The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (101 page)

Pride spoke with a combative accent, good sense with a voice of prudence. On October 6, after a sixteen-mile march that began at four in the morning, Ferguson sent his men up King's Mountain, a high point in a sixteen-mile mountain ridge running across the border separating South from North Carolina. The mountain, then covered with large pines, extends for about 600 yards from the southwest to the northeast and dominates the ground around it.

Here the over-the-mountain men surrounded a willing Ferguson shortly after three in the afternoon. The battle that followed conformed to the myth of encounters between Old World tactics and New World individualism, as few battles in the Revolution did. The loyalist militia relied on volley fire and massed bayonet charges; the Americans, moving from pine tree to pine tree, picked them off with long rifles. William Campbell commanded the American individualists from the southwestern slopes. His men and Shelby's on the northwestern side absorbed much of Ferguson's early fire and received several bayonet charges, giving ground before each and then scrambling back up the ridge. In little more than an hour it was all over, with Ferguson dead, shot off a magnifi-

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cent white horse while leading a forlorn charge. Around his body on the mountain lay dead and wounded.

More died in the next few days from the savagery of the over-themountain men. Some hint of what was coming was given in the last minutes on King's Mountain when the victors, shouting "Tarleton's Quarter," shot and stabbed the wounded and those trying to surrender. A few days later nine were hanged, including three loyalist militia officers who, Lieutenant Anthony Allaire observed, "died like Romans." Their deaths were at least quick. Some of the wounded, mistreated, starved, and neglected, died slowly in agony. Several hundred escaped during the following month, further evidence of the deterioration of the control -- and discipline -- of the over-the-mountain men. These men who had fought so well under great pressure folded when it was removed.

Cornwallis heard of the slaughter a few days later. He did not know it, but at about the same time Lt. Colonel John Cruger at Ninety-Six felt himself in danger of being strangled by emboldened partisans. Major James in the Cheraws wrote in early October that his district was out of control. On the coast Francis Marion threatened Georgetown. And around Charlotte the loyalists, such as they were, remained discreetly silent.
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Cornwallis accepted the inevitable -- the magazine at Hillsboro would have to wait and he would have to withdraw from North Carolina. He began to leave on October 14 and on the 29th reached Winnsboro, halfway between Camden and Ninety-Six.

The march itself was dreadful with Cornwallis and enough of his men sick so that they filled the wagons. As if the withdrawals were not bad enough, the news that came to Winnsboro in the next month worsened. Marion interrupted British communications with Charleston by a series of raids that seemed to suggest that no supply train coming inland could count on making it. Thomas Sumter contributed to the atmosphere of insecurity in similar ways, most dramatically on November 9, when he bloodied Major James Wemyss and 200 regulars at Fishdam Ford on the Broad River and then on November 22 when he fought Tarleton to a standstill at Blackstock's Plantation in the hills above the Tyger River. Sumter took a bullet in this encounter and had to be carried from the field. Though Sumter was disabled the irregular war was not, and Cornwallis's troops continued to look over their shoulders at night.
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When Congress heard of the debacle at Camden it recognized immediately that the remnants of the southern army required a fresh commander. By this time Congress had grown weary of trying to find someone to head up the southern department; and perhaps it felt embarrassed by its past choices -- Robert Howe, whose attempt to invade east Florida in spring 1778 flopped; Benjamin Lincoln, who surrendered his army at Charleston; and Horatio Gates, who left Camden without his army. Chastened by what had happened to its chosen, Congress asked Washington to name a new man. Washington nominated Nathanael Greene, then in his third year as quartermaster general.
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Thirty-eight years old in 1780, Greene was a more mature and a wiser man than the amateur who in November 1776 had confidently urged the defense of Fort Washington on the Hudson River. Varied experience since then had taught him much, largely because he reflected on it to draw out its meaning and utility. He learned from Trenton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Newport, all battles in which he performed well. In March 1778, much against his will and with the plaintive wail, "Nobody ever heard of a quarter Master in History," he accepted appointment as quartermaster general. His acceptance bespoke as plainly as anything he was to do in the Revolution a readiness to do what had to be done and a devotion to the glorious cause.
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To do inglorious work for a glorious cause was the sort of proposition Greene might have absorbed from Washington. He seems to have absorbed much. Though perhaps nothing uncritically: he examined his chief's methods and tactics and was shrewd enough not to try to imitate the inimitable. Yet, over the next ten months he was to fight a war that rested on the assumption that the army must be kept intact, for in an important sense, as no one saw more clearly than Washington, the army was the Revolution. Depressed by the sluggish support from state authorities who evidently lacked an understanding of the political importance of the army, Greene soon remarked to one of them, Governor Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, that "The Army is all that the States have to depend upon for their political existence."
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This comment came in a letter marked by blunt talk about what would happen to the southern states if they failed to supply the army.

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Greene may have offended Jefferson, an extraordinarily sensitive man, and he probably angered him when he sent back to Virginia a detachment of soldiers who arrived in camp destitute of clothing and weapons. But, though Greene was a blunt man, he had a much more subtle mind than his bluntness and his penchant for quick responses and fast action seem to suggest. He understood intuitively the military problems of the southern campaign, intuitively because he had made no systematic study of the war there before he was named commander; and he decided on how he would fight before he had accumulated much first-hand knowledge.
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Greene's understanding of the war also rested on knowledge of tactics and of the organization of supply. He spent much of himself in pondering the usual things that any commander in war must, how to move troops, for example, and how to obtain arms, provisions, and ammunition for them. But he also thought a good deal about the men themselves; the sort of stuff they were made of, and most importantly what impelled them to fight. As most of the senior officers of the army did, Greene spoke of the glorious cause without embarrassment, believing that his soldiers were also moved by its grandeur. He may indeed have understood the soldiers' commitments better than Washington did. At the beginning of the war Washington confessed his dismay at his troops' apparent indifference to ideals and virtue, a weakness he attributed to their lowerclass status and which explained to him their dismal performance in battle. Like all eighteenth-century military leaders he expected training would prepare them to fight willingly. Though Greene came from less impressive stock than Washington, he also considered himself to be set off from the common sort. Yet he brought more sympathy to the task of understanding and shaping common men. Pride or principle made a soldier, he wrote shortly after his arrival in North Carolina, and good leaders did what they could to instill both in their troops. All such attempts would fail, however, if soldiers were left in nakedness and hunger. Virtue -- a sense of responsibility to the public interest -could not survive while the public gave no evidence of caring for men in its service. If Greene grasped this intuitively, he needed only a glance at the men at Charlotte, living in misery, to understand that they would never take pride in themselves as long as they were reduced to plundering nearby civilians to stay alive.
As for battle, they would wilt at the first

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smell of gunpowder if they did not desert first. But clothed, fed, and properly led they might be trained to fight with spirit.

Eighteenth-century generals appeared before their soldiers in person more often than those of the twentieth. In battle they formed their lines and gave commands and set an example in person. But often they had to communicate with others in writing which meant that fluency with the pen might be more important than how they sat a horse. American generals in the Revolution dealt with an incredible number of civilians through letters, requesting recruits, money, and virtually every kind of supplies. Greene, though sometimes tactless, wrote a trenchant, muscular prose. There is much in his letters about marches and logistics, but even his most technical disquisitions do not stray far from men and their concerns. And these letters, dry as they sometimes had to be, imparted a sense that an energetic and vigorous man wrote them. This man had a talent for summing up on an aphoristic note -- and for choosing images that reminded the reader that men were the reasons for being concerned with such things as logistics and battle formations. Thus in "money is the sinew of war," "good intelligence," that is, good information, is the "Soul of an Army," and "spies are the eyes of the army," Greene's reference is to some human quality.
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The writer of these words set out for the South almost immediately on receiving his orders from Washington on October 15. At West Point when summoned, having recently assumed command there, he stopped off in Philadelphia on his way southward. Greene knew the informal rules of commanding an American army and, though he did not much like them, he had no choice but to play the game. The "game" might better be called begging -- every American army commander had to wear beggar's rags if he were to succeed. Greene began by asking Congress for money, the "sinew" his army so badly needed, and for supplies. He extracted a promise of artillery from his friend Henry Knox, but he received polite rebuffs from the city merchants he approached about a supply of clothing. He kept to this regimen after he left Philadelphia with appeals to legislatures and governors issuing from his lips and pen at every opportunity.
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