First Salute (37 page)

Determined to allow the rebels no chance to exult over their victory at Cowpens, Cornwallis was seized by a passion for pursuit, to catch up and annihilate the enemy and take from them any encouragement his reverse might have given. The army’s intention, as General O’Hara, Cornwallis’ deputy commander, wrote to the Duke of Grafton, Lord Privy Seal in the North ministry, was almost fanatic: “Without baggage, necessaries or provisions of any sort for officer or soldier, in the most barren, inhospitable unhealthy part of North America, opposed to the most savage inveterate perfidious, cruel enemy, with zeal and bayonets only, it was resolved to follow Greene’s army to the end of the world.” Cornwallis needed a victorious battle not only for public effect but to gain control of the region, for as long as Greene remained in the Carolinas as a center of resistance, the rebellion would not be stamped out. Morgan was no less anxious to bring his company with booty and prisoners out of the pursuer’s way. Still determined to eliminate Greene and reclaim the South, Cornwallis was soon joined by reinforcements of 1,500 men, under General Leslie, sent by Clinton, who had received an addition of Irish recruits to fill their places in New York. With these reinforcements he intended to pursue his offensive into North Carolina.

Recent heavy rains had made high water in the rivers and turned the roads into troughs of mud that sucked at the marchers’ boots and slowed progress. Morgan, aching from his ailments, could not trot his horse and could hardly sit astride. Greene, aware of Morgan’s condition, was anxious to bring him safely out. With his usual care, he had ordered preparation of wheeled platforms on which improvised pontoons could be hauled with the army for crossing rivers. By this foresight, he was able to ease and speed Morgan’s flight and put his own army across flooded rivers, now grown too deep for fording. Cornwallis’ large army, plowing heavily through the mud churned by Morgan’s passage, was slowed, and delayed at every river, but kept on coming. In steady rain mixed with snow, they were making no more than six miles a day. Recognizing that at this rate he would not catch his fox, Cornwallis decided he must lighten his wagon train to speed his pace. On January 25, in midwinter, 250 miles from the nearest point of resupply at Wilmington,
North Carolina, he ordered the discarding of what the Romans, knowing the problem, called
impedimenta
, all but a minimum of provisions and ammunition, and all “comforts”—that is, tents, blankets, personal baggage and, to the horror of his troops, several hogsheads of rum—the whole burned in a consuming conflagration as if to burn away the greatest British humiliation since Saratoga. To set an example, Cornwallis threw his own baggage into the flames. In the midst of nowhere, the extremism of the act seems almost suicidal, as if some premonition of the end, like the chill shadow of a cloud that darkens the earth, had turned his every prospect black. At first, free of its heavy wagons, the column made up speed, only to find itself blocked by the Dan River at flood stage with naked banks from which all boats had been pulled away by the Americans. The radical stripping of impediments had been in vain, leaving Cornwallis now with no choice but to retreat in the hope of rallying Loyalists’ support in the countryside and reaching a point of resupply. By scouring the country and slaughtering draft oxen for meat, he made it with an exhausted and hungry army back to Hillsboro, at that time the capital of North Carolina, supposedly a Loyalist center, where he raised the royal flag and issued a call to citizens to take up arms with his forces. On the principle that to declare a thing done can have the same effect as doing it, he added a proclamation that North Carolina had been recovered for the Crown. It was not persuasive. So few responded to the call to arms as to amaze General O’Hara at his government’s deceived expectations, “
Fatal infatuation! When will government see these people thro’ the proper medium? I am persuaded never.” It was now February, 1781, and the British were no nearer a secure hold on the South or the “battle [that] will give us America,” though Cornwallis was still bent on achieving it by a battle with Greene that would eliminate him as the fulcrum of resistance in the South. Greene’s ever-reviving force was to Cornwallis what Gaul was to Caesar: it had to be conquered, not merely to avenge his defeats but because there was no point in his operations unless they were directed toward restoring royal government in the South as a basis for its restoration in America. Only this could justify the lives lost at King’s Mountain and Cowpens and comfort the shades of the men who had died there that they had not died emptily.

Johannes de Graaff, artist unknown

First Marquess, Lord Cornwallis, Commander of the British forces in the last campaign, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783

General George Washington at Trenton, by John Trumbull, 1792

The Siege of Yorktown, showing Williamsburg and Yorktown left of center, naval action of the Battle of the Bay, right of center, and the subsequent blockade of the Bay by the French fleet

Surrender of the British at Yorktown, October 19, 1781, by John Trumbull, 1786–87

Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney in his last years, by Joshua Reynolds, 1789

With his losses restored by the reinforcements, Cornwallis felt fit for battle again.

In pursuit Cornwallis was always at his most vigorous, though
harassed by rebel partisans and Marion’s men and hampered by poor intelligence. He could get nothing from the local Loyalists. “Our friends hereabouts,” as he wrote to Tarleton, “are so timid and stupid” as to be useless. Supplies, supposed to reach him from New York via Charleston, often failed because of the partisans’ disruption of the roads. Absent rum after a day’s cold wet march was the worst privation, leaving many of the men, weakened by malaria, to be kept alive on opium. The underfed horses were sometimes too weak to pull the artillery, and men weakened by fever and shaking with ague often had to substitute for them. Their General while keeping his army moving had to organize protection of the supply line and push his way through to confront Greene. Rivers at flood stage in the winter rains had to be forded. Delayed for two or three days at a time at the banks of swollen rivers, Cornwallis fumed as he waited for the waters to subside. At the Catawba, broad, deep and rapid, and filled with “very large rocks,” Cornwallis, deceived by faulty or false intelligence, was led to the wagon ford of “swimming water” instead of to the shallower horse ford. The strongest men and horses were swept downstream in the swift current. Leading the van on a spirited mount, Cornwallis plunged in. His horse was shot in midstream by North Carolina militia posted behind timber at the fords. With a general’s spirit, the horse managed to clamber to the banks before it went down. General O’Hara’s horse fell on the rocks and was rolled with his rider forty yards in the torrent. The river was a mass of struggling redcoats, as reported by a Loyalist observer, “
a-hollerin’, a-snortin’ and a-drownin’, a-snortin’, a-hollerin’ and a-drownin’.” With their knapsacks weighted with powder and ball, and their muskets across their shoulders, the redcoats could not fire, but in the heavy fog hanging over the river the North Carolinians could not get accurate range for general slaughter.

Greene, certain that Cornwallis would not stop until he had avenged his defeat at Cowpens and recovered the prisoners, pushed on as hard as his pursuer. His strategy was to keep Cornwallis moving, luring him northward in his pursuit away from his supply bases until, without supply train, he would be exhausted and isolated. He himself had received reinforcements from Steuben, giving him an army of about 4,000, of whom a third was militia, and he would have liked to turn and face his foe in a pitched battle, but against the enemy’s augmented force he was not going to allow himself to be caught at a time and place of the enemy’s choosing. Facing better trained troops, the best he could do was
to deploy at his own time at a site to his own advantage. Traveling light, with his men carrying small portions of dried beef and corn and salt in wallets and guided by partisans who knew the bypaths through the swamps and forests, he kept well ahead of Cornwallis until, early in March, he came to Guilford in the center of North Carolina. A place he had previously reconnoitered, it was located on the main north-south road where it met at right angles an east-west road running along a wooded ridge. At the junction of the roads stood Guilford’s courthouse at the base of a gradual slope where the main road ran up to the top of the ridge. Halfway up the slope was a broad clearing flanked by thin woods, open enough to permit visibility for rifle fire. The site was similar to Cowpens, and here Greene decided to make his stand. He sorely missed Morgan, whom he had sent on his way home to Virginia in a litter, but he possessed Morgan’s shadow in a careful report that Morgan had written out for him after Cowpens. Knowing that Cornwallis would pursue for a finishing fight, Morgan had advised Greene to place his least reliable militia, the North Carolinians, in the center in a line interspersed with troops picked for firmness, and with a line behind of veteran Continentals to “
shoot the first man who runs.” On either side of the front line would be placed Virginia riflemen and small cavalry units of sixty horsemen each, and with them on the slope two of Greene’s four guns to command the approach along the main road.