to ride on. Ferguson called again, this time leveling his rifle toward the officer. The American glanced back before slowly cantering away.

A day later, after he had been seriously wounded himself, Ferguson learned that the American officer he let ride off was most likely General George Washington. “I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him, before he was out of my reach,” Ferguson recalled, “but it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual, who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty—so I let him alone.”

If Ferguson had taken aim and fired at the officer who turned his back and rode away, there is no telling how the American Revolution would have turned out. Washington lost the Battle of Brandywine and then the city of Philadelphia, but lived on to win the war. A century later the American historian Lyman C. Draper wrote: “How slight, oftentimes, are the incidents which…seem to give direction to the most momentous concerns of the human race. This singular impulse of Ferguson illustrates, in a forcible manner, the over-ruling hand of Providence in directing the operation of a man’s mind when he himself is least of all aware of it.”

Generations have honored the name of Washington, but few remember the chivalrous officer who held his fire and let the general ride on into history. The Scotsman deserved fame for what he did in the rest of his short but full life; he was a brave but unconventional professional soldier, eager for battle from adolescence to the day he died. As Draper would write, “No man, perhaps, of his rank and years, ever attained more military distinction in his day than Patrick Ferguson.” Many months after Brandywine, when the Revolutionary War turned south, it also turned to partisan combat, especially in the thinly settled country back of the Atlantic coast. There Ferguson rode into a darker chapter of history in a battlefield finale that was anything but glorious.

Ferguson was a son of the Scottish Enlightenment, born in 1744 to an eminent judge near Aberdeen, who bought a commission for him before his 15th birthday as a cornet (junior lieutenant) in the Royal North British Dragoons. He proved himself under fire in Flanders and Germany during the Seven Years’ War, but sustained injuries that derailed his military career for nearly six years. Although one leg was still lame, in 1768 he returned to service as a captain in the 70th Foot, a regiment assigned to put down slave uprisings in the West Indies. That meant disorganized, small-unit warfare, experience that Ferguson would draw on near the end of his life. After the tropical islands, he was sent in the early 1770s to the garrison of Halifax, Nova Scotia, quiet duty that soon bored him, and he returned to Britain as disputes heightened between the American colonies and the mother country.

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