Band of Giants_The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence Page 26
Early in 1781, before Morgan’s victory at Cowpens, Greene’s situation appeared truly dire. He could not “find a Clue to guide me through the Complicated Scene of Difficulties. I have but a Shadow of an Army.” Neither militiamen nor supplies were forthcoming. “I see but little prospect of getting a force to contend with the enemy upon equal grounds.” He took Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson to task, explaining that “it is impracticable to preserve Discipline when Troops are in Want of every Thing.”5
Yet Greene had a valuable ability to grasp the complex geometry of war. He knew how to make and remake calculations about space, time, and movement in a landscape that ranged along the coastal plain from Florida to tidewater Virginia. “Dispassionate and minute research” was his specialty.6 “Greene is beyond doubt a first-rate military genius,” wrote Washington’s aide Tench Tilghman, “and one in whose opinions the General places the utmost confidence.”7
With the eye of a mill owner, Greene quickly mastered the complicated network of rivers and streams that meandered through the Carolinas. How strongly did they flow? How fast did they rise? Where were the fords? Unlike General Gates, the former quartermaster general paid close attention to supply issues. He turned over in his mind intricate equations involving the morale of his troops, the mood of local patriots, the availability of forage, and the intentions of his enemy.
The war in the South differed from the encamped stalemate in the North. Mobility was essential, cavalry a prerequisite, hit-and-run the main tactic. His entire force would become a flying army, always on the march and ever reacting to the moves of the enemy. He would be on his own, too far from Washington to expect help in a crisis. The initiative would be his, but he would also have to deal with southern politicians, placate militia leaders, and channel partisan bands toward effective action.
He was favored with some capable lieutenants. William Washington and Henry Lee both led effective corps of cavalry. Greene called on the capable, thirty-two-year-old Otho Williams to take over the light infantry after Morgan departed. Back in 1776, when Greene had insisted on manning Fort Washington on Manhattan Island, Williams was one of those captured in the doomed fort. After being exchanged, he had emerged as a precise and effective tactician.
Greene especially cultivated Francis Marion, a South Carolina partisan who had been named brigadier general of militia. Marion, though barely literate, had formerly served as a Continental Army officer at Charleston. Luckily, he had left the city with an injured ankle before the British captured the garrison. Despite Marion’s reputation as a warrior, General Gates had shown little regard for the slight, homely, knock-kneed partisan leader, or for his band of troops, some white, some black, whose appearance was described as a “burlesque.” However, Marion’s force of stealthy, dirty, unconventional fighters would prove a constant irritant to the enemy and an inspiration to Greene. “I like your Plan of frequently shifting your Ground,” Greene wrote to the austere, pious Huguenot.8 Banastre Tarleton, who hunted in vain for the partisan band, called Marion, who was forty-eight, a “damned old fox.” Marion would live in our national memory as the Swamp Fox.
Also roaming the southern countryside was a battalion led by Thomas Sumter. A country mill owner with experience fighting Cherokees, the pugnacious Sumter hated the British and loyalists who had burned his home to the ground while his invalid wife and young son watched from the yard. Sumter’s energy, fierce independence, and fanaticism in battle had earned him the nickname “Carolina Gamecock.”
With these allies, about 1,400 Continental soldiers, and a few hundred militiamen, Greene faced the most fraught situation of the war since Burgoyne’s threat in 1777. Lord Cornwallis, Britain’s most zealous general, was determined to run down and dispose of the exhausted American army of the South. The conflict would begin with a perilous chase.
* * *
Cornwallis had begun his pursuit of the American flying army immediately after Morgan’s stunning victory at Cowpens on January 17. Eight days later, as Morgan hurried north, the British commander ordered his three thousand regulars to shed their baggage in order to pursue the more mobile American forces. Tents, wagons, beds, clothing, rum—all was set aflame. This was a desperate step—“something too like a Tartar move,” Henry Clinton said when he heard of it. But Cornwallis was determined to catch and destroy the enemy. “With zeal and with Bayonets only,” wrote Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, “it was resolved to follow Greene’s army to the end of the World.”9
Greene could do nothing but retreat to the north and east. He planned to pull back from North Carolina and escape over the Dan River into Virginia. There his men could catch their breath and regroup. His study of the rivers told him he would need boats to get across. He sent a detachment ahead to gather and conceal sufficient vessels. On February 10, the British were approaching at high speed. Greene began the critical four-day retreat that would be known as the Race to the Dan.
He again divided his army. He sent Otho Williams with the light infantry and cavalry, the cream of his troops, to the northwest, as if heading for the upper reaches of the Dan, where the river was fordable. They would lead Cornwallis astray and at the same time screen the movement of the bulk of the army, with whom Greene pushed toward the lower river, where the boats were stashed.
Rain turned the red clay soil to a thick paste that sucked the shoes off the men’s marching feet. At night, the mud froze into lacerating ridges. Williams’s men had no tents. His infantry started marching at three a.m., stopped in the late morning for their one daily meal, and continued to trudge until dark. Cornwallis’s men barked at their heels the whole time. Occasionally the two armies marched within sight of each other as they hurried through the backlands. At night, the Americans rested briefly, but with half the force on guard duty, the men could sleep only six hours every other day. Greene calculated that he slept a total of four hours over four days.
Greene and his main force reached the ferry points and began to cross the Dan. Williams turned his troops to follow. The next day his men, hearing that the main army was across and their mission a success, sent up a cheer. The British were near enough to hear the shouts and guessed what they meant. The race was over.
Williams’s men hurried on with new energy. They reached the swollen river that night and boarded the boats. Lee’s dripping horses were just clambering up the far bank at dawn when Tarleton’s cavalrymen appeared. Cornwallis could no longer keep up the pursuit. Lacking boats, his men could only stare and contemplate how close they had come to capturing Greene and ending organized resistance in the South.
In Virginia, “joy beamed on every face” as desperately needed supplies arrived. Greene had accomplished one of the most intricate strategic retreats of the war without the loss of men or equipment. Since the battle at Cowpens, his army had covered two hundred miles and crossed four major rivers. He had been required, Greene said, to accomplish “by finesse which I dare not attempt by force.” Fellow officers marveled at Greene’s talent. “A masterpiece of military skill and exertion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote.10
* * *
Having narrowly missed the chance to destroy Greene’s army, Cornwallis declared victory. He had restored King George’s sovereignty over the southern colonies from Florida to the border of Virginia. But in the process he had lost 250 valuable men to illness and desertion. He now found himself in a barren country, at the end of a precarious supply line. He had to admit that Greene was “as dangerous as Washington. He is vigilant, enterprising, and full of resources.”11
For his part, Greene had outmaneuvered the enemy and saved his army. Now it was Cornwallis who was falling back. To press him, Greene coordinated his movements with the partisan bands led by Marion, Sumter, and Pickens. He also relied on the creative strategist Henry Lee. The Lee family had been prominent in Virginia since an ancestor began growing tobacco there in the 1640s—Henry was a cousin of Richard Henry Lee
, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Henry had studied law at the College of New Jersey in Princeton. In 1776, he had dropped out and, at the age of twenty, enlisted in the Continental Army. General Charles Lee, no relation, had said the young man “seems to have come out of his mother’s womb a soldier.”12 Henry Lee was a man suited to the high-adrenaline sensations of war, when, he wrote, “the mind was always on the stretch.”
Like George Washington, Lee loved fine mounts and used his eye for horseflesh to gain an advantage over enemy cavalry. He fought at Brandywine and Germantown, but his forte was the quick, hit-and-run raid. He pulled off a successful coup in 1779, capturing stores and prisoners from the British post at Paulus Hook, New Jersey, across the river from New York City.
In the South, where the coastal plain favored cavalry operations, Lee came into his own. His self-contained unit, known as Lee’s Legion, comprised about two hundred light cavalrymen and the same number of mounted infantrymen. He acquired a nickname: Light-Horse Harry Lee.
Greene valued Lee, writing to him after the race to the Dan that “no man in the progress of the Campaign had equal merit with you.”13 George Washington had earlier honored the young officer with an invitation to join his staff as an aide. Lee turned down the prestigious position, averring, “I am wedded to my sword.”14 A slender, agile man of medium height, he combined an aptitude for violence with a precise rationality—he dared carefully.
On February 18, three days after reaching the safety of Virginia, Greene sent Lee back over the Dan to shadow Cornwallis and keep the British off guard. His presence would encourage the patriots of North Carolina, whom Greene had been forced to abandon. A few days after that, Otho Williams brought the light infantry across the Dan for the same purpose.
Cornwallis desperately needed the support of armed loyalists. A local doctor named John Pyle recruited four hundred Tories to join the British. Lee overtook this group and convinced them that he was Banastre Tarleton, come to escort them into camp. The gullible Tories stepped to the side of the road so Lee’s horsemen could pass. Lee claimed that he was about to reveal his identity and order Pyle’s recruits to disperse when the delicate pretense suddenly shattered. Before the loyalists realized what was happening, Lee’s dragoons had wheeled and plunged into their ranks. From their mounts, they slashed jugular veins and fired point-blank with pistols.
Ninety loyalists died and most of the rest were wounded in what came to be known as Pyle’s Massacre, Pyle’s Hacking Match, or simply Pyle’s Defeat. Cries from Lee’s men of “Remember Buford!” highlighted the cycles of revenge and retribution that made the conflict in the South so ruinous. Word of the massacre spread. “It has knocked up Toryism altogether in this part,” the laconic Andrew Pickens observed.15
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Baron von Steuben sent Greene four hundred additional trained but untested Continentals from Virginia. Along with new militia recruits, they gave the southern commander a total force of more than five thousand men. Knowing that the militiamen would begin to go home before long if he did not use them, Greene was determined to try his army against the two-thousand-man force of Cornwallis.
He ferried his army back over the Dan to North Carolina and began a period of maneuvering that lasted through early March 1781. At times, barely ten miles separated his men from the British army. Greene feinted, probed, shifted direction, all with the goal of keeping Cornwallis guessing his intentions.
“There are few generals that has run oftener or more lustily than I have done,” Greene declared. “But I have taken care not to run far.”16 The stress of perpetual vigilance left him afflicted with a painful inflammation of his eyes.
In the middle of March, Greene’s intuition told him that it was time to take a stand. He led his men to Guilford Courthouse in north central North Carolina, now Greensboro. They arrayed for battle. Cornwallis, having chased the rebels fruitlessly for a month, had little choice but to respond to the thrown gauntlet. He had full confidence that his regulars could manhandle Greene’s pick-up army in spite of their greater numbers.
Daniel Morgan, in a message to Greene, emphasized the importance of the militia. If they stand, he wrote, “you’l beat Cornwallis if not, he will beat you.”17 Greene heeded the advice and adopted on a larger scale the tactics Morgan had used at Cowpens. Instead of two lines, he established three: first raw militiamen, then an echelon of more experienced Virginia militia, whose ranks included Continental Army veterans. The backbone of the force would be the 1,400 Maryland and Delaware Continentals, posted on a ridge at the rear. Woods covered much of the half mile that separated the first and third lines.
Among those on the field that March 15 was Brigadier General Edward Stevens, who had seen his men flee in panic from the battlefield at Camden. To avoid a repeat of the earlier debacle, he posted marksmen ten yards behind his men with orders to shoot down “the first man who flinched.”
Before the British arrived, Greene rode along the lines of militia, encouraging the men and asking for only two volleys from the frontline troops before they fell back. These men looked out from behind a rail fence over plowed fields on either side of the road. A militia major wrote to his wife while waiting: “It is scarcely possible to paint the agitations of my mind.”18
At eleven-thirty in the morning, the troops caught sight of red uniforms and “gay banners” in the woods beyond the fields. The sky-filling boom of artillery pieces from both sides punctuated a period of further tense waiting. Finally the British and Hessian infantry came marching across the plowed field in precise parade-ground fashion. Rebel riflemen peppered them from the flanks. In the lines, a few jumpy North Carolina militiamen fired their rifles and shotguns ineffectively when the targets were still a hundred yards away, then fled. At fifty yards, the British saw the mass of rebels, and one noted that the “whole force had their arms presented and resting on a rail-fence.”19 The redcoats hesitated.
“At this awful period,” a British sergeant recorded, “a general pause took place, both parties surveyed each other a moment with anxious suspense.”20 British colonel James Webster cantered to the front and urged his men forward. Forward they came. Suddenly the thousand muskets along the fence ignited as one, roaring out flame, smoke, and flying lead balls. The punishing gunfire lacerated the British line but did not stop the hardened troops, who unloosed their own volley and charged. The militia had no time to reload. Gleaming British bayonets bore down on them. They ran like “a flock of sheep frightened by dogs.”21
“Dreadful was the havoc on both sides.” And it was only beginning. The real fight began at the second line. There the Americans wavered, fell back before a bayonet charge, regrouped, fired a volley that brought the British to a standstill, and for a while fought a fierce back-and-forth contest. War became work. Principles of country, honor, and patriotism gave way before the grim need to do a job.
With the British attack thrown into confusion by the terrain and the unexpected resistance, an opportunity suddenly opened. Greene could have ordered a charge backed by his cavalry. He might have demolished Cornwallis’s force as Morgan had blasted Tarleton’s regiments at Cowpens. He might have achieved the decisive triumph he craved. But Greene ranked survival above glory. He could not risk his army and did not.
The British pushed on and began to grapple with the Continentals of the third line. Violence convulsed the American left. Greene finally decided that it was time to retreat. His men broke off the action. The two-hour-long fight was over. Cornwallis held the field, but five hundred of his men, a quarter of his force, had fallen.
Afterward, the British general prudently retreated to Wilmington, on the North Carolina coast, for resupply. He would not take the field again in the Carolinas, admitting that he was “quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures.”22 He shifted his sights to Virginia, where he thought glory might be won more easily.
Greene could n
ot keep from bragging to Caty, to whom he wrote the hardly reassuring words that he had come “very near being taken having rode in the heat of the action full tilt directly into the Midst of the enemy.”23 He had been vexed by the long retreat and the complexity of maneuvering. Now his spirits soared. Guilford Courthouse was his Trenton. “The Enemy got the ground,” he wrote, “but we the victory.”24 Like his mentor, he had retreated, then turned and delivered the enemy a telling blow.
* * *
Having boldly faced the British in North Carolina, Greene now made another radical and far-reaching decision. “In this critical and distressing situation,” he wrote to Washington, “I am determined to carry the War immediately into South Carolina.”25 There he would face eight thousand British troops stationed in a chain of fortified outposts stretching in an arc from Charleston to Augusta, Georgia. Greene’s move away from his own lines of supply and communication risked disaster. Cornwallis could descend on his rear, or British commander Henry Clinton could embark an army from New York to crush the meager American force.
Greene had to take the chance. If he did not, the authorities in South Carolina and Georgia would most likely give up the cause, and the states would remain a permanent part of the British empire no matter how the war turned out.
On April 7, 1781, Greene’s men marched south. Two weeks later, they camped near Hobkirk’s Hill, just outside of Camden. The town was now a fortified British outpost. Greene contemplated besieging the garrison there. Lord Rawdon, a young man whose bony visage and hammock jaw had earned him a reputation as “the ugliest man in England,” commanded the British.26 He possessed a keen military instinct. Rather than wait inside his lines for Greene to act, he rushed out and attacked the rebels.
His men caught the Americans at breakfast. The British pushed back the enemy pickets and engaged the army in a hot battle. Greene rallied his men. Rawdon called up his reserves. He outflanked the American line. Panic soon caught the patriots by the neck. They began to run. So close was Greene to the action that he pitched in to haul back the American field pieces, preventing their capture.