CHAPTER 11
Downright Fighting
“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 Americans. Their spies had told them that Morgan had 3,000 men, and Banastre 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 returned, reporting 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 Tarleton’s blood more than a retreating enemy. Some have compared British soldiers, famed for their tenacity in war, to the bulldog. Tarleton was more like a 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.1
“Patrols and spies were immediately dispatched to observe the Americans,” Tarleton later recalled. He ordered the British Legion dragoons to follow Morgan until dark, then turn the job over to “other emissaries”—loyalists. Tarleton had about fifty with him to act as scouts and spies. Early that evening, January 16, 1781, probably at around the time Morgan was deciding to fight at the 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 the 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 to cross 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 Blue Ridge Mountain men who had helped destroy the loyalist army at King’s Mountain. Tarleton saw more and more clearly that he should attack Morgan as soon as possible.2
At 2:00 A.M. on January 17, Tarleton called in his sentries and ordered his drummers to rouse the men from their sleep. Leaving thirty-five baggage wagons and seventy Negro slaves with a one-hundred-man guard commanded by a lieutenant, he marched his groggy men down the Green River Road, the same rutted route Morgan had followed to Cowpens the previous day. The British found the marching even harder 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 his 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 who had been fighting in America since the beginning of the war. One company, from the 16th Regiment, had participated in some of the swift surprise attacks for which light infantry was designed. It had been part of the British force that killed and wounded 150 Americans in a night assault at Paoli, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1777. It had been part of another force that virtually wiped out the 3rd Continental Dragoons at Tappan, New Jersey, the following year. The light infantry company of the 11th Regiment had a similar record, having also been part of the light infantry brigade that the British organized early in the war.
With these two companies of 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. In the war since 1777, these northern loyalists had seen little fighting until they sailed south in 1780. After the fall of Charleston, Lord Cornwallis had divided them into detachments and used them to garrison small posts, with disastrous results. In August 1780 at Hanging Rock, Thomas Sumter had attacked and virtually annihilated one detachment. Francis Marion mauled another at Great Savannah around the same time. The British army had cashiered the regiment’s colonel for cowardice at Hanging Rock. It was hardly a brilliant record. But the men of this company of light infantry, supposedly the boldest and best of the regiment, might eagerly seek revenge for their lost comrades.
Behind the light infantry marched the first battalion of the Royal Fusiliers of the 7th Regiment, one of the oldest in the British army, with a proud history stretching back to 1685. Known as the City of London Regiment, it had been in America since 1773. The war had started out badly for its men. Divided into detachments to garrison three forts along the Canadian border, all but ninety of them had been captured in the 1775 American invasion of Canada. The ninety who remained, however, had played a vital part in repulsing the December 31, 1775, attack on Quebec, which wrecked American plans to make Canada the fourteenth colony. Among the 426 Americans captured was Daniel Morgan. Few, if any, of the men in Tarleton’s ranks had been in that fight. The battalion’s 167 men were all new recruits. When they arrived in Charleston early in December, the British commander there had written to Cornwallis, describing them as “so bad, not above a third can possibly move with a regiment.”3
The British government was having problems recruiting men to fight in America. It had never been easy to persuade Englishmen to join the army and endure its harsh discipline and low pay. Now, with the war growing more and more unpopular, army recruiters were scouring the jails and city slums. Lord Cornwallis had decided to use these new recruits as garrison troops at Ninety Six. Tarleton, as we have seen earlier, had borrowed them for his pursuit. Although the 7th’s motto was “Nec Aspera Terrent” (hardships do not frighten us), these men must have found it unnerving, little more than a month after a long, debilitating sea voyage, to be marching through the cold, wet darkness, deep in the backwoods of South Carolina, to their first battle.
Undoubtedly worsening the Fusiliers’ morale was their officers’ low opinion of Banastre Tarleton. The commander of the regiment, Major Timothy Newmarsh, had stopped at a country house for the night about a week before, during the early stage of the pursuit, and indiscreetly voiced his fears for the safety of the expedition: he was certain of defeat because almost every officer in the army detested Tarleton, who had been promoted over the heads of men who had been in the service since before he was born.
Behind the Royal Fusiliers trudged a two-hundred-man battalion of the 71st Scottish Highlanders who probably did not find the night march through the woods quite as forbidding as the city men of the Fusiliers. But at least half of these men were relatively new recruits who had arrived in America little more than a year before. The rest were veterans who had been campaigning in the rebellious colonies since 1776. They were commanded by Major Archibald McArthur, a tough veteran who had served with the Scottish Brigade in the Dutch Army, considered one of the finest groups of fighting men in Europe.
Between the 71st and 7th Regiments plodded some eighteen blue-coated royal artillerymen, leading horses that carried two brass cannons and sixty rounds of round shot and case shot (also known as grapeshot, because each “case” contained smaller, bullet-size projectiles that scattered when fired). These light guns were considered an important innovation when introduced into the British army in 1775. Because they could be dismantled and carried on horses, they could be moved over rough terrain where ordinary artillery and its cumbersome ammunition wagons could not go. The two guns Tarleton had with him could also be fitted with shafts that enabled four men to carry them around a battlefield, if the ground was too muddy or rough to move them on their carriages. With the shafts added, they bore a distinct resemblance to grasshoppers, and this was what the artillerymen, fond of nicknaming their guns, called them.
The grasshoppers added to Tarleton’s confidence. They could hurl their three-pound round shot almost 1,000 yards. There was little likelihood that Morgan had any cannons with him. The British had captured all the artillery of the southern American army at Camden. The guns with Tarleton may indeed have been two of these pieces, themselves originally seized from the British when the field army commanded by General John Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga in 1777.4
Behind the infantry and artillery rode the cavalry of the British Legion and a 50-man troop of the 17th Dragoons, giving Tarleton about 350 horsemen. In scabbards dangling from straps over their shoulders they carried the fearsome sabers that could lop off a man’s arm with a single stroke. The legion cavalry were, relatively speaking, amateurs, animated only by their courage and belief in the loyalist cause. The 17th Light Dragoons were regulars to the core, intensely proud of their long tradition. Their brass helmets displayed a death’s-head and below it a scroll with the words “Or Glory.” They and their officers disdained the British Legion.
Despite their large reputation among the Americans, the legion had several times exhibited cowardice unthinkable to a 17th Dragoon. When the British advanced into Charlotte, North Carolina, in the fall of 1780, a handful of backcountry riflemen had opposed them. Tarleton was ill with yellow fever, and his second in command, Major George Hanger, had ordered the legion cavalry to charge the Americans. The dragoons had refused to budge. Not even the exhortations of Lord Cornwallis himself stirred them until the infantry had dislodged the riflemen from cover. They apparently remembered the punishment they had taken at Blackstock’s, when Tarleton’s orders had exposed them to these sharpshooters.
AS DAWN turned the black night sky to charcoal grey, Tarleton ordered a select group of cavalry to the front of his infantry. They soon collided with American scouts on horseback and captured two, who told them that Morgan and his men were only a few miles away. Tarleton immediately ordered two troops of the legion cavalry, under one of his best officers, Captain David Ogilvie, to reinforce his vanguard. Captain Ogilvie galloped into the murky dawn. Within a half hour, one of his troopers came racing back with unexpected news. The Americans were not retreating! They were drawn up in an open wood in battle formation.
Tarleton halted his army and summoned his loyalist guides. They instantly recognized the place where Morgan had chosen to fight. The Cowpens was familiar to everyone who had visited or lived in the South Carolina backcountry. They gave Tarleton a detailed description of the battleground. The woods were open and free of swamps. The Broad River was about six miles behind the American position.
The Americans’ battle site was, Tarleton decided, made to order for their destruction. In fact, America could not produce a place more suitable to his style of war. His bloodhound instinct dominant, Tarleton assumed that Morgan, having run from him for two days, was still only trying to check his advance and gain time to retreat over the Broad River. Morgan had failed to stop him at the Pacolet. He would fail even more disastrously here.
With six miles of open country in the Americans’ rear, Tarleton looked forward to smashing Morgan’s ranks with an infantry attack and then unleashing his legion horsemen to hunt down the fleeing survivors. Tarleton never dreamt that Daniel Morgan was planning a fight to the finish.
WHILE TARLETON’S troops spent most of the night marching along the twisting, dipping Green River Road, Daniel Morgan’s men had been resting at the Cowpens and listening to their general’s battle plan. First Morgan outlined it for his officers; then he went from campfire to campfire, explaining it to his men. The plan rested on the terrain at Cowpens and on Morgan’s knowledge of Tarleton’s battle tactics. Morgan probably told his men what he repeated in later years: he expected nothing from Tarleton but “downright fighting.” The young Englishman was going to come straight at them in an all-out charge.
To repel that charge, Morgan adopted tactics he had himself helped to design at Saratoga. The little army he commanded at the Cowpens bore a similarity to the men he led in northern New York. Like his old rifle corps, his militia were crack shots. But they could not stand up against a British bayonet charge. Rifles took too long to load and fire and were not equipped with a bayonet.
Before Saratoga, the British had killed American riflemen by the dozen. But at Saratoga, Morgan had worked out close tactical cooperation with a brigade of American light infantry, commanded by Henry Dearborn. His riflemen exacted a fearful toll in their opening volleys but depended on Dearborn’s infantry, whose muskets did have bayonets, to keep the British from charging them. In later phases of the fighting at Saratoga, Morgan’s riflemen had harassed the British flanks, while the regular infantry engaged the enemy from the front. Morgan’s plan envisioned doing all these things with his mixture of militia and regulars at Cowpens.5
He had complete confidence in his Continentals. No regiments in the British army had a prouder tradition than these men from Maryland and Delaware. They and their comrades in arms had demonstrated their heroism on a dozen battlefields. Above all, Morgan trusted their commander, Lieutenant Colonel John Eager Howard of Maryland. At the battle of Germantown in 1777, he had led his 4th Maryland Regiment in a headlong charge that drove the British light infantry in panicky flight from their battle line back to their tents. After the American defeat at Camden, Howard had rounded up the survivors of his own and other regiments and led them on a three-day march to Charlotte, North Carolina, through swamps and forests to elude British pursuit. Someone asked what they had eaten during that time. “Some peaches,” Howard said.6
Morgan was equally sure of the steadiness of the ex-Continentals who comprised the bulk of his two companies of Virginia six-month militiamen. He told them that he was going to station them on either side of the Maryland and Delaware regulars, on the first crest of the almost invisibly rising slope that constituted the Cowpens. A professional soldier would consider this the “military crest” of the hill, because it was the high ground from which to mount the best defense. Behind this crest, the land sloped off to a slight hollow and then rose to another slightly higher hump of earth, which was the geographical crest of the hill. Here Morgan posted William Washington and his eighty dragoons. To make them a little more of a match for Tarleton’s 350 horsemen, he issued a call for volunteers to serve with Washington. About forty-five men stepped forward. Morgan gave them sabers and told them to obey Washington’s orders.
This part of Morgan’s battle plan entailed nothing unusual or brilliant. Selecting the most advantageous ground for his infantry and keeping Washington’s cavalry out of the immediate reach of Tarleton’s far more numerous horsemen simply made good tactical sense. Morgan demonstrated his genius in his plan for the militia. At Camden, Horatio Gates had tried to use the militia like regulars, positioning them in his battle line side by side with the Continentals. They swiftly demonstrated that they could not withstand a British bayonet charge.
Morgan decided he would use his militia as he had used his riflemen at Saratoga. He put the backwoodsmen under the command of Andrew Pickens and carefully explained what he wanted them to do. They were going to form a line about 150 yards ahead of Howard and the Continentals. They were to hold their fire until the British were within “killing distance.” Then they were to get off two or three shots and retreat behind the Continentals, who would carry on the battle while the militiamen reformed and came back into the fight on the British flanks.
A select group of riflemen, considered the best shots in the army, were to advance another hundred yards on both sides of the Green River Road and begin skirmishing with the British as soon as they appeared. Sumter had used this tactic at Blackstock’s to tempt Tarleton into a reckless charge that cost him heavy casualties.
His plan complete, Daniel Morgan did not retire to his tent, in the style of more autocratic generals, to await the moment of battle. He understood the importance of personal leadership. Above all, he knew how to talk to the militia. He, like them, was a man of the frontier. Although crippled by his rheumatism, he limped from group to group, while they cooked their suppers and, afterward, as they smoked their pipes, telling them how sure he was that they could whip “Benny.” Sixteen-year-old Thomas Young was among the men who had volunteered to serve in the cavalry with William Washington. He remembered how Morgan helped them to fix their sabers, joked with them about their sweethearts, told them to keep up their courage, and assured them that victory was certain.
“Long after I laid down,” Young recalled, “he was going among the soldiers encouraging them and telling them that the Old Wagoner would crack his whip over Benny in the morning, as sure as they lived.”
“Just hold up your heads, boys, give them three fires and you will be free,” Morgan told the young militiamen. “Then when you return to your homes, how the old folks will bless you and the girls will kiss you.”
“I don’t believe he slept a wink that night,” Young later said.7
Many of these young militiamen had something else to motivate them: a fierce resentment of the way the British and loyalists had abused, and in some cases killed, their friends and relatives. Loyalist militia had shot down Thomas Young’s brother, John, in the spring of 1780 in an attack on the Youngs’ militia regiment. “I do not believe I had ever used an oath before that day,” Young said. “But then I tore open my bosom and swore that I would never rest until I had avenged his death.”8
Another South Carolinian, seventeen-year-old James Collins, had fought under Sumter and other militia leaders since the fall of Charleston. He remembered with particular anger the swath of desolation left by loyalists when they plundered rebel Americans on the south side of the Broad River. “Women were insulted and stripped of every article of decent clothing they might have on and every article of bedding, clothing or furniture was taken—knives, forks, dishes, spoons. Not a piece of meat or a pint of salt was left. They even entered houses where men lay sick of the small-pox… dragged them out of their sick beds into the yard and put them to death in cold blood in presence of their wives and children. We were too weak to repel them.”
Collins and his friends had joined Sumter, only to encounter Tarleton at Fishing Creek. “It was a perfect rout and an indiscriminate slaughter,” he recalled. Retreating to western South Carolina, Collins described how they lived, before Morgan and his regulars arrived to confront the British and loyalists. “We kept a flying camp, never staying long in one place, never camping near a public road… never stripping off saddles.” When they ate, “each one sat down with his sword by his side, his gun lying across his lap or under the seat on which he sat.” It soon became necessary “for their safety,” Collins said, to join Morgan. At Cowpens, men like James Collins were literally fighting for their lives.9
Equally desperate—and angry—were men like Joseph Hughes, whose father had died at loyalist hands. Hughes had been living as an “out-lyer,” hiding in the woods near his home with a number of other men loyal to the American cause. One day he ventured out to visit his family. As he approached the house, three loyalists sprang out the door with leveled guns, shouting, “You damned Rebel, you are our prisoner!” Hughes wheeled his horse and leaped the gate to escape in a hail of bullets.
At the Cowpens, Hughes, though still in his teens, received command of a company of militia. Probably by his side was his close friend, William Kennedy, considered one of the best shots in South Carolina. His prowess with the rifle had discouraged rebel loyalists from venturing into the settlement at Fair Forest Shoal. His gun had a peculiar crack that his friends recognized. When they heard it, they often said, “There is another Tory less.”
The men who had turned out to fight for Andrew Pickens had no illusions about what would happen to them if captured. Like their leader, they had violated their paroles and were liable to instant execution if caught. On the night of January 16, Lord Cornwallis, in his camp at Turkey Creek on the other side of the Broad River, demonstrated what else would happen to their families. He wrote out an order for Colonel Henry Cruger at Ninety Six. “If Colonel Pickens has left any Negroes, cattle or other property that may be useful… I would have it seized accordingly and I desire that his houses may be burned and his plantations as far as lies in your power totally destroyed and himself if ever taken instantly hanged.” Cruger executed the order the moment he received it. His men hurried Rebecca Pickens and her children into the January cold to watch their house, barns, and other outbuildings become bonfires.10
The one hundred Georgians in Morgan’s army were all veterans of numerous battles, most of them fought under Elijah Clarke’s command. With their leader wounded, Major James Jackson now commanded them. Morgan had relied on Jackson to rally them. Like most of Morgan’s men, he was young, only twenty-three. He had fought Tarleton at Blackstock’s, where he had ducked bullets to seize the guns of dead British to continue the fight when his men ran out of ammunition. In one respect, Jackson was unusual. Born in England, he arrived in America in 1774 and, it seems, became an instant Georgian, right down to his extreme pugnacity and prickly sense of honor. He had recently quarreled with the rebel lieutenant governor of Georgia, challenged him to a duel, and killed him. Morgan appointed Jackson brigade major of the militia, making him Pickens’s second in command.
At least as formidable as Jackson’s Georgians were the 140 North Carolinians under Major Joseph McDowell. They had fought in numerous battles in the summer of 1780 and scrambled up the rugged slopes of King’s Mountain to destroy the loyalist army entrenched there.
WELL BEFORE dawn, Morgan sent cavalry under a Georgian, Joshua Inman, to reconnoiter the Green River Road. They collided with Tarleton’s advance guard and hastily retreated. Into the Cowpens they pounded to shout the alarm. Morgan seemed to be everywhere on his horse, rousing the men. “Boys, get up, Benny’s coming!” he shouted. Militia and Continentals quickly bolted down cold hominy they had cooked the night before. Morgan ordered the baggage wagons to depart immediately for a safe place, about a mile in the rear of the battlefield. The militiamen’s horses were tied to trees, under a guard, closer to the rear of the battle line.11
Morgan rode down to the picked riflemen who would open the fight and told them he had heard a lot of tall tales about who were better shots, the men of Georgia or Carolina. Here was their chance to settle the matter and save their country in the bargain. “Let me see which are most entitled to the credit of brave men, the boys of Carolina or those of Georgia,” he roared. By positioning Georgians on the left of the road and Carolinians on the right, Morgan shrewdly arranged to make this competition highly visible.
To Pickens’s men Morgan made a full-fledged speech, reminding them of what the British had already done to their friends and many of their families. He pounded his fist in his hand and told them this was their moment of revenge. He also praised the courage with which they had fought the British in earlier battles, without the help of American regulars or cavalry. Here they had the support of veterans in both departments. He had not the slightest doubt of victory, if they obeyed their orders and displayed their manhood.
To his Continentals, Morgan made an even more emotional speech. He called them “my friends in arms, my dear boys” and asked them to remember Saratoga, Monmouth, Paoli, Brandywine. “This day,” he said, “you must play your parts for honor and liberty’s cause.” He restated his battle plan, reminding them that after two or three rounds, the militia would retreat under orders. They would not be running away. They would be falling back to regroup and harry the enemy’s flanks.
A Delaware soldier watching Morgan’s performance said that by the time he was through, every man in the army was “in good spirits and very willing to fight.”
THE BLOOD-RED rising sun crept above the trees along the slopes of Thicketty Mountain to the east. The men stamped their feet and blew on their hands to keep warm. It was very cold, but the air was crisp and clear. The mighty ramparts of the Blue Ridge Mountains were visible forty miles away—much too distant for a refuge now, even if the swollen Broad River did not lie between them and Morgan’s men.
Suddenly the British army emerged from the woods along the Green River Road. The green-coated dragoons at their head slowed and then stopped. So did the red-coated light infantrymen behind them. An officer in a green coat, undoubtedly Banastre Tarleton, rode to the head of the column and studied the American position.
On his horse behind the American Continentals, Daniel Morgan roared one last question to his men. “Are you ready to fight?”
“Yes!” they shouted.
BANASTRE TARLETON soon found that his position at the head of the column was hazardous. The Georgia and Carolina riflemen drifted toward him through the trees on either side of the road. Their rifles popped, and bullets whistled very close to Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton’s head. He turned to the fifty British Legion dragoons commanded by Captain Ogilvie and ordered them to “drive in” the skirmishers. With a shout the dragoons charged. The riflemen rested their weapons against convenient trees and took steady aim. Again the long barrels blazed, and blue flame leaped from the firing pans of the rifled guns. Dragoons cried out and pitched from their saddles; horses screamed in pain. The riflemen flitted back through the open woods, reloading as they ran, a trick that constantly amazed the British. Each man carried four or five bullets in his mouth. Some whirled and fired again, and more dragoons crashed onto the cold brown grass of the Cowpens. In a minute or two the riflemen were safely within the ranks of Pickens’s militiamen. The dragoons recoiled from this array of fire power and cantered back toward the British commander. They had lost fifteen of their fifty men.
Tarleton meanwhile continued studying the American army. At a distance of about four hundred yards, he could identify Pickens’s line of militiamen, whose numbers he guessed to be about 1,000. He estimated the Continentals and Virginia six-months militiamen in the second line at about 800. Washington’s cavalry on the crest behind the Continentals he put at 120, his only accurate figure.
Tarleton was not in the least intimidated, even though his estimates doubled Morgan’s actual strength. He was supremely confident that his regular infantry could sweep the militia and riflemen off the field, leaving only the outnumbered Continentals and cavalry to deal with. The ground looked level enough to repeat the Waxhaws rout. In his self-confidence and growing battle fever, Tarleton did not even bother to confer on a tactical plan with Major Timothy Newmarsh of the Royal Fusiliers or Major Archibald McArthur of the 71st Highlanders. He simply ordered them to form a line of battle.
The infantrymen were told to drop their heavy packs and blanket rolls. The light infantry companies were ordered to file to the right, until they were extended as far as the flank of the militia facing them. The green-coated legion infantry was ordered into line beside them. Next came a squad of blue-coated artillerymen, with their brass grasshopper.
The light infantrymen and British Legion foot soldiers were now told to advance one hundred yards, while the Fusiliers of the 7th Regiment moved into line on their left. The other grasshopper was placed in the center of this regiment, no doubt to bolster the courage of the raw recruits. The two guns began hurling round shot and grapeshot into the woods through which the riflemen were again filtering to potshot the tempting red and green targets.
On each flank of the line, Tarleton posted a captain and fifty dragoons, more than enough, he thought, to protect his infantry from a cavalry charge. Finally, Tarleton ordered the 71st Highlanders to form a line about 150 yards in the rear of the 7th Regiment, slightly to their left. These veteran Scots and two hundred cavalry were his reserve, to be committed to the fight when most needed.
The army was ready. Everywhere Tarleton looked, he later recalled, he saw “the most promising assurance of success.” The officers and men were full of fire and vigor. Every order had been obeyed with alacrity. There was no sign of weariness, although the men had marched half the night. They had been chasing these Americans for two wearying weeks. They knew that defeating them here would end the war in South Carolina. To ensure that end, Banastre Tarleton issued a cruel order: they were to give no quarter, take no prisoners.
The order might have made some gruesome sense with regard to the militiamen. The British regarded them generally as criminals, fighting in direct violation of the law as laid down by his majesty’s officers in numerous proclamations. Killing them would save the trouble of hanging them. But an order to give no quarter to Morgan’s Continentals blatantly violated the rules of war under which both sides had fought for the past five years. It offered a graphic glimpse of the rage that continued American resistance was igniting in Englishmen like Banastre Tarleton.
One British officer in the battle later said that Major Timothy Newmarsh was still posting the officers of the Royal Fusiliers, the last regiment to move into the line, when Tarleton ordered the advance to begin. With a tremendous shout, the green- and red-coated line surged forward.
From the top of the slope, Morgan called on his men to reply. “They give us the British halloo, boys,” he shouted. “Give them the Indian whoop.” A howl of defiance leaped from nine hundred American throats. Simultaneously, the Georgians and North Carolinians opened fire from behind the big trees. Some of the new recruits of the 7th Regiment revealed their nervousness by firing back. Their officers quickly halted this tactical violation. British infantry fired by the volley, and the riflemen were out of musket range anyway. Rifles outshot muskets by 150 yards.
Daniel Morgan watched the riflemen give the British infantry “a heavy and galling fire” as they advanced. But the sharpshooters made no pretense of holding their ground. Morgan had ordered them to fall back to Pickens’s militia and join them for serious fighting. On the British came, their battle drums booming, their fifes shrilling, the two brass cannons barking. The artillerymen apparently did not consider the militiamen an important target. They blasted at the Continentals on the crest. Most of their balls whizzed over the heads of the infantrymen and came dangerously close to Colonel William Washington and his horsemen. He led his men to a safer position, on the slope of the geographic crest, behind the right wing of the main American line.
Andrew Pickens and his fellow colonels, all on horseback, urged the militiamen to hold their fire, aim low, and pick out “the epaulette men”—the British officers with gold braid on the shoulders of their red coats. It was no easy task to persuade these militiamen not to fire while those sixteen-inch British bayonets approached, glistening wickedly in the rising sun. The closer they got, the more difficult it would be to reload their clumsy muskets and get off another shot before the British were on top of them. But the musket was a grossly inaccurate weapon at more than fifty yards. This was the “killing distance” for which Pickens and Morgan wanted the men to wait. The steady fire of the grasshoppers, expertly served by the British artillerymen, made the wait even more harrowing.
Then came the moment of truth. “Fire,” snarled Andrew Pickens. “Fire,” echoed his colonels up and down the line. The militia muskets and rifles belched flame and smoke. The British line recoiled as over four hundred iron and pewter bullets hurtled into it. Everywhere, officers, easily visible at the heads of their companies, went down. It was probably here that Major Timothy Newmarsh of the Royal Fusiliers, who had been so pessimistic about fighting a battle under Banastre Tarleton’s command, fell with a painful wound. But confidence in their favorite weapon, the bayonet, and the knowledge that they were confronting militia quickly overcame the shock of this first blow. The red and green line surged forward again.
Thomas Young, sitting on his horse among William Washington’s cavalry, later recalled the noise of the battle. “At first it was pop pop pop [the sound of the rifles] and then a whole volley,” he said. Then the British regulars fired a volley. “It seemed like one sheet of flame from right to left,” Young said.12
But the British were not trained to aim and shoot. Their volley firing was designed more to intimidate than to kill. It made a tremendous noise and threw a cloud of white gun smoke over the battlefield. Most of the bullets went high over the heads of the Americans. Decades later, visitors to Cowpens found bullets in the trees as much as thirty feet above the ground.
Out of the cloud of gun smoke the British regulars came, bayonets leveled. James Collins was among those militiamen who decided that perhaps the two shots requested by General Morgan were more than they could manage. “We gave the enemy one fire,” he recalled. “When they charged us with their bayonets we gave way and retreated for our horses.”
Most of the militiamen hurried around the American left flank, following Andrew Pickens and his men. A lesser number may have found the right flank more convenient. The important thing, as far as they were concerned, was to escape those British bayonets and reach the position where Morgan had promised them that John Eager Howard’s Continentals and Washington’s cavalry would protect them.
Watching from the military crest, William Seymour, sergeant major of the Delaware regiment, thought the militia “retreated in very good order, not seeming to be in the least confused.” Thus far, Morgan’s battle plan was working smoothly.13
Tarleton ordered the fifty dragoons on his right flank to pursue Pickens and the bulk of the militiamen. If, as he later claimed, the English commander had seen William Washington and his 120 cavalry at the beginning of the battle, this order was an incomprehensible blunder. With two hundred cavalrymen in reserve, awaiting a summons to attack, Tarleton sent fifty horsemen to face twice their number of mounted Americans. He may have assumed that Morgan was using standard battle tactics and regarded Washington’s cavalry as his reserve, which he would not commit until necessity required it. The young British commander never dreamt that the Old Wagoner had made a solemn promise to the militiamen that he would protect them from the fearsome green dragoons at all costs.
As the militia retreated, Tarleton’s cavalrymen thundered down on them, their murderous sabers raised. “Now,” thought James Collins, “my hide is in the barn.” A wild melee ensued, with the militiamen dodging behind trees, parrying the slashing sabers with their gun barrels. “They began to make a few hacks at some,” Collins said, “thinking they would have another Fishing Creek frolic.” As the militiamen dodged the swinging sabers, the British dragoons lost all semblance of a military formation and became “pretty much scattered,” Collins said.
At that moment, “Col. Washington’s cavalry was among them like a whirlwind,” Collins exultantly recalled. American sabers sent dragoons keeling from their horses. “The shock was so sudden and violent, they could not stand it, and immediately betook themselves to flight,” Collins said. “They appeared to be as hard to stop as a drove of wild Choctaw steers, going to Pennsylvania market.” Washington’s cavalrymen hotly pursued them, and “in a few moments the clashing of swords was out of hearing and quickly out of sight.”
Thomas Young, one of the South Carolina volunteers in this ferocious cavalry charge, was riding a “little tackey”—a very inferior horse—which put him at a considerable disadvantage. When he saw one of the British dragoons topple from his saddle, he executed “the quickest swap I ever made in my life” and leaped onto “the finest horse I ever rode.” Young said the American charge carried them through the fifty dragoons, whereupon they wheeled and attacked them in the rear. On his new steed he joined Washington’s pursuit of the fleeing British.
Despite William Washington’s victorious strike, many militiamen decided that Cowpens was unsafe, leaped onto their horses, and departed. Among the officers who took prompt action to prevent further panic was young Joseph Hughes. Although blood streamed from a saber cut on his right hand, he drew his sword and raced after his fleeing company. Outrunning them, he whirled and flailed at them with the flat of his blade, roaring, “You damned cowards halt and fight—there is more danger in running than in fighting.” Andrew Pickens rode his horse among other sprinters, shouting, “Are you going to leave your mothers, sisters, sweethearts and wives to such unmerciful scoundrels, such a horde of thieves?”
On the battlefield from which they had just retreated, volley after volley of musketry thundered and cannons boomed. The Continentals and the British regulars were slugging it out. Daniel Morgan rode up to the milling militiamen, waving his sword and roaring in a voice that outdid the musketry. “Form, form my brave fellows. Give them one more fire and the day is ours. Old Morgan was never beaten.”
Would they fight or run? For a few agonizing moments, the outcome of the battle teetered on the response of these young backwoodsmen.
ON THE other side of the crest behind which Morgan and Pickens struggled to rally the militia, Banastre Tarleton was absorbed in pressing home the attack with his infantry. He seems to have paid no attention to the rout of his right-wing troop of cavalry. Nor did any of his junior officers in the British Legion attempt to support the fleeing dragoons with reinforcements from the two-hundred-man cavalry reserve. At this point in the battle, Tarleton badly needed a second in command with the confidence to make on-the-spot decisions. One man cannot be everywhere on a battlefield. Unfortunately for Tarleton, Major George Hanger, his right-hand man in the leadership of the British Legion, was in a hospital in Camden, slowly recovering from yellow fever.
With the militia out of their way, the British infantry had advanced on the Continentals and begun blasting volleys of musketry at them. The Continentals blasted back. Clouds of gun smoke enveloped the battlefield. Tarleton claimed that the fire produced “much slaughter,” but it is doubtful that men on either side could see what they were shooting at after the first few rounds. The British continued to fire high, hitting very few Continentals.
To Tarleton, the contest seemed “equally balanced,” and he judged it the moment to throw in his reserve. He ordered Major McArthur and the 71st Highlanders into his battle line to the left of the Royal Fusiliers. This gave Tarleton over 700 infantrymen in action to the Americans’ 420. Simultaneously, Tarleton ordered the troop of cavalry on the left to form a line and swing around the American right flank.
These orders, shouted above the thunder of musketry and the boom of the three-pound cannon, were promptly obeyed. On the crest of the hill, Lieutenant Colonel John Eager Howard saw the British threat developing. Men outflanked and taking bullets from two sides are in grave danger of being routed. Howard ordered the ex-Continentals in the Virginia militia on his right to “change their front” to meet this challenge. This standard battlefield tactic requires a company to wheel and face the flanking enemy.
A battlefield is a very confusing place, and the Virginians, although mostly trained soldiers, were not regulars who had lived and drilled together over the previous months and years. Their captain shouted the order given to him by Colonel Howard, and the men wheeled and began marching toward the rear. The Maryland and Delaware Continentals, seeing this strange departure and noting that it was done in perfect order and with the utmost deliberation, assumed that they had missed an order to fall back. They wheeled and followed the Virginians. On the opposite flank, the other company of Virginians repeated this performance. In sixty seconds the whole American line was retreating.14
Behind the geographical crest of the hill, Daniel Morgan and Andrew Pickens had managed to steady and reorganize the militia. Morgan galloped back toward the military crest on which he assumed the Continentals were still fighting. He was thunderstruck to find them retreating. In a fury, he rode up to Howard and cried, “Are you beaten?”
Howard pointed to his unbroken ranks and told Morgan that soldiers who retreated in that kind of order were not beaten. Morgan agreed and told him to stay with the men; he would ride back and choose the place where the Continentals should turn and rally. The Old Wagoner spurred his horse ahead of the infantrymen toward the geographical crest of the hill, about fifty paces behind their first line.
On the British side of the battlefield, the sight of the retreating Continentals revived hopes of an easy victory. Major McArthur of the 71st rode up to Tarleton and urged him to order the cavalry reserve to charge and turn the retreat into a rout. Tarleton claims that he sent this order to the cavalry, now at least four hundred yards from the vortex of the battle. Perhaps he did. The cavalry very probably would have obeyed, had the instruction arrived in time. The dragoons of the British Legion liked nothing so much as chopping up a retreating enemy.15
But events now occurred with a rapidity that made it impossible for the cavalry to respond. The center of Tarleton’s line of infantry surged up the slope after the Continentals, bayonets lowered, howling for American blood. With almost half their officers dead or wounded by now, the infantrymen had lost all semblance of military formation. At almost the same moment, the 71st Highlanders, whose weight, had they joined the charge, would probably have been decisive, received an unexpected blast of musketry from their flank. Andrew Pickens and the militia had returned to the battle. The backwoodsmen blazed at the kilted Scotsmen, the riflemen among them concentrating on the screen of cavalrymen. The cavalry fled, and McArthur’s men found themselves fighting a private war with the militia.
Far down the battlefield, where he had halted his pursuit of the British cavalry, William Washington saw what was happening. He sent a horseman racing to Morgan with a terse message. “They are coming on like a mob. Give them another fire and I will charge them.”
Thomas Young, riding with Washington, never forgot the moment. “The bugle sounded,” he said. “We made a half circuit at full speed and came upon the rear of the British line shouting and charging like madmen.”
Simultaneously, Morgan reached the geographical crest of the slope, with the Continentals only a few steps behind him. He roared out an order to turn and fire. The Continentals wheeled and threw a blast of concentrated musketry into the faces of the charging British. Officers and men toppled. The line recoiled.
“Give them the bayonet,” bellowed John Eager Howard. With a wild yell, the Continentals charged. The astonished British, assailed from front and rear, panicked. Some of them, probably the raw recruits of the Royal Fusiliers, flung themselves face down on the ground begging for mercy. Others, Thomas Young recalled, “took to the wagon road and did the prettiest sort of running away.”
Tarleton, astonished and appalled, sent an officer racing to the British Legion cavalry to order its men to form a line of battle about four hundred yards away, on the right of the road. He rode frantically among his fleeing infantrymen, trying to rally them. His first purpose was “to protect the guns.” To lose a cannon was a major disgrace in eighteenth-century warfare. The artillerymen were the only part of the British center that had not succumbed to the general panic. They continued to fire their grasshoppers, while the infantrymen threw down their muskets or ran past them helter-skelter. Part of the artillery’s tradition was an absolute refusal to surrender. Artillerymen lived by the code of victory or death.
Once the Continentals had passed the surrendering infantry, the cannon became their chief target. Like robots—or very brave men—the artillerymen continued to fire until every man except one had been shot down or bayoneted. Lieutenant Colonel Howard, seeing one gun crew wiped out, shouted to one of his captains to seize the cannon. Another captain joined him in a footrace. Both carried the only weapon American officers used in battle, a long pike with a spear tip, called an espontoon. The second officer won the race by converting his espontoon into a vaulting pole. Plunging the spear tip into the ground, he made a great leap over the dead bodies of the artillerymen and captured the gun.
The last survivor of the other gun crew was the man who thrust the match into the touchhole. An American infantryman called on him to surrender this tool. The artilleryman refused. As the infantryman raised his bayonet to kill him, Howard rode up and blocked the blow with his sword. A man that brave, the colonel said, deserved to live. The artilleryman surrendered the match to Howard.
Up and down the American line on the crest of the hill rang an ominous cry: “Give them Tarleton’s quarter.” Remembering Waxhaws, the regulars and their Virginia militia cousins were ready to massacre the surrendering British. But Daniel Morgan, the epitome of battle fury while the guns were firing, was a humane and generous man. He rode his horse into the shouting infantrymen, ordering them to let the enemy live. Junior officers joined him in enforcing the order.
Discipline as well as mercy made the order advisable. The battle was not over. The 71st Highlanders were still fighting fiercely against Pickens’s militiamen. Banastre Tarleton was riding frantically toward his legion cavalry to bring them into the battle. But the militia riflemen were back on the field, and Tarleton was their prime target. Bullets whistled around him as he rode. Several hit his horse. The animal crashed to the ground. Tarleton sprang up, his saber ready. Dr. Robert Jackson, assistant surgeon of the 71st Regiment, galloped to the distraught young lieutenant colonel and offered him his horse. Tarleton refused. For a moment he seemed ready to die on the chaotic battlefield with his men. Dr. Jackson helped to change his mind. He sprang off his horse and shouted, “Your safety is of the highest importance to the army.”
Tarleton mounted Jackson’s horse and rode to rally his dragoons. Jackson fastened a white handkerchief to the end of his cane and strolled toward the all-but-victorious Americans. No matter how the battle ended, he wanted to stay alive to help the wounded.16
Looking over his shoulder at the battlefield, Tarleton clung to a shred of hope. An all-out charge by the cavalry could still “retrieve the day,” he said later. The Americans were “much broken by their rapid advance.”
But the cavalrymen of the British Legion had no appetite for another encounter with the rifles of Andrew Pickens’s militia. “All attempts to restore order, recollection [of past glory] or courage, proved fruitless,” Tarleton said. No fewer than two hundred British Legion dragoons wheeled their horses and galloped for safety in the very teeth of Tarleton’s harangue. Fourteen officers and forty dragoons of the 17th Regiment obeyed his summons and charged with him toward the all but disintegrated British battle line. They hoped chiefly to save the cannon and rescue some small consolation from the defeat.
They never got there. Instead, they collided with William Washington’s cavalry, which had wheeled after its assault on the rear of the infantry and begun a pursuit of the scampering redcoats, calling on them to surrender and sabering those who refused. Washington shouted an order to meet the British charge. Most of his horsemen, absorbed in their pursuit of the infantry, did not hear him. Washington, leading the countercharge, did not realize he was almost unsupported. The burly Virginian, remembering the humiliation of his defeat at Lenud’s Ferry in the fall of 1780, had a personal score to settle with Banastre Tarleton. He headed straight for him.
Tarleton and two officers accepted Washington’s challenge. The Virginian slashed at the first man, and his saber snapped at the hilt. As the officer stood up in his stirrups, his saber raised for a fatal stroke, Washington’s black bugle boy rode up and fired a bullet into the Englishman’s sword arm. The second officer assaulted Washington and was about to make a similar stroke when the sergeant major of the 3rd Continental Dragoons arrived to parry the blow and slash this assailant’s sword arm. Tarleton made a final assault. Washington parried his blow with the hilt of his broken sword. From his saddle holsters, Tarleton drew two pistols in swift succession and fired them at Washington. One bullet wounded Washington’s horse.
By this time Tarleton saw that the battle was totally lost. The American riflemen were running toward his horsemen, and their bullets were again whistling close. Pickens’s militia and Morgan’s Continentals were methodically surrounding the 71st Highlanders. Summoning his fifty-four gallant supporters, Tarleton galloped down the Green River Road a defeated man.
On the battlefield, the Highlanders were trying to retreat. But Morgan’s Continentals and Washington’s cavalry were now between them and safety. Through the center of their line charged Major James Jackson and some of his Georgians to try to seize their standard. Bayonet-wielding Scotsmen were about to kill Jackson when Howard and his Continentals broke through the 71st’s flank and saved him. Howard called on the Highlanders to surrender.
Major McArthur handed his sword to Andrew Pickens, as did almost every other officer who was still alive. Pickens passed the major’s sword to James Jackson and ordered him to escort McArthur to General Morgan. Jackson took him to Colonel Washington instead.
Captain Duncasson of the 71st’s grenadiers surrendered his sword to Lieutenant Colonel Howard. When Howard remounted, the captain clung to his saddle and almost unhorsed him. “I expressed my displeasure,” Howard recalled, “and asked him what he was about.” Duncasson told Howard that Tarleton had issued orders to give no quarter, and they thus did not expect any. The Maryland and Delaware Continentals were approaching with their bayonets still fixed. He was afraid of what they might do to him. Howard ordered a sergeant to protect the captain.
Around the American main position, a happy chaos raged. In his exultation, Morgan picked up his nine-year-old drummer boy and kissed him on both cheeks. Major Jackson, having delivered Major McArthur, noticed that a Continental sergeant seemed to have charge of a cask of wine, from which he was distributing drinks to his friends. A wounded militiaman, propped against a tree, asked Jackson to get him a swig of it. Jackson asked for a cup, and the sergeant haughtily informed him that General Morgan had told him to guard the wine, which meant it was not available to militiamen. The fiery-tempered Jackson called for his Georgia friends, and they chased the sergeant away with kicks and curses. The sergeant ran to Morgan, who came roaring after Jackson, his huge fists ready to strike a knockout blow. Jackson hastily explained what the sergeant had been doing. Morgan made the sergeant get down on his knees in front of Jackson and beg his pardon.
Others were off on even more curious adventures. Volunteer cavalryman Thomas Young joined a half dozen riders who decided to pursue prisoners and possible loot down the Green River Road. They must have embarked on this adventure shortly after most of Tarleton’s cavalry had deserted him and before Tarleton himself quit the battlefield, following his encounter with William Washington.
“We went about twelve miles,” Young said in his recollections of the battle, “and captured two British soldiers, two negroes and two horses laden with portmanteaus. One of the portmanteaus belonged to a paymaster… and contained gold.” The other riders decided this haul was too good to risk on the road and told Young to escort the prisoners and the money back to the Cowpens.
Young had ridden several miles when he collided with Tarleton and the fifty-four troopers and officers who had joined him for his last charge. Abandoning his captures, Young tried to escape. He darted down a side road, but his horse was so stiff from the hard exercise on the battlefield that the British overtook him.
“My pistol was empty so I drew my sword and made battle,” the courageous young militiaman said. “I never fought so hard in my life.” But he was hopelessly outnumbered. In a few clanging, cursing seconds, one saber split a finger on his left hand; another slashed his sword arm. A third blade raked his forehead, and the skin slipped over his eyes, blinding him. A saber tip speared his left shoulder, a blade sank deep into his right shoulder, and a final blow hammered the back of his head. Young clung to his horse’s neck, half conscious.
He was battered and bleeding, but his courage saved his life. With the somewhat peculiar sense of sportsmanship that the British bring to war, they took him off his horse, bandaged his wounds, and led him back to the main road, where they rejoined Tarleton and the rest of his party. One of the Tory guides who had led the British through the backcountry to the Cowpens recognized Young and announced he was going to kill him. He cocked his gun. “In a moment,” Young said, “about twenty British soldiers drew their swords, cursed him for a coward wishing to kill a boy without arms and a prisoner, and ran him off.”
Colonel Tarleton ordered Young to ride beside him and asked many questions about Morgan’s army. He was particularly interested in how many dragoons Washington had. “He had seventy,” Young said, “and two volunteer companies of mounted militia. But you know, they [the militia] won’t fight.”
“They did today,” Tarleton replied.17
ON THE battlefield at the Cowpens, surgeons Robert Jackson of the 71st Regiment and Richard Pindell of the 1st Maryland Regiment were doing their limited best to help the wounded of both sides. Sixty-two Americans and two hundred British needed medical attention, which consisted largely of extracting a bullet if possible, then bandaging the wound and giving the sufferer some opium or liquor, if available. The battle had also cost the British 110 dead, including ten officers. Only twelve Americans had perished. But the number of prisoners, 502, underscored the totality of the American victory.
Even as prisoners, the British, particularly the Scots, somewhat awed the Americans. Joseph McJunkin said they “looked like nabobs in their flaming regimentals as they sat down with us, the militia, in our tattered hunting shirts, black-smoked and greasy.”
Other Americans were not content to inspect their exotic captives. William Washington and Andrew Pickens, in a terse conference, agreed they still had a good chance of catching Tarleton. But they needed enough men to overwhelm his fifty-four-man squadron. Washington changed his wounded horse for a healthy mount and rounded up his scattered dragoons. Pickens summoned some of his own men and ordered James Jackson to follow him “with as many of the mounted militia as he could get.”
Down the Green River Road they galloped, sabers in hand. But Tarleton the cavalryman was not easy to catch. He rode at his usual horse-killing pace. A few miles above William Thompson’s plantation on Thicketty Creek, they found the expedition’s thirty-five baggage wagons, most of them belonging to the 7th Regiment, abandoned. The fleeing cavalry of the British Legion had told the one-hundred-man guard of the defeat. The officer in command had set fire to all the baggage that would burn, cut loose the wagon horses, mounted his infantry two to a horse, and ridden for the safety of Cornwallis’s army. Abandoned with the baggage were some seventy black slaves. A short time later, a party of loyalists, fugitives from the Cowpens battlefield, reached the baggage train and began to loot it. They were not long at this work before Tarleton and his heartsick officers and troopers came thundering down the road. Asking no questions about loyalty, they cut down the looters without mercy.
Tarleton was riding for Cornwallis’s camp but had more than safety on his mind. He assumed the British commander was just across the Broad River at King’s Mountain in a position to rescue the five hundred men Morgan had taken prisoner. Perhaps Tarleton met a loyalist messenger or a scout somewhere along the road; at any rate, he heard from someone, “with infinite grief and astonishment,” that the main army was twenty-five miles away at Turkey Creek.
This news meant a change of route. The British decided they needed a guide. Near Thicketty Creek they stopped at the house of a man named Goudelock, known as a rebel. But Tarleton probably put a saber to his throat and told him he would be a dead man if he did not lead them to Hamilton’s Ford across the Broad River. Goudelock’s terrified wife watched this virtual kidnapping of her husband.
About a half hour after Tarleton and his troopers departed to the southeast, Washington, Pickens, and their dragoons and volunteer militia troopers rode into Goudelock’s yard. They had stopped to extinguish the fires the British started in the baggage wagons and to collect some of the slaves the enemy had abandoned. The Americans asked Mrs. Goudelock if she had seen the British fugitives. Yes, she said. What road did they take? they eagerly asked. Mrs. Goudelock pointed down the Green River Road to Grindal’s Shoals on the Pacolet.
Like a great many people in every war, she was more interested in personal survival than national victory. If the Americans caught up to Tarleton, a bloody struggle would certainly result, and her husband might get killed. Mrs. Goudelock preferred a live husband to a dead or captured British cavalry commander.18
The Americans galloped for the Pacolet. Not until they had traveled twenty-two miles on this cold trail did they turn back. By then, it was much too late. Tarleton was safely across the Broad River at Hamilton’s Ford. But the American pursuit helped save the captured volunteer cavalryman Thomas Young. When Tarleton and his men, guided by the reluctant Mr. Goudelock, reached the ford, it was almost dark. Someone told them the river was “swimming.” Someone else, probably a loyalist scout, rode up to tell them that Washington and the American cavalry were after them.
Considerable confusion ensued, as Tarleton and his officers conferred about whether to flee down the river to some other ford, attempt to swim the river in the dark, or stand and fight. Everyone stopped thinking about Thomas Young and another prisoner, a Virginian whom the British had scooped up along the road. The two Americans spurred their horses into the darkness, and no one noticed they were gone.
Tarleton crossed the Broad River that night and spent the next morning collecting his runaway dragoons and other stragglers before riding down to Cornwallis’s camp at Turkey Creek. The British commander had already heard the bad news. Some of the legion cavalry had drifted into the camp the previous night. But Tarleton, as the field commander, had to make a detailed report.
According to Joseph McJunkin, whose father had been taken prisoner by the British and was an eyewitness, Cornwallis grew so agitated that he plunged his sword into the ground in front of his tent and leaned on it while he listened to the details of the disaster. By the end of Tarleton’s account, he was leaning so hard on the hilt that the sword snapped in half. He threw the broken blade on the ground and swore he would recapture the lost light infantry, fusiliers, and highlanders.
The British commander exonerated Tarleton of all culpability for the defeat at the Cowpens. “You have forfeited no part of my esteem, as an officer,” he assured Tarleton. Cornwallis blamed the loss on the “total misbehavior of the troops.” But he confided to Francis, Lord Rawdon, the commander at Camden, “The late affair has almost broke my heart.” It also shattered his plan for an easy conquest of North Carolina.19
ON THE same morning that Tarleton made his doleful report, William Washington and Andrew Pickens returned to the Cowpens. On their ride back, they collected several dozen—some versions make it as many as one hundred—additional British soldiers straggling through the woods. At the battlefield they found only the two surgeons caring for the wounded and a handful of Pickens’s militia guarding them. Daniel Morgan, knowing Cornwallis would make a determined effort to regain the 530 prisoners, had crossed the Broad River on the afternoon of the battle and headed northwest toward Gilbert Town, North Carolina. Pickens and Washington caught up to him there, and Morgan gave Pickens charge of the prisoners, with orders to head for an upper ford of the Catawba River. Decoying Cornwallis, Morgan led his Continentals toward a lower ford of the same river. In an exhausting five-day march, often in an icy rain, both detachments got across this deep, swift-running river ahead of the pursuing British. The prisoners were now beyond Cornwallis’s reach. They were soon marched to camps in Virginia, where the men Morgan had helped to capture at Saratoga were held.
This final retreat, a vital maneuver that consolidated the field victory at the Cowpens, worsened Morgan’s rheumatism. He warned Nathanael Greene that he would have to leave the army. “I grow worse every hour,” he wrote. “I can’t ride out of [faster than a] walk.” As the rain continued to pour down, Morgan had to abandon his tent and seek the warmth of a private house. By the time the Old Wagoner departed for Virginia, he was in such pain that he had to ride in a litter.20