Fusiliers (39 page)
Greene had already warned Washington while journeying down to take up the command that he would be hard pressed to stop Cornwallis extending the areas under British control. Seeing all the problems that faced his little army at first hand, Greene noted, ‘L [or] d Cornwallis has a much greater force on foot than we have and much better provided.’ Whatever British officers like Balfour, O’Hara or Clinton might have felt about the dangers of a thrust into North Carolina, the new commander of the Southern Department saw quite clearly how vulnerable his forces would be if Cornwallis pressed ahead. The English earl and the autodidact Rhode Island soldier were thus thinking along very similar lines, Greene stating baldly: ‘If Lord Cornwallis knows his true interest he will pursue our army. If he can disperse that, he completes the reduction of the state.’
The American general set to work immediately to thwart such a disaster, firing off directives in the days after he assumed command: to survey the rivers behind him for a fighting retreat across North Carolina to the borders of Virginia; to build boats so that he might ferry troops or supplies rapidly across these obstacles; to get better intelligence reports from the likes of Marion or Sumpter; and to announce his arrival by gripping the discipline of his ragtag army.
Greene’s experience of war and countless Patriot setbacks had imbued him with a violent contempt towards recidivism or indiscipline within the Continental Army. Before leaving the north he had pleaded with Washington that one of his soldiers ‘be hung without judge or jury as an example to the rest’. Washington agreed and the man, accused of theft, was summarily executed. The major general wanted to signal his arrival in the southern army in a similar way. Finding that many men were absent without leave (usually foraging for food or getting drunk), Greene waited for one of them, Thomas Anderson, a private in the 1st Maryland Regiment to wander back to camp, brought him to trial and had him shot by firing squad on 4 December.
In order to stymie Cornwallis while he tightened his hold over his soldiers, Greene had the inspired idea of sending a raiding force into the earl’s backyard. On 21 December, he dispatched Brigadier Daniel Morgan with 600 picked troops as well as authority to call out the South Carolina militia. Morgan was to march deep into the state, threatening Ninety Six and other backcountry posts. Greene knew that this ought to hamper any British offensive thrust into North Carolina, telling Morgan that if Cornwallis advanced anyway, the raiders should ‘fall back upon the flank or into the rear of the enemy as occasion may require’. This diversion worked better than Greene could possibly have expected.
On 8 January, the 23rd Fusiliers struck camp at Winnsborough, along with the 33rd and 2nd Battalion of the 71st, marching off at a blistering pace, covering eighteen miles that day. They were following behind Tarleton who had already left with the British Legion, 7th Fusiliers, and 1st Battalion 71st. Cornwallis had launched his campaign of 1781 on hearing reports of Morgan’s presence in the province, but it would develop in ways he had not anticipated at all.
The first battle-stained stragglers came into the encampment in the evening of 17 January. Lieutenant Harry Calvert of the Fusiliers was
quick to spot them – troopers of the 17th Light Dragoons, one or two officers of the British Legion, on exhausted horses stumbling into the plantation where Lord Cornwallis’s main force had marched 50 miles from Winnsborough. The soldiers spat out their gobbets of bad news through powder-blackened faces. Calvert recorded they ‘came in with accounts of having been totally defeated that morning by General Morgan, and most of them affirmed, that Colonel Tarleton was killed’.
The American brigadier, who went by the nickname of ‘the Old Waggoner’, had drawn Tarleton to a place called Cowpens, close to the North Carolina border, luring him on to a fighting position of his own choosing. As one fugitive after another wandered into the British camp, Calvert pieced together the story of what had gone wrong. Tarleton, as was his custom, had hurled his troops into action before they were all up, and the 71st had advanced towards their enemy, taking significant losses from enemy sharpshooters as they went. The 71st had gone forward just like the 23rd at Camden, two deep and very open (i.e., with a few feet separating each file or pair of men), but the outcome had been very different. Morgan had put his best troops in line behind the militia. Once the redcoats charged and burst through this first line they had gone on to the second. It was at that point, according to Calvert’s interpretation of the accounts he heard over the campfire that evening, that things had gone wrong: ‘Instead of continuing the charge the infantry halted to load again; the enemy rallied and gave them a very severe fire and the British troops lost the action more by their own misconduct, than by the enemy’s bravery.’ A prompt charge by William Washington, an American cavalry commander in the same mould as Tarleton himself, had then put the Legion horse to rout. ‘The whole of his flying army except the Legion cavalry, who secured themselves by a disgraceful flight’, wrote Calvert with some disgust, ‘were either killed, wounded, or missing.’
These early reports were, unfortunately for Cornwallis, all too accurate except in one detail. Tarleton himself got into the bivouac early on the morning of the 18th. The majority of the 7th and 71st were lost – the English Fusiliers sustaining the odious distinction of having the Americans relieve them of their colours for a second time (the first had been in Canada five years earlier). Tarleton had lost his cannon and all his Legion infantry too. Cornwallis was beside himself, feeling that all the gains of his recent build-up had been lost.
At the very moment of receiving the dismal news from Cowpens, the
Guards Grenadier Company had been marching into Cornwallis’s encampment from the south. Major General Leslie had arrived with 1,200 soldiers, including two battalions of Guards, the Hessian Regiment von Bose, a company of Hessian jaegers and the North Carolina Volunteers loyalists. Any joy at this substantial reinforcement had evaporated due to Tarleton’s defeat.
‘The late affair has almost broke my heart,’ Cornwallis wrote to Lord Rawdon. ‘Morgan is at Gilbertown, I shall march tomorrow with 1,200 infantry and the cavalry to attack or follow him to the banks of the Catawba … I was never more surrounded with difficulty and distress but practice in the school of adversity has strengthened me.’ He launched the army in hot pursuit. Three days of hard marching followed, but without bringing the redcoats up with Morgan. The American ability to move so quickly was a problem that would frustrate Cornwallis throughout the coming weeks.
On 22 January, he ordered the ‘bad marchers’ and regimental baggage left with the von Bose Regiment and loyalists. He pushed the men on into North Carolina, but still did not succeed in catching up. Four days on, after reaching Ramsour’s Mill, Cornwallis took the dramatic step of ordering the army’s wagons burnt so that it might travel faster. It should not be imagined that they were moving around with some vast train of wheeled transport. The 23rd, like other regiments, had been given three large wagons, each towed by four horses, during the Camden part of the campaign. This had later been reduced to a single four-wheeled vehicle, ‘which is intended for the conveyance of their medicine chest, sick men, forage or any other necessary purpose’. Officers’ little luxuries would have to be carried on their own packhorse, with strict limits set on them. As for the men, they had long been equipped in the light infantry style, carrying everything about their person with a blanket, haversack and knapsack.
While Cornwallis consigned all but one of his personal wagons to the bonfire to show that he was sharing in the hardships, there was one aspect of his army’s train that he was failing to rein in. Since their arrival in South Carolina, the redcoats had picked up hundreds of black servants. Many of these people were slaves who took advantage of British offers of freedom. Senior officers had at first looked the other way, accepting that a regiment with a retinue of hired officers’ servants would be able to return to the battle-line soldiers previously used for the same purpose. However, every quartermaster and many non
commissioned officers had acquired their own negroes and the numbers were getting too large – for they had to be fed and camp followers were felt more likely to loot than soldiers on duty. On the same day that he ordered the wagons burnt, Cornwallis issued a General Order concerning ‘negroes and horses’, limiting field officers (majors and lieutenant colonels) to two and three of each respectively, captains to one servant and two horses and so on. Like many instructions of this kind, its effects were limited.
Before leaving Ramsour’s Mill supplies of leather were handed out so the men could re-sole their shoes and carry a spare pair. On 28 January, Cornwallis launched them forward once more with morning orders warning that ‘the supply of rum for a time will be absolutely impossible, and that of meal very uncertain’. They were marching for the Catawba River – Cornwallis and Greene both understood the contest now, it was about whether the British general could smash the Continental troops before they could escape.
When the redcoats came into view early in the morning on 1 February on the far bank of the Catawba, General William Lee Davidson’s militia prepared their weapons. There were some 300 ready to contest the McGowan’s Ford. The local men had reason to feel confident. The river was broad at that point, nearly half a mile wide. Its waters, swollen by recent rains, ran fast and deep. If the redcoats made it across, they would find the militia posted on parts of the bank that rose several feet above the water. They would watch their enemy splash in – and wait. These militia were not going to run away.
The Guards had gone into the water first, with their Light Bobs and Cornwallis himself, mounted, at their head. Then some horses pulling two little 3-pounders of the Royal Artillery followed, and after them the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The men soon found the water rushing round their legs and as they pressed on it was up to their bellies. They held their muskets, bayonets fixed, above their heads, tying their cartridge boxes to their necks so the precious contents would not get spoiled.
As they got to the middle of the stream the fast torrent was tugging at their clothes, the stones and mud slippery beneath their feet. Few could swim, and they were all heavily laden in any case. Struggling forward, many men were gripped with the fear of drowning, but for one bombardier, or corporal of the artillery, the current proved stronger than his grip on a gun carriage and he was swept off by the
waters. Serjeant Lamb of the 23rd, seeing the man’s head disappear below the brown foaming waters, ‘determined to save his life or perish in the attempt’. Lamb, who was a strong swimmer, dived in, being swept 40 yards downstream holding on to the corporal. Eventually he stopped the man, got him to his feet and heaved him back to the 3-pounder.
Soon, though, Davidson’s militia were adding to the redcoats’ troubles with a crackling fire. Lord Cornwallis’s horse was hit, but struggled across the river, expiring only after it had delivered its noble rider to dry land. Once the British were a few dozen yards from their enemy, the militia’s fire began to bite, sending plumes of water into the air and cutting down a soldier of the Guards here and there – about fifteen did not make it across, lost either to bullets or the waters. The rest kept thrashing onward, struggling up the banks. Lieutenant Calvert was struck by the soldiers’ composure throughout this ordeal, declaring, ‘They gained the opposite shore without returning a single shot, they then formed with the greatest coolness and drove the militia from a post which they might have defended against any body of men.’ ‘I believe’, wrote Lamb, a little more generous to the 23rd’s foe, ‘not one of them moved from his post till we mounted the hill and used our bayonets; their general was the first man that received us sword in hand and suffered himself to be cut to pieces sooner than retreat.’ The Catawba was forced and its defenders dispersed.
Cornwallis was racing after Greene, the two men united in their understanding that the American must retreat to the line of the River Dan, the border between North Carolina and Virginia. Greene had appealed for help and expected reinforcements from that state, but he did not feel himself strong enough in early February to engage Cornwallis in open battle; on the contrary, he felt that such an event might be disastrous. The British general congratulated the Guards on their coolness crossing the Catawba and pressed on.
Moving forward at such a pace, through a land that was often hostile, there was no possibility of maintaining a regular line of communication to the depots at Camden. The soldiers initially were fed from bags of cornmeal prepared to support the expedition. In time, though, this resource began to run low, and in any case the men often found their bivouacs far ahead of the remaining wagons in the army. Unripe ears of maize were frequently taken from the fields, and the men instructed in how to rasp them in order to detach the corn from
the cob. Cattle too were run into camp, swiftly slaughtered and divided up between messes of six soldiers each.
One soldier of Webster’s brigade described the cooking arrangements on these marches: ‘My mess mates and I made two meals a day, which we managed by first boiling the beef, and then taking it out and having mixed our pound of flour with some water, we put it into the kettle in which the beef had been boiled; and when sufficiently heated we took it off the fire … This served us for breakfast and the beef we kept for dinner.’
A fellow-soldier in that brigade, Serjeant Lamb, wrote of each evening’s smooth routine once they halted. He gives some sense of how the simple comforts of a field camp sustained such hard campaigning:
It is a pleasing sight to see a column arrive at its halting ground. The camp is generally marked out, if circumstances allow of it, on the edge of some wood, and near a river or stream. The troops are halted in open columns and arms piled, pickets and guards paraded and posted, and in two minutes all appear at home. Some fetch large stones to form fire places; others hurry off with canteens and kettles for water while the wood resounds with the blows of the tomahawk. Dispersed under the more distant trees you see the officers, some dressing, some arranging a few boughs to shelter them by night, others kindling their own fires. How often under some spreading pine tree which afforded shade, shelter and fuel have I taken up my lodging for the night. Sitting in the midst of my comrades, men whom I loved and esteemed partaking of a coarse but wholesome meal.