Washington's General (38 page)

Once again, the battle hung in the balance as the American counterattack cut down the advancing British. Cornwallis, watching the tide turn against him, ordered his artillery to open fire with grapeshot on the American left. It was a cold-blooded decision, for it meant the British cannons would take their toll indiscriminately–His Majesty's troops would be killed and maimed along with the Americans. O'Hara, wounded and behind the lines with Cornwallis, protested to no avail. The British guns began blowing gaps on the American left, slaughtering friend and foe alike.

The 1st Maryland buckled and then began to fall back. Greene, who had nearly been overtaken by a British advance, saw that his left was about to collapse. The outcome of the battle was not a given, but he could not and would not risk his army. He ordered a retreat.

The Battle of Guilford Court House was over after two hours of fierce fighting. Greene left the field in defeat; Cornwallis was triumphant.

The cost of Britain's victory, however, was horrific. Cornwallis lost more than five hundred men–25 percent of his army–either dead or wounded. Greene suffered about eighty dead and one hundred eighty-five wounded. He retreated ten miles to Speedwell Iron Works, where he dutifully filed a report to Congress. “From the best information I can get the Enemy's loss is very great,” he wrote, with little exaggeration. His natural optimism reasserted itself, despite his having suffered a tactical defeat. His letters to Washington no longer bemoaned his fate or spoke of the seeming inevitability of misfortune and defeat. Greene was experienced enough to understand that he had been defeated in only the narrowest sense; that he had, in fact, sold the British another hill–just like
Bunker Hill–at a price almost too dear to bear. “Our Men are in good spirits and in perfect readiness for another field Day,” he reported. He knew Cornwallis was in no position to follow up on his “victory.”

Indeed, he was not. He lingered on his hard-won field for two days but then fell back, leaving his wounded to the care of the Americans. Greene's young aide Lewis Morris Jr. wrote to his father, a distinguished New York patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence: “Like Peter the Great we shall profit by defeat, and in time learn to beat our Enemy–one more such action, and they are ruined.” Morris was not alone in his assessment of the wound Greene had inflicted on the British. When word reached London of Cornwallis's triumph at Guilford Court House, an antiwar member of Parliament, Charles James Fox, observed, “Another such victory would ruin the British Army.”

Greene wrote home to Caty on March 18, as the dead were being counted and buried. By chance, he had received a letter from her the day after the battle, and her pleasant, chatty news of life at home in Rhode Island offered him “some consolation” after living through the fire and hell of combat. In his reply, he spared her the gruesome details of the late action, reassuring her that none of her friends was among the dead. “I had not the honor of being wounded,” he wrote, which was a roundabout way of telling her he was healthy and well.

So many of his men, however, were wounded, and it is not likely they considered their suffering an honor. They were left to the care of local residents with uncertain and perhaps dubious medical skills. With their tribulations on his mind, Greene wrote a moving letter to Quakers living in New Garden near Guilford Court House, asking for their help in tending to his wounded. He took the occasion to cite his own Quaker background and to hint, gently, that some patriots were skeptical of Quaker claims to absolute neutrality.

I was born and educated in the professions and principles of your Society; and am perfectly acquainted with your religious sentiments and general good conduct as citizens. I am also sensible from . . . the misconduct of a few of your
own, that you are generally considered as enemies to the independence of America. I entertain other sentiments. ... I respect you as a people, and shall always be ready to protect you from every violence and oppression.

These were noble sentiments, and Greene no doubt meant every word. But he had himself expressed a few choice words about Quakers during the Pennsylvania campaigns, and
respect
was not one of them.

After both armies rested briefly, Greene and Cornwallis exchanged roles. The British general was now retreating toward Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city where his broken army could be resupplied. Greene was in cautious pursuit, looking for a chance to strike. “It is my intention to attack the enemy the moment we can get up with them,” he told Lee on March 22, even though his men were short on bread and ammunition.

But soon he was short on men. The bulk of his militia were eligible to go home in late March, and they made it clear that they intended to do exactly that. Camped at Ramsey's Mill along the Deep River, Greene paused and decided he could not “attack the enemy” without the militia.

He gave up the chase but not his aggression. With his smaller force of about twelve hundred Continentals and only about two hundred and fifty militia, he decided to leave North Carolina and march south, toward Camden, South Carolina. “In this critical and distressing situation I am determined to carry the War immediately into South Carolina,” he informed Washington. “The Manoeuvre will be critical and dangerous; and our troops exposed to every hardship. But as I share it with them I hope they will bear up under it with that magnanimity which has already supported them.” Greene was proud of his troops and appreciated their sacrifice and their suffering. He did not command them from lofty heights. He shared their hardships and lived with the consequences of his decisions.

Greene thought that Cornwallis would pursue him. But the British general was too exhausted to contemplate another campaign through the
Carolinas, too battered to reprise the role of Greene's strategic foil. “I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventures,” Cornwallis wrote. Virginia, he decided, should be the center of British operations in the South.

Cornwallis left Wilmington on April 24. His march would take him to another port city: Yorktown.

Nathanael Greene did not believe he had seen the last of Lord Cornwallis. His strategy for the next phase of the southern campaign was based on his hunch–mistaken, as it turned out–that Cornwallis would resume his former role as the hunter, and so might once again be lured into a strategic trap of Greene's making. With Cornwallis pursuing him, with Benedict Arnold in Virginia, and with Lord Rawdon trying to hold South Carolina and Georgia, British forces in the South would be widely scattered. Greene believed that the patriot militia would be more likely to turn out to assist him if they saw an immediate threat in their state or locality. Three British forces operating in three parts of the region figured to inspire the militia in a way that a more powerful but distant threat would not.

In moving his army in the direction of South Carolina and Georgia, Greene was turning his back on the battered but still formidible Cornwallis, exposing himself to an attack from his rear. This was still another violation of the military textbook. He explained to an officer from North
Carolina: “Don't be surprised if my movements don't correspond with your Ideas of military propriety. War is an intricate business, and people are often [saved] by ways and means they least look for or expect.”

Greene admitted that his strategy was based in part on a game he was playing with Cornwallis: he wanted his foe to furrow his brow, shake his head, and wonder what, exactly, Nathanael Greene was thinking. Greene told Baron von Steuben, still in Virginia and waiting in vain for an allied assault against Arnold, “[The] boldness [of my plan] will make [the British] think I have secret reasons which they cannot comprehend.”

He had no “secret reasons.” There was only what struck him as the obvious choice: if he could not pursue Cornwallis–and the departure of hundreds of militiamen meant that he could not–then he would move against Rawdon and a string of forts that were the bulwark of British and loyalist defenses in South Carolina and Georgia. “If I can get supplies and secure a retreat,” he told Steuben, “I fear no bad consequences.”

By now, though, Greene was experienced enough to know that the first part of that equation was bound to prove the most troublesome. Supplies remained the bane of his army, as he impatiently reminded Congress: “I have been anxiously waiting for succour, but the prospect appears to me to be remote.”

Perhaps, he thought, one of the militia commanders would help. Greene dispatched a message to General Thomas Sumter, asking him to join the march into South Carolina and to bring along whatever provisions he might lay his hands on. “[On] this our whole operation will depend,” he noted. Greene would soon learn that Sumter did not feel obliged to heed the orders, never mind the suggestions, of the commander of the Southern Department. Although Sumter assured Greene, “[I will] promote & facilitate your Designs,” he neither joined the army in the march to Camden nor complied with Greene's polite requests for supplies. Greene began to realize that while he could depend on partisans like Marion and Pickens, Thomas Sumter, the famous gamecock, danced to his own melodies.

Greene needed help from the likes of Sumter because he knew he would receive precious little from his commander in chief, more than a
thousand miles away. Washington was delighted to learn that Cornwallis had been so badly mauled at Guilford Court House; still, he reminded Greene, the war remained very much in the balance. General Clinton commanded a large force in New York City and was capable and bold enough to move his army south by ship if an opportunity to crush Greene presented itself. “I ... regard your affairs as critically situated,” Washington told Greene in mid-April, a month after Guilford Court House. “[The] enemy are accumulating a large force in the Southern States; we have several concurring accounts that a further detachment is preparing at New York to be commanded by Clinton himself.” Those reports turned out to be untrue, but even if they were accurate, Greene could expect little in the way of assistance. “You may be assured that we give you all the support in our power,” Washington wrote. “I wish our means were more adequate.”

Washington was more candid in a letter to Congress in April. “We are at the end of our tether,” he wrote.

Greene appealed to the region's politicians to come to the aid of their embattled country. Once again, he was dissatisfied with their responses, particularly those of the Virginia politicians. At issue was horseflesh, and the lack of it among Greene's cavalry, the most important units of his command. Although Greene had the power to seize the horses he needed, a power he always used sparingly, the Virginia legislature passed a bill limiting such seizures to horses valued at less than five thousand pounds in highly inflated currency. (The true value was less than forty pounds.) This effectively eliminated most horses worth seizing. Greene told a sympathetic Jefferson that he “would not trust a dragoon upon” the scrawny, weak mounts he was collecting, and later wondered if “Horses are dearer to the Inhabitants” of Virginia than “the liberties of the People.” Greene never ceased to be disappointed with the responses of civilians as well as politicians to the needs of his suffering army.

Greene and his fifteen hundred men began their march south toward Camden, South Carolina, on April 7. When Cornwallis realized that his antagonist had outfoxed him yet again, he told London that he feared Lord Rawdon and the British posts in South Carolina and Georgia were
doomed. The Crown's men in the lower South, he wrote, were “so scattered” that they were in “the greatest danger of being beat in detail.”

It was springtime in the Carolinas, and the trees were in full blossom, the rivers swollen and fast. Two of Greene's most capable subordinates, Light Horse Harry Lee and Francis Marion, the legendary Swamp Fox, already were in action, laying siege to a small British garrison in Fort Watson, South Carolina. Sumter, however, was nowhere near Camden, despite Greene's requests that he cooperate in the planned assault. Greene sent a plaintive dispatch to the insubordinate militia commander: “My greatest dependence is on you for supplies of Corn and Meal. Both of these Articles are immediately wanted, and unless you can furnish me with them it will be impossible for me to keep my position.” Almost as important as the corn and meal was the physical presence of Sumter and his men, but they, like the supplies, were conspicuous by their absence. Greene worried that his messages to Sumter had fallen into the hands of loyalist militia.

Greene brought his march to a halt on April 20 on Hobkirk's Hill outside Camden. Defending the town were nine hundred British and loyalist troops under the command of Lord Rawdon himself, the man who would now shoulder the burden of Britain's deteriorating southern strategy.

Greene inspected Rawdon's defenses and was surprised to see that they were, as he admitted in a letter to Sumter, “much stronger than I expected.” While he was intent on destroying Rawdon's force, he decided he dared not risk his army against such a well-entrenched opponent. So he would, in the manner of Pickens and Lee at Fort Watson, lay siege to the post, daring Rawdon to venture out from behind his defenses. His army was stronger than Rawdon's, and Greene had hopes that it would grow stronger still, if only Sumter would arrive.

As they prepared for the siege, Greene's men set up camp on Hobkirk's Hill according to their order of battle. The militia were on the front lines, with the cream of the southern army–two Continental regiments from Virginia and two from Maryland–behind them, along with the artillery. To the left of the American position ran Pine Tree Creek, screened, appropriately enough, by thick forest.

On the night of April 24, as Greene's men prepared their siege, a solitary American soldier fled Greene's camp and turned himself over to Rawdon's men in Camden. He told the British that Greene still was awaiting reinforcements, had no artillery (which was false), and was vulnerable to a surprise attack. Rawdon acted quickly: the following morning, he ordered his men to move out of Camden and toward Hobkirk's Hill, where Greene's men were eating breakfast.