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.]