Lewis was an original member of the New York Society of the Cincinnati and served as its president general from 1839 to 1844. In 1774, he joined the American Revolution as a volunteer in the Continental Army. Lewis was then made a captain of a regiment of the New York militia. Once the 2nd New York militia regiment was organized, he was promoted to the rank of major. He was then appointed chief-of-staff to General Horatio Gates, with the rank of colonel, and accompanied him into Canada, and soon after congress appointed him quartermaster-general of the Northern Army. He was prominent throughout the campaign that ended with the surrender of John Burgoyne at Saratoga. In 1832, the house was destroyed by a fire, said to be an act of arson committed by disgruntled tenant farmers. After the fire, Lewis and his wife immediately replaced the structure with a Greek Revival mansion with 25 rooms. The house was inherited in 1844 after Morgan Lewis died, by his daughter Margaret and her husband, Maturin Livingston. The available biographical account does not describe a continuous final medical course. It gives no dependable sequence of treatment and last symptoms from which to reconstruct a more detailed bedside narrative.