Daniel Marshal is a name that Baptists ought to know or learn. He was a friend and relative of Shubal Sterns and a member for some time of the Sandy Creek Baptist Church in North Carolina. He was acquainted with John Gano. It was Marshal who carried the gospel into Georgia. During the Revolutionary War, he was the only preacher of any denomination outside of the Church of England to continue to serve in that place. His son, Abraham, succeeded him in the ministry and may have become even better known than his father. Only the Lord knows how many people Marshal brought to the cross.
Historians tell us that Daniel Marshal was not a great preacher nor a man of great charisma. Morgan Edwards wrote: “His success is surprising when we consider that he is a man of no bright parts, nor eloquence, nor learning. Piety, earnestness and honesty are all he can boast of.” William Lumpkin added that Marshal was a weak man, a stammerer, no scholar. And even his son said that his gifts were by no means above mediocrity. And yet he was instrumental in awaking attention, in many of his hearers to the interest of their souls.
Daniel Marshal was not immersed until he was forty-eight years old. He was ordained three years later, and he began his Georgian ministry when he was sixty-five. Daniel Marshal died on this day in 1784 at the age of seventy-eight.
Source – “This Day in Baptist History” by Wayne Thompson and David Cummins.