Conceived in Liberty (259 page)

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For an almost hysterical attack on Gates by an otherwise judicious and highly competent military historian, see Ward,
The War of the Revolution,
11:717–30. More sober evaluations of Gates’ southern campaign may be found in Billias, “Horatio Gates,” pp. 99–104; Alden,
The American Revolution,
pp. 233–35; and Bernhard Knollenberg,
Washington and the Revolution: A Reappraisal
(New York: Macmillan, 1940), a pioneering work in Gates revisionism.

Historians, however, have greatly overinflated the importance of the routs at Camden and Fishing Creek; for the way that had been opened was quickly closed, and the British invasion of North Carolina decisively blocked. This blocking came not from the Continental troops, but from the really decisive forces of the American Revolution—the American public, the local militia, the people in arms.

Within two weeks after Camden, it was clear to Cornwallis that, instead of the Carolina back country flocking to his cause as the British had believed would happen once the Continentals were routed, the opposite was occurring. In South Carolina, guerrilla bands under Marion, Sumter, Pickens, and Col. William Davie were harassing Cornwallis’ rear as he advanced northward. In North Carolina, the Tories had never recovered from the defeat at Ramsour’s Mill, and the local militia and public sentiment mobilized against the British. In desperation, Cornwallis began to take drastic measures, hanging several men who had enrolled in the Tory militia and then had deserted to the rebels. By the end of August, he was insistently reminding Clinton of the need for a diversionary attack on the Chesapeake area of Virginia. The battles of Camden and Fishing Creek sank into insignificance in the face of the rising rebel voice of the people of the back country.

By the time Cornwallis began to march northward from Camden, the advance, harassed by guerrillas and with particular brilliance by Colonel William Davie, was far from triumphal, and proceeded rather in hopes that Charlotte would provide a happier and healthier base for the ailing British army. Charlotte, North Carolina, was finally reached on September
25; here Cornwallis called upon the people to deliver their arms and flock to accept the protection of the British army. But nobody flocked to the invaders here, in the heart of rebel sentiment; instead, Cornwallis could find little information about rebel movements, and British foraging parties were incessantly attacked. Cornwallis was therefore forced to pause once more to await supplies from Camden.

As Cornwallis marched northward to Charlotte, he ordered Major Patrick Ferguson, head of Tory recruiting, who had gathered and sent out over the countryside a formidable force of thousands of Tories at Ninety-Six, to march northward as well. Ferguson was to gather Tories and punish rebels to the west, and finally to join Cornwallis at Charlotte. Reaching Gilbert Town at the edge of the mountains in western North Carolina by late September, Ferguson, with 1100 men, began to turn south to help relieve Augusta, which had been besieged by rebels under Colonel Elijah Clark, and to help capture the rebels.

Ferguson had warned the “overmountain men” on the Watauga River in what would later be northeastern Tennessee that if they did not cease opposing the king, he would march over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay waste to their country. Not taking kindly to this threat and tired of his depredations and plundering, the Watauga men decided to end the Ferguson menace once and for all, and became the center of a new rising. To them came Colonels Isaac Shelby, John Sevier, and William Campbell of Virginia, and Colonels Benjamin Cleveland and Charles Macdowell of North Carolina. By September 15 over 1,400 frontier riflemen knowledgeable of the terrain and eminently suited for guerrilla action gathered at the Watauga. This large force began to pursue Ferguson’s troops, who turned eastward to take up fortified positions on top of King’s Mountain, on the North Carolina-South Carolina border. Nine hundred of the best mounted riflemen were then detached to catch up to Ferguson and these arrived at the mountain on October 7.

Ferguson, with superior numbers, had assumed a well-fortified position on the mountain; but what he failed to realize was that the dense woods on all sides of the low mountain provided excellent cover for the deadly guerrilla force. Surrounding the mountain and climbing its sides, the riflemen climbed to the trees surrounding the plateau on the open mountaintop and cut down the bayonet-wielding troops with deadly individual rifle fire. As Ward puts it: “Everywhere the Tories were surrounded by men, not in solid bodies to be attacked with a bayonet and driven back, but fighting each man on his own behind the trees fringing the open plateau. From every side came a hail of bullets.”
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The Tory force was hopelessly beaten, but the frenzied Ferguson declared
that he would “never surrender to such banditti”; his reward for this was to be killed in the battle. The surrounded and helpless Tories were slaughtered by the vengeful rebels, who shouted, “Tarleton’s quarter!” until their officers finally brought them under control. The battle had been a glorious one for the Americans. The entire Tory force of 1,000 men was either killed or captured, while rebel casualties totalled only 90. Great stores of arms and ammunition also fell to the Americans. The Tory prisoners were marched to Gilbert Town, and nine were convicted of aiding the British in raiding and hanged.

The Battle of King’s Mountain was one of the turning points of the Revolutionary War. A people’s victory, a guerrilla victory without any semblance of a Continental force or even of an overall commander, King’s Mountain showed that so long as its spirit was high, the United States could absorb such devastating defeats of its regulars as at Camden and yet come back to crush the British and Tory forces.

Beaten at King’s Mountain and increasingly worried about growing guerrilla bands throughout the Carolina back country, Cornwallis was forced to beat a hasty retreat from North Carolina. His troops, ill, exhausted, and increasingly short of provisions, were hammered every step of the way by American militia bands. They finally encamped for the winter at Winnsboro, between Camden and Ninety-Six in northern South Carolina. At Winnsboro, continually harassed by American bands, Cornwallis was properly chastened. The end of the 1780 campaign saw the British, despite the massive victories at Charleston and Camden, thoroughly beaten back from their attempt to invade North Carolina. Cornwallis realized that the failure of the North Carolina Tories to materialize spelled the collapse of the whole southern strategy. The end of the projected northern offensive seemed at hand.

Of the American guerrilla bands, the most active and successful were those of Sumter and Marion. Marion did yeoman work between the Pee Dee and the Santee rivers in northeastern South Carolina, arousing revolt, cutting supplies, and threatening key British communication lines between Charleston and Camden. Cornwallis sent Tarleton after Marion, but the Swamp Fox proved too elusive in the best guerrilla manner. In the meantime, north of Winnsboro, Sumter was beginning to display great improvement as a guerrilla leader. The British sent out Maj. James Wemyss to catch him; but at Fishdam Ford on December 9, Sumter was ready for the supposed surprise. Wemyss was captured and his unit repulsed with heavy losses.

Moving westward and escalating his operations, Sumter threatened the key British post at Ninety-Six. Alarmed, Cornwallis sent Tarleton with a formidable force in pursuit. Sumter turned northward and, on November 20, took up a strong position at Blackstock’s on the south side of the
Tiger River. Sumter’s 420 men now faced Tarleton’s feared cavalry of 250. While Tarleton waited for his infantry to arrive, Sumter moved to cut them off; Tarleton’s answering charges met concentrated guerrilla rifle fire from buildings nearby, forcing this British retreat. The widely feared and seemingly invincible Tarleton had been beaten, his force losing about a hundred men, while the Americans suffered virtually no casualties. This was a decisive blow to British prestige in the Carolinas. A piquant footnote to the battle is that Tarleton had the gall to claim “victory” because Sumter’s force, in the classic manner of guerrilla fighters, later withdrew in the face of British reinforcements.

Cornwallis’ natural optimism soon returned in December, when he found that Clinton had at last sent a diversionary force of 2,500 under Gen. Alexander Leslie to Portsmouth, Virginia. The harassed Cornwallis, however, now ordered Leslie to join him at Winnsboro; when Leslie complied in early January 1781, Cornwallis unwisely thought that his 4,000 men could now carry out the original British plan of the year before. He was further emboldened by the news that Benedict Arnold had been sent in December with 1,500 troops to raid Virginia in force.

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Ward,
The War of the Revolution,
11:742.

It was inevitable, however, that Gates would be removed from command in semi-disgrace, as he was in October. A chastened Congress entrusted the choice of his replacement to Washington and, fortunately, Washington chose the one highly able general whom he had not turned against, a man whose talents had been languishing for years in the post of quartermaster general: Nathanael Greene. Both Greene and Morgan were fully cognizant of the necessity for a guerrilla strategy in fighting the British. Greene arrived at Charlotte, where the American army was now stationed, in early December, taking over a force of fewer than 1,500 fit for duty, and these hungry and wretched.

It was clear to him that a move must be made right away, for the food supply of the entire Charlotte area had been stripped clear by the foraging and plundering of British troops. In addition, Cornwallis was about to begin his long-delayed and final invasion of North Carolina. At first, Greene proposed an immediate hit-and-run attack on Winnsboro, but he deferred to Morgan’s judgment of its excessive risk. He then decided to march his army southeast for winter quarters to Cheraw Hill, 75 miles east of the British camp at Winnsboro. But so that this would not seem like a retreat from the British invasion route, he split his already inferior force in a daring and highly unorthodox maneuver. Accordingly, on December 16 Morgan quickly took 600 men to South Carolina north of Winnsboro, while Greene set out for Cheraw Hill on December 20 with 1,100 men, arriving there on December 26. Here was a brilliant piece of strategy in defiance of the sound classical injunction never to split an inferior force,
lest each in turn be attacked and destroyed. But this injunction rested on the assumption that frontal engagements would then be fought, and in Greene’s strategy, it was the task of the American forces to be swift and mobile, and to avoid frontal battles.

In the face of this split, Cornwallis was in a bind. He could not chase Morgan or invade northward without leaving Charleston open to Greene’s invasion, and he could not strike out for Cheraw without allowing Morgan to strike west at Ninety-Six or Augusta. Furthermore, if Cornwallis advanced, he could be hit on both flanks, and if he tried to return to Charleston, he could be harassed on both flanks also. At the same time, the various and effective guerrilla bands could continually harry the British wherever they might be. To counteract the multiple threats posed by the two forces, Cornwallis would also have to split his army—indeed, to split it into three parts. He sent Leslie east to Camden to defend against any possible attack by Greene; he sent the mobile Tarleton north to find and crush Morgan; and he moved himself slowly into western North Carolina to destroy the expected remnants of Morgan’s force.

While Cornwallis was preparing his blow, American guerrilla action grew more and more menacing. Taking up his post at the Pacolet River and reinforced by over 300 North Carolina militia, Morgan threatened the British base at Ninety-Six: on December 27, he sent the mobile cavalry of Lt. Col. William Washington with over 200 men to the vicinity of Ninety-Six, where they crushed a Tory force at Faufort Creek. Nearly 200 of the 250 Tories were lost, while Washington lost nary a man. Meanwhile, to the east, the great cavalry unit of Col. “Light Horse Harry” Lee arrived from the north, and was sent east to assist Marion’s guerrilla operations. Marion and Lee struck against the British base at Georgetown and nearly captured the post.

In this deteriorating situation, it was clearer than ever to Cornwallis that the guerrillas, and especially Morgan, must be crushed in a frontal engagement before the invasion northward could proceed. As Higginbotham notes:

His Lordship was not the only British military leader in the war to discover that rear areas could not be treated in the European sense—as free of enemy forces and simply as zones of communication.... Because of the activities of Morgan, Sumter, Pickens and others, [the] front-behind-the-front became a theater of operations in its own right. Hence, before Cornwallis could launch his long-planned invasion of North Carolina and the upper South, Morgan would have to be eliminated.
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If anyone could catch up with Morgan, it was Tarleton; with more than 3,300 men, he gave chase to Morgan’s force of now a little over 1,000 —although it was soon to be raised to 1,100 when Colonel Pickens and his band joined him. In trained regulars, of course, Tarleton’s force outnumbered Morgan’s by over three to one. More militia had been expected to join Morgan, but Cornwallis had successfully roused the Indians to attack the frontier posts, and militia units had to remain in the West.

Hearing of Tarleton’s advance, Morgan began to flee northward, properly trying to avoid open combat. But Tarleton was approaching with remarkable speed, and Morgan was forced to turn and fight on open ground at the plain of the Cowpens on the south side of the Broad River, a little bit south of the North Carolina border. On the highly unfavorable terrain, an open field with no protection on his flanks and no protection from Tarleton’s famed horsemen, Morgan seemed doomed.
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