American Revolutionary Officer. A native of Maryland, he enlisted in the Continental Army on July 13, 1776, and obtained a commission in the Continental Army, serving with the Rawlings Additional Regiment as a lieutenant. He fought at Long Island, York Island, and Fort Washington, where he was wounded, taken prisoner, and confined in the British prison ship Jersey. He was said to have contemptuously rebuffed overtures from the British, in which they offered him a great deal of money if he would turn coat. After repatriation at war's end, he returned to Maryland where was made Collector of the Port of Georgetown, and became a Brigadier-General in the Maryland State Militia. During the War of 1812, a Baltimore newspaper, the 'Federal Republican and Commercial Gazette,' produced anti-war editorials considered so inflammatory that an opposing mob marched on its offices, smashed the printing presses, broke all the windows, and pulled the entire building to the ground with grappling hooks, ropes, and axes. Weeks later, the newspaper's opinionated editor, Alexander Hanson, and a group of armed friends, including Lingan, returned to Baltimore where they barricaded themselves in a building on South Charles Street. By nightfall, rioters had surrounded them, and the authorities persuaded the Federalist group to surrender to them, so they might remove them to the Baltimore City jail. The mob moved on the jail and Lingan and his cohorts were "beat enough to satisfy the devil," and tarred with boiling pitch. Although Hanson lived through the ordeal, his defender, Lingan did not. The 61 year old died of injuries sustained by the following morning. Although not a journalist himself, Lingan was believed to be part owner of the newspaper, and is now regarded as the first documented case in which an American journalist was killed in pursuit of his vocation. He was originally buried in a private cemetery in Washington, but his remains were moved to Section 1-89 A of Arlington National Cemetery on November 5, 1908. In 1996, his name was the first of 934 names of journalists killed on the job, engraved on the Journalists Memorial in Rosslyn, Virginia.