by Jack Kelly
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.”17 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.”18 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.19
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.”20 “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.”21 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.”22
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.23 Time was growing elastic, stretching and compressing.
Morgan had sent 150 North Carol
ina 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.”24
“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.”25
“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.
It was another Camden. The sight of enemy soldiers’ backs delighted the British infantrymen, inspired them. Victory! Yelling redcoats pounded forward, thrusting their lethal bayonets.
Passing over a low ridge, the British caught sight of another line of soldiers ahead of them. Not so many men as in the militia ranks, but these were American Continentals, uniformed in blue and white, their own bayonets glittering in the cold morning light. The militiamen were slipping through gaps in their line and disappearing to the rear.
British officers screamed orders. The men slowed, halted to dress their ranks. The battlefield narrowed here. The British now stood shoulder to shoulder. Their line, longer than that of the rebels, extended beyond Howard’s Maryland and Delaware Continentals on the American right.
The British presented their muskets and fired. When the last of the militiamen had cleared their front, the Continentals answered, one corps, then another delivering a disciplined fire. “It seemed like one sheet of flame from right to left,” an officer said. Morgan later wrote to Greene, “When the enemy advanced on our lines they received a well directed and incessant fire.”26 Incessant—the field was now a cauldron of hammering, ear-numbing noise, the deep roar of muskets, the crackle of rifles, an all-out contest of fire against fire.
A Delaware private recalled Morgan’s “powerful & trumpet like voice” that “drove fear from every bosom, and gave new energies to every man.”27 It was the “awful voice” that had heartened soldiers during the snowy struggle at Quebec.
Men tasted gunpowder, tasted waxed paper as they bit cartridge after cartridge. They sweated. Their faces turned black with scorched powder. Bullets tore the air with a hoarse hum or a singing crescendo. Wounded men screamed. Officers bellowed. Prime and load! Fire! The intensity of the action lifted men’s minds from their bodies and let them view the confusion from on high.
Tarleton ordered the powerful Highlanders, supported by fifty dragoons, to sweep past the Americans’ right and crash into their rear. The horsemen burst through a small group of the North Carolina riflemen shielding the American flank, hacking shoulders and heads with sabers, trampling men. The Highlanders screamed Gaelic curses and came on at a run.
Howard directed the unit on the end of his line to wheel backward to take the charge from their front. The order was misunderstood, they retreated instead. Then, spontaneously, the next unit fell back, and the next.
Morgan had been busy behind the line rallying the militia. “Form, form my brave fellows! Give them one more fire and the day is ours. Old Morgan was never beaten.” His plan was for the militiamen to find safety behind the bayonets of the Continentals, sort themselves out, and form a reserve force.
Now he galloped to the collapsing Continental line. The repositioning of troops was a mistake, Howard told him. But they could see that the retreating men were still under the control of their officers. They were reloading as they marched. Let them retreat, Morgan said, then form again on a new line. He rode back a hundred yards and chose the spot. Here.
The Highlanders smelled victory. The enemy was giving way before them. They charged, broke ranks, stumbled ahead, eager for the kill. They came on “like a mob.” The Continentals, on order, halted and faced about. The Highlanders were nearly on them, barely fifteen yards away. Fire! Their “close and murderous fire” smashed into the faces of their pursuers.
Many Highlanders fell dead. All were stunned. Howard saw his chance. He told his drummer to sound the charge. His men leveled their bayonets and started forward. Morgan ordered Washington to sweep in with his dragoons. The American horsemen came on, “shouting and charging like madmen.” Pickens’s militiamen, whom Morgan had helped reorganize, rushed up to help, pouring fire into the mass of scarlet uniforms.
It was too much. The Highlanders, the best troops in the British army, buckled. Then the entire British line broke, reeled backward, turned to the rear, and ran. Many threw down their guns and, a Continental private chortled, “did the prettiest sort of running!”28
The Americans surrounded the disorganized Highlanders. Their commander, seeing that all was lost, handed Howard his sword. Continentals rushed forward to grab the British cannon. More and more enemy soldiers were surrendering. Tarleton tried to lead his cavalry reserve into the fray. The horsemen refused to obey their young commander.
“All attempts to restore order, recollection, or courage, proved fruitless,” Tarleton later reported.29 Two hundred dragoons turned and rode away, pursued by Washington’s cavalry.
Quiet fell on the field like a heavy weight. The whole thing had lasted barely forty minutes. An exuberant Morgan picked up a nine-year-old drummer boy, who had risked his life amid the din, and kissed him on both cheeks.
Morgan had read the impulsive Tarleton precisely. “I knew my adversary, and was perfectly sure I should have nothing but downright fighting.”30 He had positioned his men in a brilliant, unconventional arrangement—militiamen in front but with permission to fall back behind stronger lines. He had used his charisma and energy to exert his will against the enemy. He had won the most decisive patriot victory of the war, utterly destroying Tarleton’s dreaded Legion. He had, he wrote to a friend, given Tarleton “a devil of a whiping.”31 His masterly handling of his men is studied by tacticians to this day.
He had little time to savor his victory. Escaping to the north with his haul of eight hundred prisoners, Morgan needed to keep moving, keep crossing rivers, to avoid Cornwallis. But when Cornwallis sent the news to General Henry Clinton in New York, he wrote that it was “impossible to foresee all the consequences that this unexpected and extraordinary event may produce.” To Lord Rawdon, he sighed that “the late affair has almost broke my heart.”32
Abigail Adams called Morgan “the rising Hero in the South.” But Cowpens wa
s to be the Old Wagoner’s last battle. During the first week in February 1781, he reunited his troops with Greene’s army. Morgan had increasingly been laid low with sciatica, malaria, and fever, and, he told Greene, “Nothing will help me but rest.” Reluctantly, Greene let him go. “Great generals are scarce,” he lamented. “There are few Morgans to be found.”33
Seventeen
War Is an Intricate Business
1781
Nathanael Greene, born to the middle class, had never lost the habit of looking over his shoulder. In spite of his exalted position in the Continental Army, he remained nervous about his rank in society. When he wrote to his wife, Caty, about joining him in camp, he suggested that she send a letter to Lucy Knox to ask for new clothes from Boston. “But remember when you write to Mrs. Knox . . . mind and spell well. You are defective in this matter, my love. . . . People are often laught at for not spelling well.”1 Greene’s own spelling was shaky, and the memory of being barred from leadership of his militia unit because of his limp still galled him. The rank of major general fueled his pride but brought with it a certain vertigo.
As the army’s quartermaster general, Greene had responded to a mild admonition from Washington by complaining, “I can submit very patiently to deserved censure; but it wounds my feelings exceedingly to meet with a rebuke for doing what I conceived to be a proper part of my duty.”2
Greene could evoke mirth with his dinner table imitations of Dr. Slop, a character in the popular comic novel Tristram Shandy, yet he was subject to bouts of gloomy disappointment. “There is so much wickedness and viliany in the World,” he wrote Caty in the autumn of 1780, “and so little regard paid to truth, honor and justice that I am almost sick of life.”3
Now, as commander of all forces in the South, Greene’s doubts resurfaced. “How I shall be able to support myself under all these embarrassments God only knows,” he wrote to Washington. “Censure and reproach ever follow the unfortunate.”4
