Early Life
Roane was born in 1759 or 1760 in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, then a part of Lancaster County. He was the son of Andrew and Margaret Walker Roane. Andrew Roane, who was born in Ireland, was one of four sons of Archibald Gilbert Roane, a Scotsman who had been awarded land in Ireland in return for his British military service. All of the sons of Archibald Gilbert Roane emigrated to America. After Andrew and Margaret Roane both died when young Archibald Roane was about eight years old, he was raised by an uncle, John Roane, a Presbyterian minister, who provided him with a good education.
During the Revolutionary War, Archibald Roane served in the Continental Army as a member of the Lancaster County Militia (5th Company, 9th Battalion, Pennsylvania Volunteers). serving under George Washington. He was present at the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
In the 1780s he settled for a time in vicinity of Lexington, Rockbridge County, Virginia, where he studied and later taught at Liberty Hall Academy, a predecessor institution to Washington and Lee University. In Virginia, he married Ann (or Anne) Campbell, whom he had met there. The couple were to have six or eight children.
In 1788 Roane moved to Jonesborough, Tennessee, then still a part of North Carolina, where he was admitted to the bar and began the practice of law.
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“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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