Washington’s tightly coiled response to Rochambeau reveals that he was far from contrite. While claiming the letter’s publication had caused him “extreme pain,” he fell short of disavowing its contents, stating that “it would be disingenuous in me not to acknowledge that I believe the general import to be true.” He concluded, “With this explanation, I leave the matter to [Destouches’s] candor and to yours, and flatter myself it will make no impressions inconsistent with an entire persuasion of my sincere esteem and attachment.” These are hardly the words of abasement and regret.
It may have proved messier than he would have liked, but Washington had found a way to let Rochambeau (and the rest of the world) know the true extent of his frustrations. There was such a thing as a chain of command. At some point the French in Newport needed to start taking their cue not from the state of Virginia or even the Continental Congress in Philadelphia but from their commander in chief on the west bank of the Hudson.
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LORD CORNWALLIS, the forty-two-year-old commander of the British forces in the south, was devoted to his wife, the beautiful and sad-eyed Jemima Tullikens. When he had learned in the fall of 1778 that she was critically ill, he rushed from New York back to their home in Culford, a small town about a hundred miles to the northeast of London, arriving shortly before her death at the age of thirty-two. Never happy about her husband’s decision to leave her and their two children in England while he fought the war in America, Jemima had requested that a thorn tree be planted over her grave to signify “the sorrow which [had] destroyed her life.” Cornwallis made sure her wishes were fulfilled, and as late as the middle of the nineteenth century, a thorn tree still flourished over the grave of Jemima Cornwallis.
In a letter to his brother, Cornwallis confessed that his wife’s death had “effectually destroyed all my hopes of happiness in this world.” Unable to remain in Culford with his grief, he determined to return to the war and his regiment. “I am now returning to America,” he explained, “not with views of conquest and ambition [since] nothing brilliant can be expected in that quarter; but I find this country quite unsupportable to me. I must shift the scene; I have many friends in the [British] army [in America]; I love that army, and flatter myself that I am not quite indifferent to them.” Cornwallis would never remarry. Unlike other British generals, who were notorious for their affairs, he appears to have remained faithful to the memory of his wife. Instead of another woman, he would devote the rest of his life to what was perhaps his first love, the British army.
By the time Cornwallis returned to America, he had already established a reputation as a dedicated and energetic officer whose eagerness for battle could, on occasion, blind him to the strategic possibilities that lay before him. At the second Battle of Trenton, on January 2, 1777, which followed up Washington’s unexpected victory against the Hessians on Christmas Day, Cornwallis had neglected to send out the flanking movement that might have trapped the Americans on the bank of Trenton’s Assunpink Creek. Instead, he launched a series of unsuccessful frontal assaults across a narrow stone bridge that resulted in the deaths of dozens of British and Hessian soldiers before learning the following morning that Washington’s army had escaped in the dead of night. After serving as William Howe’s loyal second in command during the taking of Philadelphia in 1777 and his sad farewell to his wife in England in 1779, Cornwallis had served under Sir Henry Clinton during the taking of Charleston in 1780. Although that campaign had been a success, Cornwallis’s relations with Clinton had begun to deteriorate soon after the British commander in chief returned to New York.
It was Clinton’s understanding that Cornwallis would pursue a gradual process of reestablishing His Majesty’s authority in South Carolina—a strategy developed by Secretary of State Germain’s administration in London to address the obvious inadequacies of what had occurred during the previous five years of the war. Even though the British army had won virtually every battle it had fought (with the notable exception of the Battle of Saratoga in 1777), it had not succeeded in destroying Washington’s Continentals. It had also made no apparent progress in persuading the American people to return to the welcoming embrace of the British Empire. If Britain could not subdue the colonies militarily, perhaps it was possible to do it politically. Rather than fight, conquer, and move on, it was time for the British army to remain in place for a while, especially in a colony with as many loyalists as South Carolina was reputed to have. If the army could restore order to the extent that the colonists began to enjoy even a portion of the English liberties and economic benefits they had known before the Revolution, perhaps South Carolina could serve as an example to the rest of America. According to a 1780 memorandum in the Germain papers, “[this] would with ease bring about what will never be effected by mere force.”
The gist of this new approach was to promote the benefits of British rule by persuasion rather than by conquest. The successful implementation of this plan would have required a general with the demeanor of a diplomat. That was not Lord Cornwallis, whose restless and aggressive temperament was ill suited to the execution of a largely defensive strategy. Given the tremendous distance between his army in the interior of the Carolinas and Clinton in New York, Cornwallis felt free to do as he saw fit. Almost as soon as the commander in chief had sailed from Charleston for New York, his army was on the move. As his young and merciless subordinates (most notably, the cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton) cut a wide and bloody swath across the region, Cornwallis began hatching plans to extend the military presence of the British Empire into North Carolina, even if that left the preexisting outposts in South Carolina dangerously exposed. Tarleton’s defeat at Cowpens on January 17 was certainly a setback (“the late affair has almost broke my heart,” he admitted), but even the loss of close to a third of his army was not enough to deter him from seizing the offensive. He had to pursue Daniel Morgan’s army across the North Carolina border, retrieve his five hundred British prisoners, and then turn his sights on the army of Nathanael Greene to the east on the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. “All was to be risked,” wrote Brigadier General Charles O’Hara, who had recently joined the British army in the south, “as the only event that could possibly . . . retrieve our affairs in this quarter was the beating or driving of Greene’s army out of the Carolinas.” This was completely contrary to the original plan in the region, but it provided Cornwallis with the satisfaction of doing what he did best: attack with little regard for the consequences.
Encouraging Cornwallis in this determination to run wild across the region was the official whose administration had hatched the policy that his lordship was about to abandon: Secretary of State Germain. The inherent problem with the ministry’s southern strategy was that it took time and patience—neither of which made good headlines back in England. It was battles (the more desperately fought the better) that created the impression that progress was being made. Cornwallis might be inviting the same fate that had claimed detachments of his army at King’s Mountain and Cowpens, but at least he was doing something. Henry Clinton, on the other hand, hadn’t moved from New York in years. Who cared if he had good reasons for that inactivity (such as the British army’s absolute dependence on the navy)? By contrast, Cornwallis had the derring-do. And since it took as many as three to four months for a letter from Clinton in New York to reach him in the interior of the Carolinas, Cornwallis was free to pursue whatever strategy he felt was appropriate, especially since one of his subordinates, who had spoken directly to Germain during a recent trip to England, reported that he had the ministry’s support.
Cornwallis hardly looked the part of a swashbuckling risk taker. He was overweight and had a deviated left eye due to an injury as a student at Eton. As his earlier letter to his brother indicated, he was deeply skeptical of Britain’s ability to put an end to the American rebellion. By late January 1781, however, he had embraced a fatalistic determination to give i
t a try nonetheless. Fueled by his deeply felt sense of loss for his wife and his equally passionate love for his army, and emboldened by the ministry back home, he was about to confront the conundrum that had so far stymied every one of his predecessors: how to subdue a wilderness. While Washington hoped to beat the British by using the French fleet to establish naval superiority on the sea, Cornwallis was determined to take the war into the tangled heart of the enemy’s own country.
With every step north, he was putting more distance between his army and its source of supply in Charleston. Although he had hopes of rallying the local loyalists to his cause, he could not ignore the threat posed by the Overmountain Men from the west (the band who had annihilated Major Patrick Ferguson’s army at King’s Mountain) and the militiamen in Virginia, whom Governor Jefferson and Baron von Steuben were attempting to rally in support of Nathanael Greene. But perhaps the severest challenge Cornwallis faced came from the land itself. Nowhere in eighteenth-century colonial America were the roads as terrible as they were in North Carolina, where, in the words of one frustrated traveler, “the red clay abounds.” What roads existed were transformed into “linear bogs” by the relentless winter rains. Soldiers on foot found it easier to walk through the dense undergrowth on either side of a road than wallow in the knee-deep clay; wagon wheels became so clotted with reddish-brown muck that the spokes had to be turned by hand; even horses floundered in the clinging mire. And then there were the many rivers. Since bridges and boats were a rarity, Cornwallis’s army would more than likely have to wade across the shallows of long established fords that might be ankle-deep in summer but were waist-high (if not deeper) in winter.
On January 27, as his army paused at Ramsour’s Mill on the south fork of the Catawba River, forty miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, Cornwallis decided he and his men must make the ultimate sacrifice. To increase their speed and ease of movement in pursuit of Morgan’s army, which was less than twenty miles to the east on the opposite side of the Catawba, they must rid themselves of their “superfluous baggage.” All of it—not only the baggage but the wagons that carried it—must be hurled into a huge bonfire.
One can only wonder what was going through the minds of his two thousand or so soldiers as they pitched their belongings into the flames. With this strangely ritualistic, ultimately self-defeating act, Cornwallis had deprived them of what were commonly regarded as essential to an army: food, shelter, and rum. From here on in, they must live off the land, sleep in the rain, and (perhaps the greatest sacrifice of all) remain sober.
Cornwallis later downplayed the magnitude of what he had demanded of his army, insisting in a letter to Germain that his officers and men displayed “the most general cheerful acquiescence” as they watched the billows of smoke rise through the gray rain. General Charles O’Hara, on the other hand, was fully aware of the deprivations that awaited them. “In this situation,” he wrote, “without baggage, necessaries, or provisions of any sort for officer or soldier, in the most barren, inhospitable, unhealthy part of North America, opposed to the most savage, inveterate, perfidious, cruel enemy, with zeal and with bayonets only, it was resolved to follow Greene’s army to the end of the world.”
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LIKE HIS BRITISH OPPONENT, Lord Cornwallis, Nathanael Greene, then stationed with the eastern portion of the American army at Cheraw, South Carolina, was acting with only minimal input from his commander in chief. For all intents and purposes, he was operating on his own, and on January 28, the day after Cornwallis burned his baggage train, he committed what his first biographer described as “the most imprudent action of his life.” Knowing that the British were in pursuit of Daniel Morgan’s prisoner-burdened army in the west, he decided he must leave the main portion of the American army at Cheraw and go to support Morgan. Instructing General Isaac Huger to march the army to a meeting place at the town of Salisbury in the center of North Carolina, he set out with just an aide, a guide, and a sergeant’s guard of cavalry. Given the lack of roads and the presence of a significant number of loyalist militiamen, plus the fact that he had more than a hundred miles to cover, Greene ran a high risk of capture. Three days later, however, at 2:30 p.m. on January 31, he rode into Morgan’s camp on the eastern bank of the Catawba. That afternoon Greene, Morgan, William Washington (a cavalry officer and distant relative of the commander in chief), and William Davidson, the local militia general, sat down on a log beside the river and conducted an impromptu council of war.
In addition to learning about Cornwallis’s decision to burn his baggage train, Greene received tangible proof of just how close the enemy was when a British officer, who may have been Cornwallis himself, was spotted on the opposite bank of the river studying them through a spyglass. Only the extreme depth of the newly risen Catawba (which had just begun to recede after several days of rain) prevented the British from crossing the river and attacking Morgan’s tiny and exhausted army.
Greene soon realized he and Morgan had differing ideas about what to do next. There were only about 100 miles between them and the mountains to the west and close to 300 miles of river-ribbed country extending eastward to the coast. Morgan felt their only chance was to retreat into the mountains, where the topography was better adapted to keeping Cornwallis at bay. Heading west would also reduce the number of rivers they needed to cross. For the present, the flooded Catawba was shielding them from the British; however, if they continued to work their way east, the rivers that lay ahead were just as likely to block their path and force a confrontation with the British—exactly the scenario that had led to the Battle of Cowpens. Although Morgan had pulled off a stunning victory in that instance, he knew better than anyone that his army could have just as easily been destroyed on the banks of the impassable Broad River. Morgan, for one, had had enough of rivers.
Greene, in contrast, saw North Carolina’s many waterways as a potential asset, especially if his army had boats. Unfortunately, logistical difficulties would make it impossible for General Huger to bring the many flat-bottomed craft built during the army’s encampment in Cheraw. That, however, did not prevent boats from working to his army’s strategic advantage. They weren’t as abundant as they’d been before the war, but watercraft—from canoes to raftlike vessels known as “flats”—could still be found on the rivers of North Carolina. It would require an extraordinary amount of planning and coordination, but with Edward Carrington, his highly capable quartermaster, traveling in advance, Greene was confident they would find the boats they needed to cross each river at a point that was too deep for the British to follow on foot. Assuming they could stay ahead of the enemy (which was a very big assumption), rivers would provide his troops with the opportunity to increase the distance between them and their pursuers.
With this as his guiding principle, Greene proposed they march northeast, meet up with Huger and the main army at Salisbury, and, when the time was right, attack Cornwallis. It would involve a march of more than fifty miles to Salisbury, during which Cornwallis might catch up to them at any time, but it was, Greene felt, worth the gamble, especially since they could always slip across the next river to the east, the Yadkin, if it was in their best interests to avoid a battle.
Morgan was hardly averse to risk, but this, he felt, was simply hazarding too much, and he declared “he would not be answerable for consequences.” Many commanding officers in Greene’s position would have had difficulty contradicting Morgan, who had just won one of the most decisive victories of the war. But Greene was not to be dissuaded, assuring Morgan that he would “take the measure upon myself.” As events soon proved, Greene had hit upon the only strategy capable of buying the time his army needed before it could face the British in battle.
Greene was a pessimist by nature. “I am of the Spanish disposition,” he admitted to his wife, Caty, “always most serious when there is the greatest need of good fortune . . . for fear of some ill-fated stroke.” Now, how
ever, at what was the most desperate point of the campaign, he projected an aura of quiet confidence, much of it based on his opponent’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the logistical realities of supporting an army in the hinterlands of North Carolina. “I am not without hopes of ruining Lord Cornwallis if he persists in his mad scheme of pushing through the country,” he wrote to General Huger, who was in motion with the main army to the east, “and it is my earnest desire to form a junction [with you] as soon as possible for this purpose.”
Already Morgan had sent ahead his five hundred British prisoners toward Virginia; soon the rest of the army was marching toward Salisbury. It would be left to General William Davidson and his three hundred North Carolina militiamen to prevent the British from crossing the Catawba River for as long as possible.
Cornwallis had camped near Beatty’s Ford, which was the most commonly used crossing point in the area. Greene, however, suspected that the British commander actually planned to cross elsewhere. Three miles to the south was Cowan’s Ford. The water was deeper and faster-flowing at this portion of the river, but Greene was convinced that Cornwallis’s outward interest in Beatty’s Ford was only a feint. Davidson should divide his force and place a significant number of men at the ford to the south.
On the way down to Cowan’s Ford, William Davidson turned to a twenty-one-year-old captain named Joseph Graham and expressed his astonishment at their commander’s knowledge of the region, all of it apparently acquired by looking at a map. “Though General Greene had never seen the Catawba before,” he marveled, “he appeared to know more about it than those who were raised on it.”
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