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Title: Cowpens - Downright Fighting: The Story of Cowpens
Author: Fleming, Thomas J.
Language: English
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Handbook 135 Cowpens
“Downright Fighting”
The Story of Cowpens
_by Thomas J. Fleming_
A Handbook for
Cowpens National Battlefield
South Carolina
Division of Publications
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
Washington, D.C. 1988
_About this book_
The story of Cowpens, as told in these pages, is ever fresh and will
live in memory as long as America’s wars are studied and talked about.
The author is Thomas Fleming, a biographer, military historian, and
novelist of distinction. His works range from an account of the
Pilgrims’ first year in America to biographies of Jefferson and Franklin
and novels of three American wars. _Downright Fighting, The Story of
Cowpens_ is a gripping tale by a master storyteller of what has been
described as the patriot’s best fought battle of the Revolutionary War.
The National Park System, of which Cowpens National Battlefield is a
unit, consists of more than 340 parks totaling 80 million acres. These
parks represent important examples of the nation’s natural and cultural
inheritance.
_National Park Handbooks_
National Park handbooks, compact introductions to the natural and
historical places administered by the National Park Service, are
designed to promote public understanding and enjoyment of the parks.
Each handbook is intended to be informative reading and a useful guide
to park features. More than 100 titles are in print. They are sold at
parks and by mail from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government
Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402.
_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data_
Fleming, Thomas J.
Cowpens: “downright fighting.”
(Handbook: 135)
“A Handbook for Cowpens National Battlefield, South Carolina.”
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
Supt. of Docs. no.: I29.9/5:135
1. Cowpens, Battle of, 1781. I. Title. II. Series: Handbook (United
States. National Park Service. Division of Publications); 135.
E241.C9F58 1988 973.3’37 87-600142
_ISBN 0-912627-33-6_
★GPO: 1988—201-939/60005
Prologue 4
_George F. Scheer_
Part 1 “Downright Fighting” 10
The Story of Cowpens
_Thomas J. Fleming_
Part 2 Cowpens and the War in the South 86
A Guide to the Battlefield and Related Sites
Cowpens Battleground 88
The Road to Yorktown 91
Savannah, 1778-79 91
Charleston, 1780 91
The Waxhaws, 1780 91
Camden, 1780 92
Kings Mountain, 1780 92
Guilford Courthouse, 1781 92
Ninety Six, 1781 93
Eutaw Springs, 1781 93
Yorktown, 1781 93
For Further Reading 94
Index 95
Prologue
[Illustration: On the morning of January 15, 1781, Morgan’s army
looked down this road at Tarleton’s legion deploying into a line of
battle. Locally it was known as the Green River Road. Four or five
miles beyond the position held by Morgan, the road crossed the Broad
River at Island Ford. For opposite reasons, Morgan and Tarleton each
thought this field and its relationship to the Broad River gave him
the advantage.]
Splendid Antagonists
As battlefields go, this one is fairly plain: a grassy clearing in a
scrub-pine forest with no obvious military advantages. There are a
thousand meadows like it in upstate South Carolina. This one is
important because two centuries ago armies clashed here in one of the
dramatic battles of the Revolutionary War.
In January 1781, this clearing was a frontier pasturing ground, known
locally as the Cowpens. The name came from the custom of upcountry stock
raisers wintering their cattle in the lush vales around Thicketty
Mountain. It was probably squatters’ ground, though one tradition says
that it belonged to a person named Hannah, while another credits it to
one Hiram Saunders, a wealthy loyalist who lived close by.
The meadow was apparently well known to frontiersmen. The previous
October, a body of over-mountain men, pursuing Patrick Ferguson and his
loyalist corps, made camp here and, according to another tradition,
hauled the Tory Saunders out of bed at night seeking information on
Ferguson’s whereabouts. Finding no sign of an army passing through, they
butchered some cattle and after refreshing themselves took up the trail
again.
When the troops of Continental General Daniel Morgan filed onto this
field on a dank January day in 1781, they were an army on the run,
fleeing an implacable and awesome enemy, the dreaded British Legion of
Col. Banastre Tarleton. Their patrols reported that they were
substantially outnumbered, and by any military measure of the time, they
were clearly outclassed. They were a mixed force of some 830
soldiers—320 seasoned Continentals, a troop of light dragoons, and the
rest militia. Though some of the militia were former Continentals, known
to be stalwarts in battle, most were short-term soldiers whose
unpredictable performance might give a commander pause when battle lines
were drawn. Their foe, Tarleton’s Legion, was the best light corps in
the British army in America, and it was now reinforced by several
hundred British regulars and an artillery company.
On this afternoon of January 16, 1781, the men of Morgan’s army had run
long enough. They were spoiling for a fight. They knew Tarleton as the
enemy whose troopers at the Waxhaws had sabered to death Americans in
the act of surrendering. From him they had taken their own merciless
victory cry, “Tarleton’s quarter.” In the months after the infamous
butchery, as Tarleton’s green-jacketed dragoons attacked citizens and
soldiers alike and pillaged farms and burned homes, they had come to
characterize him as “Bloody Tarleton.” He was bold, fearless, often rash
and always a savage enemy, and they seethed to have a go at him.
Morgan chose this ground as much for its tactical advantages as from
necessity. Most of his militia lacked bayonets and could not stand up to
bayonet-wielding redcoats in a line of battle. Morgan saw advantage in
this unlikely field: a river to the rear to discourage the ranks from
breaking, rising ground on which to post his regulars, a scattering of
trees to hinder the enemy’s cavalry, and marsh on one side to thwart
flanking maneuvers. It was ground on which he could deploy his troops to
make the most of their abilities in the kind of fighting that he
expected Tarleton to bring on.
In the narrative that follows, Thomas Fleming, a historian with the
skills of a novelist, tells the authentic, dramatic story that climaxed
on the next morning. In his fully fleshed chronicle, intimate in detail
and rich in insights, he relates the complex events that took shape in
the Southern colonies after the War of the Revolution stalemated in the
north. He describes the British strategy for conquering the rebel
Americans and the Americans’ counterstrategy. An important part of this
story is an account of the daringly unorthodox campaign of
commander-in-chief George Washington’s trusted lieutenant Nathanael
Greene, who finally “flushed the bird” that Washington caught at
Yorktown. Upon reading _Downright Fighting_, one understands why the
Homeric battle between two splendid antagonists on the morning of
January 17, 1781, became the beginning of the end of the British hold on
America.
—George F. Scheer
[Illustration: Scattered hardwoods gave Morgan’s skirmishers
protection and helped deflect Tarleton’s hard-riding dragoons sent
out to drive them in. The battle opened at sunrise, in light similar
to this scene.]
Part 1
“Downright Fighting”
The Story of Cowpens.
_by Thomas J. Fleming_
[Illustration: British and Continental dragoons clash in the opening
minutes of battle. From Frederick Kimmelmeyer’s painting, “The
Battle of Cowpens,” 1809.]
The Anatomy of Victory
1
All night the two men rode northwest along the muddy winding roads of
South Carolina’s back country. Twice they had to endure bone-chilling
swims across swollen creeks. Now, in the raw gray cold of dawn, they
faced a more formidable obstacle—the wide, swift Pacolet River. They
rode along it until they found the ford known as Grindal Shoals.
Ordinarily, it would have been easy to cross. But the river was high.
The icy water lapped at their thighs as the weary horses struggled to
keep their feet in the rushing current. “Halt,” snarled a voice from the
river bank. “Who goes there?”
“Friend,” said the lead rider, 25-year-old Joseph McJunkin.
The sentry barked the password for the night. McJunkin and his
companion, James Park, did not know the countersign. McJunkin told the
sentry he had an important message for General Morgan. The sentry told
him not to move or he would put a hole through his chest. He called for
the captain of the guard. The two riders had to sit there in the icy
river while the captain made his way to the bank. Once more McJunkin
insisted he had a message for General Morgan. It was from Colonel
Pickens. It was very important.
The captain invited the two men onto the north bank of the Pacolet.
Above them, on a wooded hill, was the camp of Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan
of the Continental Army of the United States. Around Morgan’s tent,
about 830 men were lighting fires and beginning to cook their
breakfasts, which consisted largely of cornmeal. From a barrel in a
wagon, a commissary issued a gill (four ounces) of rum. Most added water
to it and put it in their canteens. A few gulped the fiery liquid
straight, in spite of the frowns of their officers. Some 320 of the men
still wore pieces of uniforms—a tattered blue coat here, a ragged white
wool waistcoat there, patched buff breeches. In spite of the rainy, cold
January weather, few had shoes on their feet. These men were
Continentals—the names by which patriot regular army soldiers, usually
enlisted for three years, were known.
The rest of the army wore a varied assortment of civilian clothing.
Hunting shirts of coarse homespun material known as linsey-woolsey,
tightly belted, or loose wool coats, also homespun, leather leggings,
wool breeches. These men were militia—summoned from their homes to serve
as emergency soldiers for short periods of time. Most were from western
districts of the Carolinas. About 120 were riflemen from Virginia,
committed to serving for six months. Most of these were former
Continentals. They were being paid by other Virginians who hired them as
substitutes to avoid being drafted into the army. After five years of
war, patriotism was far from universal in America.
In his tent, Morgan listened to the message McJunkin brought from Col.
Andrew Pickens: the British were advancing in force. Morgan whirled and
roused from a nearby camp cot a small groggy man who had managed to
sleep through McJunkin’s bad news. His name was Baron de Glaubech. He
was one of the many French volunteers who were serving with the
Americans. “Baron,” Morgan said. “Get up. Go back and tell Billy that
Benny is coming and he must meet me tomorrow evening at Gentleman
Thompson’s on the east side of Thicketty Creek.”
Sixty-three years later, when he was 80, Joseph McJunkin remembered
these words with their remarkable combination of informality and
decision. It was part of the reason men like young McJunkin trusted
Daniel Morgan. It was somehow reassuring to hear him call Lt. Col.
William Washington, commander of the American cavalry and second cousin
to Gen. George Washington, “Billy.” It was even more reassuring to hear
him call Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, commander of the British army that
was coming after them, “Benny.”
Adding to this reassurance was 45-year-old Daniel Morgan’s appearance
and reputation. He was over six feet tall, with massive shoulders and
arms, toughened from his youthful years as a wagonmaster in western
Virginia. In his younger days he had been one of the champion sluggers
and wrestlers of the Shenandoah Valley. His wide volatile face could
still flash from cheerfulness to pugnacity in an instant. In the five
years of the Revolution, Morgan had become a living legend: the man who
led a reckless assault into the very mouths of British cannon on the
barricaded streets of Quebec in 1775, whose corps of some 570 riflemen
had been the cutting edge of the American army that defeated the British
at Saratoga in 1777.
[Illustration: The victor at Saratoga, Gen. Horatio Gates (top) came
south in July 1780 to command the Southern Department after the main
Continental army in the South was surrendered at Charleston. Charles
Willson Peale shows Gates at 49 with an open face and a steady
gaze.]
[Illustration: A month later he himself was routed at Camden by
Cornwallis. Cornwallis was only 45, two years after Yorktown, when
he sat for Gainsborough. Both generals are portrayed in their
prime.]
Daniel Morgan, Frontiersman
[Illustration: Daniel Morgan]
He was a giant of a man, 6 feet 2 inches, with a full face, blue eyes,
dark hair, and a classic nose. As a youth in western Virginia, he had
drifted into wagoneering along the roads of the frontier. His
education was slight. Good-natured and gregarious, he was, like his
companions of the road, rowdy and given to drink, gambling, and
fighting. In time, he married, settled down, went into farming, and
became a man of substance in his community.
He was already a hero of the Revolution when he took command of
Greene’s light troops in late 1780. His rifle corps had fought with
distinction at Quebec (1775) and Saratoga (1777). But after being
passed over for promotion, unfairly he thought, he retired to his
Virginia farm. When the South fell to British armies in 1780, he put
aside his feelings and welcomed a new command.
Morgan was at home in the slashing, partisan warfare in the South. At
Cowpens the mixed force of regulars and militia that he led so ably
destroyed Tarleton’s dreaded Legion, depriving Cornwallis of a wing of
swift-moving light troops essential to his army’s operation.
[Illustration: Woodcuts of the gold medal Congress awarded Morgan
for his victory at Cowpens. The original medal is lost.]
[Illustration: Morgan’s fine stone house, which he named “Saratoga,”
still stands near Winchester, Virginia.]
The War in the South
[Illustration: Map]
NORTH CAROLINA
New Bern•
Edenton•
Brunswick•
Gilbert Town•
SOUTH CAROLINA
Georgetown•
GEORGIA
Augusta•
Moores Creek 27 Feb 1776
Sullivans Island 28 June 1776
Kettle Creek 14 Feb 1779
Brier Creek 3 March 1779
Lenuds Ferry 6 May 1780
Waxhaws 29 May 1780
Williamson Plantation 12 July 1780
Kings Mountain 7 Oct 1780
Ninety Six•
Besieged by Greene May-June 1781;
evacuated by the British July 1781
Hobkirks Hill 25 Apr 1781
Charleston•
Captured by the British 12 May 1780
Eutaw Springs 8 Sept 1781
Fort Watson
HIGH HILLS OF SANTEE
Cornwallis routs Gates at Camden and advances into North Carolina
Camden•
Hanging Rock 6 Aug 1780
Camden 16 Aug 1780
Fishing Creek 18 Aug 1780
Great Savannah 20 Aug 1780
Charlotte•
Greene divides his army sending Morgan to the west and the main army
into winter quarters at Cheraw Hills. 20-26 Dec 1780
Cheraw Hills•
Greene’s winter quarters 1780-1781
Grindal Shoals
Morgan’s camp 25 Dec 1780 to 14 Jan 1781
Cornwallis turns back after Ferguson’s defeat at Kings Mountain and
goes into winter quarters at Winnsborough.
Winnsborough•
Cornwallis’s winter quarters 1780-1781
Tarleton
Musgroves Mill 18 Aug 1780
Fishdam Ford 9 Nov 1780
Blackstocks 20 Nov 1780
Hammonds Store 28 Dec 1780
Easterwood Shoals
Cowpens 17 Jan 1781
Hamiltons Ford
Cornwallis pursues Morgan.
Morgan’s line of retreat after Cownpens.
Green River Road
Island Ford
Beatties Ford
Island Ford
Ramsour’s Mill
Cornwallis burns his baggage. 24 Jan 1781
Salisbury•
Salem•
Guilford Courthouse•
Cheraw Hills•
Coxs Mill
Greene races for the Dan River with Cornwallis in pursuit.
Boyds Ferry
Greene crosses the Dan River and is resupplied and reinforced. 13
Feb 1781
Cornwallis halts south of the Dan River.
Hillsborough•
Guilford Courthouse 15 March 1781
Ramseys Mill•
Greene breaks off pursuit of Cornwallis after Guilford.
Cross Creek•
Elizabethtown•
Cornwallis retreats to Wilmington
Wilmington•
Cornwallis marches into Virginia April-May 1781
Halifax•
Petersburg•
Richmond•
Williamsburg•
Yorktown•
Cornwallis surrenders 19 Oct 1781
The lower South became the decisive theatre of the Revolutionary War.
After the struggle settled into stalemate in the north, the British
mounted their second campaign to conquer the region. British
expeditionary forces captured Savannah in late 1778 and Charleston in
May 1780. By late in that summer, most of South Carolina was pacified,
and a powerful British army under Cornwallis was poised to sweep across
the Carolinas into Virginia.
This map traces the marches of Cornwallis (red) and his wily adversary
Nathanael Greene (blue). The campaign opened at Charleston in August
1780 when Cornwallis marched north to confront Gen. Horatio Gates moving
south with a Continental army. It ended at Yorktown in October 1781 with
Cornwallis’s surrender of the main British army in America. In between
were 18 months of some of the hardest campaigning and most savage
fighting of the war.
On this 14th of January, 1781, a great many people in South Carolina and
North Carolina were badly in need of the reassurance that Daniel Morgan
communicated. The year just completed had been a series of military and
political disasters, with only a few flickering glimpses of hope for the
Americans who had rebelled against George III and his Parliament in
1776. In 1780 the British had adopted a new strategy. Leaving enough
troops to pin down George Washington’s main American army near New York,
the British had sent another army south to besiege Charleston. On May
12, 1780, the city and its defending army, under the command of a
Massachusetts general named Benjamin Lincoln, surrendered. Two hundred
and forty-five regular officers and 2,326 enlisted men became captives
along with an equal number of South Carolina militia; thousands of
muskets, dozens of cannon, and tons of irreplaceable gunpowder and other
supplies were also lost.
[Illustration: Gen. Nathanael Greene (1742-86) served with
distinction in two roles: as quartermaster general of the army after
others had failed in the post, and as the strategist of the decisive
Southern Campaign.]
It was the worst American defeat of the war. The Continental Congress
responded by sending south Gen. Horatio Gates, commander of the army
that had beaten the British at Saratoga. Gates brought with him about
1,200 Maryland and Delaware Continentals and called on the militia of
North Carolina and Virginia to support him. On August 16, 1780, outside
the village of Camden, S.C., the Americans encountered an army commanded
by Charles, Earl Cornwallis, the most aggressive British general in
America. Cornwallis ordered a bayonet charge. The poorly armed,
inexperienced militia panicked and fled. The Continentals fought
desperately for a time but were soon surrounded and overwhelmed.
Both North and South Carolina now seemed prostrate. There was no patriot
army in either state strong enough to resist the thousands of British
regulars. Georgia had been conquered by a combined British naval and
land force in late 1778 and early 1779. There were rumors that America’s
allies, France and Spain, were tired of the war and ready to call a
peace conference. Many persons thought that the Carolinas and Georgia
would be abandoned at this conference. In the Continental Congress, some
already considered them lost. “It is agreed on all hands the whole state
of So. Carolina hath submitted to the British Government as well as
Georgia,” a Rhode Island delegate wrote. “I shall not be surprised to
hear N. Carolina hath followed their example.”
[Illustration: Thomas Sumter (1732-1832), a daring and energetic
partisan leader, joined the patriot side after Tarleton’s dragoons
burned his Santee home. His militia harassed and sometimes defeated
the British in the savage civil war that gripped the South Carolina
backcountry in 1780-81.]
British spokesmen eagerly promoted this idea. They were more numerous in
the Carolinas than most 20th-century Americans realize. The majority of
them were American born—men and women whom the rebel Americans called
tories and today are usually known as loyalists. Part of the reason for
this defection was geographical. The people of the back country had long
feuded with the wealthier lowlanders, who controlled the politics of the
two States. The lowlanders had led the Carolinas into the war with the
mother country, and many back-country people sided with the British in
the hope of humbling the haughty planters. Some of these
counter-revolutionists sincerely believed their rights would be better
protected under the king. Another large group thought the British were
going to win the war and sided with them in the hope of getting rich on
the rebels’ confiscated estates. A third, more passive group simply
lacked the courage to oppose their aggressive loyalist neighbors.
The British set up forts, garrisoned by regulars and loyalists, in
various districts of South Carolina and told the people if they swore an
oath of allegiance to the king and promised to lay down their weapons,
they would be protected and forgiven for any and all previous acts of
rebellion. Thousands of men accepted this offer and dropped out of the
war.
But some South Carolinians refused to submit to royal authority. Many of
them were Presbyterians, who feared that their freedom to worship would
be taken away from them or that they would be deprived of the right to
vote, as Presbyterians were in England. Others were animated by a
fundamental suspicion of British intentions toward America. They
believed there was a British plot to force Americans to pay unjust taxes
to enable England’s aristocratic politicians and their followers to live
in luxury.
Joseph McJunkin was one of the men who had refused to surrender. He had
risen from private to major in the militia regiment from the Union
district of South Carolina. After the fall of Charleston, he and his
friends hid gunpowder and ammunition in hollow logs and thickets. But in
June 1780, they were badly beaten by a battalion of loyalist neighbors
and fled across the Broad River. They were joined by men from the
Spartan, Laurens, and Newberry districts. At the Presbyterian Meeting
House on Bullocks Creek, they debated whether to accept British
protection. McJunkin and a few other men rose and vowed they would fight
on. Finally someone asked those who wanted to fight to throw up their
hats and clap their hands. “Every hat went up and the air resounded with
clapping and shouts of defiance,” McJunkin recalled.
[Illustration: Short, disciplined to the life of a soldier, yet
plain and gentle in manner, Francis Marion (the figure at left) was
equally brilliant as an officer of regulars and a partisan leader of
militia. To the British he was as elusive as a fox, marching his
brigade at night, rarely sleeping twice in the same camp, and
vanishing into the swamps when opposed by a larger force.]
A few days later, these men met Thomas Sumter, a former colonel in the
South Carolina Continentals. He had fled to western South Carolina after
the British burned his plantation. The holdouts asked him his opinion of
the situation. “Our interests are the same. With me it is liberty or
death,” he said. They elected him their general and went to war.
Elsewhere in South Carolina, other men coalesced around another former
Continental officer, Francis Marion. Still others followed Elijah
Clarke, who operated along the border between South Carolina and
Georgia. These partisans, seldom numbering more than 500 men and often
as few as 50, struck at British outposts and supply routes and attacked
groups of loyalists whom the British were arming and trying to organize
into militia regiments. The British and loyalists grew exasperated.
After the battle of Camden, Lord Cornwallis declared that anyone who
signed a British parole and then switched sides would be hanged without
a trial if captured. If a man refused to serve in the loyalist militia,
he would be imprisoned and his property confiscated. At a convention of
loyalist militia regiments on August 23, 1780, the members resolved that
these orders should be ruthlessly applied. They added one other
recommendation. Anyone who refused to serve in the king’s militia should
be drafted into the British regulars, where he would be forced to fight
whether he liked it or not.
For the rest of 1780, a savage seesaw war raged along the Carolina
frontier. Between engagements both sides exacted retaliation on
prisoners and noncombatants. Elijah Clarke besieged Augusta with a mixed
band of South Carolinians and Georgians. Forced to retreat by British
reinforcements, he left about two dozen badly wounded men behind. The
loyalist commander of Augusta, Thomas Browne, wounded in the siege,
hanged 13 of them in the stairwell of his house, where he could watch
them die from his bed. A rebel named Reed was visiting a neighbor’s
house when the landlady saw two loyalists approaching. She advised Reed
to flee. Reed replied that they were old friends; he had known them all
his life. He went outside to shake hands. The loyalists shot him dead.
Reed’s aged mother rode to a rebel camp in North Carolina and displayed
her son’s bloody pocketbook. The commander of the camp asked for
volunteers. Twenty-five men mounted their horses, found the murderers,
and executed them.
In this sanguinary warfare, the rebels knew the side roads and forest
tracks. They were expert, like Marion’s men, at retreating into swamps.
But the British also had some advantages. The rebels could do little to
prevent retaliation against their homes and property. If a man went into
hiding when the British or loyalists summoned him to fight in their
militia, all his corn and livestock were liable to seizure, and his
house might even be burned, leaving his wife and children destitute.
This bitter and discouraging truth became more and more apparent as the
year 1780 waned. Without a Continental army to back them up, Sumter and
the other partisan leaders found it difficult to persuade men to fight.
Not even the greatest militia victory of the war, the destruction of a
loyalist army of over a thousand men at Kings Mountain in October 1780,
significantly altered the situation. Although loyalist support declined,
the British army was untouched by this triumph. Moreover, many of the
militiamen in the rebel army had come from remote valleys deep in the
Appalachians, and they went home immediately, as militiamen were
inclined to do. The men of western South Carolina were left with the
British regulars still dominating four-fifths of the State, still ready
to exact harsh retaliation against those who persisted in the rebellion.
[Illustration: Elijah Clarke, a colonel of Georgia militia, fought
at a number of important actions in the civil war along the Southern
frontier in 1780-81.]
George Washington understood the problem. In an earlier campaign in the
north, when the New Jersey militia failed to turn out, he had said that
the people needed “an Army to look the Enemy in the Face.” To replace
the disgraced Horatio Gates, he appointed Nathanael Greene of Rhode
Island as the commander of the Southern army. A 38-year-old Quaker who
walked with a slight limp, Greene had become Washington’s right-hand man
in five years of war in the north. On December 2 he arrived in
Charlotte, N.C., where Horatio Gates was trying to reorganize the
remnants of the army shattered at Camden. Neither the numbers nor the
appearance of the men were encouraging. There were 2,046 soldiers
present and fit for duty. Of these, only 1,173 were Continentals. The
rest were militia. Worse, as Greene told his friend the Marquis de
Lafayette, if he counted as fit for duty only those soldiers who were
properly clothed and equipped, he had fewer than 800 men and provisions
for only three days in camp. There was scarcely a horse or a wagon in
the army and not a dollar of hard money in the military chest.
Among Greene’s few encouraging discoveries in the army’s camp at
Charlotte was the news that Daniel Morgan had returned to the war and at
that very moment was within 16 miles of the British base at Camden with
a battalion of light infantry and what was left of the American cavalry
under Lt. Col. William Washington. Angered by Congress’s failure to
promote him, Morgan had resigned his colonel’s commission in 1779. The
disaster at Camden and the threat of England’s new southern strategy had
persuaded him to forget his personal grievance. Congress had responded
by making him a brigadier general.
Studying his maps, and knowing Morgan’s ability to inspire militia and
command light infantry, Nathanael Greene began to think the Old Wagoner,
as Morgan liked to call himself, was the key to frustrating British
plans to conquer North Carolina. Lord Cornwallis and the main British
army were now at Winnsborough, S.C., about halfway between the British
base at Camden and their vital back-country fort at Ninety Six. The
British general commanded 3,324 regulars, twice the number of Greene’s
motley army, and all presumably well trained and equipped. Spies and
scouts reported the earl was preparing to invade North Carolina for a
winter campaign. North Carolina had, if anything, more loyalists than
South Carolina. There was grave reason to fear that they would turn out
at the sight of a British army and take that State out of the shaky
American confederacy.
To delay, if not defeat, this potential disaster, Greene decided to
divide his battered army and give more than half of it to Daniel Morgan.
The Old Wagoner would march swiftly across the front of Cornwallis’s
army into western South Carolina and operate on his left flank and in
his rear, threatening the enemy’s posts at Ninety Six and Augusta,
disrupting British communications, and—most important—encouraging the
militia of western South Carolina to return to fight. “The object of
this detachment,” Greene wrote in his instructions to Morgan, “is to
give protection to that part of the country and spirit up the people.”
This was the army that Joseph McJunkin had ridden all night to warn.
Lord Cornwallis had no intention of letting Nathanael Greene get away
with this ingenious maneuver. Cornwallis had an answer to Morgan. His
name was Banastre Tarleton.
2
Daniel Morgan might call him “Benny.” Most Americans called him “the
Butcher” or “Bloody Tarleton.” A thick-shouldered, compact man of middle
height, with bright red hair and a hard mouth, he was the most feared
and hated British soldier in the South. In 1776 he had come to America,
a 21-year-old cornet—the British equivalent of a second lieutenant. He
was now a lieutenant colonel, a promotion so rapid for the British army
of the time that it left older officers frigid with jealousy. Tarleton
had achieved this spectacular rise almost entirely on raw courage and
fierce energy. His father had been a wealthy merchant and Lord Mayor of
Liverpool. He died while Tarleton was at Oxford, leaving him £5,000,
which the young man promptly gambled and drank away, while ostensibly
studying for the law in London. He joined the army and discovered he was
a born soldier.
In America, he was a star performer from the start. In the fall of 1776,
while still a cornet, he played a key role in capturing Maj. Gen.
Charles Lee, second in command of the American army, when he unwisely
spent the night at a tavern in New Jersey, several miles from his
troops. Soon a captain, Tarleton performed ably for the next two years
and in 1778 was appointed a brigade major of the British cavalry.
[Illustration: Charles Lee, an English general retired on half-pay
at the outbreak of the war, threw in with Americans and received
several important commands early in the war. His capture in late
1776 at a New Jersey tavern by dragoons under Banastre Tarleton was
a celebrated event.]
Tarleton again distinguished himself when the British army retreated
from Philadelphia to New York in June 1778. At Monmouth Court House he
began the battle by charging the American advance column and throwing it
into confusion. In New York, sorting out his troops, the new British
commander, Sir Henry Clinton, rewarded Tarleton with another promotion.
While the British were in Philadelphia, various loyalists had recruited
three troops of dragoons. In New York, officers—some loyalist, some
British—recruited companies of infantry and more troops of dragoons from
different segments of the loyalist population. One company was Scottish,
two others English, a third American-born. Clinton combined these
fragments into a 550-man unit that he christened the British Legion.
Half cavalry, half infantry, a legion was designed to operate on the
fringe of a main army as a quick-strike force. Banastre Tarleton was
given command of the British Legion, which was issued green coats and
tan breeches, unlike other loyalist regiments, who wore red coats with
green facings.
Banastre Tarleton, Gentleman
[Illustration: Banastre Tarleton]
Banastre Tarleton, only 26, was a short, thick-set, rather handsome
redhead who was tireless and fearless in battle. Unlike Morgan, he had
been born to privilege. Scion of a wealthy Liverpool mercantile
family, he was Oxford educated and might have become a barrister
except that he preferred the playing field to the classroom and the
delights of London theatres and coffee houses to the study of law.
After squandering a modest inheritance, he jumped at the chance to buy
a commission in the King’s Dragoons and serve in America. Eventually
he came into command of the British Legion, a mounted and foot unit
raised among American loyalists. Marked by their distinctive green
uniforms, they soon became known as Tarleton’s Green Horse. It was
their ruthless ferocity that earned Tarleton the epithet, “Bloody
Tarleton.”
After the war, Tarleton fell in love with the beautiful Mary Robinson,
a poet, playwright, and actress. Tarleton’s memoir, _The Campaigns of
1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces_, owes much to her gifted pen.
[Illustration: Mary Robinson]
[Illustration: Tarleton’s birthplace on Water Street in Liverpool.]
[Illustration: Under Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, the patriots suffered
their worst defeat of the war. Bottled up by Sir Henry Clinton in
the peninsula city of Charleston, he surrendered the entire
Continental Army in the South—more than 5,000 men—in May 1780.]
Sailing south with the royal army that besieged and captured Charleston,
Tarleton and his Legion acted as a mobile screen, protecting the British
rear against attacks by American cavalry and militia from the interior
of the State. The young officer soon demonstrated a terrifying ability
to strike suddenly and ferociously when the Americans least expected
him. On May 6, 1780, at Lenuds Ferry, he surprised and virtually
destroyed the American cavalry, forcing William Washington and many
other officers and men to leap into the Santee River to escape him.
After Charleston surrendered, there was only one unit of regular
American troops left in South Carolina, the 3d Virginia Continentals
commanded by Col. Abraham Buford. He was ordered to retreat to North
Carolina. Cornwallis sent Tarleton and his Legion in pursuit. Covering
105 miles in 54 hours, Tarleton caught up with the Americans at Waxhaws.
The 380 Virginians were largely recruits, few of whom had seen action
before. Tarleton and the Legion charged from front, flank, and rear.
Buford foolishly ordered his men to hold their fire until the
saber-swinging dragoons were on top of them. The American line was torn
to fragments. Buford wheeled his horse and fled. Tarleton reportedly
sabered an American officer as he tried to raise a white flag. Other
Americans screamed for quarter, but some kept firing. A bullet killed
Tarleton’s horse and he crashed to the ground. This, he later claimed,
aroused his men to a “vindictive asperity.” They thought their leader
had been killed. Dozens of Americans were bayonetted or sabered after
they had thrown down their guns and surrendered.
[Illustration: The contemporary map shows the patriot defenses north
of the city, the British siege lines, and warships of the Royal Navy
that controlled the harbor waters.]
One hundred and thirteen Americans were killed and 203 captured at
Waxhaws. Of the captured, 150 were so badly wounded they were left on
the battlefield. Throughout the Carolinas, the word of the
massacre—which is what Americans called Waxhaws—passed from settlement
to settlement. It did not inspire much trust in British benevolence
among those who were being urged to surrender.
[Illustration: Tarleton’s slaughter of Col. Abraham Buford’s command
at the Waxhaws gave the patriots a rallying cry—“Tarleton’s
quarter”—remembered to this day.]
After helping to smash the American army at Camden with another
devastating cavalry charge, Tarleton was ordered to pursue Thomas Sumter
and his partisans. Pushing his men and horses at his usual pace in spite
of the tropical heat of August, he caught up with Sumter’s men at
Fishing Creek. Sabering a few carelessly posted sentries, the British
Legion swept down on the Carolinians as they lay about their camp, their
arms stacked, half of them sleeping or cooking. Sumter leaped on a
bareback horse and imitated Buford, fleeing for his life. Virtually the
entire American force of more than 400 men was killed or captured. When
the news was published in England, Tarleton became a national hero. In
his official dispatches, Cornwallis called him “one of the most
promising officers I ever knew.”
But Sumter immediately began gathering a new force and Francis Marion
and his raiders repeatedly emerged from the lowland swamps to harass
communications with Charleston and punish any loyalist who declared for
the king. Tarleton did not understand this stubborn resistance and liked
it even less. A nauseating bout with yellow fever deepened his saturnine
mood. Pursuing Marion along the Santee and Black Rivers, Tarleton
ruthlessly burned the farmhouses of “violent rebels,” as he called them.
“The country is now convinced of the error of the insurrection,” he
wrote to Cornwallis. But Tarleton failed to catch “the damned old fox,”
Marion.
The British Legion had scarcely returned from this exhausting march when
they were ordered out once more in pursuit of Sumter. On November 9,
1780, with a new band of partisans, Sumter fought part of the British
63d Regiment, backed by a troop of Legion dragoons, at Fishdam Ford on
the Broad River and mauled them badly. “I wish you would get three
Legions, and divide yourself in three parts,” Cornwallis wrote Tarleton.
“We can do no good without you.”
Once more the Legion marched for the back country. As usual, Tarleton’s
pace was almost supernaturally swift. On November 20, 1780, he caught
Sumter and his men as they were preparing to ford the Tyger River. But
this time Tarleton’s fondness for headlong pursuit got him into serious
trouble. He had left most of his infantry far behind him and pushed
ahead with less than 200 cavalry and 90 infantry, riding two to a horse.
Sumter had close to a thousand men and he attacked, backwoods style,
filtering through the trees to pick off foot soldiers and horsemen.
Tarleton ordered a bayonet charge. The infantry was so badly shot up,
Tarleton had to charge with the cavalry to extricate them, exposing his
dragoon to deadly rifle fire from other militiamen entrenched in a log
tobacco house known as Blackstocks. The battle ended in a bloody draw.
Sumter was badly wounded and his men abandoned the field to the
green-coated dragoons, slipping across the Tyger in the darkness.
Without their charismatic leader, Sumter’s militia went home.
[Illustration: This portrait of Tarleton and the illustration
beneath of a troop of dragoons doing maneuvers appeared in a
flattering biography shortly after he returned to England in 1782.]
“Sumter is defeated,” Tarleton reported to Cornwallis, “his corps
dispersed. But my Lord I have lost men—50 killed and wounded.” The war
was becoming more and more disheartening to Tarleton. Deepening his
black mood was news from home. His older brother had put him up for
Parliament from Liverpool. The voters had rejected him. They admired his
courage, but the American war was no longer popular in England.
While Cornwallis remained at Winnsborough, Tarleton returned from
Blackstocks and camped at various plantations south of the Broad River.
During his projected invasion of North Carolina, Cornwallis expected
Tarleton and his Legion to keep the dwindling rebels of South Carolina
dispersed to their homes. Thus the British commander would have no
worries about the British base at Ninety Six, the key to the back
country. The fort and surrounding settlement had been named by an early
mapmaker in the course of measuring distances on the Cherokee Path, an
ancient Indian route from the mountains to the ocean. The district
around Ninety Six was the breadbasket of South Carolina; it was also
heavily loyalist. But a year of partisan warfare had made their morale
precarious. The American-born commander of the fort, Col. John Harris
Cruger, had recently warned Cornwallis that the loyalists “were wearied
by the long continuance of the campaign ... and the whole district had
determined to submit as soon as the rebels should enter it.” The mere
hint of a threat to Ninety Six and the order it preserved in its
vicinity was enough to send flutters of alarm through British
headquarters.
There were flutters aplenty when Cornwallis heard from spies that Daniel
Morgan had crossed the Broad River and was marching on Ninety Six.
Simultaneously came news that William Washington, the commander of
Morgan’s cavalry, had routed a group of loyalists at Hammonds Store and
forced another group to abandon a fort not far from Ninety Six. At 5
a.m. on January 2, Lt. Henry Haldane, one of Cornwallis’s aides, rode
into Tarleton’s camp and told him the news. Close behind Haldane came a
messenger with a letter from Cornwallis: “If Morgan is ... anywhere
within your reach, I should wish you to push him to the utmost.” Haldane
rushed an order to Maj. Archibald McArthur, commander of the first
battalion of the 71st Regiment, which was not far away, guarding a ford
over the Broad River that guaranteed quick communication with Ninety
Six. McArthur was to place his men under Tarleton’s command and join him
in a forced march to rescue the crucial fort.
[Illustration: The little village of Ninety Six was a center of
loyalist sentiment in the Carolina backcountry. Cornwallis
mistakenly thought Morgan had designs on it and therefore sent
Tarleton in pursuit, bringing on the battle of Cowpens. This map
diagrams the siege that Gen. Nathanael Greene mounted against the
post in May-June of 1781.]
Tarleton obeyed with his usual speed. His dragoons ranged far ahead of
his little army, which now numbered about 700 men. By the end of the day
he concluded that there was no cause for alarm about Ninety Six. Morgan
was nowhere near it. But his scouts reported that Morgan was definitely
south of the Broad River, urging militia from North and South Carolina
to join him.
Tarleton’s response to this challenge was almost inevitable. He asked
Cornwallis for permission to pursue Morgan and either destroy him or
force him to retreat over the Broad River again. There, Cornwallis and
his army could devour him.
The young cavalry commander outlined the operation in a letter to
Cornwallis on January 4. He realized that he was all but giving orders
to his general, and tactfully added: “I feel myself bold in offering my
opinion [but] it flows from zeal for the public service and well
grounded enquiry concerning the enemy’s designs and operations.” If
Cornwallis approved the plan, Tarleton asked for reinforcements: a troop
of cavalry from the 17th Light Dragoons and the infantrymen of the 7th
Regiment of Royal Fusiliers, who were marching from Camden to reinforce
Ninety Six.
Cornwallis approved the plan, including the reinforcements. As soon as
they arrived, Tarleton began his march. January rain poured down,
swelling every creek, turning the roads into quagmires. Cornwallis, with
his larger army and heavy baggage train, began a slow advance up the
east bank of the Broad River. As the commander in chief, he had more to
worry about than Tarleton. Behind him was another British general, Sir
Alexander Leslie, with 1,500 reinforcements. Cornwallis feared that
Greene or Marion might strike a blow at them. The earl assumed that
Tarleton was as mired by the rain and blocked by swollen watercourses as
he was. On January 12, Cornwallis wrote to Leslie, who was being delayed
by even worse mud in the lowlands: “I believe Tarleton is as much
embarrassed with the waters as you are.” The same day, Cornwallis
reported to another officer, the commander in occupied Charleston: “The
rains have put a total stop to Tarleton and Leslie.” On this assumption,
Cornwallis decided to halt and wait for Leslie to reach him.
Tarleton had not allowed the August heat of South Carolina to slow his
pace. He was equally contemptuous of the January rains. His scouts
reported that Morgan’s army was at Grindal Shoals on the Pacolet River.
To reach the patriots he had to cross two smaller but equally swollen
streams, the Enoree and the Tyger. Swimming his horses, floating his
infantry across on improvised rafts, he surmounted these obstacles and
headed northeast, deep into the South Carolina back country. He did not
realize that his column, which now numbered over a thousand men, was
becoming more and more isolated. He assumed that Cornwallis was keeping
pace with him on the east side of the Broad River, cowing the rebel
militia there into staying home.
[Illustration: Gen. Alexander Leslie, veteran commander in America.
His service spanned actions from Salem Bridge in February 1775 to
the British evacuation of Charleston in December 1782.]
Tarleton also did not realize that this time, no matter how swiftly he
advanced, he was not going to take the patriots by surprise. He was
being watched by a man who was fighting with a hangman’s noose around
his neck.
3
_Skyagunsta_, the Wizard Owl, was what the Cherokees called 41-year-old
Andrew Pickens. They both feared and honored him as a battle leader who
had defeated them repeatedly on their home grounds. Born in
Pennsylvania, Pickens had come to South Carolina as a boy. In 1765 he
had married the beautiful Rebecca Calhoun and settled on Long Canes
Creek in the Ninety Six district. Pickens was no speechmaker, but
everyone recognized this slender man, who was just under 6 feet tall, as
a leader. When he spoke, people listened. One acquaintance declared that
he was so deliberate, he seemed at times to take each word out of his
mouth and examine it before he said it. Pickens had been one of the
leaders who repelled the British-inspired assaults on the back country
by the Cherokee Indians in 1776 and carried the war into the red men’s
country, forcing them to plead for peace. By 1779 he was a colonel
commanding one of the most dependable militia regiments in the State.
When the loyalists, encouraged by the British conquest of Georgia in
1778-79, began to gather and plot to punish their rebel neighbors,
Pickens led 400 men to assault them at Kettle Creek on the Savannah
River. In a fierce, hour-long fight, he whipped them although they
outnumbered him almost two to one.
After Charleston surrendered, Pickens’ military superior in the Ninety
Six district, Brig. Gen. Andrew Williamson, was the only high-ranking
official left in South Carolina. The governor John Rutledge had fled to
North Carolina, the legislature had dispersed, the courts had collapsed.
Early in June 1780, Williamson called together his officers and asked
them to vote on whether they should continue to resist. Only eight
officers opposed immediate surrender. In Pickens’ own regiment only two
officers and four enlisted men favored resistance. The rest saw no hope
of stopping the British regular army advancing toward them from
Charleston. Without a regular army of their own to match the British,
they could envision only destruction of their homes and desolation for
their families if they resisted.
Andrew Pickens was among these realists who had accepted the surrender
terms offered by the British. At his command, his regiment of 300 men
stacked their guns at Ninety Six and went home. As Pickens understood
the terms, he and his men were paroled on their promise not to bear arms
against the king. They became neutrals. The British commander of Ninety
Six, Colonel Cruger, seemed to respect this opinion. Cruger treated
Pickens with great deference. The motive for this delicate treatment
became visible in a letter Cruger sent Cornwallis on November 27.
“I think there is more than a possibility of getting a certain person in
the Long Canes settlement to accept of a command,” Cruger wrote. “And
then I should most humbly be of opinion that every man in the country
would declare and act for His Majesty.”
It was a tribute to Pickens’ influence as a leader. He was also a man of
his word. Even when Sumter, Clarke, and other partisan leaders
demonstrated that there were many men in South Carolina ready to keep
fighting, Pickens remained peaceably at home on his plantation at Long
Canes. Tales of Tarleton’s cruelty at Waxhaws, of British and loyalist
vindictiveness in other districts of the State undoubtedly reached him.
But no acts of injustice had been committed against him or his men. The
British were keeping their part of the bargain and he would keep his
part.
Then Cornwallis’s aide, Haldane, appeared at Ninety Six and summoned
Pickens. He offered him a colonel’s commission in the royal militia and
a promise of protection. There were also polite hints of the possibility
of a monetary reward for switching sides. Pickens agreed to ride down to
Charleston and talk over the whole thing with the British commander
there. The visit was delayed by partisan warfare in the Ninety Six
district, stirred by the arrival of Nathanael Greene to take command of
the remnant of the American regular army in Charlotte. Greene urged the
wounded Sumter and the Georgian Clarke to embody their men and launch a
new campaign. Sumter urged Pickens to break his parole, call out his
regiment, and march with him to join Greene. Pickens refused to leave
Long Canes.
[Illustration: Andrew Pickens, a lean and austere frontiersman of
Scotch-Irish origins, ranked with Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter
as major partisan leaders of the war.]
In desperation, the rebels came to him. Elijah Clarke led a band of
Georgians and South Carolinians to the outskirts of Long Canes, on their
march to join Greene. Many men from Pickens’ old regiment broke their
paroles and joined them. Clarke ordered Maj. James McCall, one of
Pickens’ favorite officers and one of two who had refused to surrender
at Ninety Six, to kidnap Pickens and bring him before an improvised
court-martial board. Accused of preparing to join the loyalists, Pickens
calmly admitted that the British were making him offers. So far he had
refused them. Even if former friends made good on their threat to
court-martial and hang him, he could not break his pledged word of honor
to remain neutral.
The frustrated Georgians and South Carolinians let Pickens go home. On
December 12, Cruger sent a detachment of regulars and loyalist militia
to attack the interlopers. The royalists surprised the rebels and routed
them, wounding Clarke and McCall and scattering the survivors. Most of
the Georgians drifted back to their home state and the Carolinians
straggled toward Greene in North Carolina.
The battle had a profound effect on Andrew Pickens. Friends, former
comrades-in-arms, had been wounded, humiliated. He still hesitated to
take the final step and break his parole. His strict Presbyterian
conscience, his soldier’s sense of honor, would not permit it. But he
went to Ninety Six and told Colonel Cruger that he could not accept a
commission in the royal militia. Cruger sighed and revealed what he had
been planning to do since he started wooing Pickens. In a few days, on
orders from Cornwallis, the loyalist colonel was going to publish a
proclamation which would permit no one to remain neutral. It would
require everyone around Ninety Six to come to the fort, swear allegiance
to the king, and enlist in the royal militia.
Pickens said his conscience would not permit him to do this. If the
British threatened him with punishment for his refusal, it would be a
violation of his parole and he would consider himself free to join the
rebels. One British officer, who had become a friend and admirer of the
resolute Pickens, warned him: “You will campaign with a halter around
your neck. If we catch you, we will hang you.”
Pickens decided to take the risk. He rode about Long Canes calling out
his regiment. The response was somewhat discouraging. Only about 70 men
turned out. Coordinating their movements with Colonel Washington’s raid
on the loyalists at Hammonds Store, they joined the patriot cavalry and
rode past Ninety Six to Morgan’s camp on the Pacolet.
The numbers Pickens brought with him were disappointing. But he and his
men knew the back country intimately. They were the eyes and ears
Morgan’s little army desperately needed. Morgan immediately asked
Pickens to advance to a position about midway between Fair Forest Creek
and the Tyger River and send his horsemen ranging out from that point in
all directions to guard against a surprise attack by Banastre Tarleton.
The Wizard Owl and his men mounted their horses and rode away to begin
their reconnaissance. General Morgan soon knew enough about the enemy
force coming after him to make him fear for his army’s survival.
4
Daniel Morgan might call Banastre Tarleton “Benny” for the entertainment
of young militiamen like Joseph McJunkin. But Morgan had been fighting
the British for five years. He was as close to being a professional
soldier as any American of his time. He knew Banastre Tarleton was no
joke. In fact, the casual style of his decision to reunite his cavalry
and infantry at the Thompson plantation on Thicketty Creek disguised a
decision to retreat. The march to Thicketty Creek put an additional 10
miles between him and the aggressive British cavalryman. Behind the mask
of easy confidence Morgan wore for his men, there was a very worried
general.
As soon as he crossed the Broad River and camped at Grindal Shoals on
the north bank of the Pacolet on December 25, 1780, Morgan began sending
messengers to the men of western Georgia, South Carolina, and North
Carolina, urging them to turn out and support him. The response had been
disheartening. Pickens, as we have seen, was unable to muster more than
a fraction of his old regiment. From Georgia came only a small
detachment of about 100 men under the command of Lt. Col. James Jackson
and Maj. John Cunningham. Because their leader Elijah Clarke was out of
action from his wound at Long Canes, the Georgians were inclined to stay
home. Sumter, though almost recovered from his wound, sulked on the east
side of the Broad River. He felt Greene had sent Morgan into his sphere
of command without properly consulting him.
Arms and Tactics
The armies fought the way they did—on open ground in long lines of
musket-wielding infantry standing two and three ranks deep—because
that was the most rational way to use the weapons they had.
The main weapon of this combat was the muzzle-loading, smooth-bore,
flint-lock musket, equipped with a 16-inch bayonet. It hurled a
one-ounce lead ball of .70 to .80 calibre fairly accurately up to 75
yards, but distance scarcely mattered. The object was to break up the
enemy’s formations with volleys and then rout them with cold steel.
The British were masters of these linear tactics, and Washington and
his commanders spent the war trying to instill the same discipline in
their Continentals so that they could stand up to redcoats on equal
terms in battle.
The American rifle was not the significant weapon legend later made it
out to be. Though accurate at great distances, it was slow to load and
useless in open battle because it was not equipped with a bayonet. But
in the hands of skirmishers the rifle could do great damage, as the
British found out at Cowpens.
[Illustration: French musket, calibre .69]
[Illustration: British Brown Bess, calibre .75]
[Illustration: British dragoon carbine]
[Illustration: American rifle]
Pistols _Cavalrymen and mounted officers nearly always carried a brace
of pistols. Though wildly inaccurate, they were useful in emergencies
when formal combat broke down and a foe was only a few feet away._
[Illustration: Officer’s Pistol]
[Illustration: American dragoon pistol]
[Illustration: Powder horns of the type used by rifle-carrying
militia at Cowpens: each was usually made by the man who carried
it.]
Edged Weapons _came in many varieties. The most important for
hand-to-hand fighting were bayonets and swords. For cavalrymen, the
sword was more useful than firearms. It was “the most destructive and
almost the only necessary weapon a Dragoon carries,” said William
Washington. They used two types: the saber and the broadsword. Both
are shown here._
_Officers, foot as well as mounted, carried swords, often for
fighting, sometimes only for dress. The small-sword (shown at left
below) was popular with Continental officers._
[Illustration: Officers’ swords]
[Illustration: American dragoon sabre]
[Illustration: British dragoon sabre, model 1768]
Pole Arms _were in common use. Washington wanted his foot officers to
direct their men and not be distracted by their own firearms. He
therefore armed them with a spear-like weapon called a spontoon. It
became a badge of rank as well as a weapon._
[Illustration: American officers’ spontoons]
Morgan’s highest hopes had been focused on North Carolina, which had
thus far been relatively untouched by the British. The commander of the
militia in the back country was Brig. Gen. William Davidson, a former
Continental officer whom Morgan had known at Valley Forge. An energetic,
committed man, popular with the militia, Davidson had been expected to
muster from 600 to 1,000 men. Instead, Morgan got a letter from him with
the doleful report: “I have not ninety men.” An Indian incursion on the
western frontier had drawn off many of the militia and inclined others
to stay home to protect their families. On December 28, Davidson rode
into Morgan’s camp with only 120 men. He said that he hoped to have
another 500 mustered at Salisbury in the next week and rode off to find
them, leaving Morgan muttering in dismay.
Morgan had eagerly accepted this independent command because he thought
at least 2,500 militiamen would join his 500 Continentals and Virginia
six-months men. With an army that size, he could have besieged or even
stormed the British stronghold at Ninety Six. His present force seemed
too small to do the enemy any damage. But it was large enough to give
its commander numerous headaches. In addition to the major worry of
annihilation by the enemy, food was scarce. The country along the
Pacolet had been plundered and fought over for so long, there was
nothing left to requisition from the farms. On December 31, in a letter
to Greene, Morgan predicted that in a few days supplies would be
“unattainable.”
What to do? The only practical move he could see for his feeble army was
a march into Georgia. The British outpost at Augusta was weaker and more
isolated than Ninety Six. Even here, Morgan was cautious. “I have
consulted with General Davidson and Colonel Pickens whether we could
secure a safe retreat, should we be pushed by a superior force. They
tell me it can be easily effected,” he wrote Greene, asking his approval
of this plan.
Morgan was reluctant to advance beyond the Pacolet. The reason was
rooted in his keen understanding of the psychology of the average
militiaman. He wanted to come out, fight and go home as soon as
possible. He did not want to fight if the regular army that was supposed
to look the enemy in the face seemed more interested in showing the
enemy their backs. “Were we to advance, and be constrained to retreat,
the consequences would be very disagreeable,” Morgan told Greene,
speaking as one general to another. The militia, he was saying, would go
home.
Greene was equally anxious about Morgan. Writing from Cheraw Hills on
the Pee Dee River on December 29, the southern commander told Morgan of
the arrival of Gen. Alexander Leslie in Charleston with reinforcements.
This news meant the British would almost certainly advance soon. “Watch
their motions very narrowly and take care to guard against a surprise,”
he wrote. A week later, in another letter, he repeated the warning. “The
enemy and the Tories both will try to bring you into disgrace ... to
prevent your influence upon the militia, especially the weak and
wavering.”
Greene vetoed Morgan’s expedition into Georgia. He did not think Morgan
was strong enough to accomplish much. “The enemy ... secure in their
fortifications, will take no notice of your movement,” he predicted.
Greene was persuaded that Cornwallis would strike at his half of the
army in their camp at Cheraw Hills, and he did not want Morgan in
Georgia if this threat materialized. Ignoring Morgan’s worries about
feeding his men, Greene told him to stay where he was, on the Pacolet or
“in the neighborhood,” and await an opportunity to attack the British
rear when they marched into North Carolina.
Morgan replied with a lament. He reiterated his warning that “forage
[for the horses] and provisions are not to be had.” He insisted there
was “but one alternative, either to retreat or move into Georgia.” A
retreat, he warned, “will be attended with the most fatal consequences.
The spirit which now begins to pervade the people and call them into the
field, will be destroyed. The militia who have already joined will
desert us and it is not improbable but that a regard for their own
safety will induce them to join the enemy.”
That last line is grim evidence of the power of the British policy of
forcing everyone to serve in the loyalist militia. But Nathanael Greene
remained adamant. He reported to Morgan more bad news, which made a
march into Georgia even more inadvisable. Another British general, with
2,500 men, had landed in Virginia and was attacking that vital State,
upon which the southern army depended for much of its supplies. It made
no sense to send some of the army’s best troops deeper into the South,
when Virginia might call on Greene and Morgan for aid. Almost casually
Greene added: “Col. Tarleton is said to be on his way to pay you a
visit. I doubt not but he will have a decent reception and a proper
dismission.”
This was a strange remark for a worried general to make. From other
letters Greene wrote around this time, it is evident that he had
received a number of conflicting reports about Tarleton’s strength and
position. The American commander was also unsure about British
intentions. He assumed that Cornwallis and Tarleton were moving up the
opposite sides of the Broad River in concert. Since the main British
column under Cornwallis had all but stopped advancing, Greene assumed
Tarleton had stopped too and that Morgan was in no immediate danger.
Around this time, a man who had known Daniel Morgan as a boy in Virginia
visited his camp. Richard Winn, after whom Winnsborough was named—and
whose mansion Cornwallis was using as his headquarters—discussed
Tarleton’s tactics with his old friend. Winn told Morgan that Tarleton’s
favorite mode of fighting was by surprise. “He never brings on [leads]
his attacks himself,” Winn said. He prefers to send in two or three
troops of horse, “whose goal is to throw the other party into confusion.
Then Tarleton attacks with his reserve and cuts them to pieces.”
Much as he dreaded the thought of a retreat, Morgan was too experienced
a soldier not to prepare for one. He sent his quartermaster across the
Broad River with orders to set up magazines of supplies for his army.
This officer returned with dismaying news. General Sumter had refused to
cooperate with this request and directed his subordinates to obey no
orders from Morgan.
Adding to Morgan’s supply woes was a Carolina military custom. Every
militiaman brought his horse to camp with him. This meant that Morgan
had to find forage for over 450 horses (counting William Washington’s
cavalry), each of whom ate 25 to 30 pounds of oats and hay a day. “Could
the militia be persuaded to change their fatal mode of going to war,”
Morgan groaned to Greene, “much provision might be saved; but the custom
has taken such deep root that it cannot be abolished.”
Bands of militiamen constantly left the army to hunt for forage. This
practice made it impossible for Morgan to know how many men he had in
his command. In desperation, he ordered his officers, both Continental
and militia, to call the roll every two hours. This measure only gave
him more bad news. On January 15, after retreating from the Pacolet to
Thicketty Creek, he reported to Greene that he had only 340 militia with
him, but did not expect “to have more than two-thirds of these to assist
me, should I be attacked, for it is impossible to keep them collected.”
Making Morgan feel even more like a military Job was a personal problem.
The incessant rain and the damp January cold had awakened an illness
that he had contracted fighting in Canada during the winter of 1775-76,
a rheumatic inflammation of the sciatic nerve in his hip. It made riding
a horse agony for Morgan.
In his tent on Thicketty Creek, where he had rendezvoused with William
Washington and his 80 cavalrymen, who had been getting their horses shod
at Wofford’s iron works, Morgan all but abandoned any hope of executing
the mission on which Greene had sent him. “My force is inadequate,” he
wrote. “Upon a full and mature deliberation I am confirmed in the
opinion that nothing can be effected by my detachment in this country,
which will balance the risks I will be subjected to by remaining here.
The enemy’s great superiority in numbers and our distance from the main
army, will enable Lord Cornwallis to detach so superior a force against
me, as to render it essential to our safety to avoid coming to action.”
It would be best, Morgan told Greene, if he were recalled with his
little band of Continentals and Andrew Pickens or William Davidson left
to command the back-country militia. Without the regulars to challenge
them, the British were less likely to invade the district and under
Pickens’ leadership the rebels would be able to keep “a check on the
disaffected”—the Tories—“which,” Morgan added mournfully, “is all I can
effect.”
When he wrote these words on January 15, Morgan was still unaware of
what was coming at him. From the reports of Pickens’ scouts, he had
begun to worry that Tarleton might have more than his 550-man British
Legion with him. With the help of Washington’s cavalry, he felt
confident that he could beat off an attack by the Legion. But what if
Tarleton had additional men? “Col. Tarleton has crossed the Tyger at
Musgrove’s Mill,” Morgan told Greene. “His force we cannot learn.”
Into Morgan’s camp galloped more scouts from Pickens. They brought news
that Morgan made the last sentence of his letter.
“We have just learned that Tarleton’s force is from eleven to twelve
hundred British.”
The last word was the significant one. _British._ Twelve hundred
regulars, trained troops, saber-swinging dragoons and bayonet-wielding
infantry like the men who had sent the militia running for their lives
at Camden and then cut the Continentals to pieces. Gen. Daniel Morgan
could see only one alternative—retreat.
5
Until he got this information on the numbers and composition of
Tarleton’s army, Morgan seems to have toyed with the possibility of
ambushing the British as they crossed the Pacolet. He left strong
detachments of his army at the most likely fords. At the very least, he
may have wanted to make the crossing a bloody business for the British,
perhaps killing some of their best officers, even Tarleton himself. If
he could repulse or delay Tarleton at the river, Morgan hoped he could
gain enough time to retreat to a ford across the upper Broad, well out
of reach of Cornwallis on the other side of the river. Pickens had kept
Morgan well informed of the sluggish advance of the main British army.
He knew they were far to the south, a good 30 miles behind Tarleton.
North of the Broad, Morgan reasoned they could be easily joined by the
500 North Carolina militia William Davidson had promised him as well as
South Carolina men from that district. If Tarleton continued the
pursuit, they could give battle on the rugged slopes of Kings Mountain,
where the cavalry of the British Legion would be useless.
Morgan undoubtedly discussed this plan with the leaders of the
militiamen who were already with him—Joseph McDowell of North Carolina,
whose men had fought at Kings Mountain, James Jackson and John
Cunningham of Georgia, James McCall, Thomas Brandon, William Bratton and
other South Carolinians, perhaps also Andrew Pickens. They did not have
much enthusiasm for it. They warned Morgan that at least half the
militia, especially the South Carolinians, would be inclined to go home
rather than retreat across the Broad. In the back country, men perceived
rivers as dividing lines between districts. Most of the South Carolina
men in camp came from the west side of the Broad. Moreover, with Sumter
hostile, there was no guarantee that they would be able to persuade many
men on the other side of the river to join them.
In this discussion, it seems likely that these militia leaders mentioned
the Cowpens as a good place to fight Tarleton on the south side of the
river. The grazing ground was a name familiar to everyone in the back
country. It was where the militia had assembled before the battle of
Kings Mountain the previous fall. Messengers could be sent into every
district within a day’s ride to urge laggards to join them there.
Morgan mulled this advice while his men guarded the fords of the
Pacolet. As dusk fell on January 15, Tarleton and his army appeared on
the south bank of the river. He saw the guards and wheeled, marching up
the stream toward a ford near Wofford’s iron works. On the opposite
bank, Morgan’s men kept pace with him, step for step. Then, with no
warning, the British disappeared into the night. Retreating? Making
camp? No one knew. It was too risky to venture across the swollen river
to follow him. The British Legion cavalry always guarded Tarleton’s
flanks and rear.
On the morning of the 16th, a militia detachment miles down the river in
the opposite direction made an alarming discovery. Tarleton was across!
He had doubled back in the dark and marched most of the night to cross
at Easterwood Shoals. He was only 6 miles from Morgan’s camp on
Thicketty Creek. Leaping on their horses, the guards galloped to Morgan
with the news.
Morgan’s men were cooking breakfast. Out of his tent charged the general
to roar orders at them, the wagoners, the infantry, the cavalrymen.
Prepare to march immediately! The men grabbed their half-cooked cornmeal
cakes and stuffed them into their mouths. The militia and the cavalry
ran for their horses, the wagoners hitched their teams, the Continentals
formed ranks, and the column got underway. Morgan pressed forward,
ignoring the pain in his hip, demanding more and more speed from his
men. He headed northwest, toward Cowpens, on the Green River Road, a
route that would also take him to the Island Ford across the Broad
River, about 6 miles beyond Cowpens.
All day the men slogged along the slick, gooey roads, Morgan at the head
of the column setting a relentless pace. His sciatic hip tormented him.
Behind him, the militiamen were expending “many a hearty curse” on him,
one of them later recalled. As Nathanael Greene wryly remarked, in the
militia every man considered himself a general.
But Daniel Morgan was responsible for their lives and the lives of his
Continentals, some of whom had marched doggedly from battlefield to
battlefield for over four years. In the company of the Delaware
Continentals who served beside the Marylanders in the light infantry
brigade, there was a lieutenant named Thomas Anderson who kept track of
the miles he had marched since they headed south in May 1780. At the end
of each day he entered in his journal the ever-growing total. By January
16, it was 1,435. No matter what the militia thought of him, Daniel
Morgan was not going to throw away such men in a battle simply to prove
his courage.
Seldom has there been a better example of the difference between the
professional and the amateur soldier. In his letters urging militiamen
to join him, Morgan had warned them against the futility of fighting in
such small detachments. He had asked them to come into his camp and
subject themselves to “order and discipline ... so that I may be enabled
to direct you ... to the advantage of the whole.”
In the same letters, Morgan had made a promise to these men. “I will ask
you to encounter no dangers or difficulties, but what I shall
participate in.” If he retreated across the Broad, he would be exposing
the men who refused to go with him to Tarleton’s policy of extermination
by fire and sword. If they went with him, their families, their friends,
their homes would be abandoned to the young lieutenant colonel’s
vengeance.
This conflict between prudence and his promise must have raged in
Morgan’s mind as his army toiled along the Green River Road. It was hard
marching. The road dipped into hollows and looped around small hills.
Swollen creeks cut across it. The woods were thick on both sides of it.
At dusk, the Americans emerged from the forest onto a flat, lightly
wooded tableland. At least, it looked flat at first glance. As Morgan
led his men into it, he noted that the ground rose gradually to a slight
crest, then dipped and rose to another slightly higher crest. Oak and
hickory trees were dotted throughout the more or less rectangular area,
but there was practically no underbrush. This was the Cowpens, a place
where back-country people pastured their cattle and prepared them to be
driven to market.
In the distance, Morgan could see the Blue Ridge Mountains, which rise
from the flat country beyond the Broad like a great rampart. They were
30 miles away. If they could reach them, the army was safe. But militia
scouts brought in grim news. The river was rising. It would be a
difficult business crossing at Island Ford in the dark. The ford was
still 6 miles away, and the men were exhausted from their all-day march.
If they rested at Cowpens and tried to cross the river the next morning,
Banastre Tarleton, that soldier who liked to march by night, would be
upon them, ready to slash them to pieces.
Perhaps it was that report which helped Morgan make his decision. One
suspects he almost welcomed the news that the army was, for all
practical purposes, trapped and fighting was the only alternative. There
was enough of the citizen-soldier in Morgan to dislike retreating almost
as much as the average militiaman.
The more Morgan studied the terrain around him, the more he liked it.
The militia leaders were right. This was the best place to fight
Tarleton. Sitting on his horse, looking down the slope to the Green
River Road, Morgan noted the way the land fell off to the left and right
toward several creeks. The Cowpens was bordered by marshy ground that
would make it difficult for Tarleton to execute any sweeping flank
movements with his cavalry. As his friend Richard Winn had told him,
that was not Tarleton’s style, anyway. He was more likely to come
straight at the Americans with his infantry and cavalry in a headlong
charge. Experience told Morgan there were ways to handle such an
assault—tactics that 26-year-old Banastre Tarleton had probably never
seen.
Now the important thing was to communicate the will to fight. Turning to
his officers, Morgan said, “On this ground I will beat Benny Tarleton or
I will lay my bones.”
6
_Eleven to twelve hundred British_, Daniel Morgan had written.
Ironically, as Morgan ordered another retreat from this formidable foe,
the British were barricading themselves in some log houses on the north
bank of the Pacolet River, expecting an imminent attack from the
patriots. Their spies had told them that Morgan had 3,000 men, and
Tarleton was taking no chances. After seizing this strong point, only a
few miles below Morgan’s camp, he sent out a cavalry patrol. They soon
reported that the Americans had “decamped.” Tarleton immediately
advanced to Morgan’s abandoned campsite, where his hungry soldiers were
delighted to find “plenty of provisions which they had left behind them,
half cooked.”
Nothing stirred Banastre Tarleton’s blood more than a retreating enemy.
British soldiers, famed for their tenacity in war, have often been
compared to the bulldog. But Tarleton was more like the bloodhound. A
fleeing foe meant the chance of an easy victory. It was not only
instinct, it was part of his training as a cavalryman.
“Patrols and spies were immediately dispatched to observe the
Americans,” Tarleton later recalled. The British Legion dragoons were
ordered to follow Morgan until dark. Then the job was turned over to
“other emissaries”—loyalists. Tarleton had about 50 with him to act as
scouts and spies. Early that evening, January 16, probably around the
time that Morgan was deciding to fight at Cowpens, a party of loyalists
brought in a militia colonel who had wandered out of the American line
of march, perhaps in search of forage for his horse. Threatened with
instant hanging, the man talked. He told Tarleton that Morgan hoped to
stop at Cowpens and gather more militia. But the captive said that
Morgan then intended to get across the Broad River, where he thought he
would be safe.
The information whetted Tarleton’s appetite. It seemed obvious to him
that he should “hang upon General Morgan’s rear” to cut off any militia
reinforcements that might show up. If Morgan tried to cross the Broad,
Tarleton would be in a position to “perplex his design,” as he put it—a
stuffy way of saying he could cut him to pieces. Around midnight, other
loyalist scouts brought in a rumor of more American reinforcements on
their way—a “corps of mountaineers.” This sent a chill through the
British, even through Tarleton. It sounded like the return of the
mountain men who had helped destroy the loyalist army at Kings Mountain.
It became more and more obvious to Tarleton that he should attack Morgan
as soon as possible.
About three in the morning of the 17th of January, Tarleton called in
his sentries and ordered his drummers to rouse his men. Leaving 35
baggage wagons and 70 Negro slaves with a 100-man guard commanded by a
lieutenant, he marched his sleepy men down the rutted Green River Road,
the same route Morgan had followed the previous day. The British found
the marching hard in the dark. The ground, Tarleton later wrote, was
“broken, and much intersected by creeks and ravines.” Ahead of the
column and on both flanks scouts prowled the woods to prevent an ambush.
Describing the march, Tarleton also gave a precise description of his
army. Three companies of light infantry, supported by the infantry of
the British Legion, formed his vanguard. The light infantry were all
crack troops, most of whom had been fighting in America since the
beginning of the war. One company was from the 16th Regiment and had
participated in some of the swift, surprise attacks for which light
infantry was designed. They had been part of the British force that
killed and wounded 150 Americans in a night assault at Paoli, Pa., in
the fall of 1777. The light company of the 71st Regiment had a similar
record, having also been part of the light infantry brigade that the
British organized early in the war.
[Illustration: Music made the soldier’s life more tolerable on the
march and in camp. But the most important use was in battle. Both
the drum and the fife conveyed signals and orders over the din and
confusion far better than the human voice. This iron fife is an
original 18th-century instrument. The drum, according to tradition,
was carried in the war.]
With these regulars marched another company of light infantry whose
memories were not so grand—the green-coated men of the Prince of Wales
Loyal American Volunteers. Northern loyalists, they had been in the war
since 1777. They had seen little fighting until they sailed south in
1780. After the fall of Charleston, Cornwallis had divided them into
detachments and used them to garrison small posts, with disastrous
results. In August 1780 at Hanging Rock, Sumter had attacked one
detachment, virtually annihilating it. The colonel of the regiment was
cashiered for cowardice. Another detachment was mauled by Francis Marion
at Great Savannah around the same time. It was hardly a brilliant
record. But this company of light infantry, supposedly the boldest and
best of the regiment, might be eager to seek revenge for their lost
comrades.
Tarleton’s Legion
Tarleton gave the Carolinas a foretaste of modern war. His Legion was
a fast-moving, hard-hitting combat team, accounted the best in the
British army at that stage of the war. Its specialty was relentless
pursuit followed by all-out attack. In Tarleton’s hands, the Legion
became a weapon of terror directed at civilian and soldier alike. As
in modern war, this tactic spawned as much partisan resistance as fear
and was ultimately self-defeating.
The figures across these pages represent the main units of the cooly
efficient battle machine that Tarleton led onto the field that winter
day.
[Illustration: 17th Dragoons • Private, 16th Light Infantry • Legion
cavalry • Private, 7th Fusiliers • Royal Artillery • Private, 71st
Highlanders]
Behind the light infantry marched the first battalion of the Royal
Fusiliers of the 7th Regiment. This was one of the oldest regiments in
the British army, with a proud history that went back to 1685. Known as
the “City of London” regiment, it had been in America since 1773. A
detachment played a vital part in repulsing the December 31, 1775,
attack on Quebec, which wrecked American plans to make Canada the 14th
State. Among the 426 Americans captured was Daniel Morgan. Few if any of
the men in Tarleton’s ranks had been in that fight. The 167-man
battalion were all new recruits. When they arrived in Charleston early
in December, the British commander there had described them to
Cornwallis as “so bad, not above a third can possibly move with a
regiment.”
The British government was having problems recruiting men for America.
It had never been easy to persuade Englishmen to join the army and
endure its harsh discipline and low pay. Now, with the war in America
growing more and more unpopular, army recruiters were scouring the jails
and city slums. Cornwallis had decided to use these new recruits as
garrison troops at Ninety Six. Tarleton, as we have seen earlier, had
borrowed them for his pursuit. Although the 7th’s motto was _Nec aspera
terrent_ (“hardships do not frighten us”), it must have been an
unnerving experience for these men, little more than a month after a
long, debilitating sea voyage, to find themselves deep in the backwoods
of South Carolina, marching through the cold, wet darkness to their
first battle.
Undoubtedly worsening the Fusiliers’ morale was the low opinion their
officers had of Banastre Tarleton. The commander of the regiment, Maj.
Timothy Newmarsh, had stopped at a country house for the night about a
week ago, during the early stage of the pursuit, and had not been
discreet in voicing his fears for the safety of the expedition. He said
he was certain they would be defeated, because almost every officer in
the army detested Tarleton, who had been promoted over the heads of men
who had been in the service before he was born.
Behind the Royal Fusiliers trudged a 200-man battalion of the 71st
Scottish Highlanders (Fraser’s), who probably did not find the night
march through the woods as forbidding as the city men of the Fusiliers.
At least half were relatively new recruits who had arrived in America
little more than a year ago. The rest were veterans who had been
campaigning in the rebellious colonies since 1776. They had sailed south
to help the British capture Georgia in 1778 and had fought well in one
of the most devastating royal victories of the southern campaign, the
rout of the Americans at Briar Creek, Ga., in early 1779. They were
commanded by Maj. Archibald McArthur, a tough veteran who had served
with the Scottish Brigade in the Dutch army, considered one of the
finest groups of fighting men in Europe.
Between the 71st and the 7th Regiments plodded some 18 blue-coated royal
artillerymen, leading horses carrying two brass cannon and 60 rounds of
round shot and case shot (also known as canister because each “case” was
full of smaller bullet-size projectiles that scattered in flight). These
light guns were considered an important innovation when they were
introduced into the British army in 1775. Because they could be
dismantled and carried on horses, they could be moved over rough terrain
impassable to ordinary artillery with its cumbersome ammunition wagons.
The two guns Tarleton had with him could also be fitted with shafts that
enabled four men to carry them around a battlefield, if the ground was
too muddy or rough for their carriages. With the shafts, they resembled
grasshoppers, and this was what artillerymen, fond of nicknames for
their guns, called them.
The cannon added to Tarleton’s confidence. They could hurl a 3-pound
round shot almost 1,000 yards. There was little likelihood that Morgan
had any artillery with him. All the southern army’s artillery had been
captured at Camden. These guns with Tarleton may have been two of the
captured pieces, which had originally been captured from the British at
Saratoga in 1777.
John Eager Howard, Citizen-soldier
[Illustration: John Eager Howard]
Few field officers served the Continental Army with greater skill or
devotion to duty than John Eager Howard. When the revolution broke
out, he was 23, the son of a landed Maryland family, brought up in an
atmosphere of ease and comfort. He saw his first hostile fire as a
captain of militia at White Plains (1776). The next year, as a major
in the regulars, he helped lead the 4th Maryland at Germantown. In the
Southern Campaign of 1780-81, regiments he led fought with great
courage at Camden, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Hobkirks Hill, and
Eutaw Springs. Nathanael Greene considered Howard “as good an officer
as the world affords.” After the war, ‘Light-Horse Harry’ Lee
described Howard as “always to be found where the battle raged,
pressing into close action to wrestle with fixed bayonet.”
[Illustration: The silver medal awarded by Congress to Howard for
service at Cowpens.]
[Illustration: J E Howard]
[Illustration: Belvidere, the elegant estate that John Eager Howard
built after the Revolution, stood in what is now downtown Baltimore.
It was torn down a century ago and the land is now occupied by row
houses.]
Behind the infantry and artillery rode the cavalry of the British Legion
and a 50-man troop of the 17th Light Dragoons, giving Tarleton about 350
horsemen. In scabbards dangling from straps over their shoulders were
the fearsome sabers that could lop off a man’s arm with a single stroke.
The Legion cavalry were, relatively speaking, amateurs, with only their
courage and belief in their cause to animate them. The 17th Dragoons
were regulars to the core, intensely proud of their long tradition. On
their brass helmets they wore a death’s head and below it a scroll with
the words “or glory.” They and their officers were somewhat disdainful
of the British Legion.
[Illustration: A helmet of the 17th Light Dragoons, c. 1780.]
Although their reputation among the patriots was good, the Legion had
several times exhibited cowardice unthinkable to a 17th dragoon. When
the British army advanced into Charlotte in the fall of 1780, they had
been opposed by 75 or 80 back-country riflemen. Tarleton was ill with
yellow fever and his second in command, Maj. George Hanger, had ordered
them to charge the Americans. The Legion refused to budge. Not even the
exhortations of Cornwallis himself stirred them until infantry had
dislodged the riflemen from cover. They apparently remembered the
punishment they had taken at Blackstocks, when Tarleton’s orders had
exposed them to sharpshooters.
As dawn began turning the black night sky to charcoal gray, Tarleton
ordered a select group of cavalry to the front of his infantry. They
soon collided with American scouts on horseback and captured two of
them. These captives told them that Morgan and his men were only a few
miles away. Tarleton immediately ordered two troops of the Legion
cavalry, under one of his best officers, Capt. David Ogilvie, to
reinforce his vanguard. Ogilvie galloped into the murky dawn. Within a
half hour, one of his troopers came racing back with unexpected news.
The patriots were not retreating! They were drawn up in an open wood in
battle formation.
Tarleton halted his army and summoned his loyalist guides. They
instantly recognized the place where Morgan had chosen to fight—the
Cowpens. It was familiar to everyone who had visited or lived in the
South Carolina back country. They gave Tarleton a detailed description
of the battleground. The woods were open and free from swamps. The Broad
River was about six miles away.
The ground, Tarleton decided, was made to order for the rebels’
destruction. In fact, America could not produce a place more suitable to
his style of war. His bloodhound instinct dominant, Banastre Tarleton
assumed that Morgan, having run away from him for two days, was still
only trying to check his advance and gain time to retreat over the Broad
River. Morgan failed to stop him at the Pacolet. He would fail even more
disastrously here. With six miles of open country in the Americans’
rear, Tarleton looked forward to smashing Morgan’s ranks with an
infantry attack and then unleashing his Legion horsemen to hunt down the
fleeing survivors. Tarleton never dreamt that Daniel Morgan was planning
to fight to the finish.
7
While Tarleton’s troops spent most of the night marching along the
twisting, dipping Green River Road, Daniel Morgan’s men had been resting
at Cowpens and listening to their general’s battle plan. First Morgan
outlined it for his officers, then he went from campfire to campfire
explaining it to his men.
The plan was based on the terrain at Cowpens and on the knowledge of
Tarleton’s battle tactics that Morgan had from such friends as Richard
Winn. Morgan probably told his men what he repeated in later years—he
expected nothing from Tarleton but “downright fighting.” The young
Englishman was going to come straight at them in an all-out charge.
To repel that charge, Morgan adopted tactics he had himself helped
design at Saratoga. There was a similarity between the little army he
commanded at Cowpens and the men he led in northern New York. Like his
old rifle corps, his militia were crack shots. But they could not stand
up against a British bayonet charge. It took too long to load and fire a
rifle, and it was not equipped with a bayonet.
He had complete confidence in his Continentals. No regiment in the
British army had a prouder tradition than these men from Maryland and
Delaware. They and their comrades in arms had demonstrated their heroism
on a dozen battlefields. Above all, Morgan trusted their commander, Lt.
Col. John Eager Howard of Maryland. At the battle of Germantown in 1777,
he had led his 4th Maryland Regiment in a headlong charge that drove the
British light infantry in panicky flight from their battle line back to
their tents. After the American defeat at Camden, Howard had rounded up
the survivors of his own and other regiments and led them on a three-day
march to Charlotte through swamps and forests to elude British pursuit.
Someone asked what they had to eat during that time. “Some peaches,”
Howard said.
[Illustration: An American canteen of the type used by militia at
Cowpens.]
Morgan was equally sure of the steadiness of the ex-Continentals who
made up the bulk of his two companies of Virginia six-months militiamen.
He told them that he was going to station them on either side of the
Maryland and Delaware regulars, on the first crest of the almost
invisibly rising slope that constituted Cowpens. A professional soldier
would consider this the “military crest” because it was the high ground
from which the best defense could be made. Behind this crest, the land
sloped off to a slight hollow, and then rose to another slightly higher
hump of earth, which was the geographical crest of the battleground.
Here Morgan planned to post William Washington and his 80 dragoons. To
make them more of a match for Tarleton’s 300 horsemen, he called for
volunteers to serve with Washington. About 40 men stepped forward, led
by Andrew Pickens’ friend, James McCall. Morgan gave them sabers and
told them to obey Washington’s orders.
There was nothing unusual or brilliant about this part of Morgan’s
battle plan. It was simply good sense and good tactics to select the
most advantageous ground for his infantry and keep Washington’s cavalry
out of the immediate reach of Tarleton’s far more numerous horsemen. It
was in his plan for the militia that Morgan demonstrated his genius. At
Camden, Horatio Gates had tried to use the militia as if they were
regulars, positioning them in his battle line side by side with the
Continentals. They swiftly demonstrated that they could not withstand a
British bayonet charge.
Morgan decided that he would use his militia in a different way. He put
the backwoodsmen under the command of Andrew Pickens and carefully
explained what he wanted them to do. They were going to form a line
about 150 yards ahead of Howard and the Continentals. They were to hold
their fire until the British were within “killing distance.” They were
to get off two or three shots and retreat behind the Continentals, who
would carry on the battle while the militiamen re-formed and came back
into the fight on the British flanks.
A select group of riflemen, considered the best shots in the army, were
to advance another hundred yards on both sides of the Green River Road
and begin skirmishing with the British as soon as they appeared. This
was the tactic Sumter had used at Blackstocks to tempt Tarleton into a
reckless charge, and it had cost the British heavy casualties.
His plan complete, Morgan did not retire to his tent, in the style of
more autocratic generals, and await the moment of battle. He understood
the importance of personal leadership. Above all, he knew how to talk to
the militia. He was a man of the frontier, like them. Although he was
crippled from his sciatica, he limped from group to group while they
cooked their suppers and smoked their pipes, telling them how sure he
was that they could whip “Benny.” Sixteen-year-old Thomas Young was
among the cavalry volunteers. He remembered how Morgan helped them to
fix their sabers, joked with them about their sweethearts, told them to
keep up their courage and victory was certain.
“Long after I laid down,” Young recalled, “he was going among the
soldiers encouraging them and telling them that the ‘Old Wagoner’ would
crack his whip over Ben in the morning, as sure as they lived.”
“Just hold up your heads, boys, give them three fires, and you will be
free,” Morgan told them. “Then when you return to your homes, how the
old folks will bless you, and the girls will kiss you.” “I don’t believe
that he slept a wink that night,” Young said later.
Many of these young militiamen had something else to motivate them—a
fierce resentment of the way the British and loyalists had abused, and
in some cases killed, their friends and relatives. Thomas Young’s
brother, John, had been shot down in the spring of 1780 when loyalist
militia attacked the Youngs’ regiment. “I do not believe I had ever used
an oath before that day,” Young said. “But then I tore open my bosom and
swore that I would never rest until I had avenged his death.”
[Illustration: A powder horn and linstock like these were essential
tools for artillerymen. They primed the cannon by pouring powder
into a vent leading to the charge and fired it by touching the
burning hemp on the tip of the linstock to the vent. The gunners
serving the two 3-pounder “grasshoppers” at Cowpens used such
equipment.]
Another South Carolinian, 17-year-old James Collins, had fought with
Sumter and other militia leaders since the fall of Charleston. He
remembered with particular anger the swath of desolation left by
loyalists when they plundered rebel Americans on the east side of the
Broad. “Women were insulted and stripped of every article of decent
clothing they might have on and every article of bedding, clothing or
furniture was taken—knives, forks, dishes, spoons. Not a piece of meat
or a pint of salt was left. They even entered houses where men lay sick
of the smallpox ... dragged them out of their sick beds into the yard
and put them to death in cold blood in the presence of their wives and
children. We were too weak to repel them....”
Morgan’s Army
On paper Morgan’s army was inferior. The British numbered some 1100,
all regulars and most of them tested in battle. Morgan had at best a
little over 800 troops, and half of them were militia. Numbers,
though, deceive, for Morgan’s army was in fact a first-rate detachment
of light infantry, needing only leadership to win victories.
The core of Morgan’s army was a mixed brigade of Maryland and Delaware
Continentals under Col. John Eager Howard, about 320 men. They were
supported by 80 or so Continental dragoons under Col. William
Washington.
[Illustration: Maryland Continental • Dragoon, 3rd Continentals]
These Continentals were tough and experienced. Morgan’s militia were
better material than the green troops who folded at Camden and later
ran away at Guilford. Some 200 were ex-Continentals from Virginia.
Morgan thought enough of them to employ them in the main battle line.
The other militia were recruited by that wily partisan leader, Andrew
Pickens, and William Davidson, a superb militia general. It’s unlikely
that such able commanders would have filled their ranks with the
wavering and shiftless.
Morgan knew the worth of these troops and deployed them in a way that
made the most of their strengths and minimized their weakness. They
rewarded him with a victory still marveled at two centuries later.
These figures represent the units in Morgan’s command.
[Illustration: Virginia militiaman • Carolina militiaman]
Collins and his friends had joined Sumter, only to encounter Tarleton at
Fishing Creek. “It was a perfect rout and an indiscriminate slaughter,”
he recalled. Retreating to the west, Collins described how they lived
before Morgan and his regulars arrived to confront the British and
loyalists. “We kept a flying camp, never staying long in one place,
never camping near a public road ... never stripping off saddles.” When
they ate, “each one sat down with his sword by his side, his gun lying
across his lap or under the seat on which he sat.” It soon became
necessary “for their safety,” Collins said, to join Morgan. At Cowpens,
men like James Collins were fighting for their lives.
Equally desperate—and angry—were men like Joseph Hughes, whose father
had been killed by the loyalists. Hughes had been living as an
“out-lier,” hiding in the woods near his home with a number of other men
who remained loyal to militia colonel Thomas Brandon. One day he
ventured out to visit his family. As he approached the house, three
loyalists sprang out of the door with leveled guns, shouting: “You
damned Rebel, you are our prisoner!” Hughes wheeled his horse and leaped
the gate to escape the hail of bullets.
At Cowpens, Hughes, though still in his teens, was given command of a
company of militia. Probably by his side was his close friend, William
Kennedy, considered one of the best shots in South Carolina. His prowess
with the rifle had discouraged loyalists from venturing into the rebel
settlement at Fairforest Shoals. His gun had a peculiar _crack_ which
his friends recognized. When they heard it, they often said: “There is
another Tory less.”
The men who had turned out to fight for Andrew Pickens had no illusions
about what would happen to them if they were captured. Like their
leader, they were violators of their paroles, liable to instant
execution if captured. On the night of the 16th, Cornwallis, in his camp
at Turkey Creek on the other side of the Broad, demonstrated what else
would happen to their families. He wrote out an order for Cruger at
Ninety Six. “If Colonel Pickens has left any Negroes, cattle or other
property that may be useful ... I would have it seized accordingly and I
desire that his houses may be burned and his plantations as far as lies
in your power totally destroyed and himself if ever taken instantly
hanged.” The order was executed the moment it was received at Ninety
Six. Rebecca Pickens and her children were hurried into the January cold
to watch their house, barns, and other outbuildings become bonfires.
The 200 Georgians and South Carolinians in Morgan’s army were all
veterans of numerous battles, most of them fought under Elijah Clarke’s
command. With their leader wounded, they were now commanded by James
Jackson and John Cunningham. Morgan had largely relied on Jackson to
rally them. Like most of Morgan’s men, he was young, only 23. He had
fought Tarleton at Blackstocks, where he had ducked bullets to seize the
guns of dead British to continue the fight after his men ran out of
ammunition. In one respect, Jackson was unusual. He had been born in
England. He arrived in America in 1774 and seems to have become an
instant Georgian, right down to extreme pugnacity and a prickly sense of
honor. He had recently quarreled with the rebel lieutenant governor of
Georgia, challenged him to a duel, and killed him. Morgan appointed
Jackson brigade major of the militia, making him Pickens’ second in
command.
At least as formidable as Jackson’s veterans were the 140 North
Carolinians under Maj. Joseph McDowell. They had fought at Musgrove’s
Mill and in other battles in the summer of 1780 and had scrambled up the
slopes of Kings Mountain to help destroy the loyalist army entrenched
there.
Well before dawn, Morgan sent cavalry under a Georgian, Joshua Inman, to
reconnoiter the Green River Road. They bumped into Tarleton’s advance
guard and hastily retreated. Into the Cowpens they pounded to shout the
alarm.
Morgan seemed to be everywhere on his horse, rousing the men. “Boys, get
up, Benny is coming,” he shouted. Quickly militia and Continentals got
on their feet and bolted down cold hominy they had cooked the night
before. Morgan ordered the baggage wagons to depart immediately to a
safe place, about a mile in the rear. The militiamen’s horses were tied
to trees, under a guard, closer to the rear of the battle line.
Morgan rode down to the picked riflemen who were going to open the fight
and told them he had heard a lot of tall tales about who were the better
shots, the men of Georgia or Carolina. Here was the chance to settle the
matter and save their country in the bargain. “Let me see which are most
entitled to the credit of brave men, the boys of Carolina or those of
Georgia,” he roared. By positioning Georgians on the left of the road
and Carolinians on the right, Morgan shrewdly arranged to make his
competition highly visible.
To Pickens’ men Morgan made a full-fledged speech, reminding them of
what the British had already done to their friends and many of their
families. He pounded his fist in his hand and told them that this was
their moment of revenge. He also praised the courage with which they had
fought the British in earlier skirmishes, without the help of regulars
or cavalry. Here they had the support of veterans in both departments.
He had not the slightest doubt of victory if they obeyed their orders
and fought like men. He told them his experiences with his rifle
regiment at Saratoga and other battles, where they had beaten the flower
of the British army, generals far more distinguished than Benny Tarleton
and regiments far more famous than the units Tarleton was leading.
To his Continentals, Morgan made an even more emotional speech. He
called them “my friends in arms, my dear boys,” and asked them to
remember Saratoga, Monmouth, Paoli, Brandywine. “This day,” he said,
“you must play your parts for honor and liberty’s cause.” He restated
his battle plan, reminding them that after two or three rounds the
militia would retreat under orders. They would not be running away. They
would be falling back to regroup and harry the enemy’s flanks.
A Delaware soldier watching Morgan’s performance said that by the time
he was through, there was not a man in the army who was not “in good
spirits and very willing to fight.”
The blood-red rising sun crept above the hills along the slopes of
Thicketty Mountain to the east. The men stamped their feet and blew on
their hands to keep warm. It was cold, but the air was crisp and clear.
The mighty ramparts of the Blue Ridge were visible, 30 miles away. Much
too distant for a refuge now, even if the swollen Broad River did not
lie between them and Morgan’s men.
Suddenly the British army was emerging from the woods along the Green
River Road. The green-coated dragoons at their head slowed and then
stopped. So did the red-coated light infantry behind them. An officer in
a green coat rode to the head of the column and studied the American
position. Everyone in the rebel army recognized him. It was Banastre
Tarleton.
8
Tarleton soon found his position at the head of the column was
hazardous. The Georgia and Carolina riflemen drifted toward him through
the trees on either side of the road. _Pop pop_ went their rifles.
Bullets whistled close to Tarleton’s head. He turned to the 50 British
Legion dragoons commanded by Captain Ogilvie and ordered them to “drive
in” the skirmishers. With a shout the dragoons charged. The riflemen
rested their weapons against convenient trees and took steady aim. Again
the long barrels blazed. Dragoons cried out and pitched from their
saddles, horses screamed in pain. The riflemen flitted back through the
open woods, reloading as they ran, a trick that continually amazed the
British. Some whirled and fired again, and more dragoons crashed to
earth. In a minute or two the riflemen were safely within the ranks of
Pickens’ militia. The dragoons recoiled from this array of fire power
and cantered back toward the British commander. They had lost 15 out of
their 50 men.
Tarleton meanwhile continued studying the rebel army. At a distance of
about 400 yards he was able to identify Pickens’ line of militia, whose
numbers he guessed to be about a thousand. He estimated the Continentals
and Virginia six-month militia in the second line at about 800.
Washington’s cavalry on the crest behind the Continentals he put at 120,
his only accurate figure.
[Illustration: Few officers saw more combat than William Washington.
a distant cousin of George. He was a veteran of many battles—among
them Long Island and Trenton in 1776, Charleston in 1780, and
Cowpens, Guilford, Hobkirks Hill, and Eutaw Springs in 1781—and
numerous skirmishes. Thrice he was wounded, the last time at Eutaw
Springs, where he was captured. His fellow cavalryman, ‘Light-Horse
Harry’ Lee described him as of “a stout frame, being six feet in
height, broad, strong, and corpulent ... in temper he was
good-humored.... Bold, collected, and persevering, he preferred the
heat of action to the collection and sifting of intelligence, to the
calculations and combinations of means and measures....”]
[Illustration: The British carried at least two flags into battle:
the King’s standard and the colors of the 7th Fusiliers (below).
Both were captured by Morgan’s troops.]
[Illustration: Colors of the 7th Fusiliers]
Tarleton was not in the least intimidated by these odds, even though his
estimates doubled Morgan’s actual strength. He was supremely confident
that his regular infantry could sweep the riflemen and militia off the
field, leaving only the outnumbered Continentals and cavalry. The ground
looked level enough to repeat the Waxhaws rout. In his self-confidence
and growing battle fever, he did not even bother to confer on a tactical
plan with Newmarsh of the Fusiliers or McArthur of the Highlanders. He
simply issued them orders to form a line of battle. The infantry was
told to drop their heavy packs and blanket rolls. The light infantry
companies were ordered to file to the right, until they extended as far
as the flank of the militia facing them. The Legion infantry was ordered
into line beside them. Next came a squad of blue-coated artillerymen
with their brass grasshopper. They unpacked their gun and ammunition
boxes and mounted them on the wheeled carriage with professional speed.
In the Royal Artillery school at Woolrich the men who designed the gun
estimated this task should take no more than two minutes.
The light infantry and Legion infantry were now told to advance a
hundred yards, while the Fusiliers moved into line on their left. The
other grasshopper was placed on the right of this regiment, no doubt to
bolster the courage of the raw recruits. The two guns began hurling shot
into the woods, firing at the riflemen who were filtering back to
potshot the tempting red and green targets.
On each flank, Tarleton posted a captain and 50 dragoons, more than
enough, he thought, to protect his infantry from a cavalry charge.
Tarleton ordered the Highlanders to form a line about 150 yards in the
rear of the Fusiliers, slightly to their left. These veteran Scots and
200 Legion cavalry were his reserve, to be committed to the fight when
they were most needed.
Everywhere Tarleton looked, he later recalled, he saw “the most
promising assurance of success.” The officers and men were full of fire
and vigor. Every order had been obeyed with alacrity. There was not a
sign of weariness, though his men had marched half the night. They had
been chasing these Americans for two weary weeks. They knew that if they
beat them here, the war in South Carolina would be over. To make this a
certainty, Banastre Tarleton issued a cruel order. They were to give no
quarter, take no prisoners.
[Illustration: The only reasonably sure patriot flag on the field
was a damask color, cut from the back of a chair, that Washington’s
dragoons carried. The original, which measures only 18 inches by 18,
is in the collection of the Washington Light Infantry Corps of
Charleston.]
The order might have made some gruesome sense as far as the militia was
concerned. Almost every one of them was considered a criminal, fighting
in direct violation of the law as laid down by His Majesty’s officers in
numerous proclamations. Killing them would save the trouble of hanging
them. But to order his men to give no quarter to Morgan’s Continentals
was a blatant violation of the rules of war under which both sides had
fought for the past five years. It was graphic glimpse of the rage which
continued American resistance was igniting in Englishmen like Banastre
Tarleton.
One British officer in the battle later said that Major Newmarsh was
still posting the officers of the Fusiliers, the last regiment into
line, when Tarleton ordered the advance to begin. With a tremendous
shout, the green- and red-coated line surged forward.
From the top of the slope, Morgan called on his men to reply. “They give
us the British haloo, boys,” he cried. “Give them the Indian haloo.” A
howl of defiance leaped from 800 American throats. Simultaneously, the
Georgians and North Carolinians opened fire behind the big trees. Some
of the new recruits of the Fusiliers regiment revealed their nervousness
by firing back. Their officers quickly halted this tactical violation.
British infantry fired by the volley, and the riflemen were out of
musket range anyway. Rifles outshot muskets by 150 yards.
Morgan watched the riflemen give the British infantry “a heavy and
galling fire” as they advanced. But the sharpshooters made no pretense
of holding their ground. Morgan had ordered them to fall back to
Pickens’ militia and join them for serious fighting. On the British
came, their battle drums booming, their fifes shrilling, the two brass
cannon barking. The artillerymen apparently did not consider the
militiamen an important target. They blasted at the Continentals on the
crest. Most of their rounds whizzed over the heads of the infantry and
came dangerously close to Colonel Washington and his horsemen. He led
his men to a safer position on the slope of the geographical crest,
behind the left wing of the main American line.
Andrew Pickens and his fellow colonels, all on horseback, urged the
militia to hold their fire, to aim low and pick out “the epaulette
men”—the British officers with gold braid on their shoulders.
Tarleton’s Order of Battle
_Legion dragoons (two troops)_
_Light infantry companies of the 16th, 71st, and Prince of Wales
regiments_
_Legion infantry_
_7th Fusiliers_
_Royal artillery_
_71st Highlander regulars_
_17th Light Dragoons_
_Legion dragoons_
_This is the order in which Tarleton deployed his units on the
battlefield._
It was no easy task to persuade these men not to fire while those
16-inch British bayonets bore down on them, glistening wickedly in the
rising sun. The closer they got, the more difficult it would be to
reload their clumsy muskets and get off another shot before the British
were on top of them. But the musket was a grossly inaccurate weapon at
anything more than 50 yards. This was the “killing distance” for which
Pickens and Morgan wanted the men to wait. The steady fire of the
grasshoppers, expertly served by the British artillerymen, made the wait
even more harrowing.
Then came the moment of death. “Fire,” snarled Andrew Pickens. “Fire,”
echoed his colonels up and down the line. The militia muskets and rifles
belched flame and smoke. The British line recoiled as bullets from over
300 guns hurtled among them. Everywhere officers, easily visible at the
heads of their companies, went down. It was probably here that Newmarsh
of the Fusiliers, who had been so pessimistic about fighting under
Tarleton, fell with a painful wound. But confidence in their favorite
weapon, the bayonet, and the knowledge that they were confronting
militia quickly overcame the shock of this first blow. The red and green
line surged forward again.
Thomas Young, sitting on his horse among Washington’s cavalry, later
recalled the noise of the battle. “At first it was _pop pop pop_ (the
sound of the rifles) and then a whole volley,” he said. Then the
regulars fired a volley. “It seemed like one sheet of flame from right
to left,” Young said.
The British were not trained to aim and fire. Their volley firing was
designed to intimidate more than to kill. It made a tremendous noise and
threw a cloud of white smoke over the battlefield. Most of the musket
balls flew high over the heads of the Americans. Decades later, visitors
to Cowpens found bullets embedded in tree trunks as high as 30 feet from
the ground.
Out of the smoke the regulars came, bayonets leveled. James Collins was
among the militiamen who decided that the two shots requested by Morgan
was more than they could manage. “We gave the enemy one fire,” he
recalled. “When they charged us with their bayonets we gave way and
retreated for our horses.”
Most of the militia hurried around Morgan’s left flank, following
Pickens and his men. A lesser number may have found the right flank more
convenient. The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was to
escape those bayonets and reach the position where Morgan promised them
they would be protected by Howard’s Continentals and Washington’s
cavalry. Watching from the military crest, Sgt. William Seymour of the
Delaware Continentals thought the militia retreated “in very good order,
not seeming to be in the least confused.” Thus far, Morgan’s plan was
working smoothly.
Tarleton ordered the 50 dragoons on his right flank to pursue Pickens
and the bulk of the militia. If, as he later claimed, the British
commander had seen William Washington and his 120 cavalry at the
beginning of the battle, this order was a blunder. With 200 cavalrymen
in reserve, waiting a summons to attack, Tarleton sent 50 horsemen to
face twice their number of mounted Americans. He may have assumed that
Morgan was using standard battle tactics and regarded Washington’s
cavalry as his reserve, which he would not commit until necessity
required it. The British commander never dreamt that the Old Wagoner had
made a solemn promise to the militiamen that he would protect them from
the fearsome green dragoons at all costs.
As the militia retreated. Tarleton’s cavalry thundered down on them.
their deadly sabers raised. “Now,” thought James Collins, “my hide is in
the loft.” A wild melee ensued, with the militiamen dodging behind
trees, parrying the slashing sabers with their gun barrels. “They began
to make a few hacks at some,” Collins said, “thinking they would have
another Fishing Creek frolic.” As the militiamen dodged the swinging
sabers, the British dragoons lost all semblance of a military formation
and became “pretty much scattered,” Collins said.
At that moment, “Col. Washington’s cavalry was among them like a
whirlwind,” Collins exultantly recalled. American sabers sent dragoons
keeling from their horses. “The shock was so sudden and violent, they
could not stand it, and immediately betook themselves to flight.”
Collins said. “They appeared to be as hard to stop as a drove of wild
Choctaw steers, going to Pennsylvania market.” Washington’s cavalry
hotly pursued them and “in a few minutes the clashing of swords was out
of hearing and quickly out of sight.”
Thomas Young was one of the South Carolina volunteers in this ferocious
charge. He was riding a “little tackey”—a very inferior horse—which put
him at a disadvantage. When he saw one of the British dragoons topple
from his saddle, he executed “the quickest swap I ever made in my life”
and leaped onto “the finest horse I ever rode.” Young said the American
charge carried them through the 50 dragoons, whereupon they wheeled and
attacked them in the rear. On his new steed he joined Washington’s
pursuit of the fleeing British.
In spite of William Washington’s victorious strike, many militiamen
decided that Cowpens was unsafe and leaped on their horses and departed.
Among the officers who took prompt action to prevent further panic was
young Joseph Hughes. Although blood streamed from a saber cut on his
right hand, he drew his sword and raced after his fleeing company.
Outrunning them, he whirled and flailed at them with the flat of his
blade, roaring. “You damned cowards, halt and fight—there is more danger
in running than in fighting.”
Andrew Pickens rode among other sprinters, shouting. “Are you going to
leave your mothers, sisters, sweethearts and wives to such unmerciful
scoundrels, such a horde of thieves?”
On the battlefield, volley after volley of musketry thundered, cannon
boomed. The Continentals and the British regulars were slugging it out.
Daniel Morgan rode up to the milling militiamen, waving his sword and
roaring in a voice that outdid the musketry: “Form, form, my brave
fellows. Give them one more fire and the day is ours. Old Morgan was
never beaten.”
Would they fight or run? For a few agonizing moments, the outcome of the
battle teetered on the response of these young backwoodsmen.
9
On the other side of the crest behind which Morgan and Pickens struggled
to rally the militia, Banastre Tarleton was absorbed in pressing home
the attack with his infantry. He seems to have paid no attention to the
rout of his cavalry on the right. Nor did any of his junior officers in
the Legion attempt to support the fleeing dragoons with reinforcements
from the 200-man cavalry reserve. At this point in the battle, Tarleton
badly needed a second in command who had the confidence to make
on-the-spot decisions. One man cannot be everywhere on a battlefield.
Unfortunately for Tarleton, Maj. George Hanger, his second in command,
was in a hospital in Camden, slowly recovering from yellow fever.
With the militia out of the way, the British infantry had advanced on
the Continentals and begun blasting volleys of musketry at them. The
Continentals volleyed back. Smoke enveloped the battlefield. Tarleton
later claimed the fire produced “much slaughter,” but it is doubtful
that either side could see what they were shooting at after the first
few rounds. The British continued to fire high, hitting few
Continentals.
To Tarleton, the contest seemed “equally balanced,” and he judged it the
moment to throw in his reserve. He ordered Major McArthur and his 71st
Highlanders into the battle line to the left of the Fusiliers. This gave
Tarleton over 700 infantrymen in action to the rebels’ 420.
Simultaneously, Tarleton ordered the cavalry troop on the left to form a
line and swing around the American right flank.
These orders, shouted above the thunder of musketry and the boom of the
cannon, were promptly obeyed. On the crest of the hill, Howard saw the
British threat developing. Once men are outflanked and begin to be hit
with bullets from two sides, they are in danger of being routed. Howard
ordered the Virginia militia on his right to “change their front” to
meet this challenge. This standard battlefield tactic requires a company
to wheel and face a flanking enemy.
[Illustration: An officer of the Maryland Regiment. He carries a
spontoon, which is both a badge of office and in close combat a
useful weapon.]
A battlefield is a confusing place, and the Virginians, though mostly
trained soldiers, were not regulars who had lived and drilled together
over the previous months. Their captain shouted the order given him by
Howard, and the men wheeled and began marching toward the rear. The
Maryland and Delaware Continentals, seeing this strange departure,
noting that it was done in perfect order and with deliberation, assumed
that they had missed an order to fall back. They wheeled and followed
the Virginians. On the opposite flank, the other company of Virginians
repeated this performance. In 60 seconds the whole patriot line was
retreating.
Behind the geographical crest of the hill, Morgan and Pickens had
managed to steady and reorganize the militia. Morgan galloped back
toward the military crest on which he assumed the Continentals were
still fighting. He was thunderstruck to find them retreating. In a fury,
he rode up to Howard and cried: “Are you beaten?”
Howard pointed to his unbroken ranks and told Morgan that soldiers who
retreated in that kind of order were not beaten. Morgan agreed and told
him to stay with the men and he would ride back and choose the place
where the Continentals should turn and rally. The Old Wagoner spurred
his horse ahead toward the geographical crest of the hill, about 50
paces behind their first line.
On the British side of the battlefield, the sight of the retreating
Continentals revived hopes of an easy victory. Major McArthur of the
71st sought out Tarleton and urged him to order the cavalry reserve to
charge and turn the retreat into a rout. Tarleton claimed that he sent
this order to the cavalry, who were now at least 400 yards away from the
vortex of the battle. Perhaps he did. It would very probably have been
obeyed if it had arrived in time. The dragoons of the British Legion
liked nothing so much as chopping up a retreating enemy.
But events now occurred with a rapidity that made it impossible for the
cavalry to respond. The center of Tarleton’s line of infantry surged up
the slope after the Continentals, bayonets lowered, howling for American
blood. With almost half their officers dead or wounded by now, they lost
all semblance of military formation.
Far down the battlefield, where he had halted his pursuit of the British
cavalry, William Washington saw what was happening. He sent a horseman
racing to Morgan with a terse message. “They are coming on like a mob.
Give them another fire and I will charge them.” Thomas Young, riding
with Washington, never forgot the moment. “The bugle sounded,” he said.
“We made a half circuit at full speed and came upon the rear of the
British line shouting and charging like madmen.”
Simultaneously, Morgan reached the geographical crest of the slope, with
the Continentals only a few steps behind him. He roared out an order to
turn and fire. The Continentals wheeled and threw a blast of
concentrated musketry into the faces of the charging British. Officers
and men toppled. The line recoiled.
“Give them the bayonet,” bellowed John Eager Howard.
With a wild yell, the Continentals charged. The astonished British
panicked. Some of them, probably the Fusiliers, flung themselves faced
down on the ground begging for mercy. Others, Thomas Young recalled,
“took to the wagon road and did the prettiest sort of running away.”
At almost the same moment, the Highlanders, whose weight, if they had
joined the charge, would probably have been decisive, received an
unexpected blast of musketry from their flank. Andrew Pickens and the
militia had returned to the battle. The backwoodsmen blazed at the
Scotsmen, the riflemen among them concentrating on the screen of the
cavalrymen. The cavalry fled and McArthur’s men found themselves
fighting a private war with the militia.
Astonished and appalled, Tarleton sent an officer racing to the British
Legion cavalry with orders for them to form a line of battle about 400
yards away, on the left of the road. He rode frantically among his
fleeing infantry, trying to rally them. His first purpose was “to
protect the guns.” To lose a cannon was a major disgrace in 18th-century
warfare. The artillerymen were the only part of the British center that
had not succumbed to the general panic. They continued to fire their
grasshoppers, while the infantry threw down their muskets or ran past
them helter skelter. Part of the artillery’s tradition was an absolute
refusal to surrender. They lived by the code of victory or death.
Once past the surrendering infantry, the Continentals headed for the
cannon. Like robots—or very brave men—the artillerymen continued to fire
until every man except one was shot down or bayonetted.
The last survivor of the other gun crew was the man who touched the
match to the powder vent. A Continental called on him to surrender this
tool. The artilleryman refused. As the Continental raised his bayonet to
kill him, Howard came up and blocked the blow with his sword. A man that
brave, the colonel said, deserved to live. The artilleryman surrendered
the match to Howard.
Up and down the American line on the crest rang an ominous cry. “Give
them Tarleton’s quarter.” Remembering Waxhaws, the regulars and their
Virginia militia cousins were ready to massacre the surrendered British.
But Daniel Morgan, the epitome of battle fury while the guns were
firing, was a humane and generous man. He rode into the shouting
infantrymen, ordering them to let the enemy live. Junior officers joined
him in enforcing the order.
Discipline as well as mercy made the order advisable. The battle was not
over. The Highlanders were still fighting fiercely against Pickens’ men.
Tarleton was riding frantically toward his Legion cavalry to bring them
back into the battle. But the militia riflemen were back on the field
and Tarleton was their prime target. Bullets whistled around him as he
rode. Several hit his horse. The animal crashed to the ground. Tarleton
sprang up, his saber ready. Dr. Robert Jackson, assistant surgeon of the
71st, galloped to the distraught lieutenant colonel and offered him his
horse. Tarleton refused. For a moment he seemed ready to die on the
chaotic battlefield with his men. Dr. Jackson urged him again. Springing
off his horse, he told Tarleton, “Your safety is of the highest
importance to the army.”
Tarleton mounted Jackson’s horse and rode to rally his troops. Fastening
a white handkerchief to his cane, Jackson strolled toward the
all-but-victorious Americans. No matter how the battle ended, he wanted
to stay alive to tend the wounded.
Looking over his shoulder at the battlefield, Tarleton clung to a shred
of hope. An all-out charge by the cavalry could still “retrieve the
day,” he said later. The Americans were “much broken by their rapid
advance.”
But the British Legion had no appetite for another encounter with the
muskets of Andrew Pickens’ militia. “All attempts to restore order,
recollection [of past glory] or courage, proved fruitless,” Tarleton
said. No less than 200 Legion dragoons wheeled their horses and galloped
for safety in the very teeth of Tarleton’s harangue. Fourteen officers
and 40 dragoons of the 17th Regiment obeyed his summons and charged with
him toward the all-but-disintegrated British battle line. Their chief
hope was to save the cannon and rescue some small consolation from the
defeat.
Stages of the Battle
Because the battle was a continuous flow of action from the opening
skirmish to the pell-mell flight of the Legion dragoons at the end, the
important maneuvers cannot all be shown on a single map. This sequence
of maps diagrams the main stages of the battle.
[Illustration: 1.]
Skirmishers drive back Tarleton’s cavalry, sent forward to examine the
enemy’s lines, and then withdraw into Pickens’ line of militia. Without
pausing, Tarleton forms his line of battle.
Green River Road
Route 11
Morgan’s camp
Washington’s cavalry
Visitor Center
Howard’s Continentals
Pickens’ militia
Skirmishers
17th dragoons
Legion dragoons
Tarleton’s main line
71st Highlanders
Scruggs House
[Illustration: 2.]
The British advance on Pickens’ militia, who deliver the promised two
shots each and fall back on the flanks. When they are pursued by British
dragoons, Washington’s cavalry charges into action and drives them off.
Green River Road
Route 11
Morgan’s camp
Washington’s cavalry
Visitor Center
Howard’s Continentals
Pickens’ militia
17th dragoons
Tarleton’s main line
Legion dragoons
71st Highlanders
Scruggs House
[Illustration: 3.]
Howard’s Continentals rout the British in the center, supported by
cavalry on the left and militia on the right.
Green River Road
Route 11
Morgan’s camp
Howard’s Continentals
Washington’s cavalry
Visitor Center
Tarleton’s main line
Pickens’ militia
71st Highlanders
17th dragoons
Legion dragoons
Scruggs House
How to read these battle diagrams
British positions are shown in RED, American in BLUE. Open boxes show
former positions, arrows movement. Clashes are shown by stars. Modern
features, included for orientation, appear in gray.
[Illustration: This perspective by the artist Richard Schlecht
compresses the whole battle into one view. The open woods in the
foreground (A) is littered with British shot down by Pickens’
skirmishers. At the far right (B) Washington’s cavalry drive back
the British dragoons pursuing Pickens’ militia. Along the third line
(C) Howard’s Continentals repulse the attacking British regulars
with volleys and bayonets. On Tarleton’s left (D) the 71st is
engaged in a hot contest with militia, some of whom had returned to
the battle after firing their two shots and withdrawing. They hit
Tarleton’s left flank hard while Howard’s troops rout the British in
the center, giving Morgan the victory. A gem of tactical planning
and maneuver, it was by far the patriot’s best fought battle of the
war.
The painting conveys a close sense of the original terrain with its
scattered hardwoods and undulating ground that Morgan turned to good
use. The axis of the battlefield, then as now, is the old Green
River Road, which runs diagonally across the scene. The diverging
road at left was not there at the time of the battle.]
They never got there. Instead, they collided with William Washington’s
cavalry that had wheeled after their assault on the rear of the infantry
and begun a pursuit of the scampering redcoats, calling on them to
surrender, sabering those who refused. Washington shouted an order to
meet the British charge. Most of his horsemen, absorbed in their pursuit
of the infantry, did not hear him. Washington, leading the charge, did
not realize he was almost unsupported. The burly Virginian, remembering
his humiliating defeat at Lenuds Ferry in May 1780, had a personal score
to settle with Banastre Tarleton. He headed straight for him.
Tarleton and two officers accepted Washington’s challenge. The Virginian
slashed at the first man, but his saber snapped at the hilt. As the
officer stood up in his stirrups, his saber raised for a fatal stroke,
Washington’s bugler boy rode up and fired at the Englishman. The second
officer was about to make a similar stroke when the sergeant-major of
the 3d Continental Dragoons arrived to parry the blow and slash this
assailant’s sword arm. Tarleton made a final assault. Washington parried
his blow with his broken sword. From his saddle holsters, Tarleton drew
two pistols in swift succession and fired at Washington. One bullet
wounded Washington’s horse.
By this time Tarleton saw that the battle was totally lost. The riflemen
were running toward his horsemen, and their bullets were again whistling
close. The Highlanders were being methodically surrounded by Pickens’
militia and Morgan’s Continentals. Summoning his gallant 54 supporters,
Tarleton galloped down the Green River Road, a defeated man.
On the battlefield, the Highlanders were trying to retreat. But Howard’s
Continentals and Washington’s cavalry were now between them and safety.
Through the center of their line charged Lt. Col. James Jackson and some
of his Georgians to try to seize their standard. Bayonet-wielding
Scotsmen were about to kill Jackson when Howard and his Continentals
broke through the 71st’s flank and saved him. Howard called on the
Highlanders to surrender. Major McArthur handed his sword to Pickens and
so did most of the other officers. Pickens passed the major’s sword to
Jackson and ordered him to escort McArthur to the rear.
Captain Duncasson of the 71st surrendered his sword to Howard. When
Howard remounted, the captain clung to his saddle and almost unhorsed
him. “I expressed my displeasure,” Howard recalled, “and asked him what
he was about.” Duncasson told Howard that Tarleton had issued orders to
give no quarter and they did not expect any. The Continentals were
approaching with their bayonets still fixed. He was afraid of what they
might do to him. Howard ordered a sergeant to protect the captain.
Around the patriots main position, a happy chaos raged. In his
exultation, Morgan picked up his 9-year-old drummer boy and kissed him
on both cheeks.
Others were off on new adventures. Cavalryman Thomas Young joined half a
dozen riders in pursuit of prisoners and loot down the Green River Road.
They must have embarked on this foray shortly after most of Tarleton’s
cavalry had deserted him and before Tarleton himself quit the
battlefield after the encounter with Washington.
“We went about twelve miles,” Young said in his recollections of the
battle, “and captured two British soldiers, two negroes and two horses
laden with portmanteaus. One of the portmanteaus belonged to a paymaster
... and contained gold.” The other riders decided this haul was too good
to risk on the road and told Young to escort the prisoners and the money
back to Cowpens. Young had ridden several miles when he collided with
Tarleton and his 54 troopers. Abandoning his captures, Young tried to
escape. He darted down a side road, but his horse was so stiff from the
hard exercise on the battlefield, the British overtook him.
“My pistol was empty so I drew my sword and made battle,” the young
militiaman said. “I never fought so hard in my life.” He was hopelessly
outnumbered. In a few clanging seconds, a saber split a finger on his
left hand, another slashed his sword arm, a third blade raked his
forehead and the skin fell over his eyes, blinding him. A saber tip
speared his left shoulder, a blade sank deep into his right shoulder,
and a final blow caught him on the back of the head. Young clung to his
horse’s neck, half conscious.
Washington and Tarleton Duel
One of the battle’s most colorful incidents occurred at the very end.
As defeat enveloped his army, Tarleton tried to rally his cavalry to
the support of the infantry. His Legion dragoons, ignoring his orders
and threats, stampeded off the field. Only the disciplined veterans of
the 17th Dragoons followed him into battle. They ran head-on into the
Continental dragoons of Lt. Col. William Washington. As sabers
flashed, Washington found himself far in advance of his unit. What
happened next is described in a passage from John Marshall’s famous
_Life of George Washington_, written when the event still lingered in
the memory of contemporaries: “Observing [Washington about 30 yards in
front of his regiment], three British officers wheeled about and
attacked him; the officer on his left was aiming to cut him down, when
a sergeant came up and intercepted the blow by disabling the
sword-arm, at the same instant the officer on his right was about to
make a stroke at him, when a waiter, too small to wield a sword, saved
him by wounding the officer with a pistol. At this moment, Tarleton
made a thrust at him, which he parried, upon which the officer
[Tarleton] retreated a few paces and discharged his pistol at him....”
It is this account that probably inspired the artist William Ranney in
1845 to paint the vigorous battle scene spread across these pages.
Washington and Tarleton (on the black horse) raise their swords in the
center while Washington’s servant boy levels his pistol at the far
dragoon. While the painting errs in details of costume—Washington and
his sergeant should be dressed in white coats, not green, and the
British should be in green, not red—it catches the spirit of the duel.
[Illustration: Washington-Tarleton duel]
He was battered and bleeding, but his courage saved his life. With the
peculiar sportsmanship that the British bring to war, they took him off
his horse, bandaged his wounds, and led him back to the main road, where
they rejoined Tarleton and the rest of his party. One of the Tory guides
that had led the British through the back country to Cowpens recognized
Young and announced he was going to kill him. He cocked his weapon. “In
a moment,” Young said, “about twenty British soldiers drew their swords,
cursed him for a coward wishing to kill a boy without arms and a
prisoner, and ran him off.”
Tarleton ordered Young to ride beside him. He asked him many questions
about Morgan’s army. He was particularly interested in how many dragoons
Washington had. “He had seventy,” Young said, “and two volunteer
companies of mounted militia. But you know, they [the militia] won’t
fight.”
“They did today,” Tarleton replied.
10
On the battlefield at Cowpens, Surgeons Robert Jackson of the 71st
Highlanders and Richard Pindell of the 1st Maryland were doing their
limited best to help the wounded of both sides. There were 62 patriots
and 200 British in need of medical attention, which consisted largely of
extracting musket balls, if possible, bandaging wounds, and giving
sufferers some opium or whiskey, if any was available. The battle had
also cost the British 110 dead, including 10 officers. Only 12 patriots
were killed in the battle, though many more died later of wounds. But it
was the number of prisoners—some 530—that underscored the totality of
the American victory.
Even as prisoners, the British, particularly the Scots, somewhat awed
the Americans. Joseph McJunkin said they “looked like nabobs in their
flaming regimentals as they sat down with us, the militia, in our
tattered hunting shirts, black-smoked and greasy.”
Other patriots were not content to inspect their exotic captives.
William Washington was having a terse conference with Andrew Pickens.
They agreed that there was still a good chance to catch Tarleton. But
they needed enough men to overwhelm his 54-man squadron. Washington
changed his wounded horse for a healthy mount and rounded up his
scattered dragoons. Pickens summoned some of his own men and ordered
James Jackson to follow him “with as many of the mounted militia as he
could get.”
[Illustration: Among the equipment captured from the British was a
“Travelling Forge,” used by artificers to keep horses shod and
wagons in repair.]
Down the Green River Road they galloped, sabers in hand. But Tarleton
the cavalryman was not an easy man to catch. He rode at his usual
horse-killing pace. A few miles above William Thompson’s plantation on
Thicketty Creek, they found the expedition’s baggage wagons abandoned,
35 in all, most of them belonging to the 7th Regiment. The fleeing
cavalry of the Legion had told the 100-man guard of the defeat. The
officer in command had set fire to all the baggage that would burn, cut
loose the wagon horses, mounted his infantry two to a horse, and ridden
for the safety of Cornwallis’s army. Abandoned with the baggage were
some 70 black slaves. A short time later, a party of loyalists,
fugitives from the battlefield, reached the baggage train and began to
loot it. They were not long at this work before Tarleton and his
heartsick officers and troopers came pounding down the road. They did
not ask questions about loyalty. They cut down the looters without
mercy.
Tarleton too was riding for Cornwallis’s camp, but he had more than
safety on his mind. He assumed the British commander was just across the
Broad River at Kings Mountain in a position to rescue the 500 or so men
Morgan had taken prisoner. Perhaps Tarleton met a loyalist scout or
messenger somewhere along the road. At any rate, he heard “with infinite
grief and astonishment” that the main army was at least 35 miles away,
at Turkey Creek.
This news meant a change of route. The British decided they needed a
guide. Near Thicketty Creek they stopped at the house of a man named
Goudelock. He was known as a rebel. But Tarleton probably put a saber to
his throat and told him he would be a dead man if he did not lead them
to Hamiltons Ford across the Broad River, near the mouth of Bullocks
Creek. Goudelock’s terrified wife watched this virtual kidnapping of her
husband.
About half an hour after Tarleton and his troopers departed to the
southeast, Washington, Pickens, and their dragoons and militia troopers
rode into Goudelock’s yard. They had stopped to extinguish the fires the
British started in the baggage wagons and collect some of the slaves the
enemy had abandoned. The Americans asked Mrs. Goudelock if she had seen
the British fugitives. Yes, she said. What road did they take? She
pointed down the Green River Road, which led to Grindal Shoals on the
Pacolet. Like a great many people in every war, she was more interested
in personal survival than national victory. If the Americans caught up
to Tarleton, there was certain to be a bloody struggle, in which her
husband might be killed. Mrs. Goudelock preferred a live husband to a
dead or captured British commander.
[Illustration: Congress awarded this silver sword to Colonel Pickens
for his part in the battle.]
The Americans galloped for the Pacolet. Not until they had traveled 24
miles on this cold trail did they turn back. By then, it was much too
late. Tarleton was safely across the Broad River at Hamiltons Ford. But
the American pursuit helped save Thomas Young, the captured militiaman.
When Tarleton and his men, guided by the reluctant Goudelock, reached
the ford, it was almost dark. Someone told them the river was
“swimming.” Someone else, perhaps a loyalist scout, rode up with word
that Washington and his cavalry were after them. Considerable confusion
ensued, as Tarleton and his officers conferred on whether to flee down
the river to some other ford, attempt to swim the river in the dark, or
stand and fight. Everyone stopped thinking about Thomas Young and
another prisoner, a Virginian whom the British had scooped up along the
road. The two Americans spurred their horses into the darkness, and no
one noticed they were gone.
Tarleton crossed the Broad River that night and spent the next morning
collecting his runaway dragoons and other stragglers before riding down
to Cornwallis’s camp at Turkey Creek. The British commander already knew
the bad news. Some of the Legion cavalry had drifted into camp the
previous night. But Tarleton, as the field commander, was required to
make a detailed report.
According to Joseph McJunkin, whose father had been taken prisoner by
the British and was an eyewitness, Cornwallis grew so agitated he
plunged his sword into the ground in front of his tent and leaned on it
while listening to the details of the disaster. By the end of Tarleton’s
account, the earl was leaning so hard on the hilt that the sword snapped
in half. He threw the broken blade on the ground and swore he would
recapture the lost light infantry, Fusiliers, and Highlanders.
The general exonerated Tarleton of all culpability for the defeat at
Cowpens. “You have forfeited no part of my esteem, as an officer,” he
assured Tarleton. Cornwallis blamed the loss on the “total misbehavior
of the troops.” But he confided to Lord Rawdon, the commander at Camden,
that “the late affair has almost broke my heart.”
[Illustration: Of the three medals awarded by Congress—a gold medal
to Morgan and silver medals to Washington and Howard—only the Howard
medal has survived. The Latin inscription reads: “The American
Congress to John Eager Howard, commander of a regiment of infantry.”
The medal is in the collection of the Maryland Historical Society.]
On the same morning that Tarleton was making his doleful report,
Washington and Pickens returned to Cowpens. On their ride back, they
collected several dozen—some versions make it as many as 100—additional
British soldiers straggling through the woods. At the battlefield they
found only the two surgeons caring for the wounded and a handful of
Pickens’ men guarding them. Daniel Morgan, knowing Cornwallis would make
a determined effort to regain the prisoners, had crossed the Broad River
on the afternoon of the battle and headed northwest toward Gilbert Town.
Pickens and Washington caught up to him there, and Morgan gave Pickens
charge of the prisoners, with orders to head for an upper ford of the
Catawba River. Decoying Cornwallis, Morgan led his Continentals toward a
lower ford of the same river. In an exhausting five-day march, often in
an icy rain, both units got across this deep, swift-running stream ahead
of the pursuing British. The prisoners were now beyond Cornwallis’s
reach. They were soon marched to camps in Virginia, where the men Morgan
helped capture at Saratoga were held.
This final retreat, a vital maneuver that consolidated the field victory
at Cowpens, worsened Morgan’s sciatica. From the east bank of the
Catawba, he warned Greene that he would have to leave the army. “I grow
worse every hour,” he wrote. “I can’t ride or walk.” As the rain
continued to pour down, Morgan had to abandon his tent and seek the
warmth of a private house. Greene immediately rode from Cheraw Hills and
took personal command of the army. By the time Morgan departed for
Virginia on February 10, he was in such pain that he had to be carried
in a litter.
A grateful Congress showered the Cowpens victors with praise and
rewards. Morgan was voted a gold medal, and Howard and Washington were
voted silver medals. Pickens received a silver sword. Perhaps the most
immediate result of the battle was in the minds of the people of the
South. The victory sent a wave of hope through the Carolinas and
Georgia. It also changed attitudes in Congress toward the southern
States. John Mathews of South Carolina told Greene that “the
intelligence ... seems to have had a very sensible effect on _some
folks_, for as this is a convincing proof that something is to be done
in that department ... they seem at present to be well disposed to give
it every possible aid.”
The news had an exhilarating effect on Greene’s half of the southern
army. He ordered a celebration and praised Morgan extravagantly in the
general orders announcing the victory. A friend on Greene’s staff sent a
copy to Morgan, adding, “It was written immediately after we heard the
news, and during the operation of some cherry bounce.” To Francis
Marion, Greene wrote, “After this, nothing will appear difficult.”
This optimism soon faded. To the men in the field, Cowpens did not seem
particularly decisive. Banastre Tarleton was soon back in action at the
head of the British cavalry. On February 1, from his sick bed, Morgan
wrote a despairing letter to Gov. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia,
describing the retreat of the Southern army before Cornwallis. “Our men
[are] almost naked,” still too weak to fight him. “Great God what is the
reason we can’t have more men in the field? How distressing it must be
to an anxious mind to see the country over run and destroyed for want of
assistance.”
The civil war between the rebels and the loyalists continued in South
Carolina, marked by the same savage fratricidal strife. “The scenes were
awful,” Andrew Pickens recalled. Young James Collins, in his simple,
honest way, told the militiaman’s side of this story. Summing up his
role at Cowpens, Collins said he fired his “little rifle five times,
whether with any effect or not, I do not know.” The following day, he
and many other militiamen received “some small share of the plunder”
from the captured British wagons. Then, “taking care to get as much
powder as we could, we [the militia] disbanded and returned to our old
haunts, where we obtained a few days rest.” Within a week, Collins was
again on his horse, risking his life as a scout and messenger.
Only years later, with a full perspective of the war, did the importance
of Cowpens become clear. By destroying Tarleton’s Legion, Daniel Morgan
crippled the enemy’s power to intimidate and suppress the militia.
Cornwallis was never able to replace the regulars he lost at Cowpens. He
had to abandon all thought of dividing his field army—which meant that
British power did not extend much beyond the perimeter of his camp. When
he pursued Greene’s army deep into North Carolina, the partisans in
South Carolina rose in revolt. Eventually, Cornwallis was forced to
unite his decimated, half-starved regiments with the British troops in
Virginia, where they were trapped by Gen. George Washington’s army at
Yorktown in October 1781.
In South Carolina, meanwhile, Nathanael Greene combined militia with his
small regular army in the style Morgan had originated at Cowpens. Though
Greene was forced to retreat without victory at Guilford Courthouse
(March 15, 1781), Hobkirks Hill (April 25, 1781), and Eutaw Springs
(September 8, 1781), the British army suffered such heavy losses in
these and other encounters that they soon abandoned all their posts in
the back country, including the fort at Ninety Six, and retreated to a
small enclave around Charleston. There they remained, impotent and
besieged, until the war was almost over.
It took nine years for the U.S. Treasury to scrape together the cash to
buy Daniel Morgan the gold medal voted him by Congress for Cowpens. In
the spring of 1790, this letter came to the Old Wagoner at his home near
Winchester, Virginia:
_New York, March 25, 1790_
Sir: _You will receive with this a medal, struck by the order of the
late Congress, in commemoration of your much approved conduct in the
battle of the Cowpens and presented to you as a mark of the high sense
which your country entertains of your services on that occasion._
_This medal was put into my hands by Mr. Jefferson, and it is with
singular pleasure that I now transmit it to you._
_I am, Sir &c.,
George Washington_
Part 2 Cowpens and the War in the South
A Guide to the Battlefield and Related Sites
[Illustration: On the 75th anniversary of the battle, the Washington
Light Infantry—a Charleston militia company—marched to the
battlefield and erected this monument to the victors.]
Cowpens Battleground
Cowpens was one of the most skillfully fought battles in the annals of
the American military. It pitted a young and ruthless commander of
British dragoons—a man widely feared and hated in the South—against a
brilliant tactician and experienced leader of American militia. The
fighting was short and decisive. In less than an hour, three-fourths of
the British were killed or captured, many of them the best light troops
in the army. For Cornwallis, the rout was another in a series of
disasters that led ultimately to final defeat at Yorktown.
The park that preserves the scene of this battle is located in upstate
South Carolina, 11 miles northwest of Gaffney by way of S.C. 11. The
original park on this site was established in 1929 on an acre of ground
marking the point of some of the hardest fighting. For the bicentennial
of the battle, the park was expanded to over 842 acres, and many new
facilities—among them a visitor center, roads, trails, and waysides—were
built.
The battlefield is small enough for visitors to stroll around and replay
the maneuvers of the opposing commanders. A 1¼-mile trail loops through
the heart of the park. Two of the first stops are at the lines held by
Howard’s Continentals and Pickens’ militia. Farther along the trail you
can stand where Tarleton formed his troops into a line of battle. From
this point, the trail up the Green River Road covers ground over which
the British advanced at sunrise that cold January morning. The pitched
fighting between Continentals and redcoats that decided the contest
occurred just beyond the bend in the road.
The land is currently being restored to its appearance at the time of
the battle. In 1781, this field was a grassy meadow dotted with tall
hardwoods. A locally known pasturing ground, it was used by Carolina
farmers to fatten cattle before sending them to low-country markets.
Tarleton in his memoirs described it as an “open wood ...
disadvantageous for the Americans, and convenient for the British.” He
expected to break through the rebel lines, as he had so often done in
the past, and ride down the fleeing remnants with his cavalry.
Morgan saw the same ground as favoring him and based his plan of battle
on a shrewd appraisal of both his foe and his own men. He was happy
enough that there was no swamp nearby for his militia to flee to and
unconcerned that there were no natural obstacles covering his wings from
cavalry. He knew his adversary, he claimed, “and was perfectly sure I
should have nothing but downright fighting. As to retreat, it was the
very thing I wished to cut off all hope of.... When men are forced to
fight, they will sell their lives dearly.” So Morgan deployed his men
according to their abilities and handled them in battle with rare skill.
They rewarded him, militia and regular alike, with what was probably the
patriots’ best-fought battle of the war.
Cowpens was only one battle in a long campaign. For perspective, nine
other sites of the War in the South are described on the following
pages. Several of them are administered by public agencies; a few are
barely marked and may be hard to find. Travelers will find two works
useful: _Landmarks of the American Revolution_ by Mark M. Boatner III
(1975) and _The Bicentennial Guide to the American Revolution, Volume 3,
The War in the South_ by Sol Stember (1974).
[Illustration: This monument was erected by the government in 1932
to commemorate the battle. It originally stood in the center of
Morgan’s third line but was moved to this location when the new
visitor center was built for the Bicentennial.]
[Illustration: These hardwoods along the patriots’ third line
suggest the open woods that contemporaries agree covered the Cowpens
at the time of the battle.]
[Illustration: Map]
VIRGINIA
Appalachian National Scenic Trail
Blacksburg
Roanoke
Lynchburg
James River
To Yorktown and Colonial National Historical Park
Blue Ridge Parkway
NORTH CAROLINA
Danville
Winston-Salem
Guilford Courthouse National Military Park
Burlington
High Point
Greensboro
Durham
Chapel Hill
Raleigh
Hickory
Salisbury
Fayetteville
Moores Creek National Battlefield
Kannapolis
Gastonia
Charlotte
Wilmington
SOUTH CAROLINA
Cowpens National Battlefield
Gaffney
Kings Mountain National Military Park
Spartanburg
Rock Hill
Waxhaws
Ninety Six National Historic Site
Camden Battlefield
Camden
Florence
Columbia
Eutaw Springs Historical Area
Charleston
GEORGIA
Augusta
The Road to Yorktown
Savannah 1778-79
[Illustration: The British opened their campaign against the South
with the capture of this city in late 1778. They went on to conquer
Georgia and threaten the Carolinas. To retake the city, French and
American infantry opened a siege in the fall of 1779. The British
repulsed the allied attacks with great losses. Some of the hardest
fighting swirled around Spring Hill Redoubt. Nothing remains of this
earthwork. A plaque on Railroad Street is the only reminder of the
battle.]
Charleston 1780
[Illustration: The British laid siege to this city in spring 1780.
Trapped inside was the entire Southern army, 5,000 troops under Gen.
Benjamin Lincoln. When Lincoln surrendered, it was one of the most
crushing defeats of the war for the Continentals. Only a few
evidences of the war remain, among them a tabby wall (part of the
patriots’ defensive works) in Marion Square and a statue of William
Pitt, damaged in the shelling, in a park in the lower city.]
Waxhaws 1780
[Illustration: The only sizable force not trapped inside Charleston
was a regiment of Continentals under Abraham Buford. Pursuing hard,
Tarleton caught them on May 29, 1780, in a clearing. His dragoons
and infantry swarmed over Buford’s lines. The result was a
slaughter. Many Continentals were killed trying to surrender. The
massacre inspired the epithet “Bloody” Tarleton.
Site located 9 miles east of Lancaster, S.C., on Rt. 522. Marked by
a monument and common grave.]
Camden 1780
[Illustration: After the fall of Charleston, Congress sent Gates
south to stop the British. On August 16 he collided with Cornwallis
outside this village. The battle was another American disaster. The
militia broke and ran, and the Continentals were overwhelmed. This
defeat was the low point of the war in the South. Historic Camden
preserves remnants of the Revolutionary town. The battlefield is
several miles north of town. This stone marks the place where the
heroic DeKalb fell.]
Kings Mountain 1780
[Illustration: When Cornwallis invaded North Carolina in autumn
1780, he sent Patrick Ferguson ranging into the upcountry. A band of
“over-mountain” men—tired of his threats and depredations—trapped
him and his American loyalists on this summit. In a savage battle on
October 7, they killed or wounded a third of his men and captured
the rest. The defeat was Cornwallis’s first setback in his campaign
to conquer the South. Administered by NPS.]
Guilford Courthouse 1781
[Illustration: Armies under Nathanael Greene and Cornwallis fought
one of the decisive battles of the Revolutionary War here on March
15. In two hours of hard fighting, Cornwallis drove Greene from the
field, but at such cost that he had to break off campaigning and
fall back to the coast.
Located on the outskirts of Greensboro, N.C. Administered by the
National Park Service.]
Ninety Six 1781
[Illustration: Located on the main trading route to the Cherokees,
this palisaded village was the most important British outpost in the
South Carolina back country. Greene laid siege to the garrison here
from May 22 to June 19, 1781, but could not subdue the post. A
relief force raised the siege, which was soon evacuated and burned.
The star fort and some buildings have been reconstructed.
Park administered by the National Park Service.]
Eutaw Springs 1781
[Illustration: The last major battle in the lower South (September
8, 1781), Eutaw Springs matched Greene with 2,200 troops against
1,900 redcoats. The outcome was a draw. The British retreated to
Charleston, and there they remained the rest of the war.
A memorial park stands on Rt. 6. just east of Eutawville, S.C. The
original battlefield is under the waters of Lake Marion.]
Yorktown 1781
[Illustration: Cornwallis’s surrender at this little port town on
October 19, 1781, brought the war to an effective end. The victory
was a consequence of the Franco-American alliance. French ships
blockaded the harbor and prevented resupply, while Washington’s
powerful force of Continentals and French regulars besieged the
British by land. After a long bombardment and a night attack that
captured two redoubts, Cornwallis asked for terms.
Administered by NPS.]
For Further Reading
For those who wish to explore the story of Cowpens in more depth, the
following books will be helpful. _Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary Rifleman_
by Don Higgenbotham (1961) is a well-paced, solidly researched narrative
of the Old Wagoner’s adventurous life. Still valuable, especially for
its wealth of quotations from Morgan’s correspondence, is James Graham’s
_Life of General Morgan_ (1856). On the struggle for the South Carolina
back-country, _Ninety Six_ by Robert D. Bass (1978) is the best modern
study. Edward McCrady’s two-volume work, _A History of South Carolina in
the Revolution_ (1901), is also useful. For personal anecdotes about the
savage civil war between rebels and loyalists, _Traditions and
Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South_ by
Joseph Johnson, M.D. (1851) is a basic source book. Equally illuminating
is James Collins’ _Autobiography of a Revolutionary Soldier_, published
in _Sixty Years in the Nueces Valley_ (1930). Biographies of other men
who participated in Cowpens are not numerous. _Skyagunsta_ by A. L.
Pickens (1934) mingles legend and fact about Andrew Pickens. _Piedmont
Partisan_ by Chalmers G. Davidson (1951) is a balanced account of
William Lee Davidson. _James Jackson, Duelist and Militant Statesman_ by
William O. Foster (1960) is a competent study of the fiery Georgia
leader. _The Life of Major General Nathanael Greene_ by George
Washington Greene (1871) gives the reader a look at the battle from the
viewpoint of the American commander in the South. For the British side
of the story, one of the best accounts is Banastre Tarleton’s _A History
of the Campaign of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North
America_ (1787), available in a reprint edition. _The Green Dragoon_ by
Robert D. Bass (1957) gives a more objective view of Tarleton’s meteoric
career. Two other useful books are _Strictures on Lt. Col. Tarleton’s
History_ by Roderick Mackenzie (1788), an officer who fought at Cowpens
with the 71st Regiment, and _The History of the Origin, Progress and
Termination of the American War_ by Charles Stedman (1794), a British
officer who was extremely critical of Tarleton. Both are available in
reprint editions. _Cornwallis, the American Adventure_ by Franklin and
Mary Wickwire (1970) has an excellent account of Cowpens—and the whole
war in the South—from the viewpoint of Tarleton’s commander. _Rise and
Fight Again_ by Charles B. Flood (1976) ably discusses the influence of
Cowpens and other Southern battles on the ultimate decision at Yorktown.
—_Thomas J. Fleming_
Index
A
Anderson, Lt. Thomas, 44
B
Backcountry, British strategy in, 19
Blackstocks: battle of, 29, 54, 57, 61
Brandon, Thomas, 42, 60
Bratton, William, 42
Briar Creek (Ga.); battle of, 51
British Legion, 26, 28, 41, 47, 54, 70, 72
Broad River, 28, 30, 31, 40, 46, 54, 82;
tactical importance of, 44
Browne, Thomas, 20
Buford, Col. Abraham, 26
C
Camden (S.C.), 20, 22, 51;
battle of, 18
Charleston (S.C.), 18, 26, 50;
map, 27
Cheraw Hills, 39, 83
Civil war in the South, 19ff, 84
Clarke, Elijah, 20, _21_, 33ff, 61
Collins, James, 57, 60, 66, 67, 84
Cornwallis, Charles, Earl, _13_, 18, 20, 29, 30, 33, 40, 50, 61,
82;
army under, 22
Cowpens, nature of terrain, 55ff;
significance of battle, 84ff
Cruger, Col. John H., 29, 33, 34
Cunningham, Maj. John, 35, 42, 61
D
Davidson, Col. William, 38, 41, 42
Duncasson, Capt., 77
E
Easterwood Shoals, 43
F
Fair Forest Creek, 35
Fairforest Shoals, 60
Fishdam Ford, battle of, 28
Fishing Creek, battle of, 28, 60, 67
G
Gates, Gen. Horatio, _13_, 18, 21, 56
Glaubech, Baron de, 13
Goudelock, the rebel, 81ff.
Great Savannah, battle of, 50
Green River Road, 44, 45, 47, 61, 63, 76, 82
Greene, Gen. Nathanael, _18_, 21, 23, 33, 39, 40, 83, 84
Grindal Shoals, 12, 31, 35, 82
H
Haldane, Lt. Henry, 30, 33
Hamiltons Ford, 81, 82
Hammonds Store, 30, 34
Hanger, Maj. George, 54, 69
Hanging Rock, 47
Howard, Lt. Col. John Eager, _52_, 55, 70ff, 83
Hughes, Joseph, 60, 68
I
Inman, Joshua, 61
Island Ford, 44, 45
J
Jackson, Lt. Col. James, 35, 42, 61, 72, 76
Jackson, Dr. Robert, 72, 80
K
Kennedy, William, 60
Kettle Creek, 32
Kings Mountain, 42, 43, 61, 81
L
Lee, Gen. Charles, 23
Legion dragoons, 26, 28, 43, 69, 72
Lenuds Ferry, 26, 76
Leslie, Sir Alexander, _31_, 39
Lincoln, Gen. Benjamin, 18, _26_
Long Canes, 32, 33, 34
Loyalists, 20, 21, 84
M
Marion, Francis, _20_, 21, 28, 50, 84
Maryland and Delaware Continentals, 18, 55, 70, 71, 76
Mathews, John, 84
McArthur, Maj. Archibald, 30, 51, 64, 69, 70, 76
McCall, James, 34, 42, 56
McDowell, Maj. Joseph, 42, 61
McJunkin, Joseph, 12, 13, 19, 20, 23, 80, 82
Militia, 13, 18, 35, 40, 43;
at Cowpens, 65ff, 72, 80
Morgan, Gen. Daniel; 12, _14_, 22, 23, 30, 35, 38, 39, 41, 42ff;
youth and reputation, 13;
nickname, 22;
characterized, 15;
battle plan, 45, 55-7;
urges militia to join him, 44;
exhorts troops before battle, 62;
in battle, 65ff;
leads final retreat, 83;
voted gold medal, 83;
letter from Washington, 85
Musgrove’s Mill, 42, 61
N
Newmarsh, Maj. Timothy, 50, 64-6
Ninety Six (S.C.), 22, 23, 29, 32, 38, 61, 85;
map, 30
O
Ogilvie, Capt. David, 54, 63
P
Pacolet River, 12, 34, 35, 38, 42, 43, 55
Pickens, Col. Andrew, 13, _33_, 34, 35, 41, 60, 61;
characterized, 32;
his command at Cowpens, 56;
in battle, 65ff, 80ff;
receives silver sword, 83
Pindell, Dr. Richard, 80
Prince of Wales Regt., 47
R
Riflemen at Cowpens, 57, 62
Royal Artillery, 51, 71ff
S
Saratoga, Morgan’s tactics at, 55
Seymour, Sgt. William, 67
7th Fusiliers, 31, 50, 65, 69
17th Light Dragoons, 31, 54, 72
71st Highlanders, 51, 64, 69
16th Light Infantry, 47
Sumter, Col. Thomas, _19_, 20, 21, 28, 33, 35, 40, 57
T
Tarleton, Col. Banastre, 13, _24_;
characterized, 25;
career, 23-29;
pursues Morgan, 30, 42, 46;
composition of army, 47ff;
battle plan, 54-55, 63ff;
in battle, 67, 71ff, 80;
escapes with Legion dragoons, 81;
reports to Cornwallis, 82
Thicketty Creek, 35, 41, 43, 81
Thicketty Mountain, 63
Thompson’s Plantation, 35, 81
Turkey Creek, 61, 81, 82
W
Washington, George, 13, 21, 85
Washington, Col. William, 13, 30, 34, 56, _63_, 67, 70, 80;
duels with Tarleton, 76, _78_-79;
voted silver medal, 83
Waxhaws, 26, 28, 33
Williamson, Gen. Andrew, 32
Winn, Richard, 40, 45, 55
Wofford’s iron works, 41, 43
Y
Young, John, 57
Young, Thomas, 57, 66, 68, 70, 71, 77, 80, 82
Credits
4-5, 8-9: William A. Bake
10-11: “The Battle of Cowpens,” by Francis Kimmelmeyer, 1809. Yale
University.
13: Portrait of Gates by Charles Willson Peale. Collection of
Independence National Historical Park.
Cornwallis by Thomas Gainsborough, National Portrait Gallery,
London.
14: Daniel Morgan by CWPeale. Independence NHP.
18: Nathanael Greene by CWPeale. Independence NHP.
19: Thomas Sumter by Rembrandt Peale. Independence NHP.
20: Francis Marion, a detail from a painting by John B. White. Anne
S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.
21: Elijah Clarke, Georgia Department of Archives and History.
23: New-York Historical Society.
24: Banastre Tarleton by Sir Joshua Reynolds. National Portrait
Gallery, London.
25: Mary Robinson, an engraving after a painting by Reynolds.
Collection of Sir John Tilney. Tarleton birthplace. Liverpool
City Libraries.
26: Benjamin Lincoln by CW Peale. Independence NHP.
27: Library of Congress
28: Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University Library.
29: Library of Congress
30: Map from Francis V. Greene, _General Greene_ (1893).
31: Alexander Leslie by Gainsborough. Scottish National Portrait
Gallery, Edinburgh.
33: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
36-37 (except pistols), 47 (fife), 56-57: The George C. Neumann
Collection, a gift of the Sun Company to Valley Forge National
Historical Park, 1978.
Dragoon pistol: The Smithsonian Institution.
Officer’s pistol: Fort Pitt Museum.
48-49: all by Don Troiani except the 17th Light Dragoon, which is by
Gerry Embleton.
52-53: Maryland Historical Society
54: Musée du L’Empéri, Bouche du Rhône, France.
58-59: Don Troiani.
63: CW Peale. Independence NHP.
64-65: Don Troiani.
69: Don Troiani.
74-75: Artist, Richard Schlecht. Courtesy, National Geographic
Society.
83: Maryland Historical Society
86-87, 89, 93 (Ninety Six), William A. Bake.
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the
Interior has responsibility for most of our nationally owned public
lands and natural resources. This responsibility includes fostering the
wisest use of our land and water resources, protecting our fish and
wildlife, preserving the environmental and cultural values of our
national parks and historical places, and providing for the enjoyment of
life through outdoor recreation. The Department assesses our energy and
mineral resources and works to assure that their development is in the
interest of all our people. The Department also has a major
responsibility for American Indian reservation communities and for
people who live in island territories under U.S. administration.
Transcriber’s Notes
—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
is public-domain in the country of publication.
—Relocated all image captions to be immediately under the corresponding
images, removing redundant references like ”preceding page”.
—Silently corrected a few palpable typos.
—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
_underscores_.
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