"In his personal recollections, Dr. Archibald Alexander mentions as an instance of the privations of the Revolutionary war, that his school teacher found it difficult to procure a knife to make and mend the quill pens of his pupils. The teacher to whom he was indebted for his first acquaintance with Latin, was a young Irishman named John Reardon, an 'indentured servant,' or convict banished to America for crime, and purchased for a term of years, in Philadelphia, by his pupil's father. Reardon enlisted as a soldier in Captain Wallace's company, and was desperately wounded in a battle in North Carolina; but survived, and returned to school-teaching on Timber Ridge." (1)
(1) Joseph Addison Waddell, Annals of Augusta County, Virginia, from 1726 to 1871(Staunton, Va.: C.R. Caldwell, 1902), 312.