Band of Giants: The Amateur Soldiers Who Won America's Independence (25 page)

During the summer of 1780, Horatio Gates and Daniel Morgan, both of them inactive, both vexed at Congress, had sat on the porch of Gates’s Virginia estate, drinking and smoking and discussing the progress of the war. Gates mentioned that he hoped to be rewarded for his Saratoga victory with a major independent command in the South. If he received the assignment, he wanted Morgan with him.

Nearing forty-five, Morgan was afflicted by recurring “ciatick pain,” the wear and tear of a rough life. He had sat on the sidelines since 1779, when Washington had passed over him when choosing a leader for the corps of light infantry. Eager to get back into action, he agreed to help his friend if his health permitted. Gates received his southern command, but
by the time Morgan recovered and set out to join him, Gates’s army had been blasted at Camden. Morgan was needed more than ever.

The rifleman’s arrival cheered the shattered army. Gates, gathering the remnants of his command at Hillsborough, asked the Old Wagoner to take charge of a fast-moving “flying army” of infantry and horse. With this mobile force, Morgan could respond to contingencies in that chaotic and dangerous theater of war. Gates assigned him two key lieutenants: The quiet, level-headed John Eager Howard led a reliable contingent of Maryland and Delaware Continentals. Pudgy, round-faced Colonel William Washington was a cavalry commander with a reputation for ferocity in battle.

Before the year was out, Nathanael Greene had arrived to relieve Gates. The southern command was now seen as the graveyard of honor. Although it meant a return to a battlefield command, Greene had been reluctant to take charge of the bleak situation. He reportedly told Washington that his friend Henry Knox was the man for the job: “All obstacles vanish before him; his resources are infinite.”

“True,” Washington replied, “and therefore I cannot part with him.”
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Congress had at last recognized Morgan’s ability by promoting him to brigadier general. Greene was eager for him to lead his flying army into the field. He added several hundred Continentals to the force, all he could spare. Supply and manpower remained crippling problems. Greene found his army “rather a shadow than a substance, having only an imaginary existence,” with barely 1,500 men fit for duty at Charlotte.
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The new commander kept a nervous eye on Cornwallis, camped ninety miles to the south.

Although the military textbooks argued against it, Greene decided to divide his army in the face of a superior enemy. In the depleted land, feeding a concentrated mass of hungry men was next to impossible. Splitting his force would increase forage opportunities and threaten Cornwallis from two directions, perhaps holding him in place while the Americans rebuilt their capability. Spreading out would also hearten patriots in the countryside.

Just before Christmas 1780, Greene sent Morgan, with about six hundred men, to the northwest corner of South Carolina. He led the rest of the army east across the border of that same state to the town of Cheraw. The two wings, separated by 140 miles, would be unable to come quickly to the aid of each other if Cornwallis attacked.

Morgan camped in an area laced by streams and tributaries flowing into the Broad River, which angled southeast toward the ocean. He sent William Washington and eighty horsemen out to expand his presence in
the country. Unlike his distant cousin George, Washington, then twenty-eight, was no good at administrative details. Six feet tall and stocky to the point of obesity, he loved action.

British cavalry master Tarleton went out with a battalion of the best British troops to parry the rebels in the area. Of Morgan, Cornwallis told Tarleton that if he came “within your reach, I should wish you to push him to the utmost.”
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Tarleton found that Morgan was very much within his reach. During the first days of 1781, he began to chase the rebels’ flying army.

Tarleton sent a message to his superior: the divided enemy force presented an opportunity for a master stroke. Cornwallis agreed. He would march the main British army up the east bank of the Broad River. Tarleton would pursue Morgan along the west side, hopping tributaries as he went.
One of them would trap and destroy Morgan’s smaller corps while Greene remained impotent to the east.

Tarleton’s force was, like Morgan’s, an independent command designed to move quickly. In addition to his British Legion of horse and foot soldiers, he had with him two crack contingents of British regulars, including the lethal 71st Highlander Regiment, hard-eyed Scotsmen with fight in their blood.

On the surface, Tarleton and Morgan were opposites. The British colonel had been raised in privilege, attended Oxford, and studied law. He was young, debonair, a celebrated womanizer. Morgan knew little of either the classroom or the drawing room. He was still the Old Wagoner, like his men, a rustic backwoodsman. Yet both officers were fighters.
Tarleton had forged a reputation with his saber, Morgan with his rifle. Now they were rushing toward a confrontation.

On hearing of Tarleton’s approach, Morgan began to scurry north, his troops wading icy river fords. The idea was to draw Tarleton further from his supplies and further from Cornwallis. By January 16, Morgan was camped on the far bank of the Pacolet River, the most northern tributary. Beyond him, the Broad River itself curved westward to form an obstacle. He had left riflemen behind to oppose Tarleton at the fords and to give warning of his approach.

Daniel Morgan’s name, like John Stark’s, inspired militiamen eager to serve under a man they considered one of their own. A body of South Carolina militia had arrived in camp under Andrew Pickens. The tall brigadier was a man who “would first take the words out of his mouth, between his fingers, and examine them before he uttered them.”
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A devout Presbyterian of the same Scots-Irish heritage as those who had fought at Kings Mountain—some of them were with him now—Pickens had seen his farm burned by Tories. He and his men were eager for action.

They would soon have it. While they ate breakfast that frigid January morning, a messenger arrived with alarming news. Tarleton had pulled the old trick of leaving campfires burning on the far side of the Pacolet while he hurried his men through the night to an unguarded ford and crossed over. His force was now bearing down on Morgan.

Pots were left bubbling on fires as Morgan immediately put his men on the march. He sent word to militia units camped nearby and to those still on their way to join him. If he could not escape across the Broad River, a battle might be imminent.

His men marched all day. As darkness fell, they found themselves at the same cattle ranch, the Cowpens, where the over-mountain men had rested on their way to Kings Mountain the previous October. Morgan
decided to camp there, five miles south of the Broad. He could not take the chance of Tarleton catching him while he was fleeing. Surveying the terrain, he judged this an acceptable place to fight, if it came to that. And the cattle wandering the fields offered his men full stomachs.

Morgan also knew that his South Carolina militiamen were unlikely to follow him over the state line, only a few miles away. If he abandoned their state, they would abandon him. And because Cowpens was a well-known crossroads, it would serve as a convenient rendezvous spot for militiamen. Indeed, additional fighters kept arriving in camp all night.

The open ground favored Tarleton’s horsemen. The Broad River to the north would block Morgan’s escape if events went against them. “As to retreat,” Morgan said later, “it was the very thing I wished to cut off all hope of.” He knew what had happened at Camden. He wanted his troops to understand that if they gave way, there was no haven in sight. “When men are forced to fight, they will sell their lives dearly.” He was preparing a desperate gamble.
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In the dark, around the campfires, Morgan planned what he would do if Tarleton should appear. He did not ask his officers’ advice—the ideas were all his own. But he communicated his thinking to men of every rank. It was a simple plan, and he knew how to explain it in language that the men could understand. Each body of troops would have a specific task in the fight, he said, and each task would fit into the bigger scheme.

Morgan had very little military training. He had not read books about the art. He based everything on his own experience as a bare-knuckle fighter and a veteran of Quebec, Saratoga, and other battles. He saw with a remarkably clear vision, uncluttered by social furniture and learned biases. The story was told of him that he was once riding past a couple of soldiers trying to clear a boulder from a roadway. A lieutenant was watching them. “Why,” Morgan asked him, “don’t you help?” “Colonel Morgan, I am an officer,” the man replied. “Oh, I didn’t think of that,” Morgan said, climbing down and adding his own formidable strength to the privates’ effort.

All that night, he walked through camp, boosting his men’s spirits, telling tales, calming fears. He called Tarleton, the Oxford gentleman, “Benny,” as if he were another backwoods bully. “He went among the volunteers,” a private remembered, “helped them fix their swords, joked with them about their sweet-hearts.”
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“My friends in arms,” he called them, “my dear boys.”

All night, Morgan talked. “I don’t believe he slept a wink that night,” one of his men noted. When morning came, his troops were well fed and rested. Like John Stark, who ordered his men to walk rather than run to
Bunker Hill, Morgan knew that rested troops could fight with far more vigor than those who had spent their energy getting to the battle.

Early on the morning of January 17, 1781, while the winter sky was still black, word arrived from scouts. Tarleton had appeared. He was barely five miles away and was coming “like a thunder storm.”
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Morgan roused his men. “Boys, get up, Benny’s coming!” he told them. They had time for a quick breakfast before their officers positioned them for battle. The field Morgan had selected was about a quarter mile long. Largely free of brush and dotted with a few trees, it undulated over knolls and hollows, gently rising from south to north. Morgan positioned his men facing south, their flanks ending at low, wet areas that would discourage the movement of horsemen.

All were in position before dawn. Their officers allowed the men to sit or squat as they waited, blowing on their hands in the bitter, clammy morning. Morgan climbed onto his horse and rode the lines, pounding his fist into his hand as he spoke, haranguing his men “in a popular and forcible style of elocution.”
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As the sky began to lighten, the men’s ears picked up the crackle of distant gunfire. Scouts were sounding the alarm. Men and horses appeared in the trees at the far end of the field. Men in green coats faced with black. Men in scarlet and white. Drums. The sour skirl of bagpipes.

“We look’d at each other for a considerable time,” a private remembered.
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Time was growing elastic, stretching and compressing.

Morgan had sent 150 North Carolina riflemen to the forward edge of the field as skirmishers. Hiding behind trees, they fired to halt the British and make them form their line. “Pick off the epaulets!” Morgan told them. Aim for the officers.

Tarleton was in a hurry. He saw a line of enemy opposing him three hundred yards beyond the skirmishers. Was this the main body of Morgan’s force, or a rear guard left to delay him while Morgan escaped across the river? He had to find out quickly. He had to attack.

He sent fifty dragoons charging toward the enemy. The rifle shots from the North Carolina men became a rapid staccato, a “galling fire.” Fifteen of the horsemen fell from their saddles. The rest heaved on their reins and retreated.

The British battle line now began to tromp forward, drums pounding. The rebel riflemen scurried toward their own lines. With “the Discharge of two pieces of Cannon and three Huizzas,” the attack began. The British came on, one militiaman remembered, “rapidly as if certain of victory.”
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“They give us the British halloo, boys,” Morgan shouted, “give
them
the Indian halloo!” The howl of the wilderness arose from raw American throats. Morgan “galloped along the lines, cheering the men.”

What the British regulars saw ahead of them was a line of militiamen, armed only with rifles and shotguns, no bayonets; amateur troops, certain to break. Tarleton’s men came on at “a sort of trot.” The enemy “Raised a prodigious yell,” Morgan would report, “and came Running at us as if they Intended to eat us up.”
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“Don’t fire!” was the word from the American officers directing Pickens’s South Carolina militiamen. Let the enemy approach. Closer, closer. At thirty-five yards, faces became recognizable. Now the patriots let loose a volley. The sound was like heavy canvas ripping. The militiamen saw “something like a recoil” in the enemy line.

But the disciplined regulars immediately “rent the air with their shouts and quickened their advance.” The British fired and charged. It took them twenty seconds to reach the American line. Unable to reload fast enough, staring at oncoming bayonets, the militiamen turned and ran, desperate to avoid the sharp steel.