Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

the laurels of victory, the willows of defeat 319

were, according to Williams, “removed from the center of the brigades

and placed in the center of the front line.”

Cornwallis’s deployment was a mirror image of Gates’s. On his

right, facing the militia, were his best regulars: five companies of light

infantry, the 23rd (Royal Welch Fusiliers), and Lieutenant Colonel James

Webster’s own Yorkshiremen of the 33rd Foot. (Webster was in overall

command of the British right wing.) The left wing, under the twenty-

six-year-old Irishman Lieutenant Colonel Lord Francis Rawdon,

was composed mainly of Loyalist units: Rawdon’s own Volunteers of

Ireland, the infantry of the British Legion, Lieutenant Colonel John

Hamilton’s Royal North Carolina Regiment, and Colonel Morgan

Bryan’s North Carolina Volunteers. Five companies of the formidable

71st Foot (Fraser’s Highlanders) were held in reserve behind Rawdon,

and behind them was the cavalry of Tarleton’s British Legion.

Gates’s deployment has generally been criticized because he placed

his weakest troops, the militia of the left wing, against the British right

wing—the strongest that Cornwallis could muster. He should have

predicted his adversary’s dispositions, his many critics claim, because the

right wing was traditionally “the primary post of honor” and therefore

reserved for elite troops.

But in Gates’s defense he could not have

known, in the pitch-black early hours of 16 August, how Cornwallis

would deploy. Nor was it an invariable rule that the strongest troops in

the British army were always posted to the right wing. At Brandywine,

for example, the British main thrust had come from the left, as it

would later at Guilford Courthouse. And if the criticism can be leveled

at Gates, what about Cornwallis? He too placed his weakest forces

(Cornwallis had described their commander, Hamilton, as “a block

head”) against the very best in the American army. The Marylanders

were as skilled and disciplined as any of the British. The realities facing

commanders at the moment of battle are not always appreciated from

the comfortable perch of hindsight. Nathanael Greene, for one, declared

Gates’s dispositions rational: “You was unfortunate but not blameable,”

he later wrote.

As at Saratoga, Gates seemed to be transfixed, paralyzed perhaps

by the awful realization that he had neither the skill nor, more

patriot battles 320

Camden

16 August 1780

American

British

American retreat

British movements

MILES

cleared field

field

to Rugeley’s

to Camden

Rawdon

DE KALB

Bryan

Smallwood

1st Md.

71st

Cavalry

Armand

Stevens

Caswell

Royal N.C.

Legion

Light Infantry

Gist

2nd Md.

Del.

Tarleton

N.C. Volunteers

Webster

CORNWALLIS

33rd 23rd

Gum T ree Swamp

Va. Militia

N.C. Militia

Irish Vol.

GATES

important, the nerve essential to field command. Just as Arnold had

urged him to commit himself to action at the start of the Saratoga

battles, so now Otho Williams begged him to set Stevens’s militia in

motion as the British were “displaying” (transitioning from column

into their battle line) and therefore vulnerable. “The general seemed

disposed to wait events—he gave no orders.”

But finally, pressing

the laurels of victory, the willows of defeat 321

his chief, Williams elicited from Gates a lame “Let it be done” (the

last order Gates gave in the battle). But the moment had passed, and

Webster and the British right wing moved “with great vigour” to close

with the militia. Garrett Watts, a private in Caswell’s North Carolina

brigade, described the panic:

The militia were in front and in a feeble condition at that time.

They were fatigued. The weather was warm excessively. They

had been fed a short time previously on molasses entirely . . . we

were close to the enemy, who appeared to maneuver in contempt

of us, and I fired without thinking except that I might prevent

the man opposite from killing me. The discharge and loud roar

soon became general from one end of the lines to the other . . . I

confess I was amongst the first that fled. The cause of that I cannot

tell, except that everyone I saw was about to do the same. It was

instantaneous. There was no effort to rally, no encouragement to

fight. Officers and men joined in the flight.

As the American left wing evaporated, Webster, resisting the

temptations of the chase, sheered to his left to roll up the left flank of

de Kalb’s Continentals, who, until then, had been more than holding

their own against the Loyalists. “Being greatly outflanked,” the 2nd

Maryland and Delawares were forced to give ground. De Kalb called

on Smallwood’s 1st Maryland brigade to come up in support, but it was

stopped by Webster and could not link up. De Kalb, unwilling to quit

without orders from Gates (who by this time had fled the field), was

hit multiple times and bayoneted. Tarleton now swept around to the

rear of the 1st Maryland, and, as he put it, “rout and slaughter ensued

in every direction,” or, as Williams put it, “every corps was broken and

dispersed.”

Williams also says that Gates was borne away by the “torrent of

unarmed militia,” the implication being that Gates had no choice, but

if he was stationed behind Smallwood rather than his militia, it would

be interesting to understand how that could have happened. Perhaps

the truth was, as Alexander Hamilton suspected, that Gates simply ran

patriot battles 322

away, fast and far: “One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a

half! It does admirable credit to the man at his age of life.”

Of Gates’s original 3,000, 2,000 militia had fled almost unscathed.

Of the 1,000 Continentals (including about 250 North Carolina militia

who had been closest to, and felt protected by, the bayonets of Robert

Kirkwood’s Delawares) left to make their final stand, estimates of

casualties vary from 188 to 250 killed.

Most of the rest were captured

and/or wounded. The kill rate (in the region of 20 percent) was

extraordinarily high. Many “fine fellows lay on the field,” including the

stripped corpse of Johann de Kalb.

The Hunters Hunted

KINGS MOUNTAIN, 7 OCTOBER 1780;

AND COWPENS, 17 JANUARY 1781

ornwallis was not a commander with much faith in the static

warfare of “posts.” He had one goal: to find and destroy the

patriot army. As he moved out northeast from Camden toward

North Carolina, he would have to pacify the patriot bands that could

threaten his left flank. So he sent Major Patrick Ferguson, a firebrand

Scot and British army regular, with his Loyalist American Volunteers

(around 70 men, plus another 900 or so Tory militia), to do the business.

As Ferguson (the only British soldier in the whole detachment) moved

up toward the northwestern frontier bordering on the Appalachians,

he triggered a response from the tough Scotch-Irish Over Mountain

Men (mere “banditti,” in Ferguson’s estimation). Ferguson’s threat to

“hang their leaders, and lay their country to waste” did not cow a bunch

of hard-fighting frontiersmen. They came after him and tracked him

down to Kings Mountain (actually a ridge shaped like a footprint, about

60 feet high, 600 yards long, 200 feet wide at the ball of the foot, and 60

feet wide at the heel).

Ferguson was only thirty miles away from Cornwallis and had

urged his chief to come to his support. Rather than risk being caught

patriot battles 324

in the open attempting to get back to the main British army, Ferguson

thought his ridgetop defense would be strong enough to hold out; as

he declared to Cornwallis, “I arrived today [6 October 1780] at Kings

Mountain & have taken a post where I do not think I can be forced by

a stronger enemy than that against us.”

This confidence might explain

why he made no attempt to strengthen his position with breastworks

or abatis.

The patriot strategy at Kings Mountain was starkly simple, as

Colonel William Hill explained: “All that was required or expected was

that every Officer & man should ascend the mountain so as to surround

the enemy on all quarters which was promptly executed.”

Like a

cornered animal, Ferguson’s force parried and counterattacked with

the bayonet. The patriot Robert Henry, in the act of cocking his rifle,

was charged by a Tory musketeer: “His bayonet was running along the

barrel of my gun, and gave me a thrust through my hand and into my

thigh . . . Wm Caldwell saw my condition and pulled the bayonet out

of my thigh, but it hung to my hand.”

The bayonet was ineffective in

the fragmented encounters on the hillside. It was primarily a weapon

dependent for its success on mass, and not only were the Loyalists

unable to form in sufficient concentrations, but their enemy would not

provide them with a consolidated target. As a result the defenders were

run ragged and picked off.

The cover provided by the wooded slopes favored the patriot riflemen,

while firing downhill tended to cause the Loyalists to fire high, as James

Collins, a patriot, recorded: “Their great elevation above us proved their

ruin: they overshot us altogether, scarce touching a man, except those

on horseback, while every rifle from below seemed to have the desired

effect.”

As the Over Mountain Men closed in, Ferguson led one last rally

but was shot out of his saddle, riddled by rifle bullets—an ironic end to

an advocate of rifle warfare who on Kings Mountain had put his trust in

the bayonet. Given that Ferguson’s force was completely surrounded and

his defeat overwhelming, it is surprising that the Tories suffered only 157

killed and 163 wounded out of a total force of about 900. (Patriot losses

were light: 28 killed, 62 wounded.)

There were incidents of killings after

the hunters hunted 325

surrender, but given the opportunity for a full-scale massacre, the rough-

hewn frontiersmen acted with great restraint.



On 14 October George Washington finally managed to have Nathanael

Greene replace Gates as commander in chief in the southern theater,

and on 2 December Gates handed over command at Charlotte, North

Carolina, just east of the Catawba River. The army Greene inherited

was dispirited by defeat and desertion. He could probably muster 1,100

or so Continentals, of whom approximately 800 were fit for service.

Contrary to received military wisdom, Greene split his force—as he

said, “partly from choice, partly from necessity” (the parents of most

military decisions)—and sent Daniel Morgan with “the cream” of the

army off west of the Catawba.

Morgan, as Greene intended, was a threat to Cornwallis’s left

flank, and the important posts of Ninety Six and Augusta, that could

not be ignored if an expedition against Greene (and indeed into North

Carolina) was to be undertaken. Tarleton was dispatched to neutralize

Morgan and set off with his usual hard-driving determination on the

first day of 1781. His force consisted of 550 dragoons and light infantry

of the British Legion, the 1st Battalion of the 71st Foot (200), a similar

number of the 7th Foot (Royal Fusiliers), 50 horsemen of the 17th

Dragoons, and a 50-man contingent of the Royal Artillery with two

three-pound “grasshoppers”: in all, just over 1,000 men.

After eluding Morgan’s shadowing force (by employing the old

fake bivouac fires trick, used both by Washington after Trenton and

Howe after Brandywine), Tarleton doubled back and crossed the

Pacolet River. He was now closing in on his quarry with alarming speed.

Scrambling, Morgan had two choices. He could try to cross the Broad

River, which ran east to west across his line of retreat, and find good

ground in the Thicketty Mountains. His other option would be to make

his stand south of the river. In any event, to be caught by Tarleton in the

act of crossing the Broad invited disaster, and Morgan would have been

patriot battles 326

mindful of Greene’s mission directive: “Employ [your force] . . . either

offensively or defensively as your own prudence and discretion may

direct, acting with caution and avoiding surprises.”

Morgan’s own rationale for choosing the Cowpens to make his

stand offers an insight into how decisions made under the duress of

circumstances are often revisited years later to appear to be acts of pure

(and of course, brilliant) volition. Morgan wrote to his friend Captain

William Snickers only nine days after the battle that he intended to

cross the river and find “a Strong piece of Ground & there decide the

Matter but, as matters were Circumstanced, no time was to be lost, I

prepared for battle.”

Years later Morgan would present a very different,

and much more heroic, account. He had deliberately chosen to fight

with the river to his back to prevent desertion: it would be a glorious

do-or-die stand: “As to retreat, it was the very thing I wished to cut off

all hope of . . . Had I crossed the river, one half of the militia would

immediately have abandoned me.”

It was a complete contradiction of

his after-battle report, which had emphasized a terrain with an escape

route in case of defeat: “My situation at the Cowpens enabled me to

improve any advantages I might gain, and to provide better for my

own security should I be unfortunate.”

On the evening of 15 January

Andrew Pickens and a sizable militia force joined Morgan. It may have

influenced his decision to stand and fight, but the truth, despite his later

embroidering, was that he had little choice.

Tarleton fancied his chances when he surveyed the Cowpens bat-

tlefield: an open meadow (for cattle grazing) about 500 yards deep and

the same wide, gently undulating, not much by way of trees and under

growth; good terrain to maneuver infantry; good space to use cavalry

once the enemy was broken. The Mill Gap Road bisected the field north

to south. It suited, said Tarleton, “the nature of the troops under . . . [my]

command. The situation of the enemy was desperate in case of misfor-

tune.”

But Morgan was about to prove his mastery of deployment: that

science and art of fitting troops to terrain, of understanding the men in

his command, their strengths and weaknesses and how best to use them.

Morgan, by some osmosis that is difficult to describe (he had no extensive

the hunters hunted 327

experience of major field command and certainly no formal training in

the military craft), was about to demonstrate a genius for battlefield com

mand unmatched on either side at any point during the war.

In the bright but “bitterly cold” early hours of 17 January Morgan

laid out a defense in depth that, by drawing Tarleton (who he knew

would favor a frontal attack—“down right fighting,” as Morgan called

it) into a series of linear firefights, would soak up his attacker’s resources

and energy. It was an instinctive understanding of the dynamics of

battle of which Clausewitz would have been proud. First, he made

sure his men were fed. (Tarleton’s, by comparison, had nothing to eat

that day and had been on the march since three that morning.) The

main line (sometimes referred to as the light infantry line) was posted

on the reverse slope of a slight ridge that traversed the battlefield; the

flanks were close to the marshy ground of two creeks that bracketed the

Cowpens. The main line had three elements: 120 North Carolina State

Troops, Virginia Continentals, Virginia State Troops, and Virginia

riflemen all under the command of Captain Edmund Tate on the right

wing; in the center were 280 Maryland and Delaware Continentals

under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Eager Howard; and

200 Virginia militia were on the American left under Major Francis

Triplett.

Howard also had control of the whole line, which totaled

600 men and was tightly aligned along a 200-yard front. Behind the

main line, in a shallow gully, Morgan parked William Washington’s

3rd Continental Light Dragoons (82 men), together with 45 volunteer

horsemen drawn from the militia.

One hundred and fifty yards in front of Howard were 300 of Pickens’s

North and South Carolina and Georgia militia. (About 20 percent of

them had seen previous service as Continentals, and in fact about three-

quarters of Morgan’s force had combat experience.)

The battalions of

Colonel Joseph Hayes and Colonel Thomas Brandon were to the left of the

road; those of Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Roebuck and Colonel John

Thomas Jr. to the right. A skirmish screen of 120 picked militia riflemen

under Joseph McDowell, Samuel Hammond, and Charles Cunningham

went forward and stood about 150 yards in front of the militia.

patriot battles 328

Cowpens

17 January 1781

Dragoons

cavalry

clash

Light Infantry

House

Legion

7th Reg

RESERVES

Cavalry

71st Reg

MORGAN

LETO

American skirmish line

Pickens’s Militia

Howard

Triplett

Tate

N.C. and Ga. Riflemen

B RITISH

American

British

American movements

British movements

Dragoons

Cunningham and McDowell

militia

reorganization

cavalry reserve

Scruggs’s

RETREAT

William

Washington

Tarleton’s column debouched onto the southern fringe of the

Cowpens close to 6:45 am. Fifty or so dragoons drew sabers and moved

quickly against the patriot skirmishers, but accurate rifle fire took out

almost a third of them. Tarleton hurriedly began to display his infantry

into line. From right to left, he posted 50 dragoons of the 17th; next to

them were about 150 light infantry made up of the 16th Foot, the light

companies of the 71st Highlanders, and the Prince of Wales American