3

Tarleton’s slaughter of Col. Abraham Buford’s command at the Waxhaws gave the patriots a rallying cry—“Tarleton’s quarter”—remembered to this day.

After helping to smash the American army at Camden with another devastating cavalry charge, Tarleton was ordered to pursue Thomas Sumter and his partisans. Pushing his men and horses at his usual pace in spite of the tropical heat of August, he caught up with Sumter’s men at Fishing Creek. Sabering a few carelessly posted sentries, the British Legion swept down on the Carolinians as they lay about their camp, their arms stacked, half of them sleeping or cooking. Sumter leaped on a bareback horse and imitated Buford, fleeing for his life. Virtually the entire American force of more than 400 men was killed or captured. When the news was published in England, Tarleton became a national hero. In his official dispatches, Cornwallis called him “one of the most promising officers I ever knew.”

But Sumter immediately began gathering a new force and Francis Marion and his raiders repeatedly emerged from the lowland swamps to harass communications with Charleston and punish any loyalist who declared for the king. Tarleton did not understand this stubborn resistance and liked it even less. A nauseating bout with yellow fever deepened his saturnine mood. Pursuing Marion along the Santee and Black Rivers, Tarleton ruthlessly burned the farmhouses of “violent rebels,” as he called them. “The country is now convinced of the error of the insurrection,” he wrote to Cornwallis. But Tarleton failed to catch “the damned old fox,” Marion.

The British Legion had scarcely returned from this exhausting march when they were ordered out once more in pursuit of Sumter. On November 9, 1780, with a new band of partisans, Sumter fought part of the British 63d Regiment, backed by a troop of Legion dragoons, at Fishdam Ford on the Broad River and mauled them badly. “I wish you would get three Legions, and divide yourself in three parts,” Cornwallis wrote Tarleton. “We can do no good without you.”

Once more the Legion marched for the back country. As usual, Tarleton’s pace was almost supernaturally swift. On November 20, 1780, he caught Sumter and his men as they were preparing to ford the Tyger River. But this time Tarleton’s fondness for headlong pursuit got him into serious trouble. He had left most of his infantry far behind him and pushed ahead with less than 200 cavalry and 90 infantry, riding two to a horse. Sumter had close to a thousand men and he attacked, backwoods style, filtering through the trees to pick off foot soldiers and horsemen. Tarleton ordered a bayonet charge. The infantry was so badly shot up, Tarleton had to charge with the cavalry to extricate them, exposing his dragoon to deadly rifle fire from other militiamen entrenched in a log tobacco house known as Blackstocks. The battle ended in a bloody draw. Sumter was badly wounded and his men abandoned the field to the green-coated dragoons, slipping across the Tyger in the darkness. Without their charismatic leader, Sumter’s militia went home.

This portrait of Tarleton and the illustration beneath of a troop of dragoons doing maneuvers appeared in a flattering biography shortly after he returned to England in 1782.

“Sumter is defeated,” Tarleton reported to Cornwallis, “his corps dispersed. But my Lord I have lost men—50 killed and wounded.” The war was becoming more and more disheartening to Tarleton. Deepening his black mood was news from home. His older brother had put him up for Parliament from Liverpool. The voters had rejected him. They admired his courage, but the American war was no longer popular in England.

While Cornwallis remained at Winnsborough, Tarleton returned from Blackstocks and camped at various plantations south of the Broad River. During his projected invasion of North Carolina, Cornwallis expected Tarleton and his Legion to keep the dwindling rebels of South Carolina dispersed to their homes. Thus the British commander would have no worries about the British base at Ninety Six, the key to the back country. The fort and surrounding settlement had been named by an early mapmaker in the course of measuring distances on the Cherokee Path, an ancient Indian route from the mountains to the ocean. The district around Ninety Six was the breadbasket of South Carolina; it was also heavily loyalist. But a year of partisan warfare had made their morale precarious. The American-born commander of the fort, Col. John Harris Cruger, hadrecently warned Cornwallis that the loyalists “were wearied by the long continuance of the campaign ... and the whole district had determined to submit as soon as the rebels should enter it.” The mere hint of a threat to Ninety Six and the order it preserved in its vicinity was enough to send flutters of alarm through British headquarters.

There were flutters aplenty when Cornwallis heard from spies that Daniel Morgan had crossed the Broad River and was marching on Ninety Six. Simultaneously came news that William Washington, the commander of Morgan’s cavalry, had routed a group of loyalists at Hammonds Store and forced another group to abandon a fort not far from Ninety Six. At 5 a.m. on January 2, Lt. Henry Haldane, one of Cornwallis’s aides, rode into Tarleton’s camp and told him the news. Close behind Haldane came a messenger with a letter from Cornwallis: “If Morgan is ... anywhere within your reach, I should wish you to push him to the utmost.” Haldane rushed an order to Maj. Archibald McArthur, commander of the first battalion of the 71st Regiment, which was not far away, guarding a ford over the Broad River that guaranteed quick communication with Ninety Six. McArthur was to place his men under Tarleton’s command and join him in a forced march to rescue the crucial fort.

The little village of Ninety Six was a center of loyalist sentiment in the Carolina backcountry. Cornwallis mistakenly thought Morgan had designs on it and therefore sent Tarleton in pursuit, bringing on the battle of Cowpens. This map diagrams the siege that Gen. Nathanael Greene mounted against the post in May-June of 1781.

Tarleton obeyed with his usual speed. His dragoons ranged far ahead of his little army, which now numbered about 700 men. By the end of the day he concluded that there was no cause for alarm about Ninety Six. Morgan was nowhere near it. But his scouts reported that Morgan was definitely south of the Broad River, urging militia from North and South Carolina to join him.

Tarleton’s response to this challenge was almost inevitable. He asked Cornwallis for permission to pursue Morgan and either destroy him or force him to retreat over the Broad River again. There, Cornwallis and his army could devour him.

The young cavalry commander outlined the operation in a letter to Cornwallis on January 4. He realized that he was all but giving orders to his general, and tactfully added: “I feel myself bold in offering my opinion [but] it flows from zeal for the public service and well grounded enquiry concerning the enemy’s designs and operations.” If Cornwallis approvedthe plan, Tarleton asked for reinforcements: a troop of cavalry from the 17th Light Dragoons and the infantrymen of the 7th Regiment of Royal Fusiliers, who were marching from Camden to reinforce Ninety Six.

Cornwallis approved the plan, including the reinforcements. As soon as they arrived, Tarleton began his march. January rain poured down, swelling every creek, turning the roads into quagmires. Cornwallis, with his larger army and heavy baggage train, began a slow advance up the east bank of the Broad River. As the commander in chief, he had more to worry about than Tarleton. Behind him was another British general, Sir Alexander Leslie, with 1,500 reinforcements. Cornwallis feared that Greene or Marion might strike a blow at them. The earl assumed that Tarleton was as mired by the rain and blocked by swollen watercourses as he was. On January 12, Cornwallis wrote to Leslie, who was being delayed by even worse mud in the lowlands: “I believe Tarleton is as much embarrassed with the waters as you are.” The same day, Cornwallis reported to another officer, the commander in occupied Charleston: “The rains have put a total stop to Tarleton and Leslie.” On this assumption, Cornwallis decided to halt and wait for Leslie to reach him.

Tarleton had not allowed the August heat of South Carolina to slow his pace. He was equally contemptuous of the January rains. His scouts reported that Morgan’s army was at Grindal Shoals on the Pacolet River. To reach the patriots he had to cross two smaller but equally swollen streams, the Enoree and the Tyger. Swimming his horses, floating his infantry across on improvised rafts, he surmounted these obstacles and headed northeast, deep into the South Carolina back country. He did not realize that his column, which now numbered over a thousand men, was becoming more and more isolated. He assumed that Cornwallis was keeping pace with him on the east side of the Broad River, cowing the rebel militia there into staying home.

Gen. Alexander Leslie, veteran commander in America. His service spanned actions from Salem Bridge in February 1775 to the British evacuation of Charleston in December 1782.

Tarleton also did not realize that this time, no matter how swiftly he advanced, he was not going to take the patriots by surprise. He was being watched by a man who was fighting with a hangman’s noose around his neck.

Skyagunsta, the Wizard Owl, was what the Cherokees called 41-year-old Andrew Pickens. They both feared and honored him as a battle leader who had defeated them repeatedly on their home grounds. Born in Pennsylvania, Pickens had come to South Carolina as a boy. In 1765 he had married the beautiful Rebecca Calhoun and settled on Long Canes Creek in the Ninety Six district. Pickens was no speechmaker, but everyone recognized this slender man, who was just under 6 feet tall, as a leader. When he spoke, people listened. One acquaintance declared that he was so deliberate, he seemed at times to take each word out of his mouth and examine it before he said it. Pickens had been one of the leaders who repelled the British-inspired assaults on the back country by the Cherokee Indians in 1776 and carried the war into the red men’s country, forcing them to plead for peace. By 1779 he was a colonel commanding one of the most dependable militia regiments in the State. When the loyalists, encouraged by the British conquest of Georgia in 1778-79, began to gather and plot to punish their rebel neighbors, Pickens led 400 men to assault them at Kettle Creek on the Savannah River. In a fierce, hour-long fight, he whipped them although they outnumbered him almost two to one.

After Charleston surrendered, Pickens’ military superior in the Ninety Six district, Brig. Gen. Andrew Williamson, was the only high-ranking official left in South Carolina. The governor John Rutledge had fled to North Carolina, the legislature had dispersed, the courts had collapsed. Early in June 1780, Williamson called together his officers and asked them to vote on whether they should continue to resist. Only eight officers opposed immediate surrender. In Pickens’ own regiment only two officers and four enlisted men favored resistance. The rest saw no hope of stopping the British regular army advancing toward them from Charleston. Without a regular army of their own to match the British, they could envision only destruction of their homes and desolation for their families if they resisted.

Andrew Pickens was among these realists who had accepted the surrender terms offered by the British. At his command, his regiment of 300 men stacked their guns at Ninety Six and went home. As Pickens understood the terms, he and his men were paroledon their promise not to bear arms against the king. They became neutrals. The British commander of Ninety Six, Colonel Cruger, seemed to respect this opinion. Cruger treated Pickens with great deference. The motive for this delicate treatment became visible in a letter Cruger sent Cornwallis on November 27.

“I think there is more than a possibility of getting a certain person in the Long Canes settlement to accept of a command,” Cruger wrote. “And then I should most humbly be of opinion that every man in the country would declare and act for His Majesty.”

It was a tribute to Pickens’ influence as a leader. He was also a man of his word. Even when Sumter, Clarke, and other partisan leaders demonstrated that there were many men in South Carolina ready to keep fighting, Pickens remained peaceably at home on his plantation at Long Canes. Tales of Tarleton’s cruelty at Waxhaws, of British and loyalist vindictiveness in other districts of the State undoubtedly reached him. But no acts of injustice had been committed against him or his men. The British were keeping their part of the bargain and he would keep his part.

Then Cornwallis’s aide, Haldane, appeared at Ninety Six and summoned Pickens. He offered him a colonel’s commission in the royal militia and a promise of protection. There were also polite hints of the possibility of a monetary reward for switching sides. Pickens agreed to ride down to Charleston and talk over the whole thing with the British commander there. The visit was delayed by partisan warfare in the Ninety Six district, stirred by the arrival of Nathanael Greene to take command of the remnant of the American regular army in Charlotte. Greene urged the wounded Sumter and the Georgian Clarke to embody their men and launch a new campaign. Sumter urged Pickens to break his parole, call out his regiment, and march with him to join Greene. Pickens refused to leave Long Canes.

Andrew Pickens, a lean and austere frontiersman of Scotch-Irish origins, ranked with Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter as major partisan leaders of the war.

In desperation, the rebels came to him. Elijah Clarke led a band of Georgians and South Carolinians to the outskirts of Long Canes, on their march to join Greene. Many men from Pickens’ old regiment broke their paroles and joined them. Clarke ordered Maj. James McCall, one of Pickens’ favorite officers and one of two who had refused to surrender at Ninety Six, to kidnap Pickens and bring himbefore an improvised court-martial board. Accused of preparing to join the loyalists, Pickens calmly admitted that the British were making him offers. So far he had refused them. Even if former friends made good on their threat to court-martial and hang him, he could not break his pledged word of honor to remain neutral.

The frustrated Georgians and South Carolinians let Pickens go home. On December 12, Cruger sent a detachment of regulars and loyalist militia to attack the interlopers. The royalists surprised the rebels and routed them, wounding Clarke and McCall and scattering the survivors. Most of the Georgians drifted back to their home state and the Carolinians straggled toward Greene in North Carolina.

The battle had a profound effect on Andrew Pickens. Friends, former comrades-in-arms, had been wounded, humiliated. He still hesitated to take the final step and break his parole. His strict Presbyterian conscience, his soldier’s sense of honor, would not permit it. But he went to Ninety Six and told Colonel Cruger that he could not accept a commission in the royal militia. Cruger sighed and revealed what he had been planning to do since he started wooing Pickens. In a few days, on orders from Cornwallis, the loyalist colonel was going to publish a proclamation which would permit no one to remain neutral. It would require everyone around Ninety Six to come to the fort, swear allegiance to the king, and enlist in the royal militia.

Pickens said his conscience would not permit him to do this. If the British threatened him with punishment for his refusal, it would be a violation of his parole and he would consider himself free to join the rebels. One British officer, who had become a friend and admirer of the resolute Pickens, warned him: “You will campaign with a halter around your neck. If we catch you, we will hang you.”

Pickens decided to take the risk. He rode about Long Canes calling out his regiment. The response was somewhat discouraging. Only about 70 men turned out. Coordinating their movements with Colonel Washington’s raid on the loyalists at Hammonds Store, they joined the patriot cavalry and rode past Ninety Six to Morgan’s camp on the Pacolet.

The numbers Pickens brought with him were disappointing. But he and his men knew the backcountry intimately. They were the eyes and ears Morgan’s little army desperately needed. Morgan immediately asked Pickens to advance to a position about midway between Fair Forest Creek and the Tyger River and send his horsemen ranging out from that point in all directions to guard against a surprise attack by Banastre Tarleton.

The Wizard Owl and his men mounted their horses and rode away to begin their reconnaissance. General Morgan soon knew enough about the enemy force coming after him to make him fear for his army’s survival.

Daniel Morgan might call Banastre Tarleton “Benny” for the entertainment of young militiamen like Joseph McJunkin. But Morgan had been fighting the British for five years. He was as close to being a professional soldier as any American of his time. He knew Banastre Tarleton was no joke. In fact, the casual style of his decision to reunite his cavalry and infantry at the Thompson plantation on Thicketty Creek disguised a decision to retreat. The march to Thicketty Creek put an additional 10 miles between him and the aggressive British cavalryman. Behind the mask of easy confidence Morgan wore for his men, there was a very worried general.

As soon as he crossed the Broad River and camped at Grindal Shoals on the north bank of the Pacolet on December 25, 1780, Morgan began sending messengers to the men of western Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, urging them to turn out and support him. The response had been disheartening. Pickens, as we have seen, was unable to muster more than a fraction of his old regiment. From Georgia came only a small detachment of about 100 men under the command of Lt. Col. James Jackson and Maj. John Cunningham. Because their leader Elijah Clarke was out of action from his wound at Long Canes, the Georgians were inclined to stay home. Sumter, though almost recovered from his wound, sulked on the east side of the Broad River. He felt Greene had sent Morgan into his sphere of command without properly consulting him.

The armies fought the way they did—on open ground in long lines of musket-wielding infantry standing two and three ranks deep—because that was the most rational way to use the weapons they had.The main weapon of this combat was the muzzle-loading, smooth-bore, flint-lock musket, equipped with a 16-inch bayonet. It hurled a one-ounce lead ball of .70 to .80 calibre fairly accurately up to 75 yards, but distance scarcely mattered. The object was to break up the enemy’s formations with volleys and then rout them with cold steel. The British were masters of these linear tactics, and Washington and his commanders spent the war trying to instill the same discipline in their Continentals so that they could stand up to redcoats on equal terms in battle.The American rifle was not the significant weapon legend later made it out to be. Though accurate at great distances, it was slow to load and useless in open battle because it was not equipped with a bayonet. But in the hands of skirmishers the rifle could do great damage, as the British found out at Cowpens.

The armies fought the way they did—on open ground in long lines of musket-wielding infantry standing two and three ranks deep—because that was the most rational way to use the weapons they had.

The main weapon of this combat was the muzzle-loading, smooth-bore, flint-lock musket, equipped with a 16-inch bayonet. It hurled a one-ounce lead ball of .70 to .80 calibre fairly accurately up to 75 yards, but distance scarcely mattered. The object was to break up the enemy’s formations with volleys and then rout them with cold steel. The British were masters of these linear tactics, and Washington and his commanders spent the war trying to instill the same discipline in their Continentals so that they could stand up to redcoats on equal terms in battle.

The American rifle was not the significant weapon legend later made it out to be. Though accurate at great distances, it was slow to load and useless in open battle because it was not equipped with a bayonet. But in the hands of skirmishers the rifle could do great damage, as the British found out at Cowpens.

French musket, calibre .69

British Brown Bess, calibre .75

British dragoon carbine

American rifle

PistolsCavalrymen and mounted officers nearly always carried a brace of pistols. Though wildly inaccurate, they were useful in emergencies when formal combat broke down and a foe was only a few feet away.

Officer’s Pistol

American dragoon pistol

Powder horns of the type used by rifle-carrying militia at Cowpens: each was usually made by the man who carried it.

Edged Weaponscame in many varieties. The most important for hand-to-hand fighting were bayonets and swords. For cavalrymen, the sword was more useful than firearms. It was “the most destructive and almost the only necessary weapon a Dragoon carries,” said William Washington. They used two types: the saber and the broadsword. Both are shown here.

Officers, foot as well as mounted, carried swords, often for fighting, sometimes only for dress. The small-sword (shown at left below) was popular with Continental officers.

Officers’ swords

American dragoon sabre

British dragoon sabre, model 1768

Pole Armswere in common use. Washington wanted his foot officers to direct their men and not be distracted by their own firearms. He therefore armed them with a spear-like weapon called a spontoon. It became a badge of rank as well as a weapon.

American officers’ spontoons

Morgan’s highest hopes had been focused on North Carolina, which had thus far been relatively untouched by the British. The commander of the militia in the back country was Brig. Gen. William Davidson, a former Continental officer whom Morgan had known at Valley Forge. An energetic, committed man, popular with the militia, Davidson had been expected to muster from 600 to 1,000 men. Instead, Morgan got a letter from him with the doleful report: “I have not ninety men.” An Indian incursion on the western frontier had drawn off many of the militia and inclined others to stay home to protect their families. On December 28, Davidson rode into Morgan’s camp with only 120 men. He said that he hoped to have another 500 mustered at Salisbury in the next week and rode off to find them, leaving Morgan muttering in dismay.

Morgan had eagerly accepted this independent command because he thought at least 2,500 militiamen would join his 500 Continentals and Virginia six-months men. With an army that size, he could have besieged or even stormed the British stronghold at Ninety Six. His present force seemed too small to do the enemy any damage. But it was large enough to give its commander numerous headaches. In addition to the major worry of annihilation by the enemy, food was scarce. The country along the Pacolet had been plundered and fought over for so long, there was nothing left to requisition from the farms. On December 31, in a letter to Greene, Morgan predicted that in a few days supplies would be “unattainable.”

What to do? The only practical move he could see for his feeble army was a march into Georgia. The British outpost at Augusta was weaker and more isolated than Ninety Six. Even here, Morgan was cautious. “I have consulted with General Davidson and Colonel Pickens whether we could secure a safe retreat, should we be pushed by a superior force. They tell me it can be easily effected,” he wrote Greene, asking his approval of this plan.

Morgan was reluctant to advance beyond the Pacolet. The reason was rooted in his keen understanding of the psychology of the average militiaman. He wanted to come out, fight and go home as soon as possible. He did not want to fight if the regular army that was supposed to look the enemy in the face seemed more interested in showing the enemy their backs. “Were we to advance, and be constrained to retreat, the consequences would be very disagreeable,” Morgan told Greene, speakingas one general to another. The militia, he was saying, would go home.

Greene was equally anxious about Morgan. Writing from Cheraw Hills on the Pee Dee River on December 29, the southern commander told Morgan of the arrival of Gen. Alexander Leslie in Charleston with reinforcements. This news meant the British would almost certainly advance soon. “Watch their motions very narrowly and take care to guard against a surprise,” he wrote. A week later, in another letter, he repeated the warning. “The enemy and the Tories both will try to bring you into disgrace ... to prevent your influence upon the militia, especially the weak and wavering.”

Greene vetoed Morgan’s expedition into Georgia. He did not think Morgan was strong enough to accomplish much. “The enemy ... secure in their fortifications, will take no notice of your movement,” he predicted. Greene was persuaded that Cornwallis would strike at his half of the army in their camp at Cheraw Hills, and he did not want Morgan in Georgia if this threat materialized. Ignoring Morgan’s worries about feeding his men, Greene told him to stay where he was, on the Pacolet or “in the neighborhood,” and await an opportunity to attack the British rear when they marched into North Carolina.

Morgan replied with a lament. He reiterated his warning that “forage [for the horses] and provisions are not to be had.” He insisted there was “but one alternative, either to retreat or move into Georgia.” A retreat, he warned, “will be attended with the most fatal consequences. The spirit which now begins to pervade the people and call them into the field, will be destroyed. The militia who have already joined will desert us and it is not improbable but that a regard for their own safety will induce them to join the enemy.”

That last line is grim evidence of the power of the British policy of forcing everyone to serve in the loyalist militia. But Nathanael Greene remained adamant. He reported to Morgan more bad news, which made a march into Georgia even more inadvisable. Another British general, with 2,500 men, had landed in Virginia and was attacking that vital State, upon which the southern army depended for much of its supplies. It made no sense to send some of thearmy’s best troops deeper into the South, when Virginia might call on Greene and Morgan for aid. Almost casually Greene added: “Col. Tarleton is said to be on his way to pay you a visit. I doubt not but he will have a decent reception and a proper dismission.”

This was a strange remark for a worried general to make. From other letters Greene wrote around this time, it is evident that he had received a number of conflicting reports about Tarleton’s strength and position. The American commander was also unsure about British intentions. He assumed that Cornwallis and Tarleton were moving up the opposite sides of the Broad River in concert. Since the main British column under Cornwallis had all but stopped advancing, Greene assumed Tarleton had stopped too and that Morgan was in no immediate danger.

Around this time, a man who had known Daniel Morgan as a boy in Virginia visited his camp. Richard Winn, after whom Winnsborough was named—and whose mansion Cornwallis was using as his headquarters—discussed Tarleton’s tactics with his old friend. Winn told Morgan that Tarleton’s favorite mode of fighting was by surprise. “He never brings on [leads] his attacks himself,” Winn said. He prefers to send in two or three troops of horse, “whose goal is to throw the other party into confusion. Then Tarleton attacks with his reserve and cuts them to pieces.”

Much as he dreaded the thought of a retreat, Morgan was too experienced a soldier not to prepare for one. He sent his quartermaster across the Broad River with orders to set up magazines of supplies for his army. This officer returned with dismaying news. General Sumter had refused to cooperate with this request and directed his subordinates to obey no orders from Morgan.

Adding to Morgan’s supply woes was a Carolina military custom. Every militiaman brought his horse to camp with him. This meant that Morgan had to find forage for over 450 horses (counting William Washington’s cavalry), each of whom ate 25 to 30 pounds of oats and hay a day. “Could the militia be persuaded to change their fatal mode of going to war,” Morgan groaned to Greene, “much provision might be saved; but the custom has taken such deep root that it cannot be abolished.”

Bands of militiamen constantly left the army tohunt for forage. This practice made it impossible for Morgan to know how many men he had in his command. In desperation, he ordered his officers, both Continental and militia, to call the roll every two hours. This measure only gave him more bad news. On January 15, after retreating from the Pacolet to Thicketty Creek, he reported to Greene that he had only 340 militia with him, but did not expect “to have more than two-thirds of these to assist me, should I be attacked, for it is impossible to keep them collected.”

Making Morgan feel even more like a military Job was a personal problem. The incessant rain and the damp January cold had awakened an illness that he had contracted fighting in Canada during the winter of 1775-76, a rheumatic inflammation of the sciatic nerve in his hip. It made riding a horse agony for Morgan.

In his tent on Thicketty Creek, where he had rendezvoused with William Washington and his 80 cavalrymen, who had been getting their horses shod at Wofford’s iron works, Morgan all but abandoned any hope of executing the mission on which Greene had sent him. “My force is inadequate,” he wrote. “Upon a full and mature deliberation I am confirmed in the opinion that nothing can be effected by my detachment in this country, which will balance the risks I will be subjected to by remaining here. The enemy’s great superiority in numbers and our distance from the main army, will enable Lord Cornwallis to detach so superior a force against me, as to render it essential to our safety to avoid coming to action.”

It would be best, Morgan told Greene, if he were recalled with his little band of Continentals and Andrew Pickens or William Davidson left to command the back-country militia. Without the regulars to challenge them, the British were less likely to invade the district and under Pickens’ leadership the rebels would be able to keep “a check on the disaffected”—the Tories—“which,” Morgan added mournfully, “is all I can effect.”

When he wrote these words on January 15, Morgan was still unaware of what was coming at him. From the reports of Pickens’ scouts, he had begun to worry that Tarleton might have more than his 550-man British Legion with him. With the help of Washington’scavalry, he felt confident that he could beat off an attack by the Legion. But what if Tarleton had additional men? “Col. Tarleton has crossed the Tyger at Musgrove’s Mill,” Morgan told Greene. “His force we cannot learn.”

Into Morgan’s camp galloped more scouts from Pickens. They brought news that Morgan made the last sentence of his letter.

“We have just learned that Tarleton’s force is from eleven to twelve hundred British.”

The last word was the significant one.British.Twelve hundred regulars, trained troops, saber-swinging dragoons and bayonet-wielding infantry like the men who had sent the militia running for their lives at Camden and then cut the Continentals to pieces. Gen. Daniel Morgan could see only one alternative—retreat.

Until he got this information on the numbers and composition of Tarleton’s army, Morgan seems to have toyed with the possibility of ambushing the British as they crossed the Pacolet. He left strong detachments of his army at the most likely fords. At the very least, he may have wanted to make the crossing a bloody business for the British, perhaps killing some of their best officers, even Tarleton himself. If he could repulse or delay Tarleton at the river, Morgan hoped he could gain enough time to retreat to a ford across the upper Broad, well out of reach of Cornwallis on the other side of the river. Pickens had kept Morgan well informed of the sluggish advance of the main British army. He knew they were far to the south, a good 30 miles behind Tarleton.

North of the Broad, Morgan reasoned they could be easily joined by the 500 North Carolina militia William Davidson had promised him as well as South Carolina men from that district. If Tarleton continued the pursuit, they could give battle on the rugged slopes of Kings Mountain, where the cavalry of the British Legion would be useless.

Morgan undoubtedly discussed this plan with the leaders of the militiamen who were already with him—Joseph McDowell of North Carolina, whose men had fought at Kings Mountain, James Jackson and John Cunningham of Georgia, James McCall, Thomas Brandon, William Bratton and other SouthCarolinians, perhaps also Andrew Pickens. They did not have much enthusiasm for it. They warned Morgan that at least half the militia, especially the South Carolinians, would be inclined to go home rather than retreat across the Broad. In the back country, men perceived rivers as dividing lines between districts. Most of the South Carolina men in camp came from the west side of the Broad. Moreover, with Sumter hostile, there was no guarantee that they would be able to persuade many men on the other side of the river to join them.

In this discussion, it seems likely that these militia leaders mentioned the Cowpens as a good place to fight Tarleton on the south side of the river. The grazing ground was a name familiar to everyone in the back country. It was where the militia had assembled before the battle of Kings Mountain the previous fall. Messengers could be sent into every district within a day’s ride to urge laggards to join them there.

Morgan mulled this advice while his men guarded the fords of the Pacolet. As dusk fell on January 15, Tarleton and his army appeared on the south bank of the river. He saw the guards and wheeled, marching up the stream toward a ford near Wofford’s iron works. On the opposite bank, Morgan’s men kept pace with him, step for step. Then, with no warning, the British disappeared into the night. Retreating? Making camp? No one knew. It was too risky to venture across the swollen river to follow him. The British Legion cavalry always guarded Tarleton’s flanks and rear.

On the morning of the 16th, a militia detachment miles down the river in the opposite direction made an alarming discovery. Tarleton was across! He had doubled back in the dark and marched most of the night to cross at Easterwood Shoals. He was only 6 miles from Morgan’s camp on Thicketty Creek. Leaping on their horses, the guards galloped to Morgan with the news.

Morgan’s men were cooking breakfast. Out of his tent charged the general to roar orders at them, the wagoners, the infantry, the cavalrymen. Prepare to march immediately! The men grabbed their half-cooked cornmeal cakes and stuffed them into their mouths. The militia and the cavalry ran for their horses, the wagoners hitched their teams, the Continentalsformed ranks, and the column got underway. Morgan pressed forward, ignoring the pain in his hip, demanding more and more speed from his men. He headed northwest, toward Cowpens, on the Green River Road, a route that would also take him to the Island Ford across the Broad River, about 6 miles beyond Cowpens.

All day the men slogged along the slick, gooey roads, Morgan at the head of the column setting a relentless pace. His sciatic hip tormented him. Behind him, the militiamen were expending “many a hearty curse” on him, one of them later recalled. As Nathanael Greene wryly remarked, in the militia every man considered himself a general.

But Daniel Morgan was responsible for their lives and the lives of his Continentals, some of whom had marched doggedly from battlefield to battlefield for over four years. In the company of the Delaware Continentals who served beside the Marylanders in the light infantry brigade, there was a lieutenant named Thomas Anderson who kept track of the miles he had marched since they headed south in May 1780. At the end of each day he entered in his journal the ever-growing total. By January 16, it was 1,435. No matter what the militia thought of him, Daniel Morgan was not going to throw away such men in a battle simply to prove his courage.

Seldom has there been a better example of the difference between the professional and the amateur soldier. In his letters urging militiamen to join him, Morgan had warned them against the futility of fighting in such small detachments. He had asked them to come into his camp and subject themselves to “order and discipline ... so that I may be enabled to direct you ... to the advantage of the whole.”

In the same letters, Morgan had made a promise to these men. “I will ask you to encounter no dangers or difficulties, but what I shall participate in.” If he retreated across the Broad, he would be exposing the men who refused to go with him to Tarleton’s policy of extermination by fire and sword. If they went with him, their families, their friends, their homes would be abandoned to the young lieutenant colonel’s vengeance.

This conflict between prudence and his promise must have raged in Morgan’s mind as his army toiled along the Green River Road. It was hard marching.The road dipped into hollows and looped around small hills. Swollen creeks cut across it. The woods were thick on both sides of it. At dusk, the Americans emerged from the forest onto a flat, lightly wooded tableland. At least, it looked flat at first glance. As Morgan led his men into it, he noted that the ground rose gradually to a slight crest, then dipped and rose to another slightly higher crest. Oak and hickory trees were dotted throughout the more or less rectangular area, but there was practically no underbrush. This was the Cowpens, a place where back-country people pastured their cattle and prepared them to be driven to market.

In the distance, Morgan could see the Blue Ridge Mountains, which rise from the flat country beyond the Broad like a great rampart. They were 30 miles away. If they could reach them, the army was safe. But militia scouts brought in grim news. The river was rising. It would be a difficult business crossing at Island Ford in the dark. The ford was still 6 miles away, and the men were exhausted from their all-day march. If they rested at Cowpens and tried to cross the river the next morning, Banastre Tarleton, that soldier who liked to march by night, would be upon them, ready to slash them to pieces.

Perhaps it was that report which helped Morgan make his decision. One suspects he almost welcomed the news that the army was, for all practical purposes, trapped and fighting was the only alternative. There was enough of the citizen-soldier in Morgan to dislike retreating almost as much as the average militiaman.

The more Morgan studied the terrain around him, the more he liked it. The militia leaders were right. This was the best place to fight Tarleton. Sitting on his horse, looking down the slope to the Green River Road, Morgan noted the way the land fell off to the left and right toward several creeks. The Cowpens was bordered by marshy ground that would make it difficult for Tarleton to execute any sweeping flank movements with his cavalry. As his friend Richard Winn had told him, that was not Tarleton’s style, anyway. He was more likely to come straight at the Americans with his infantry and cavalry in a headlong charge. Experience told Morgan there were ways to handle such an assault—tactics that 26-year-old Banastre Tarleton had probably never seen.

Now the important thing was to communicate the will to fight. Turning to his officers, Morgan said, “On this ground I will beat Benny Tarleton or I will lay my bones.”

Eleven to twelve hundred British, Daniel Morgan had written. Ironically, as Morgan ordered another retreat from this formidable foe, the British were barricading themselves in some log houses on the north bank of the Pacolet River, expecting an imminent attack from the patriots. Their spies had told them that Morgan had 3,000 men, and Tarleton was taking no chances. After seizing this strong point, only a few miles below Morgan’s camp, he sent out a cavalry patrol. They soon reported that the Americans had “decamped.” Tarleton immediately advanced to Morgan’s abandoned campsite, where his hungry soldiers were delighted to find “plenty of provisions which they had left behind them, half cooked.”

Nothing stirred Banastre Tarleton’s blood more than a retreating enemy. British soldiers, famed for their tenacity in war, have often been compared to the bulldog. But Tarleton was more like the bloodhound. A fleeing foe meant the chance of an easy victory. It was not only instinct, it was part of his training as a cavalryman.

“Patrols and spies were immediately dispatched to observe the Americans,” Tarleton later recalled. The British Legion dragoons were ordered to follow Morgan until dark. Then the job was turned over to “other emissaries”—loyalists. Tarleton had about 50 with him to act as scouts and spies. Early that evening, January 16, probably around the time that Morgan was deciding to fight at Cowpens, a party of loyalists brought in a militia colonel who had wandered out of the American line of march, perhaps in search of forage for his horse. Threatened with instant hanging, the man talked. He told Tarleton that Morgan hoped to stop at Cowpens and gather more militia. But the captive said that Morgan then intended to get across the Broad River, where he thought he would be safe.

The information whetted Tarleton’s appetite. It seemed obvious to him that he should “hang upon General Morgan’s rear” to cut off any militia reinforcements that might show up. If Morgan tried tocross the Broad, Tarleton would be in a position to “perplex his design,” as he put it—a stuffy way of saying he could cut him to pieces. Around midnight, other loyalist scouts brought in a rumor of more American reinforcements on their way—a “corps of mountaineers.” This sent a chill through the British, even through Tarleton. It sounded like the return of the mountain men who had helped destroy the loyalist army at Kings Mountain. It became more and more obvious to Tarleton that he should attack Morgan as soon as possible.

About three in the morning of the 17th of January, Tarleton called in his sentries and ordered his drummers to rouse his men. Leaving 35 baggage wagons and 70 Negro slaves with a 100-man guard commanded by a lieutenant, he marched his sleepy men down the rutted Green River Road, the same route Morgan had followed the previous day. The British found the marching hard in the dark. The ground, Tarleton later wrote, was “broken, and much intersected by creeks and ravines.” Ahead of the column and on both flanks scouts prowled the woods to prevent an ambush.

Describing the march, Tarleton also gave a precise description of his army. Three companies of light infantry, supported by the infantry of the British Legion, formed his vanguard. The light infantry were all crack troops, most of whom had been fighting in America since the beginning of the war. One company was from the 16th Regiment and had participated in some of the swift, surprise attacks for which light infantry was designed. They had been part of the British force that killed and wounded 150 Americans in a night assault at Paoli, Pa., in the fall of 1777. The light company of the 71st Regiment had a similar record, having also been part of the light infantry brigade that the British organized early in the war.

Music made the soldier’s life more tolerable on the march and in camp. But the most important use was in battle. Both the drum and the fife conveyed signals and orders over the din and confusion far better than the human voice. This iron fife is an original 18th-century instrument. The drum, according to tradition, was carried in the war.

With these regulars marched another company of light infantry whose memories were not so grand—the green-coated men of the Prince of Wales Loyal American Volunteers. Northern loyalists, they had been in the war since 1777. They had seen little fighting until they sailed south in 1780. After the fall of Charleston, Cornwallis had divided them into detachments and used them to garrison small posts, with disastrous results. In August 1780 at Hanging Rock, Sumter had attacked one detachment, virtually annihilating it. The colonel of the regiment was cashiered for cowardice. Another detachment was mauled by Francis Marion at Great Savannah around the same time. It was hardly a brilliant record. But this company of light infantry, supposedly the boldest and best of the regiment, might be eager to seek revenge for their lost comrades.

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