Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (7 page)

At this point, in August 1780, American fortunes seemed to have sunk as low as they possibly could in the southern theater. The British had seized the major cities of Georgia and South Carolina, defeated every field army that tried to face them in the open, and inflicted severe wounds on rebel irregulars. Only the victory of rebel “over mountain men” against Ferguson cast a ray of hope on the cause.
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This was the moment when Washington gave the command of Continental forces in the south to a thirty-eight-year-old former Quaker from Rhode Island who had never held a commission before being appointed a general in 1775, Nathanael Greene. Self-taught in strategic matters—he had been closely questioned by members of his meeting when they found books on military affairs in his home library—Greene had by this time spent five years serving close to Washington. His errors in judgment had contributed to early defeats near New York and Philadelphia, but he had also fought bravely and led troops skillfully to better outcomes at Trenton and Monmouth. He had also served as quartermaster general of the Continental Army, a position well suited to his methodical brain. But Greene longed to return to an active field command, and when Washington offered him the South, he accepted eagerly.

Giving the matter deep thought before his departure for the theater of operations in October 1780, Greene wrote to Washington outlining the plan he intended to execute with every expectation of success, “I see but little prospect of getting a force to contend with the enemy upon equal grounds, and therefore must make the most of a kind of partisan war.”
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Over the course of the following year, Greene’s “partisan war” would turn the tables on the British. But it would not be simply a case of hit-and-run raids. Greene would blend these skillfully with conventional maneuvers, using lightning strikes by irregular forces alternately with pitched battles to keep his opponents off balance and always guessing as to his next move. More than this, he would exhaust the enemy, setting the stage for the British army’s retreat to Yorktown, where it would finally be trapped.

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That the campaign in the south would not be conducted according to classical military principles became apparent from the outset. Greene’s first act as field commander was to divide his vastly outnumbered forces, giving half of them (about six hundred Continentals) to Daniel Morgan, one of the heroes of the victory at Saratoga. Advancing separately, Greene thought, they would both confound Cornwallis, the British commander, and maximize their militia recruitment efforts. Besides, if the Redcoats remained for the most part massed, and chased after one of the two American main forces, the second enemy formation would be able to run wild in another area—and the balky British columns would hardly be quick enough on the march to catch the Americans. Given that Cornwallis also had to worry about being able to come to the aid of the small garrisons of the many remote outposts he had created, and others of his ten thousand plus troops had to garrison Savannah and Charleston, Greene’s opening decision to split his force seems inspired.

An aggressive, energetic commander, Cornwallis rose to the challenge by dividing his own force. Soon he sent Tarleton in search of Morgan while he went after Greene himself. This was a reasonable choice, given the problem the rebel general had posed. The only other viable alternative seemed to be to cede the initiative to the Americans and stand on the defensive. Neither Cornwallis nor Tarleton were inclined to do this; but their first countermoves played out badly. In a masterpiece of tactical battle management, Morgan defeated Tarleton at the Cowpens in January 1781, while Greene stayed just beyond Cornwallis’s grasp, retreating just in time across a series of northwest-southeast-running rivers. His quartermaster’s brain had inspired him to make sure a sufficient supply of small boats was always at hand. And while the British were engaged in their own offensive maneuvers against the rebel main forces, guerrilla fighters were having their way with Tory militias and British garrisons at remote outposts. The first round clearly went to Greene. But the victory was somewhat Pyrrhic as Morgan’s rheumatism was acting up seriously in the cold, wet winter weather, and he was invalided out of the army.

Nathanael Greene’s Revolutionary War

Bereft of his strong right arm, and without another subordinate in whom he vested similar faith, Greene now had but one conventional force with which to divert the British from their renewed offensives against the rebel guerrillas. Cornwallis caught up with the Continentals when Greene chose to stand and fight at Guilford Court House on the Ides of March in 1781. Greene tried his best to emulate Morgan’s method of using militiamen as skirmishers and Continental regulars as his firm second line of defense. In this instance, however, a planned retreat of the militia went awry, and they failed to reform, leaving the regulars to fend off the Redcoats in a ferocious fight. They held on long enough to allow Greene to withdraw in good order, leaving the field to Cornwallis, whose army—even in victory—had lost more than a quarter of its men killed and wounded.

Soon after the battle, the British army retreated toward the North Carolina coast, where it could be replenished with fresh men and supplies, drawing succor from the Royal Navy. Cornwallis hoped to draw the Americans into a new battle where British logistical advantages would begin to tell, reestablishing the war’s general pattern of victories won when in proximity to the sea. The historian Theodore Ropp described this strategic dynamic as a situation in which “the Continentals won no pitched battles in the open. . . . Most British attacks on seaports were successful. . . . Most of the rebels’ successes were won in the back country.”
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Now, Cornwallis hoped, the campaign would continue on terms more favorable to British forces, as his move north would, he thought, compel Greene to follow and give battle. If Greene did not follow, the way would be open to conquer Virginia, where the American traitor Benedict Arnold was already leading a British raiding force and creating much disruption.

Yet Greene surprised Cornwallis again. As with his first move, dividing his army in the face of a far more numerous foe, Greene again violated the principles of conventional warfare by heading in the opposite direction from his main enemy. Instead of following Cornwallis, and before informing Washington, Greene took his army southward once more, aiming to set the backcountry ablaze and reclaim the Carolinas and Georgia. This move allowed Cornwallis to invade Virginia, where he prevailed against American forces that Washington had sent from New York under the Marquis de Lafayette. Tarleton, now working in tandem with other British raiding forces, caused considerable suffering among the populace. Nevertheless Greene stuck to his belief that the partisan war in the south was the best hope of achieving a strategic victory. Among the irregular formations fighting there, Greene’s move resonated powerfully, energizing them to new levels of guerrilla activity.

Soon it seemed that no British or Tory patrol in the Carolinas could be undertaken without being ambushed. And no outpost was secure. In a series of hit-and-run raids, the rebels came close to compelling British withdrawal to Charleston and Savannah. When additional British troops were being distributed to shore up security in the hinterland, Greene’s main force arrived on the scene, posing a whole new threat. So the British had to concentrate their forces once again, this time under the command of Lord Rawdon. Early on, in the spring of 1781, Rawdon bested Greene in a firefight at Hobkirk’s Hill. Later Rawdon arrived on scene just in time to thwart Greene’s effort to take the major outpost at Ninety-Six, so named for its distance in miles into the hinterland. The opposing forces met once more at Eutaw Springs on September 8, with the British again carrying the day in savage fighting—a characteristic of Greene’s pitched battles—but suffering mightily.

While Greene engaged the main British forces, his irregulars went wild. As the historian Theodore Thayer notes, “while he was keeping Rawdon occupied, Greene’s subordinates captured
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the small forts in South Carolina except those in the vicinity of Charleston.”
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In this sort of fighting the partisan Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, showed a special aptitude and a clear understanding of the larger purpose of the campaign. The historian Derek Leebaert rates Marion quite high in this regard, observing that “what elevated him above just being a guerrilla leader was his ability to accept authority and work hand in glove with Nathanael Greene.”
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Russell Weigley, who pioneered the concept of there being an “American way of war,” went further in singling out Marion, noting that, when compared to other partisan leaders, he was “possessed of a superior sense of strategy and a superior willingness to cooperate with other leaders.”
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Beyond Marion, Greene also enjoyed the benefit of a great cavalry leader, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee,
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father of Robert E. Lee, who would go on to write a brilliant account of the winning mix of conventional and irregular operations in his classic
MEMOIRS OF THE WAR IN THE SOUTHERN DEPARTMENT OF THE UNITED STATES
. With just a few hundred riders under his command, Lee was often able to raise complete havoc with the vulnerable British communications and supply lines. Ironically, his famous son, who would come to command Confederate forces replete with skillful raiders during the Civil War, would choose to fight conventionally, viewing irregular warfare as “an unmixed evil.”
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His supporting cast aside, it was to Greene’s particular credit that he understood the fundamental dynamic of the campaign: he did not have to win conventional battles in order to prevail. Stand-up fights wore down the British and created opportunities for irregular actions that added to the enemy’s physical and psychological fatigue. All Greene needed to do was keep his conventional force “in being,” able to compel a fight or pose a new challenge when circumstances required. In his famous, fatalistic description of the conventional part of the campaign, Greene summed up matters: “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.” This became his mantra, in the view of some historians making him more willing to accept tactical defeats, or not to press too hard when battles were in flux, in order to ensure the continuance of the overall strategy, which depended on keeping a conventional force in being. As Greene put it in a letter to Daniel Morgan, “It is not our business to risk too much.”
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Perhaps not. But these are odd words coming from a man who regularly risked his whole force in hard-fought pitched battles, and whose strategic moves—dividing his force, marching
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from the enemy—were exceptionally bold.

In the end it was the British who were, to their amazement, beaten strategically. Without having lost a pitched battle after Cowpens, they nevertheless found their forces exhausted and worn down by attrition and constant marching and countermarching, and in 1781 they began withdrawing from all their backcountry forts and outposts. They holed up in Charleston where they remained until 1782, then made good their escape. As to Cornwallis, his fate at Yorktown is a best-known part of American lore, especially the grace note about his band marching out at the surrender playing a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” What is less recognized is the crucial role that Greene’s campaign played in his ending up trapped there.

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When Lord Cornwallis turned his forces north into Virginia, he was emulating Greene’s move away from him—so perhaps he should receive as much credit as his rebel opponent for creativity. Indeed, Cornwallis continued to win battles and, in conjunction with Arnold’s and his successor’s raiding forces, brought considerable suffering to Virginia and the prospect of renewed British control. Farther south, Lord Rawdon showed his ability to stand toe-to-toe with Greene’s continuing operations and even to prevail tactically. The main British stronghold in the south, Charleston, continued to be virtually unassailable as long as the British held command of the sea, though it was briefly lost during the Yorktown campaign in the fall of 1781. But Greene’s maneuvers had a peculiarly unnerving effect on the British high command in North America, which grew worried that the insurgency in the far south had to be dealt with in order to avert an overall disastrous outcome to the war. Cornwallis’s superior, Sir Henry Clinton, took the position that the main Redcoat force “should have stayed in the Carolinas.”
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A bitterly contentious correspondence ensued between the two before Cornwallis complied with the order to retreat to the coast, pending redeployment of his forces.