First Salute (36 page)

The French alliance had now intervened, convincing Cornwallis that the doorways by which the French could enter, bringing men, money and arms to the rebels, must be closed, in particular those of Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake ports were in regular use by the Americans for the shipping of tobacco and cotton and export goods to European traders to finance the purchase of arms and ammunition. Cornwallis envisaged
a major offensive to subdue the South and make an end of insurgency there, for which Clinton was obviously disinclined. What Clinton wanted was for Cornwallis to settle contentedly at a permanent base and lend his army for operations in Pennsylvania or for defense of New York. Cornwallis thought this was pointless and wrote to his colleague General Phillips the shocking suggestion that “
if we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York.” Instead, we should “bring our whole force into Virginia” where “we then have a stake to fight for” and where his refrain “
A successful battle may give us America” might be realized.

Proof of the dogma was not making much progress. The fighting at this time was conducted for the British by two hated and dreaded figures, the cavalry Colonel Banastre Tarleton, valued highly by Cornwallis as the spearhead of his army, and the traitor Benedict Arnold, who, having sold himself to the British for £10,000, as he thought, and fringe benefits, had to prove by his violence the value of what he had sold. (He had asked for £10,000 but received £6,000, calculated on a basis of 2 guineas per man of the West Point garrison.) Tarleton’s heavy dragoons trampled fields of corn and rye while his and Arnold’s raiders plundered and destroyed the harvested tobacco and grain in barns, spreading devastation. Tarleton was charged with driving cattle, pigs and poultry into barns before setting them afire. He was known as “no quarter Tarleton” for his violation of surrender rules in the
Waxhaw massacre, where he had caught a body of American troops that held its fire too long before firing at fifty yards, too late to stop the charging cavalry. After surrender, they were cut down when Tarleton’s men, let loose to wield their knife-edged sabers, killed a total of 113 and wounded 150 more, of whom half died of their wounds. Enmity flared higher when the tale of the Waxhaw spread through the Carolinas, inflaming hatred and hostility and sharpening the conflict of Loyalists and patriots.

Owing to his wife’s serious illness, Cornwallis hurried home a second time, to be met by the misery of her death shortly after he reached England. Profoundly depressed, he wrote to his brother that the loss of his wife had “effectually destroyed all hopes of happiness in this world.” He could find nothing to live for save the army. The personal tragedy, leaving him alone and unoccupied, brought him back to the war once more, in July, 1779.

In August, 1780, Cornwallis defeated Gates in the battle of Camden. Though the English saw Camden as a pronounced victory, rebellion
was not reduced and American militia and Continentals did not dissolve and leave the field to the victors. “We fight,” as Greene wrote to Luzerne, “get beat and rise to fight again.” As this was all too true, a victory in the field for the British did not appear to bring the contest any nearer to victory in the war. Greene’s simple formula kept the nucleus of an army and the coals of rebellion alive in the South, while the defeat at Camden proved almost a benefit because it led to the replacement of Gates and Washington’s appointment of Greene and Steuben to reform and command the southern army. All they had left was a remnant of the Continental militia, whose members would join together to fight for a few days or weeks and then return to care for their crops and fields, plus a saving addition of a few formidable partisans or guerrilla leaders, like the Swamp Fox and Andrew Pickens and Thomas Sumter, who kept the fighting hot and resistance to the British alive. Intensified raids of destruction by Tarleton’s men, whose cavalry gave them extra mobility, and the outrage aroused by the Waxhaw massacre stirred desires of revenge and augmented the feud between Loyalists and patriots. Their strife as much as anything kept the fires of rebellion hot in the Carolinas. In South Carolina, Cornwallis had to admit that the
Swamp Fox “had so wrought on the minds of the people partly by the terror and punishments and partly by the promise of plunder that there was scarce an inhabitant [in the region] that was not in arms against us.” His diagnosis of the hostility, ignoring the raids of Tarleton and Benedict Arnold, who were plundering homes, burning flour mills and dragging off civilians as prisoners to the lethal prison ships, reflects the willful blindness of the invader who assures himself that the natives are only made unfriendly by some other provocation than his own. Cornwallis was convinced that after so crushing a defeat as the Americans had sustained at Camden, they could not maintain the Revolution in the South except with help from the North. To him this meant one thing—that he must wipe out the rebel forces in North Carolina and take control of that province. The one necessity for victory—to destroy the enemy’s army—proved beyond his reach. Exasperated by the partisans’ warfare that erupted whenever districts were thought pacified, Cornwallis’ commander in the province, Major Patrick Ferguson, resorted to the threat of terror. He issued a proclamation in September, 1780, to patriot officers that if they persisted in resistance to British arms, he would march over the mountains, hang their leaders and lay waste to the country with fire and sword. Ferguson was not a tyrant but
ordinarily a humane and temperate individual. He had entered military service at fourteen, when his family purchased for him a cornetcy commission in the Royal Scots Greys. After a study of military science, more technical than ballroom dancing and the opera, he invented a rapid-firing breech-loading rifle capable of four shots a minute while hitting a target at 200 yards. As more efficient than anything the British Army possessed, it was, of course, not adopted; only 200 were manufactured. Ferguson was one of the few English officers to treat the American Loyalists with equality, sitting and talking with them for hours on the state of affairs and the ruinous effects of rebellion. As a local hero to the back-country people, he was chosen to lead a campaign to stamp out the patriot fires. Nevertheless, his ill-advised proclamation had the normal effect of such things. Used by the partisan leaders to call “over-mountain” men to throw off the iron heel of the oppressor in defense of their homes and lands, it brought in more than 1,000 mounted volunteers with their sharpshooting rifles. Clad in buckskin, they assembled at Sycamore Shoals in Tennessee. Ferguson sensed their dangerous mood and sent for reinforcements to Cornwallis, who was camped with his army only 35 miles away at Charlotte in North Carolina. His message, expressing urgency, read “
something must be done,” but the help did not come. Taking the road to Charlotte that passed by a high ridge called
King’s Mountain, and sharing the usual assumption that the Americans would be beaten, Ferguson decided to confront his pursuers on the ridge, though he might have reached Cornwallis in a couple of hours. He took his stand on a cleared oval space that crowned the ridge whose slopes were thickly wooded by tall pines from top to bottom, creating, as he believed, an impregnable position. The frontiersmen, informed of his location by spies, marched through a night of rain with rifles wrapped to keep them dry and their ears alert for sounds of ambush. As the weather cleared, they reached King’s Mountain at three in the afternoon, where they dismounted and circled the base of the hill. Having no commander, they elected a Colonel William Campbell to take command. Then, with war whoops and barking rifles, they charged up the hill, crouching behind tree trunks as they climbed. The height above, which had seemed a daunting obstacle, proved an advantage, for the British fire from the ridge “overshot us altogether, scarce touching a man except those on horseback.” Ferguson’s Loyalists, with bayonets bared, came charging downhill under the frontiersmen’s deadly rifle fire which felled them in rows. The redcoat ranks wavered and
fell back. Attempting to rally the assault, Ferguson rode forward on a white horse, slashing with his sword at two flags of surrender already raised among his troops by men in panic. Target of fifty rifles, he was pierced and torn by their bullets and blasted from the saddle to a dead heap on the ground. The ridge was captured; the Battle of King’s Mountain was over in half an hour. His bloodstained riderless white horse plunged in abandon down the embattled slope where Ferguson died. News of the defeat at King’s Mountain sped through the region, causing Loyalist adherents to blow away like dust clouds. “
Dastardly and pusillanimous” in Cornwallis’ words, they refused after King’s Mountain to aid the British while the rebels turned more “inveterate in rancour.” Seven hundred of the Loyalist force that fought with Ferguson were taken prisoner. Of them, twenty-four were tried for treason by the rebels at a drumhead court-martial, and nine found guilty and hanged, heating the feud of Loyalists versus patriots.

In this situation Cornwallis was persuaded he must abandon the campaign for North Carolina and fall back to winter in South Carolina. Accordingly he set out for Winnsboro, about fifty miles south of King’s Mountain and thirty miles from Camden, where his fortunes had been so high. The retreat, though the distance was short, proved a ghastly ordeal and the winter at Winnsboro his Valley Forge. In continual rain his men marched without tents and with food so scarce that they subsisted on nothing but turnips and Indian corn scratched from the fields for a yield of five ears a day for two men. With no rum and no beef, they pulled their wounded in wagons jouncing over rough fields. Rivers were the worst, with half-starved horses barely able to reach the other side through rushing icy waters. The last reverse was loss of a single blockhouse, made of strong logs, on a hill which had been fortified by Colonel Rugeley of the Loyalist militia with earth piled at the base and a circle of stakes defying it to be taken except by cannon. The American cavalry officer Colonel William Washington fashioned an imitation cannon from a tree trunk and, pulling it up, though not too close for inspection, summoned the blockhouse to surrender. Colonel Rugeley yielded without firing a shot.

For the patriots, the small triumph at King’s Mountain was offset by the difficulties of trying to prepare for a winter without the suffering of Morristown and Valley Forge. Pennsylvania had 5,000 horned cattle growing too thin to serve for beef. They could not be slaughtered anyway, because there was no hard money to buy salt to preserve the meat and
merchants would not salt anything for paper money. Shortage of everything persisted—of cash first of all, of clothes, shoes, blankets, ammunition and, less material but more important, of popular support. Lethargy in prosperous Virginia was notable. While he believed that “the views and wishes of the great body of the people are with us,” Greene wrote to Jefferson, then Governor of Virginia, “they are, except, for the influence of a few, a lifeless and inanimate mass without direction or spirit to employ the means they possess for their own security.” Washington felt chagrined to have the French witness the poverty of his army and the “paucity of enlistments.” When the French came to find “that
we have but a handful of men in the field,” he feared that they “might sail away.” Washington was sadly discovering the frailty of his fellowmen. “It is a melancholy thing,” he wrote, “to see such a decay of public virtue and the fairest prospects overcast and clouded by a host of infamous harpies who to acquire a little pelf, would involve this great continent in inextricable ruin.… Unless leaders in the states bestir themselves, our affairs are irretrievably lost.” Yet he never for a moment believed them lost. Through it all he had “no doubt but that
the same bountiful Providence which has relieved us in a variety of difficulties before will enable us to emerge from them ultimately and crown our struggles with success.” In the face of the piling up of frustrations and disappointments—the mutinies, the fall of credit, doubting officers and failing army—Washington was still able, when he learned from Laurens that de Grasse was bringing part of his fleet to America, to state to a member of Congress with the confident assurance that made him unique, “
The game is yet in our hands … a cloud may pass over us, individuals may be ruined and the country at large or particular States undergo temporary distress, but certain I am that it is in our power to bring this war to a happy conclusion.” If it was the need of the hour that produced a man so firm in purpose, so unshakable in faith, the same need had not yet produced a nation to match him.

Despite Cornwallis’ recent setbacks, the crushing of Greene’s army, engine of rebellion in the South, was still his overriding objective. On New Year’s Day, 1781, the year of so many decisions, Tarleton, in the van of Cornwallis’ force, received orders from the General “to push Morgan [in Greene’s army] to the utmost. No time is to be lost.” Tarleton had a force of disciplined dragoons, light infantry and five battalions of British regulars and a small artillery unit, altogether about 1,100 men. General Daniel Morgan commanded 1,600 Continental infantry, the
Maryland and Virginia, and other state militias, 200 Virginia riflemen and a cavalry unit of his own, numbering 160 horsemen. Alerted by local partisans of Tarleton’s advance, Morgan took up position in a thinly wooded camp in the bend of the Broad River near the northern border of South Carolina. No Alamo or Argonne with heroic overtones, the site bore the plain domestic name Cowpens because cattle were customarily penned there when awaiting delivery to market. Morgan, crippled by painful arthritis, made camp at the base of a hill flanked by woods to prevent surprise penetration. Expecting his untrained militia to run at the charge of the dreaded Cavalry Legion, but knowing they could not run far because of the unfordable river behind them, he limped among the campfires, encouraging the men to stand firm next morning, long enough to fire three volleys. “
Just hold your heads up, boys, three fires and you are free,” and he told them how the girls would kiss them and the old folks bless them when they returned home. As the first British infantry line marched forward with heavy tread and fierce shouts, Morgan called, “They are giving us the British halloo. Give them the Indian halloo, by God!” and was answered by wild cheers and shouts from his own lines. Calling to the men to aim for the epaulets of officers, he mounted and rode for the place of his tethered horses, to which he could see a militia unit was fleeing. When the runaways reached the horse park, the General was there ahead, waving his sword and barring their way, and crying to them to “Form again! Give them one more fire, and the day is ours!” Behind the lines, Virginia sharpshooters were picking off the riders from Tarleton’s saddles. Suddenly the dragoons were met in turn by a charge of American cavalry, under Colonel William Washington, swinging their sabers with no less vigor than the enemy. Pursued by the Americans for nearly a mile, the British line lost cohesion. “Give them one fire,” ordered Colonel Washington, “and I’ll charge them.” Below the hill, riflemen and Continentals were pouring fire on the British infantry, and at the order “Give them bayonet!” swept down upon them. Seeing their infantry broken and running, Tarleton’s horsemen, despite his furious orders, refused to make another charge, and turned and galloped from the field, shortly followed by their commander. Surrounded by vengeful rebels, his Legion, his dragoons, his light infantry and regular foot soldiers surrendered—all but a few obdurate artillerymen, who refused to yield and were killed or captured defending their guns. The British lost
at Cowpens 110 dead, 700 prisoners, 800 muskets, 100 horses and Tarleton’s entire baggage train of
35 wagons with ammunition. Except for 300 who escaped, virtually the whole of Tarleton’s force was killed or captured—a substantial portion of Cornwallis’ army. “The late affair,” he was to say, “has
almost broke my heart.” General Greene could take more satisfaction. “After this,” he said, “nothing seems difficult.”