Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (26 page)

It was another Camden. The sight of enemy soldiers’ backs delighted the British infantrymen, inspired them. Victory! Yelling redcoats pounded forward, thrusting their lethal bayonets.

Passing over a low ridge, the British caught sight of another line of soldiers ahead of them. Not so many men as in the militia ranks, but these were American Continentals, uniformed in blue and white, their own bayonets glittering in the cold morning light. The militiamen were slipping through gaps in their line and disappearing to the rear.

British officers screamed orders. The men slowed, halted to dress their ranks. The battlefield narrowed here. The British now stood shoulder to shoulder. Their line, longer than that of the rebels, extended beyond Howard’s Maryland and Delaware Continentals on the American right.

The British presented their muskets and fired. When the last of the militiamen had cleared their front, the Continentals answered, one corps, then another delivering a disciplined fire. “It seemed like one sheet of flame from right to left,” an officer said. Morgan later wrote to Greene, “When the enemy advanced on our lines they received a well directed and incessant fire.”
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Incessant—the field was now a cauldron of hammering, ear-numbing noise, the deep roar of muskets, the crackle of rifles, an all-out contest of fire against fire.

A Delaware private recalled Morgan’s “powerful & trumpet like voice” that “drove fear from every bosom, and gave new energies to every
man.”
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It was the “awful voice” that had heartened soldiers during the snowy struggle at Quebec.

Men tasted gunpowder, tasted waxed paper as they bit cartridge after cartridge. They sweated. Their faces turned black with scorched powder. Bullets tore the air with a hoarse hum or a singing crescendo. Wounded men screamed. Officers bellowed. Prime and load! Fire! The intensity of the action lifted men’s minds from their bodies and let them view the confusion from on high.

Tarleton ordered the powerful Highlanders, supported by fifty dragoons, to sweep past the Americans’ right and crash into their rear. The horsemen burst through a small group of the North Carolina riflemen shielding the American flank, hacking shoulders and heads with sabers, trampling men. The Highlanders screamed Gaelic curses and came on at a run.

Howard directed the unit on the end of his line to wheel backward to take the charge from their front. The order was misunderstood, they retreated instead. Then, spontaneously, the next unit fell back, and the next.

Morgan had been busy behind the line rallying the militia. “Form, form my brave fellows! Give them one more fire and the day is ours. Old Morgan was never beaten.” His plan was for the militiamen to find safety behind the bayonets of the Continentals, sort themselves out, and form a reserve force.

Now he galloped to the collapsing Continental line. The repositioning of troops was a mistake, Howard told him. But they could see that the retreating men were still under the control of their officers. They were reloading as they marched. Let them retreat, Morgan said, then form again on a new line. He rode back a hundred yards and chose the spot. Here.

The Highlanders smelled victory. The enemy was giving way before them. They charged, broke ranks, stumbled ahead, eager for the kill. They came on “like a mob.” The Continentals, on order, halted and faced about. The Highlanders were nearly on them, barely fifteen yards away. Fire! Their “close and murderous fire” smashed into the faces of their pursuers.

Many Highlanders fell dead. All were stunned. Howard saw his chance. He told his drummer to sound the charge. His men leveled their bayonets and started forward. Morgan ordered Washington to sweep in with his dragoons. The American horsemen came on, “shouting and charging like madmen.” Pickens’s militiamen, whom Morgan had helped reorganize, rushed up to help, pouring fire into the mass of scarlet uniforms.

It was too much. The Highlanders, the best troops in the British army, buckled. Then the entire British line broke, reeled backward, turned to
the rear, and ran. Many threw down their guns and, a Continental private chortled, “did the prettiest sort of running!”
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The Americans surrounded the disorganized Highlanders. Their commander, seeing that all was lost, handed Howard his sword. Continentals rushed forward to grab the British cannon. More and more enemy soldiers were surrendering. Tarleton tried to lead his cavalry reserve into the fray. The horsemen refused to obey their young commander.

“All attempts to restore order, recollection, or courage, proved fruitless,” Tarleton later reported.
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Two hundred dragoons turned and rode away, pursued by Washington’s cavalry.

Quiet fell on the field like a heavy weight. The whole thing had lasted barely forty minutes. An exuberant Morgan picked up a nine-year-old drummer boy, who had risked his life amid the din, and kissed him on both cheeks.

Morgan had read the impulsive Tarleton precisely. “I knew my adversary, and was perfectly sure I should have nothing but downright fighting.”
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He had positioned his men in a brilliant, unconventional arrangement—militiamen in front but with permission to fall back behind stronger lines. He had used his charisma and energy to exert his will against the enemy. He had won the most decisive patriot victory of the war, utterly destroying Tarleton’s dreaded Legion. He had, he wrote to a friend, given Tarleton “a devil of a whiping.”
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His masterly handling of his men is studied by tacticians to this day.

He had little time to savor his victory. Escaping to the north with his haul of eight hundred prisoners, Morgan needed to keep moving, keep crossing rivers, to avoid Cornwallis. But when Cornwallis sent the news to General Henry Clinton in New York, he wrote that it was “impossible to foresee all the consequences that this unexpected and extraordinary event may produce.” To Lord Rawdon, he sighed that “the late affair has almost broke my heart.”
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Abigail Adams called Morgan “the rising Hero in the South.” But Cowpens was to be the Old Wagoner’s last battle. During the first week in February 1781, he reunited his troops with Greene’s army. Morgan had increasingly been laid low with sciatica, malaria, and fever, and, he told Greene, “Nothing will help me but rest.” Reluctantly, Greene let him go. “Great generals are scarce,” he lamented. “There are few Morgans to be found.”
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Seventeen

War Is an Intricate Business

1781

Nathanael Greene, born to the middle class, had never lost the habit of looking over his shoulder. In spite of his exalted position in the Continental Army, he remained nervous about his rank in society. When he wrote to his wife, Caty, about joining him in camp, he suggested that she send a letter to Lucy Knox to ask for new clothes from Boston. “But remember when you write to Mrs. Knox . . . mind and spell well. You are defective in this matter, my love. . . . People are often laught at for not spelling well.”
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Greene’s own spelling was shaky, and the memory of being barred from leadership of his militia unit because of his limp still galled him. The rank of major general fueled his pride but brought with it a certain vertigo.

As the army’s quartermaster general, Greene had responded to a mild admonition from Washington by complaining, “I can submit very patiently to deserved censure; but it wounds my feelings exceedingly to meet with a rebuke for doing what I conceived to be a proper part of my duty.”
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Greene could evoke mirth with his dinner table imitations of Dr. Slop, a character in the popular comic novel
Tristram Shandy,
yet he was subject to bouts of gloomy disappointment. “There is so much wickedness and viliany in the World,” he wrote Caty in the autumn of 1780, “and so little regard paid to truth, honor and justice that I am almost sick of life.”
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Now, as commander of all forces in the South, Greene’s doubts resurfaced. “How I shall be able to support myself under all these embarrassments God only knows,” he wrote to Washington. “Censure and reproach ever follow the unfortunate.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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* * *

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.