“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.