Lachlan McIntosh was a Scottish American military and political leader in colonial America and during the American Revolutionary War. He was born near Raits, Badenoch, Scotland, on March 17, 1725. His father moved the family to Georgia in 1736 with a Scottish group that would settle what is now Darien, Georgia. After his father's death, Lachlan was sent to the Bethesda Orphanage in Savannah, under the care of the evangelist George Whitefield.

In 1748, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to work for a wealthy merchant and slaveholder, Henry Laurens. There, he met and married Sarah Threadcraft. In 1756, he returned to Georgia with his new wife, settling as a prosperous rice planter near the Altamaha River delta.

By 1770, McIntosh became a leader in the independence movement in Georgia. He helped organize the delegation for the Provincial Congress for the Darien District of St. Andrew Parish. At the Battle of the Rice Boats, he was commissioned as a colonel in the Georgia Militia, raising the 1st Georgia Regiment of the Georgia line, which organized the defense of Savannah and helped repel the British assault. He was then promoted to brigadier general in the Continental Army and put in charge of the defense of Georgia's southern flank from British incursions from Florida, which was held by the British.

In 1779, General George Washington ordered McIntosh to return to the south, where he marched with General Benjamin Lincoln from Charleston, South Carolina, to Augusta, Georgia, and then on to Savannah.

He was elected to the 1784 Continental Congress but never attended. He held several political jobs in the following years and died in Savannah, Georgia, on February 20, 1806. of a wound received in a duel.

Despite his impressive service and accomplishments, McIntosh is best known for participating in a duel with Button Gwinnett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, in 1777. Both men were wounded. Gwinnett's proved to be fatal. –Written by Suzanne Sanborn.