Chapter III: Part 1 (1)

“Downright Fighting”
The Story of Cowpens.

_by Thomas J. Fleming_

The Anatomy of Victory

1

All night the two men rode northwest along the muddy winding roads of South Carolina’s back country. Twice they had to endure bone-chilling swims across swollen creeks. Now, in the raw gray cold of dawn, they faced a more formidable obstacle—the wide, swift Pacolet River. They rode along it until they found the ford known as Grindal Shoals. Ordinarily, it would have been easy to cross. But the river was high. The icy water lapped at their thighs as the weary horses struggled to keep their feet in the rushing current. “Halt,” snarled a voice from the river bank. “Who goes there?”

“Friend,” said the lead rider, 25-year-old Joseph McJunkin.

The sentry barked the password for the night. McJunkin and his companion, James Park, did not know the countersign. McJunkin told the sentry he had an important message for General Morgan. The sentry told him not to move or he would put a hole through his chest. He called for the captain of the guard. The two riders had to sit there in the icy river while the captain made his way to the bank. Once more McJunkin insisted he had a message for General Morgan. It was from Colonel Pickens. It was very important.

The captain invited the two men onto the north bank of the Pacolet. Above them, on a wooded hill, was the camp of Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan of the Continental Army of the United States. Around Morgan’s tent, about 830 men were lighting fires and beginning to cook their breakfasts, which consisted largely of cornmeal. From a barrel in a wagon, a commissary issued a gill (four ounces) of rum. Most added water to it and put it in their canteens. A few gulped the fiery liquid straight, in spite of the frowns of their officers. Some 320 of the men still wore pieces of uniforms—a tattered blue coat here, a ragged white wool waistcoat there, patched buff breeches. In spite of the rainy, cold January weather, few had shoes on their feet. These men were Continentals—the names by which patriot regular army soldiers, usually enlisted for three years, were known.

The rest of the army wore a varied assortment of civilian clothing. Hunting shirts of coarse homespun material known as linsey-woolsey, tightly belted, or loose wool coats, also homespun, leather leggings, wool breeches. These men were militia—summoned from their homes to serve as emergency soldiers for short periods of time. Most were from western districts of the Carolinas. About 120 were riflemen from Virginia, committed to serving for six months. Most of these were former Continentals. They were being paid by other Virginians who hired them as substitutes to avoid being drafted into the army. After five years of war, patriotism was far from universal in America.

In his tent, Morgan listened to the message McJunkin brought from Col. Andrew Pickens: the British were advancing in force. Morgan whirled and roused from a nearby camp cot a small groggy man who had managed to sleep through McJunkin’s bad news. His name was Baron de Glaubech. He was one of the many French volunteers who were serving with the Americans. “Baron,” Morgan said. “Get up. Go back and tell Billy that Benny is coming and he must meet me tomorrow evening at Gentleman Thompson’s on the east side of Thicketty Creek.”

Sixty-three years later, when he was 80, Joseph McJunkin remembered these words with their remarkable combination of informality and decision. It was part of the reason men like young McJunkin trusted Daniel Morgan. It was somehow reassuring to hear him call Lt. Col. William Washington, commander of the American cavalry and second cousin to Gen. George Washington, “Billy.” It was even more reassuring to hear him call Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, commander of the British army that was coming after them, “Benny.”

Adding to this reassurance was 45-year-old Daniel Morgan’s appearance and reputation. He was over six feet tall, with massive shoulders and arms, toughened from his youthful years as a wagonmaster in western Virginia. In his younger days he had been one of the champion sluggers and wrestlers of the Shenandoah Valley. His wide volatile face could still flash from cheerfulness to pugnacity in an instant. In the five years of the Revolution, Morgan had become a living legend: the man who led a reckless assault into the very mouths of British cannon on the barricaded streets of Quebec in 1775, whose corps of some 570 riflemen had been the cutting edge of the American army that defeated the British at Saratoga in 1777.

Daniel Morgan, Frontiersman

He was a giant of a man, 6 feet 2 inches, with a full face, blue eyes,
dark hair, and a classic nose. As a youth in western Virginia, he had
drifted into wagoneering along the roads of the frontier. His
education was slight. Good-natured and gregarious, he was, like his
companions of the road, rowdy and given to drink, gambling, and
fighting. In time, he married, settled down, went into farming, and
became a man of substance in his community.

He was already a hero of the Revolution when he took command of
Greene’s light troops in late 1780. His rifle corps had fought with
distinction at Quebec (1775) and Saratoga (1777). But after being
passed over for promotion, unfairly he thought, he retired to his
Virginia farm. When the South fell to British armies in 1780, he put
aside his feelings and welcomed a new command.

Morgan was at home in the slashing, partisan warfare in the South. At
Cowpens the mixed force of regulars and militia that he led so ably
destroyed Tarleton’s dreaded Legion, depriving Cornwallis of a wing of
swift-moving light troops essential to his army’s operation.

The War in the South

NORTH CAROLINA
New Bern•
Edenton•
Brunswick•
Gilbert Town•
SOUTH CAROLINA
Georgetown•
GEORGIA
Augusta•
Moores Creek 27 Feb 1776
Sullivans Island 28 June 1776
Kettle Creek 14 Feb 1779
Brier Creek 3 March 1779
Lenuds Ferry 6 May 1780
Waxhaws 29 May 1780
Williamson Plantation 12 July 1780
Kings Mountain 7 Oct 1780
Ninety Six•
Besieged by Greene May-June 1781;
evacuated by the British July 1781
Hobkirks Hill 25 Apr 1781
Charleston•
Captured by the British 12 May 1780
Eutaw Springs 8 Sept 1781
Fort Watson
HIGH HILLS OF SANTEE
Cornwallis routs Gates at Camden and advances into North Carolina
Camden•
Hanging Rock 6 Aug 1780
Camden 16 Aug 1780
Fishing Creek 18 Aug 1780
Great Savannah 20 Aug 1780
Charlotte•
Greene divides his army sending Morgan to the west and the main army
into winter quarters at Cheraw Hills. 20-26 Dec 1780
Cheraw Hills•
Greene’s winter quarters 1780-1781
Grindal Shoals
Morgan’s camp 25 Dec 1780 to 14 Jan 1781
Cornwallis turns back after Ferguson’s defeat at Kings Mountain and
goes into winter quarters at Winnsborough.
Winnsborough•
Cornwallis’s winter quarters 1780-1781
Tarleton
Musgroves Mill 18 Aug 1780
Fishdam Ford 9 Nov 1780
Blackstocks 20 Nov 1780
Hammonds Store 28 Dec 1780
Easterwood Shoals
Cowpens 17 Jan 1781
Hamiltons Ford
Cornwallis pursues Morgan.
Morgan’s line of retreat after Cownpens.
Green River Road
Island Ford
Beatties Ford
Island Ford
Ramsour’s Mill
Cornwallis burns his baggage. 24 Jan 1781
Salisbury•
Salem•
Guilford Courthouse•
Cheraw Hills•
Coxs Mill
Greene races for the Dan River with Cornwallis in pursuit.
Boyds Ferry
Greene crosses the Dan River and is resupplied and reinforced. 13
Feb 1781
Cornwallis halts south of the Dan River.
Hillsborough•
Guilford Courthouse 15 March 1781
Ramseys Mill•
Greene breaks off pursuit of Cornwallis after Guilford.
Cross Creek•
Elizabethtown•
Cornwallis retreats to Wilmington
Wilmington•
Cornwallis marches into Virginia April-May 1781
Halifax•
Petersburg•
Richmond•
Williamsburg•
Yorktown•
Cornwallis surrenders 19 Oct 1781

The lower South became the decisive theatre of the Revolutionary War. After the struggle settled into stalemate in the north, the British mounted their second campaign to conquer the region. British expeditionary forces captured Savannah in late 1778 and Charleston in May 1780. By late in that summer, most of South Carolina was pacified, and a powerful British army under Cornwallis was poised to sweep across the Carolinas into Virginia.

This map traces the marches of Cornwallis (red) and his wily adversary Nathanael Greene (blue). The campaign opened at Charleston in August 1780 when Cornwallis marched north to confront Gen. Horatio Gates moving south with a Continental army. It ended at Yorktown in October 1781 with Cornwallis’s surrender of the main British army in America. In between were 18 months of some of the hardest campaigning and most savage fighting of the war.

On this 14th of January, 1781, a great many people in South Carolina and North Carolina were badly in need of the reassurance that Daniel Morgan communicated. The year just completed had been a series of military and political disasters, with only a few flickering glimpses of hope for the Americans who had rebelled against George III and his Parliament in 1776. In 1780 the British had adopted a new strategy. Leaving enough troops to pin down George Washington’s main American army near New York, the British had sent another army south to besiege Charleston. On May 12, 1780, the city and its defending army, under the command of a Massachusetts general named Benjamin Lincoln, surrendered. Two hundred and forty-five regular officers and 2,326 enlisted men became captives along with an equal number of South Carolina militia; thousands of muskets, dozens of cannon, and tons of irreplaceable gunpowder and other supplies were also lost.

It was the worst American defeat of the war. The Continental Congress responded by sending south Gen. Horatio Gates, commander of the army that had beaten the British at Saratoga. Gates brought with him about 1,200 Maryland and Delaware Continentals and called on the militia of North Carolina and Virginia to support him. On August 16, 1780, outside the village of Camden, S.C., the Americans encountered an army commanded by Charles, Earl Cornwallis, the most aggressive British general in America. Cornwallis ordered a bayonet charge. The poorly armed, inexperienced militia panicked and fled. The Continentals fought desperately for a time but were soon surrounded and overwhelmed.

Both North and South Carolina now seemed prostrate. There was no patriot army in either state strong enough to resist the thousands of British regulars. Georgia had been conquered by a combined British naval and land force in late 1778 and early 1779. There were rumors that America’s allies, France and Spain, were tired of the war and ready to call a peace conference. Many persons thought that the Carolinas and Georgia would be abandoned at this conference. In the Continental Congress, some already considered them lost. “It is agreed on all hands the whole state of So. Carolina hath submitted to the British Government as well as Georgia,” a Rhode Island delegate wrote. “I shall not be surprised to hear N. Carolina hath followed their example.”

British spokesmen eagerly promoted this idea. They were more numerous in the Carolinas than most 20th-century Americans realize. The majority of them were American born—men and women whom the rebel Americans called tories and today are usually known as loyalists. Part of the reason for this defection was geographical. The people of the back country had long feuded with the wealthier lowlanders, who controlled the politics of the two States. The lowlanders had led the Carolinas into the war with the mother country, and many back-country people sided with the British in the hope of humbling the haughty planters. Some of these counter-revolutionists sincerely believed their rights would be better protected under the king. Another large group thought the British were going to win the war and sided with them in the hope of getting rich on the rebels’ confiscated estates. A third, more passive group simply lacked the courage to oppose their aggressive loyalist neighbors.

The British set up forts, garrisoned by regulars and loyalists, in various districts of South Carolina and told the people if they swore an oath of allegiance to the king and promised to lay down their weapons, they would be protected and forgiven for any and all previous acts of rebellion. Thousands of men accepted this offer and dropped out of the war.

But some South Carolinians refused to submit to royal authority. Many of them were Presbyterians, who feared that their freedom to worship would be taken away from them or that they would be deprived of the right to vote, as Presbyterians were in England. Others were animated by a fundamental suspicion of British intentions toward America. They believed there was a British plot to force Americans to pay unjust taxes to enable England’s aristocratic politicians and their followers to live in luxury.

Joseph McJunkin was one of the men who had refused to surrender. He had risen from private to major in the militia regiment from the Union district of South Carolina. After the fall of Charleston, he and his friends hid gunpowder and ammunition in hollow logs and thickets. But in June 1780, they were badly beaten by a battalion of loyalist neighbors and fled across the Broad River. They were joined by men from the Spartan, Laurens, and Newberry districts. At the Presbyterian Meeting House on Bullocks Creek, they debated whether to accept British protection. McJunkin and a few other men rose and vowed they would fight on. Finally someone asked those who wanted to fight to throw up their hats and clap their hands. “Every hat went up and the air resounded with clapping and shouts of defiance,” McJunkin recalled.

A few days later, these men met Thomas Sumter, a former colonel in the South Carolina Continentals. He had fled to western South Carolina after the British burned his plantation. The holdouts asked him his opinion of the situation. “Our interests are the same. With me it is liberty or death,” he said. They elected him their general and went to war.

Elsewhere in South Carolina, other men coalesced around another former Continental officer, Francis Marion. Still others followed Elijah Clarke, who operated along the border between South Carolina and Georgia. These partisans, seldom numbering more than 500 men and often as few as 50, struck at British outposts and supply routes and attacked groups of loyalists whom the British were arming and trying to organize into militia regiments. The British and loyalists grew exasperated. After the battle of Camden, Lord Cornwallis declared that anyone who signed a British parole and then switched sides would be hanged without a trial if captured. If a man refused to serve in the loyalist militia, he would be imprisoned and his property confiscated. At a convention of loyalist militia regiments on August 23, 1780, the members resolved that these orders should be ruthlessly applied. They added one other recommendation. Anyone who refused to serve in the king’s militia should be drafted into the British regulars, where he would be forced to fight whether he liked it or not.

For the rest of 1780, a savage seesaw war raged along the Carolina frontier. Between engagements both sides exacted retaliation on prisoners and noncombatants. Elijah Clarke besieged Augusta with a mixed band of South Carolinians and Georgians. Forced to retreat by British reinforcements, he left about two dozen badly wounded men behind. The loyalist commander of Augusta, Thomas Browne, wounded in the siege, hanged 13 of them in the stairwell of his house, where he could watch them die from his bed. A rebel named Reed was visiting a neighbor’s house when the landlady saw two loyalists approaching. She advised Reed to flee. Reed replied that they were old friends; he had known them all his life. He went outside to shake hands. The loyalists shot him dead. Reed’s aged mother rode to a rebel camp in North Carolina and displayed her son’s bloody pocketbook. The commander of the camp asked for volunteers. Twenty-five men mounted their horses, found the murderers, and executed them.

In this sanguinary warfare, the rebels knew the side roads and forest tracks. They were expert, like Marion’s men, at retreating into swamps. But the British also had some advantages. The rebels could do little to prevent retaliation against their homes and property. If a man went into hiding when the British or loyalists summoned him to fight in their militia, all his corn and livestock were liable to seizure, and his house might even be burned, leaving his wife and children destitute. This bitter and discouraging truth became more and more apparent as the year 1780 waned. Without a Continental army to back them up, Sumter and the other partisan leaders found it difficult to persuade men to fight.

Not even the greatest militia victory of the war, the destruction of a loyalist army of over a thousand men at Kings Mountain in October 1780, significantly altered the situation. Although loyalist support declined, the British army was untouched by this triumph. Moreover, many of the militiamen in the rebel army had come from remote valleys deep in the Appalachians, and they went home immediately, as militiamen were inclined to do. The men of western South Carolina were left with the British regulars still dominating four-fifths of the State, still ready to exact harsh retaliation against those who persisted in the rebellion.

George Washington understood the problem. In an earlier campaign in the north, when the New Jersey militia failed to turn out, he had said that the people needed “an Army to look the Enemy in the Face.” To replace the disgraced Horatio Gates, he appointed Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island as the commander of the Southern army. A 38-year-old Quaker who walked with a slight limp, Greene had become Washington’s right-hand man in five years of war in the north. On December 2 he arrived in Charlotte, N.C., where Horatio Gates was trying to reorganize the remnants of the army shattered at Camden. Neither the numbers nor the appearance of the men were encouraging. There were 2,046 soldiers present and fit for duty. Of these, only 1,173 were Continentals. The rest were militia. Worse, as Greene told his friend the Marquis de Lafayette, if he counted as fit for duty only those soldiers who were properly clothed and equipped, he had fewer than 800 men and provisions for only three days in camp. There was scarcely a horse or a wagon in the army and not a dollar of hard money in the military chest.

Among Greene’s few encouraging discoveries in the army’s camp at Charlotte was the news that Daniel Morgan had returned to the war and at that very moment was within 16 miles of the British base at Camden with a battalion of light infantry and what was left of the American cavalry under Lt. Col. William Washington. Angered by Congress’s failure to promote him, Morgan had resigned his colonel’s commission in 1779. The disaster at Camden and the threat of England’s new southern strategy had persuaded him to forget his personal grievance. Congress had responded by making him a brigadier general.

Studying his maps, and knowing Morgan’s ability to inspire militia and command light infantry, Nathanael Greene began to think the Old Wagoner, as Morgan liked to call himself, was the key to frustrating British plans to conquer North Carolina. Lord Cornwallis and the main British army were now at Winnsborough, S.C., about halfway between the British base at Camden and their vital back-country fort at Ninety Six. The British general commanded 3,324 regulars, twice the number of Greene’s motley army, and all presumably well trained and equipped. Spies and scouts reported the earl was preparing to invade North Carolina for a winter campaign. North Carolina had, if anything, more loyalists than South Carolina. There was grave reason to fear that they would turn out at the sight of a British army and take that State out of the shaky American confederacy.

To delay, if not defeat, this potential disaster, Greene decided to divide his battered army and give more than half of it to Daniel Morgan. The Old Wagoner would march swiftly across the front of Cornwallis’s army into western South Carolina and operate on his left flank and in his rear, threatening the enemy’s posts at Ninety Six and Augusta, disrupting British communications, and—most important—encouraging the militia of western South Carolina to return to fight. “The object of this detachment,” Greene wrote in his instructions to Morgan, “is to give protection to that part of the country and spirit up the people.”

This was the army that Joseph McJunkin had ridden all night to warn. Lord Cornwallis had no intention of letting Nathanael Greene get away with this ingenious maneuver. Cornwallis had an answer to Morgan. His name was Banastre Tarleton.

2

Daniel Morgan might call him “Benny.” Most Americans called him “the Butcher” or “Bloody Tarleton.” A thick-shouldered, compact man of middle height, with bright red hair and a hard mouth, he was the most feared and hated British soldier in the South. In 1776 he had come to America, a 21-year-old cornet—the British equivalent of a second lieutenant. He was now a lieutenant colonel, a promotion so rapid for the British army of the time that it left older officers frigid with jealousy. Tarleton had achieved this spectacular rise almost entirely on raw courage and fierce energy. His father had been a wealthy merchant and Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He died while Tarleton was at Oxford, leaving him £5,000, which the young man promptly gambled and drank away, while ostensibly studying for the law in London. He joined the army and discovered he was a born soldier.

In America, he was a star performer from the start. In the fall of 1776, while still a cornet, he played a key role in capturing Maj. Gen. Charles Lee, second in command of the American army, when he unwisely spent the night at a tavern in New Jersey, several miles from his troops. Soon a captain, Tarleton performed ably for the next two years and in 1778 was appointed a brigade major of the British cavalry.

Tarleton again distinguished himself when the British army retreated from Philadelphia to New York in June 1778. At Monmouth Court House he began the battle by charging the American advance column and throwing it into confusion. In New York, sorting out his troops, the new British commander, Sir Henry Clinton, rewarded Tarleton with another promotion. While the British were in Philadelphia, various loyalists had recruited three troops of dragoons. In New York, officers—some loyalist, some British—recruited companies of infantry and more troops of dragoons from different segments of the loyalist population. One company was Scottish, two others English, a third American-born. Clinton combined these fragments into a 550-man unit that he christened the British Legion. Half cavalry, half infantry, a legion was designed to operate on the fringe of a main army as a quick-strike force. Banastre Tarleton was given command of the British Legion, which was issued green coats and tan breeches, unlike other loyalist regiments, who wore red coats with green facings.

Banastre Tarleton, Gentleman

Banastre Tarleton, only 26, was a short, thick-set, rather handsome
redhead who was tireless and fearless in battle. Unlike Morgan, he had
been born to privilege. Scion of a wealthy Liverpool mercantile
family, he was Oxford educated and might have become a barrister
except that he preferred the playing field to the classroom and the
delights of London theatres and coffee houses to the study of law.
After squandering a modest inheritance, he jumped at the chance to buy
a commission in the King’s Dragoons and serve in America. Eventually
he came into command of the British Legion, a mounted and foot unit
raised among American loyalists. Marked by their distinctive green
uniforms, they soon became known as Tarleton’s Green Horse. It was
their ruthless ferocity that earned Tarleton the epithet, “Bloody
Tarleton.”

After the war, Tarleton fell in love with the beautiful Mary Robinson,
a poet, playwright, and actress. Tarleton’s memoir, _The Campaigns of
1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces_, owes much to her gifted pen.

Sailing south with the royal army that besieged and captured Charleston, Tarleton and his Legion acted as a mobile screen, protecting the British rear against attacks by American cavalry and militia from the interior of the State. The young officer soon demonstrated a terrifying ability to strike suddenly and ferociously when the Americans least expected him. On May 6, 1780, at Lenuds Ferry, he surprised and virtually destroyed the American cavalry, forcing William Washington and many other officers and men to leap into the Santee River to escape him.

After Charleston surrendered, there was only one unit of regular American troops left in South Carolina, the 3d Virginia Continentals commanded by Col. Abraham Buford. He was ordered to retreat to North Carolina. Cornwallis sent Tarleton and his Legion in pursuit. Covering 105 miles in 54 hours, Tarleton caught up with the Americans at Waxhaws. The 380 Virginians were largely recruits, few of whom had seen action before. Tarleton and the Legion charged from front, flank, and rear. Buford foolishly ordered his men to hold their fire until the saber-swinging dragoons were on top of them. The American line was torn to fragments. Buford wheeled his horse and fled. Tarleton reportedly sabered an American officer as he tried to raise a white flag. Other Americans screamed for quarter, but some kept firing. A bullet killed Tarleton’s horse and he crashed to the ground. This, he later claimed, aroused his men to a “vindictive asperity.” They thought their leader had been killed. Dozens of Americans were bayonetted or sabered after they had thrown down their guns and surrendered.

One hundred and thirteen Americans were killed and 203 captured at Waxhaws. Of the captured, 150 were so badly wounded they were left on the battlefield. Throughout the Carolinas, the word of the massacre—which is what Americans called Waxhaws—passed from settlement to settlement. It did not inspire much trust in British benevolence among those who were being urged to surrender.

After helping to smash the American army at Camden with another devastating cavalry charge, Tarleton was ordered to pursue Thomas Sumter and his partisans. Pushing his men and horses at his usual pace in spite of the tropical heat of August, he caught up with Sumter’s men at Fishing Creek. Sabering a few carelessly posted sentries, the British Legion swept down on the Carolinians as they lay about their camp, their arms stacked, half of them sleeping or cooking. Sumter leaped on a bareback horse and imitated Buford, fleeing for his life. Virtually the entire American force of more than 400 men was killed or captured. When the news was published in England, Tarleton became a national hero. In his official dispatches, Cornwallis called him “one of the most promising officers I ever knew.”

But Sumter immediately began gathering a new force and Francis Marion and his raiders repeatedly emerged from the lowland swamps to harass communications with Charleston and punish any loyalist who declared for the king. Tarleton did not understand this stubborn resistance and liked it even less. A nauseating bout with yellow fever deepened his saturnine mood. Pursuing Marion along the Santee and Black Rivers, Tarleton ruthlessly burned the farmhouses of “violent rebels,” as he called them. “The country is now convinced of the error of the insurrection,” he wrote to Cornwallis. But Tarleton failed to catch “the damned old fox,” Marion.

The British Legion had scarcely returned from this exhausting march when they were ordered out once more in pursuit of Sumter. On November 9, 1780, with a new band of partisans, Sumter fought part of the British 63d Regiment, backed by a troop of Legion dragoons, at Fishdam Ford on the Broad River and mauled them badly. “I wish you would get three Legions, and divide yourself in three parts,” Cornwallis wrote Tarleton. “We can do no good without you.”

Once more the Legion marched for the back country. As usual, Tarleton’s pace was almost supernaturally swift. On November 20, 1780, he caught Sumter and his men as they were preparing to ford the Tyger River. But this time Tarleton’s fondness for headlong pursuit got him into serious trouble. He had left most of his infantry far behind him and pushed ahead with less than 200 cavalry and 90 infantry, riding two to a horse. Sumter had close to a thousand men and he attacked, backwoods style, filtering through the trees to pick off foot soldiers and horsemen. Tarleton ordered a bayonet charge. The infantry was so badly shot up, Tarleton had to charge with the cavalry to extricate them, exposing his dragoon to deadly rifle fire from other militiamen entrenched in a log tobacco house known as Blackstocks. The battle ended in a bloody draw. Sumter was badly wounded and his men abandoned the field to the green-coated dragoons, slipping across the Tyger in the darkness. Without their charismatic leader, Sumter’s militia went home.

“Sumter is defeated,” Tarleton reported to Cornwallis, “his corps dispersed. But my Lord I have lost men—50 killed and wounded.” The war was becoming more and more disheartening to Tarleton. Deepening his black mood was news from home. His older brother had put him up for Parliament from Liverpool. The voters had rejected him. They admired his courage, but the American war was no longer popular in England.

While Cornwallis remained at Winnsborough, Tarleton returned from Blackstocks and camped at various plantations south of the Broad River. During his projected invasion of North Carolina, Cornwallis expected Tarleton and his Legion to keep the dwindling rebels of South Carolina dispersed to their homes. Thus the British commander would have no worries about the British base at Ninety Six, the key to the back country. The fort and surrounding settlement had been named by an early mapmaker in the course of measuring distances on the Cherokee Path, an ancient Indian route from the mountains to the ocean. The district around Ninety Six was the breadbasket of South Carolina; it was also heavily loyalist. But a year of partisan warfare had made their morale precarious. The American-born commander of the fort, Col. John Harris Cruger, had recently warned Cornwallis that the loyalists “were wearied by the long continuance of the campaign ... and the whole district had determined to submit as soon as the rebels should enter it.” The mere hint of a threat to Ninety Six and the order it preserved in its vicinity was enough to send flutters of alarm through British headquarters.

There were flutters aplenty when Cornwallis heard from spies that Daniel Morgan had crossed the Broad River and was marching on Ninety Six. Simultaneously came news that William Washington, the commander of Morgan’s cavalry, had routed a group of loyalists at Hammonds Store and forced another group to abandon a fort not far from Ninety Six. At 5 a.m. on January 2, Lt. Henry Haldane, one of Cornwallis’s aides, rode into Tarleton’s camp and told him the news. Close behind Haldane came a messenger with a letter from Cornwallis: “If Morgan is ... anywhere within your reach, I should wish you to push him to the utmost.” Haldane rushed an order to Maj. Archibald McArthur, commander of the first battalion of the 71st Regiment, which was not far away, guarding a ford over the Broad River that guaranteed quick communication with Ninety Six. McArthur was to place his men under Tarleton’s command and join him in a forced march to rescue the crucial fort.

Tarleton obeyed with his usual speed. His dragoons ranged far ahead of his little army, which now numbered about 700 men. By the end of the day he concluded that there was no cause for alarm about Ninety Six. Morgan was nowhere near it. But his scouts reported that Morgan was definitely south of the Broad River, urging militia from North and South Carolina to join him.

Tarleton’s response to this challenge was almost inevitable. He asked Cornwallis for permission to pursue Morgan and either destroy him or force him to retreat over the Broad River again. There, Cornwallis and his army could devour him.

The young cavalry commander outlined the operation in a letter to Cornwallis on January 4. He realized that he was all but giving orders to his general, and tactfully added: “I feel myself bold in offering my opinion [but] it flows from zeal for the public service and well grounded enquiry concerning the enemy’s designs and operations.” If Cornwallis approved the plan, Tarleton asked for reinforcements: a troop of cavalry from the 17th Light Dragoons and the infantrymen of the 7th Regiment of Royal Fusiliers, who were marching from Camden to reinforce Ninety Six.

Cornwallis approved the plan, including the reinforcements. As soon as they arrived, Tarleton began his march. January rain poured down, swelling every creek, turning the roads into quagmires. Cornwallis, with his larger army and heavy baggage train, began a slow advance up the east bank of the Broad River. As the commander in chief, he had more to worry about than Tarleton. Behind him was another British general, Sir Alexander Leslie, with 1,500 reinforcements. Cornwallis feared that Greene or Marion might strike a blow at them. The earl assumed that Tarleton was as mired by the rain and blocked by swollen watercourses as he was. On January 12, Cornwallis wrote to Leslie, who was being delayed by even worse mud in the lowlands: “I believe Tarleton is as much embarrassed with the waters as you are.” The same day, Cornwallis reported to another officer, the commander in occupied Charleston: “The rains have put a total stop to Tarleton and Leslie.” On this assumption, Cornwallis decided to halt and wait for Leslie to reach him.

Tarleton had not allowed the August heat of South Carolina to slow his pace. He was equally contemptuous of the January rains. His scouts reported that Morgan’s army was at Grindal Shoals on the Pacolet River. To reach the patriots he had to cross two smaller but equally swollen streams, the Enoree and the Tyger. Swimming his horses, floating his infantry across on improvised rafts, he surmounted these obstacles and headed northeast, deep into the South Carolina back country. He did not realize that his column, which now numbered over a thousand men, was becoming more and more isolated. He assumed that Cornwallis was keeping pace with him on the east side of the Broad River, cowing the rebel militia there into staying home.

Tarleton also did not realize that this time, no matter how swiftly he advanced, he was not going to take the patriots by surprise. He was being watched by a man who was fighting with a hangman’s noose around his neck.

3

_Skyagunsta_, the Wizard Owl, was what the Cherokees called 41-year-old Andrew Pickens. They both feared and honored him as a battle leader who had defeated them repeatedly on their home grounds. Born in Pennsylvania, Pickens had come to South Carolina as a boy. In 1765 he had married the beautiful Rebecca Calhoun and settled on Long Canes Creek in the Ninety Six district. Pickens was no speechmaker, but everyone recognized this slender man, who was just under 6 feet tall, as a leader. When he spoke, people listened. One acquaintance declared that he was so deliberate, he seemed at times to take each word out of his mouth and examine it before he said it. Pickens had been one of the leaders who repelled the British-inspired assaults on the back country by the Cherokee Indians in 1776 and carried the war into the red men’s country, forcing them to plead for peace. By 1779 he was a colonel commanding one of the most dependable militia regiments in the State. When the loyalists, encouraged by the British conquest of Georgia in 1778-79, began to gather and plot to punish their rebel neighbors, Pickens led 400 men to assault them at Kettle Creek on the Savannah River. In a fierce, hour-long fight, he whipped them although they outnumbered him almost two to one.

After Charleston surrendered, Pickens’ military superior in the Ninety Six district, Brig. Gen. Andrew Williamson, was the only high-ranking official left in South Carolina. The governor John Rutledge had fled to North Carolina, the legislature had dispersed, the courts had collapsed. Early in June 1780, Williamson called together his officers and asked them to vote on whether they should continue to resist. Only eight officers opposed immediate surrender. In Pickens’ own regiment only two officers and four enlisted men favored resistance. The rest saw no hope of stopping the British regular army advancing toward them from Charleston. Without a regular army of their own to match the British, they could envision only destruction of their homes and desolation for their families if they resisted.

Andrew Pickens was among these realists who had accepted the surrender terms offered by the British. At his command, his regiment of 300 men stacked their guns at Ninety Six and went home. As Pickens understood the terms, he and his men were paroled on their promise not to bear arms against the king. They became neutrals. The British commander of Ninety Six, Colonel Cruger, seemed to respect this opinion. Cruger treated Pickens with great deference. The motive for this delicate treatment became visible in a letter Cruger sent Cornwallis on November 27.

“I think there is more than a possibility of getting a certain person in the Long Canes settlement to accept of a command,” Cruger wrote. “And then I should most humbly be of opinion that every man in the country would declare and act for His Majesty.”

It was a tribute to Pickens’ influence as a leader. He was also a man of his word. Even when Sumter, Clarke, and other partisan leaders demonstrated that there were many men in South Carolina ready to keep fighting, Pickens remained peaceably at home on his plantation at Long Canes. Tales of Tarleton’s cruelty at Waxhaws, of British and loyalist vindictiveness in other districts of the State undoubtedly reached him. But no acts of injustice had been committed against him or his men. The British were keeping their part of the bargain and he would keep his part.

Then Cornwallis’s aide, Haldane, appeared at Ninety Six and summoned Pickens. He offered him a colonel’s commission in the royal militia and a promise of protection. There were also polite hints of the possibility of a monetary reward for switching sides. Pickens agreed to ride down to Charleston and talk over the whole thing with the British commander there. The visit was delayed by partisan warfare in the Ninety Six district, stirred by the arrival of Nathanael Greene to take command of the remnant of the American regular army in Charlotte. Greene urged the wounded Sumter and the Georgian Clarke to embody their men and launch a new campaign. Sumter urged Pickens to break his parole, call out his regiment, and march with him to join Greene. Pickens refused to leave Long Canes.

In desperation, the rebels came to him. Elijah Clarke led a band of Georgians and South Carolinians to the outskirts of Long Canes, on their march to join Greene. Many men from Pickens’ old regiment broke their paroles and joined them. Clarke ordered Maj. James McCall, one of Pickens’ favorite officers and one of two who had refused to surrender at Ninety Six, to kidnap Pickens and bring him before an improvised court-martial board. Accused of preparing to join the loyalists, Pickens calmly admitted that the British were making him offers. So far he had refused them. Even if former friends made good on their threat to court-martial and hang him, he could not break his pledged word of honor to remain neutral.

The frustrated Georgians and South Carolinians let Pickens go home. On December 12, Cruger sent a detachment of regulars and loyalist militia to attack the interlopers. The royalists surprised the rebels and routed them, wounding Clarke and McCall and scattering the survivors. Most of the Georgians drifted back to their home state and the Carolinians straggled toward Greene in North Carolina.

The battle had a profound effect on Andrew Pickens. Friends, former comrades-in-arms, had been wounded, humiliated. He still hesitated to take the final step and break his parole. His strict Presbyterian conscience, his soldier’s sense of honor, would not permit it. But he went to Ninety Six and told Colonel Cruger that he could not accept a commission in the royal militia. Cruger sighed and revealed what he had been planning to do since he started wooing Pickens. In a few days, on orders from Cornwallis, the loyalist colonel was going to publish a proclamation which would permit no one to remain neutral. It would require everyone around Ninety Six to come to the fort, swear allegiance to the king, and enlist in the royal militia.

Pickens said his conscience would not permit him to do this. If the British threatened him with punishment for his refusal, it would be a violation of his parole and he would consider himself free to join the rebels. One British officer, who had become a friend and admirer of the resolute Pickens, warned him: “You will campaign with a halter around your neck. If we catch you, we will hang you.”

Pickens decided to take the risk. He rode about Long Canes calling out his regiment. The response was somewhat discouraging. Only about 70 men turned out. Coordinating their movements with Colonel Washington’s raid on the loyalists at Hammonds Store, they joined the patriot cavalry and rode past Ninety Six to Morgan’s camp on the Pacolet.

The numbers Pickens brought with him were disappointing. But he and his men knew the back country intimately. They were the eyes and ears Morgan’s little army desperately needed. Morgan immediately asked Pickens to advance to a position about midway between Fair Forest Creek and the Tyger River and send his horsemen ranging out from that point in all directions to guard against a surprise attack by Banastre Tarleton.

The Wizard Owl and his men mounted their horses and rode away to begin their reconnaissance. General Morgan soon knew enough about the enemy force coming after him to make him fear for his army’s survival.

4

Daniel Morgan might call Banastre Tarleton “Benny” for the entertainment of young militiamen like Joseph McJunkin. But Morgan had been fighting the British for five years. He was as close to being a professional soldier as any American of his time. He knew Banastre Tarleton was no joke. In fact, the casual style of his decision to reunite his cavalry and infantry at the Thompson plantation on Thicketty Creek disguised a decision to retreat. The march to Thicketty Creek put an additional 10 miles between him and the aggressive British cavalryman. Behind the mask of easy confidence Morgan wore for his men, there was a very worried general.

As soon as he crossed the Broad River and camped at Grindal Shoals on the north bank of the Pacolet on December 25, 1780, Morgan began sending messengers to the men of western Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, urging them to turn out and support him. The response had been disheartening. Pickens, as we have seen, was unable to muster more than a fraction of his old regiment. From Georgia came only a small detachment of about 100 men under the command of Lt. Col. James Jackson and Maj. John Cunningham. Because their leader Elijah Clarke was out of action from his wound at Long Canes, the Georgians were inclined to stay home. Sumter, though almost recovered from his wound, sulked on the east side of the Broad River. He felt Greene had sent Morgan into his sphere of command without properly consulting him.

Arms and Tactics

The armies fought the way they did—on open ground in long lines of
musket-wielding infantry standing two and three ranks deep—because
that was the most rational way to use the weapons they had.

The main weapon of this combat was the muzzle-loading, smooth-bore,
flint-lock musket, equipped with a 16-inch bayonet. It hurled a
one-ounce lead ball of .70 to .80 calibre fairly accurately up to 75
yards, but distance scarcely mattered. The object was to break up the
enemy’s formations with volleys and then rout them with cold steel.
The British were masters of these linear tactics, and Washington and
his commanders spent the war trying to instill the same discipline in
their Continentals so that they could stand up to redcoats on equal
terms in battle.

The American rifle was not the significant weapon legend later made it
out to be. Though accurate at great distances, it was slow to load and
useless in open battle because it was not equipped with a bayonet. But
in the hands of skirmishers the rifle could do great damage, as the
British found out at Cowpens.

Pistols _Cavalrymen and mounted officers nearly always carried a brace
of pistols. Though wildly inaccurate, they were useful in emergencies
when formal combat broke down and a foe was only a few feet away._

Edged Weapons _came in many varieties. The most important for
hand-to-hand fighting were bayonets and swords. For cavalrymen, the
sword was more useful than firearms. It was “the most destructive and
almost the only necessary weapon a Dragoon carries,” said William
Washington. They used two types: the saber and the broadsword. Both
are shown here._

_Officers, foot as well as mounted, carried swords, often for
fighting, sometimes only for dress. The small-sword (shown at left
below) was popular with Continental officers._

Pole Arms _were in common use. Washington wanted his foot officers to
direct their men and not be distracted by their own firearms. He
therefore armed them with a spear-like weapon called a spontoon. It
became a badge of rank as well as a weapon._

Morgan’s highest hopes had been focused on North Carolina, which had thus far been relatively untouched by the British. The commander of the militia in the back country was Brig. Gen. William Davidson, a former Continental officer whom Morgan had known at Valley Forge. An energetic, committed man, popular with the militia, Davidson had been expected to muster from 600 to 1,000 men. Instead, Morgan got a letter from him with the doleful report: “I have not ninety men.” An Indian incursion on the western frontier had drawn off many of the militia and inclined others to stay home to protect their families. On December 28, Davidson rode into Morgan’s camp with only 120 men. He said that he hoped to have another 500 mustered at Salisbury in the next week and rode off to find them, leaving Morgan muttering in dismay.

Morgan had eagerly accepted this independent command because he thought at least 2,500 militiamen would join his 500 Continentals and Virginia six-months men. With an army that size, he could have besieged or even stormed the British stronghold at Ninety Six. His present force seemed too small to do the enemy any damage. But it was large enough to give its commander numerous headaches. In addition to the major worry of annihilation by the enemy, food was scarce. The country along the Pacolet had been plundered and fought over for so long, there was nothing left to requisition from the farms. On December 31, in a letter to Greene, Morgan predicted that in a few days supplies would be “unattainable.”

What to do? The only practical move he could see for his feeble army was a march into Georgia. The British outpost at Augusta was weaker and more isolated than Ninety Six. Even here, Morgan was cautious. “I have consulted with General Davidson and Colonel Pickens whether we could secure a safe retreat, should we be pushed by a superior force. They tell me it can be easily effected,” he wrote Greene, asking his approval of this plan.

Morgan was reluctant to advance beyond the Pacolet. The reason was rooted in his keen understanding of the psychology of the average militiaman. He wanted to come out, fight and go home as soon as possible. He did not want to fight if the regular army that was supposed to look the enemy in the face seemed more interested in showing the enemy their backs. “Were we to advance, and be constrained to retreat, the consequences would be very disagreeable,” Morgan told Greene, speaking as one general to another. The militia, he was saying, would go home.

Greene was equally anxious about Morgan. Writing from Cheraw Hills on the Pee Dee River on December 29, the southern commander told Morgan of the arrival of Gen. Alexander Leslie in Charleston with reinforcements. This news meant the British would almost certainly advance soon. “Watch their motions very narrowly and take care to guard against a surprise,” he wrote. A week later, in another letter, he repeated the warning. “The enemy and the Tories both will try to bring you into disgrace ... to prevent your influence upon the militia, especially the weak and wavering.”

Greene vetoed Morgan’s expedition into Georgia. He did not think Morgan was strong enough to accomplish much. “The enemy ... secure in their fortifications, will take no notice of your movement,” he predicted. Greene was persuaded that Cornwallis would strike at his half of the army in their camp at Cheraw Hills, and he did not want Morgan in Georgia if this threat materialized. Ignoring Morgan’s worries about feeding his men, Greene told him to stay where he was, on the Pacolet or “in the neighborhood,” and await an opportunity to attack the British rear when they marched into North Carolina.

Morgan replied with a lament. He reiterated his warning that “forage [for the horses] and provisions are not to be had.” He insisted there was “but one alternative, either to retreat or move into Georgia.” A retreat, he warned, “will be attended with the most fatal consequences. The spirit which now begins to pervade the people and call them into the field, will be destroyed. The militia who have already joined will desert us and it is not improbable but that a regard for their own safety will induce them to join the enemy.”

That last line is grim evidence of the power of the British policy of forcing everyone to serve in the loyalist militia. But Nathanael Greene remained adamant. He reported to Morgan more bad news, which made a march into Georgia even more inadvisable. Another British general, with 2,500 men, had landed in Virginia and was attacking that vital State, upon which the southern army depended for much of its supplies. It made no sense to send some of the army’s best troops deeper into the South, when Virginia might call on Greene and Morgan for aid. Almost casually Greene added: “Col. Tarleton is said to be on his way to pay you a visit. I doubt not but he will have a decent reception and a proper dismission.”

This was a strange remark for a worried general to make. From other letters Greene wrote around this time, it is evident that he had received a number of conflicting reports about Tarleton’s strength and position. The American commander was also unsure about British intentions. He assumed that Cornwallis and Tarleton were moving up the opposite sides of the Broad River in concert. Since the main British column under Cornwallis had all but stopped advancing, Greene assumed Tarleton had stopped too and that Morgan was in no immediate danger.

Around this time, a man who had known Daniel Morgan as a boy in Virginia visited his camp. Richard Winn, after whom Winnsborough was named—and whose mansion Cornwallis was using as his headquarters—discussed Tarleton’s tactics with his old friend. Winn told Morgan that Tarleton’s favorite mode of fighting was by surprise. “He never brings on [leads] his attacks himself,” Winn said. He prefers to send in two or three troops of horse, “whose goal is to throw the other party into confusion. Then Tarleton attacks with his reserve and cuts them to pieces.”

Much as he dreaded the thought of a retreat, Morgan was too experienced a soldier not to prepare for one. He sent his quartermaster across the Broad River with orders to set up magazines of supplies for his army. This officer returned with dismaying news. General Sumter had refused to cooperate with this request and directed his subordinates to obey no orders from Morgan.

Adding to Morgan’s supply woes was a Carolina military custom. Every militiaman brought his horse to camp with him. This meant that Morgan had to find forage for over 450 horses (counting William Washington’s cavalry), each of whom ate 25 to 30 pounds of oats and hay a day. “Could the militia be persuaded to change their fatal mode of going to war,” Morgan groaned to Greene, “much provision might be saved; but the custom has taken such deep root that it cannot be abolished.”

Bands of militiamen constantly left the army to hunt for forage. This practice made it impossible for Morgan to know how many men he had in his command. In desperation, he ordered his officers, both Continental and militia, to call the roll every two hours. This measure only gave him more bad news. On January 15, after retreating from the Pacolet to Thicketty Creek, he reported to Greene that he had only 340 militia with him, but did not expect “to have more than two-thirds of these to assist me, should I be attacked, for it is impossible to keep them collected.”