The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (102 page)

Greene did not expect and did not receive unanimously favorable responses. He took the command knowing that he would face dreadful problems, and how could it be otherwise when two American armies had disintegrated in a four-month period. He summed up his and the army's prospects in one word -- "dismal."
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How bad things truly were surpassed even this pessimism. The troops at Hillsboro, which Greene reached on November 27, were badly clothed, armed, and fed. The word "troops" implies that the sad creatures Greene inspected were gathered in units, which they were, but only in a formal sense. In reality they were a collection of some 1400 individuals, many "naked," or virtually so with only a rag or a blanket tied around their middles -- "in the Indian form," Greene remarked -- devoid of shoes and just about everything else they needed. They were spiritless, understandably, many able to rouse themselves only to plunder nearby farmers and villagers. As bad as the troops were, the officers were worse. They had lost their self-respect at Camden, and they despised and blamed Gates for it. One, William Smallwood of Maryland, would not stay with the army because in the new line of command he ranked below Greene's second, General von Steuben. Smallwood may have expected to succeed Gates, and when Greene was named instead of himself he set off to plead with Congress for a redating of his commission which would place him higher on the seniority list. Greene thought Smallwood's mission to Congress an act of lunacy but could not prevent his departure and may not have really tried. Smallwood was disaffected, a source of discontent in an army amply supplied with such sources.
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Greene arrived at the American camp in Charlotte on December 2. There he found Gates in control of himself but of not much else. The soldiers, living in even worse conditions than he had imagined, had begun to build huts, an activity that at least showed that some initiative remained but which otherwise promised only to make their misery permanent. Greene said nothing of his dissatisfaction at this work and assumed command the next day. He brought with him a charge from Congress to convene an inquiry into Gates's conduct at Camden, but since the general officers necessary for such a review were not present he gratefully put the matter aside. Gates, who wanted to clear his name and believed that any court would exonerate him, soon after left for home dissatisfied.
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Over the next month, Greene began to realize just what he had taken on. He did not understand the politics of North Carolina, but he did learn quickly that he faced a divided leadership. There were three "parties" in the state, he told a colleague, and none was terribly fond of the others. By "parties," Greene meant factions distinguished by no formal organization but endowed with ambitious leaders. One of them, Colonel Martin, who headed the state's Board of War, had been dismissed from the army for cowardice. The other two were the governor and a leading rival. If the prospect of dealing with Martin and "all those great and mighty men" did not lift Greene's heart, neither did it depress him. Rather than give way to despair, Greene laughed, resolving to treat all with civility and to strike a balance between "haughtiness and mean condescension."
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A more important division for the Revolution than these factional splits was the one between Whigs and Tories. The ferocity of the conflict between these two groups impressed Greene so much that he customarily referred to it as "savage." He was to find the same groupings in South Carolina and used identical language to describe it. In North Carolina the two sides found release in murdering and plundering one another. Greene thought that when he arrived these practices had gone so far as virtually to destroy public morals. Although he professed to believe that the Tories outnumbered the Whigs in both Carolinas, the Whigs in fact usually had the greatest number.
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As far as Greene was concerned the Whigs were almost as bad as the Tories -- at least when they were gathered into the militia. The reason lay in the militia's appetite for everything but combat. "Like the locusts of Egypt [the militia] have eaten up every green thing," he told his friend Joseph Reed. What he particularly resented was that the Congress paid for the militia, and since Congress paid, North Carolina preferred raising militia to supporting Continental regiments. The result was that Greene, though wanting a regular-- and reliable -- army, had sometimes to depend upon the undependable, the militia, and even more frequently to go without fresh troops of any sort.
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Greene's dissatisfaction did not extend to the partisan leaders, Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion, Andrew Pickens, and William Davidson, all of whom led irregular forces drawn mostly from militia.
Greene genuinely

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admired these men though he deplored the propensity for plundering shown by, as he remarked, half their followers. In the absence of a regular army the militia was his only resource. Greene planned to use it to fight a "fugitive war," a term that he invented to describe a fighting force that would often be in flight.
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Putting this army together, rudimentary as it was to be, taxed all the imagination Greene possessed. To supply it, he had Steuben in Virginia working as hard as possible. Edward Carrington, a Virginia artillery officer, agreed to head up the deputy quartermaster general's office, and William R. Davie, an able North Carolinian, accepted appointment as commissary general though all his instincts were to refuse. Greene appealed to these men's devotion to the Revolution, a tactic of limited use in persuading the "haves," state officials, merchants, and planters, to give money and supplies to the "have nots," the troops of the southern department.
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Like any army a fugitive army could do something for itself. It could scout which rivers would be useful for transportation -- and which might prove even more useful when they separated the fugitives from their pursuers. Greene sent Carrington, Kosciuszko, and several others to study the rivers. Knowing where the rivers could be forded was absolutely vital to him, for he expected to hit and then run. He could not survive a major battle, and he might have to fight one should he be so incautious as to get trapped against a river at an unfordable point. Since the rivers were deeper below the falls, prudence dictated that he fight above, where fords were not uncommon.

It was well not to rely completely on presumed knowledge of the rivers. Heavy rains sometimes deepened fords; for example, early in January 1781 the Pee Dee rose twenty-five feet in thirty hours after a heavy rain. When the rains stopped and runoff slackened, the Pee Dee might drop just as quickly. The others were the same. Boats could be almost as valuable as horses in the country, but collecting them was as difficult as collecting horses. Greene decided to build his own and to put them on wheels. Horses could pull these craft between the rivers and then float across with the army.

Before Greene had put an army together, he decided to divide it. The camp at Charlotte exuded a stench of defeat and decay, and the

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countryside around it contained few food supplies. To rouse his command and give the men hope and training, Greene resolved to march most of his troops to Cheraw on the Pee Dee and to send Daniel Morgan with a contingent of the Maryland and Virginia militia, and Colonel Washington's horsemen, to the west side of the Catawba River. There Morgan might harass the enemy on the frontier and perhaps feed his troops better than Greene could along the Pee Dee. All textbooks of war warned against dividing an army in that it was easier for an enemy to defeat it in detail. Greene could not conduct himself according to such a sensible rule -- he and his soldiers might starve to death while operating according to the textbooks. There were military advantages to splitting off Morgan anyway. Along the Catawba he threatened the British post at Ninety-Six -- and smaller ones as well. If Cornwallis divided to go after Morgan, Charleston would be exposed, and if he went after Greene, the interior would be more vulnerable than usual. Morgan might. also be called back to strike along Cornwallis's flanks and rear. All these possibilities figured in Greene's decision to separate Morgan from himself.
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Unknown to the Americans, Cornwallis was considering pushing from Winnsboro into North Carolina again. He was thoroughly fed up with South Carolina and its "perpetual risings" and its incompetent loyalist militia. To send out dispatch riders who never arrived at their destination was discouraging and to have supply trains ambushed every time they set out was equally discouraging. To crush a rebel army at Camden and see no change in the citizens was enough to make him want to give it all up. And when he learned that rebel militia had fairly successfully suppressed news of the British victory from spreading to the backcountry, confidence in his ability to bring the province back to the king's side began to evaporate.
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Cornwallis seems never to have comprehended why pacifying South Carolina proved so difficult. A part of his explanation reflected conventional aristocratic prejudice: the British army faced malevolent men, not simply another enemy. Moreover, the friends of the government would not behave like men even when, in the presence of the British regulars, power shifted to their side. Why wouldn't they? Cornwallis had no answer except that they were intimidated by the rebels.
And

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