Victory at Yorktown (14 page)

*   *   *

WASHINGTON HAD A
hunch that Clinton would soon “detach to the southward to extend his conquests,” and the American commander was far from sanguine about the rebels' ability to resist him. Sure enough, it was only a few days after Washington reached that conclusion that Sir Henry ordered General Alexander Leslie, with 2,200 men, to the Chesapeake, instructing him to proceed as far as possible up the James River, where he was to seize or destroy any magazines the Americans had in Petersburg or Richmond. Finally, he should establish a post on the Elizabeth River and await orders from Cornwallis.

The rebels' discovery of the Arnold-André plot wrote finis to Clinton's plan to move up the Hudson and seize West Point, but the arrival of an English fleet with the recruits he had been promised permitted Clinton to send Leslie's force south; they had no sooner arrived than Cornwallis ordered them to join him in the Carolinas. That in turn triggered Clinton's decision to dispatch Benedict Arnold's new command to Portsmouth, Virginia, at the mouth of the Chesapeake, though he could “ill spare it.”

Virginia's governor, Thomas Jefferson, in a broadside sent to all the towns, warned them to have their militias ready, with every man to put his gun “into the best order, a bayonet fitted to it, a bayonet belt, cartouche box, canteen with its strap, tomahawk, blanket, and knapsack,” adding that militia captains should consider sending a wagon with every seventy-five men. If this suggests that Virginia was woefully unprepared, that was indeed the case, and much of the blame was attributable to Mr. Jefferson, who had done little to prepare against invasion. As William North reported to Lewis Morris in January 1781, “if the head is in trouble, the members cannot enjoy themselves” and “this state has everything in its power but does nothing.” Arnold, regrettably, “has not been molested. His troops … are infamous beasts [and] march'd through the settled part of Virginia 100 miles.”

Arriving in Virginia, Arnold wasted no time in lashing out at the rebels. His first target was the James River valley, but he had his eye on other opportunities, made possible by the Royal Navy's unopposed support that enabled him to ascend navigable rivers and destroy supplies vital to the American army in the South. Testifying to the effectiveness of his campaign, Baron von Closen noted in his diary, “All the letters from Virginia [to Newport] are full of lamentations over the horrors and depredations that Arnold's detachment is committing there.…”

Quite apart from General Washington's intense desire to capture the traitor, he would have given a lot to remove Arnold from a position that cut the southern army's communications from the north. As matters stood, Arnold had the ability to send some of his troops against the rebels from the north while Cornwallis closed in on them from the south—all of this possible because the British navy dominated the waters off Chesapeake Bay.

More than anyone else, Washington realized the imperative need for a fleet—a French fleet, obviously, since the Americans had nothing worth the name. To John Laurens he wrote, “How loud are our calls from every quarter for a decisive naval superiority, and how might the enemy be crushed if we had it.” He was, as before, thinking of New York and how it could be besieged by a French naval force, and of course there was Charleston, which could also be recaptured with adequate sea power.

*   *   *

THANKS TO THE
catastrophe at Camden, Gates's army was shattered, the militia gone beyond recall, and the Continentals reduced to remnants, totaling no more than twelve hundred men. And in late September of 1780 Cornwallis was on the move, readying his force for a full-scale invasion of North Carolina. His right wing was heading toward Wilmington and the Cape Fear River; the center, under his personal command, was bound for Hillsboro, not far south of the Virginia border; and his left, composed of loyalists commanded by Major Patrick Ferguson, was operating in the foothills of the hostile backcountry, planning to rendezvous with the main army at Charlotte.

This Ferguson was a first-rate soldier, with experience on the Continent and four years in the American war, and his slight build and long, gentle-looking face belied a fearlessness and tenacity that caused fellow officers to call him “Bull Dog.” He had invented what he called a “rifle gun,” a breech-loading weapon that could be fired from a prone position with accuracy and speed (five or six shots a minute, or about twenty-five times that of a muzzle-loading gun with a fouled barrel), and he had the reputation of being one of the best marksmen in the army.

The story was told that Ferguson, at the battle of Brandywine, had George Washington in his sights without knowing who he was and refused to fire because the man's back was turned toward him. In that same engagement a musket ball shattered his right elbow, leaving the arm useless. Now he commanded his own corps of seven loyalist battalions, amounting to about a thousand men, and they had reached the village of Gilbert Town between the Broad and Second Broad rivers when his spies alerted him to the gathering of several thousand over-mountain men, moving toward him through a gap in the mountains. Ferguson issued a broadside, warning residents of the area to beware these “back water men … a set of mongrels,” and led his force to a more secure location on Kings Mountain. This stony spur of the Blue Ridge Mountains had a narrow plateau on its summit, about 600 yards long and 70 to 120 feet wide. It averaged about 100 feet in height above the surrounding land and was a perfect campsite, where Ferguson settled down to await the rebels.

In late September the over-mountain men began to gather, and a curious lot they were. Most were North Carolinians: Colonel Isaac Shelby with 240 men from Sullivan County; Colonel John “Nolichucky Jack” Sevier with 240 from Washington County; and Colonel Charles McDowell with 160 from Burke and Rutherford counties; plus Colonel William Campbell, leading 400 men from Washington County, Virginia. They made their way through snow in the gap and on the bank of the Catawba picked up Colonel Benjamin Cleveland and his 350 men from Wilkes and Surry counties. Shelby was there for a good reason: Ferguson had sent a patriot he took prisoner to tell Shelby if he did not surrender, Ferguson planned to cross the mountains and burn his whole county.

These frontiersmen from the Watauga settlements in what is now Tennessee did not take that sort of threat lightly. They were acutely aware of what the enemy had done at the Battle of the Waxhaws, where Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton attacked Colonel Abraham Buford's Virginia Continentals, rode them down, and massacred his command even though they had surrendered. As an American wrote, “The demand for quarters … was at once found to be in vain … for fifteen minutes after every man was prostrate they went over the ground plunging their bayonets into every one that exhibited any signs of life.…” Only Buford and a handful of other mounted men escaped from the battlefield, and the man who defeated them was known thereafter as “Bloody Tarleton,” and “Tarleton's Quarter” became a rallying cry for the rebels.

Most of the over-mountain irregulars were Scotch-Irish hunters and Indian fighters—big, tough men who had learned combat in the no-quarter warfare of the southern frontier—and they were out to get Ferguson and his Tories after he sent a warning that he planned to hang their leaders and lay waste their homes and settlements. They were deadly shots with their long-barreled rifles, and they traveled light, on horseback, with not much more than a blanket, hunting knife, and a pouch full of ground parched corn sweetened with maple syrup. They were in North Carolina because they preferred to have the fighting here, rather than back home on their farms, near their wives and children.

As Shelby remembered the little army of which he was a part, it “accidentally collected without a head [and] was a mere confused mass, incapable of performing any great achievement.” The officers recognized that they needed a commander, but Charles McDowell, the senior man present, was “too slow” and there was too much rivalry between these local warlords for any one of them to be chosen. So they appointed a committee to decide on tactics and asked William Campbell, who had the advantage of being a Virginian, to serve as officer of the day and see that the committee's plans were executed. As an afterthought they sent McDowell to fetch Daniel Morgan or William Davidson—both generals—to see if one of them would take overall command.

The committee's first decision was to track down Ferguson and “pursue him unremittingly” with as many men as had horses and firearms, leaving the others to follow. Just over nine hundred men set out at daylight on October 6, 1780, and at the Cowpens, a place where a local woman named Hannah had pastured her cows, they met up with Colonel James Williams of South Carolina and four hundred men and pushed on that night and the next day through heavy rains. Sixteen-year-old James Collins wrote that each man slept in his blanket and ate whatever he could lay hands on—usually raw turnips and a mess of parched corn. With that and two or three spoonfuls of honey, washed down with a good draft of cold water, he said, a man “could pass longer without suffering than with any other diet he could use.”

October 7 was gray and overcast, with a scrim of rain, and the men reached Kings Mountain after noon, dismounted, secured their loose gear to saddles, and hitched their horses before falling in behind their officers. Ferguson, they heard, had announced that “he defied God Almighty and all the rebels out of Hell to overcome him,” and Collins recalled that each colonel delivered a short speech to his men, telling those who might be frightened to clear out at once. The teenager said, “I would willingly have been excused, for my feelings were not the most pleasant,” but after giving it some thought, “I could not swallow the appellation of coward.…” About three o'clock the rebels moved to the attack in four columns, and as they reached the foot of the mountain two columns deployed to the right, two to the left, so that they eventually surrounded the enemy. Each man put three or four musket balls in his mouth to prevent thirst and to be ready to reload in a hurry.

The loyalists' position, which Ferguson had thought impregnable, proved to have its disadvantage: the summit was bare ground, while the slopes of the mountain below were covered with trees, affording the attackers good cover. Another piece of luck for them was that when the enemy opened fire from the heights above them, they aimed too high, as is often the case in such circumstances, and the over-mountain men continued to climb. When they came out in the open, Campbell was heard shouting, “Here they are, boys! Shout like hell and fight like devils!” A charge from Ferguson's troops drove them back, but the determined rebels were coming on fast, moving from tree to tree, in a tactic that won the battle; one defender believed that Ferguson's position on top of the mountain would have enabled his men to oppose a much superior force successfully, but the rebels took shelter among the trees and fought in their favorite manner, dodging behind cover, firing, and running quickly to another tree before anyone could draw a bead on them. Another sixteen-year-old private, Thomas Young, was barefooted and found himself out between his regiment and the loyalist lines. Behind him he could see the rebels with white paper stuck in their hats; ahead were the Tories, with pine knots in their headgear for identification.

In the thick of the fight he saw Colonel Williams charge by at full speed. Near the summit a ball hit the officer's horse below the jaw, and the animal began stamping as if it had fallen into a yellow jacket's nest. Williams threw the reins over the horse's head, leaped off, and dashed ahead. Within minutes Young heard someone shout that the colonel was shot, and he ran up the hill to help him, “for I loved him as a father. He had ever been so kind to me and almost always carried a cake in his pocket for me and his little son, Joseph.” Someone sprinkled water on Williams's face and revived him. His son Daniel was holding him in his arms, and the mortally wounded Williams called out, “For God's sake, boys, don't give up the hill!”

Over the roar of battle, the shouting, and the racket of men crashing through the underbrush, both sides could hear the piercing shriek of the silver whistle Patrick Ferguson used to maneuver his men. Mounted on a clever little white horse, he seemed to be everywhere, wearing a checkered hunting shirt over his uniform, the whistle in his teeth, and a sword in his left hand. Suddenly, the whistle was heard no more. Ferguson drooped over the horse's neck with a rifle bullet in his body, his sword broken, his face bleeding badly, and one foot caught in a stirrup. His men lifted him from the horse and propped him against a tree, where he died. At that, the fight went out of his men, and his second in command, Captain Abraham DePeyster, known as “the Bull Dog's pup,” ordered a white flag shown. Ferguson had been the only British soldier in the battle; all the rest, on both sides, were Americans.

At the moment of Ferguson's death Colonel Shelby gained the eastern summit and drove the defenders along the ridge until they were forced down the western end, where their comrades had been fighting Cleveland's and Williams's men. Terrified, the loyalists hunkered down behind their wagons and continued to fight until Shelby ordered them to throw down their arms. But there was no staying the rebel militia, who continued to shoot, yelling, “Buford! Buford! Tarleton's Quarter!” Two men who came out carrying white flags were shot dead despite Campbell's cry, “For God's sake, quit! It's murder to shoot any more!” Finally the carnage ended, but the over-mountain men stood in a circle four-deep, glowering at their prisoners, calling out the names of those who were known for atrocities. When the fight finally ended, the Tories were found to have lost 157 men killed, 163 wounded, and 698 taken prisoner—every single man of Ferguson's command—against rebel losses of 28 killed and 62 wounded. The battle had taken less than an hour.