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THE WAR IN NORTH CAROLINA 

THE MARCH OF CORNWALLIS TO YORKTOWN
AND THE LAST BATTLES IN THE CAROLINAS
March - September 1781

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After Guilford Court House, the American forces had left the field to the British, but there was little comfort to be found there. After the battle, rain began to fall in torrents; the wounded lay scattered about, many of them untended and dying. There were few medical stores and little food. From their last meal on the evening of March 14, before the battle, the British troops had been entirely without food for forty-eight hours and what each man got after that was four ounces of flour and four ounces of lean beef. Cornwallis was almost destitute of supplies, and his nearest certain source of them was at Wilmington, two hundred miles away. "As for securing provisions from the country around him, his army was, in effect, the garrison of a besieged town. No foraging party could safely go abroad. No provisions could come unmolested by road or river. He had lost the campaign, and there was no hope of recovery; his army was too weak to fight another battle. If it should try and should lose as many men as in the last one, the patriot countrymen would rise and tear the rest of it to pieces. All he could hope for now was a swift, safe retreat to a place of refuge and a store of food." He marched for Cross Creek, a settlement of loyal Scottish Highlanders, on the Cape Fear River, hoping for supplies there, but his hopes failed to materialize and he was forced to go on to Wilmington, a hundred miles farther southeast. After he rested there and refitted his army, now reduced to one thousand four hundred thirty-five fit men, he resolved to march to "the back part of Virginia" to attempt a junction with General Phillips, leaving the remaining British forces in the Carolinas under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Francis Rawdon, then encamped at Camden. On April 25, 1781, Greene's army met Rawdon's at the battle Hobkirk's Hill, near Camden. In numbers, it was a relatively small engagement and Rawdon won the day, but the price he paid for victory was too high and Greene's army remained intact. Skirmishes continued between Rawdon's army and American forces commanded by Francis Marion, William Davie, "Light horse Harry" Lee, Pickens and Sumter. On May 22, 1781, Greene besieged the British stronghold at Ninety-Six. The siege failed and the British continued to hold the fort. After Ninety-Six, Greene's army marched towards Charlotte, northeastward, crossing the Saluda River the first day, then the Enoree, the Tiger and the Broad, to the Congaree. On learning that the army of Lord Rawdon, which he thought was in pursuit after the siege of Ninety-Six had turned back, Greene decided to rest his troops. They too had suffered much from extreme heat, forced marches and lack of food and supplies. Rice was their staple, in the absence of bread, and they fed on frogs and alligators. Greene determined to take his army to an area called "The High Hills of Santee," a long, irregular chain on the east bank of the Wateree River, about twenty miles north of its juncture with the Congaree. The hills are composed of sand and clay, twenty-four miles long, rising some two hundred feet about the riverbank to a wide plateau. The army remained there for six weeks while resting and recuperating. By the end of August, Greene's army had increased to some two thousand men and he decided to resume active military operations. On August 22, the Americans broke camp and marched to Eutaw Springs, where the British army was encamped, under command of Lieutenant Colonel Stuart, who had succeeded Lord Rawdon due to the latter's illness. At the time, Greene's army consisted of one thousand two hundred fifty-six Continental infantry, plus North and South Carolina militia under Sumter, Pickens and Marion, and cavalry under Lee and Washington, with four pieces of artillery. The British forces consisted of regular troops commanded by Major Marjoribanks and Lieutenant Colonel Stuart, including the famous Buffs, and a large number of Tories from New York, New Jersey and South Carolina, a total of about two thousand men. He had three artillery pieces. The battle of Eutaw Springs, on September 8, 1781, was one of the hottest engagements of the Revolution and in the fight the hero was British Major Majoribanks, who died in the battle, a valiant and outstanding soldier. American casualties amounted to five hundred twenty-two, including killed, wounded and missing, while the British losses were eight hundred sixty-six, more than two-fifths of the entire British force, including killed, wounded and missing. The British again held the field and claimed a victory, but neither side could carry on the fight and the results were distinctly favorable to Greene's side. After Eutaw Springs, there was no serious fighting in the states of North or South Carolina or Georgia, and the British domination of territory was confined to the seaports of Charleston and Savannah and the areas immediately surrounding those cities. The battle site at Eutaw Springs is now a national military park about sixty miles from Charlotte, toward Charleston. On October 19, 1781, Cornwallis, who had finally been forced by a lack of supplies and support to bring the British forces in Virginia to a peninsula on Chesapeake Bay at Yorktown, surrendered his army. He had intended to rendezvous with British naval forces which would take his army to safety but the French fleet under Admiral d'Estaing had reappeared and blockaded the port. A terrific storm had also intervened and had dispersed the British transports and their supporting vessels. Washington had descended upon the British forces from the north and besieged Yorktown in a masterly fashion, finally achieving the victory which is now regarded as the end of the Revolutionary War. "In fact, the capitulation at Yorktown was the surrender of only one of the three British armies in America, and that the weakest. New York was still held as strongly as ever; Wilmington in North Carolina and Savannah in Georgia were still in British hands, and Charleston, the capital city of the south and its most important strategic position. Yorktown was not everything. In fact, peace was yet more than a year away; and during that time, though no important battle was fought, the troops in the south had to continue their exertions and undergo much hardship." Although Greene had great leaders under his command in the southern campaign, including General Daniel Morgan, General Elijah Clarke, Colonels Pickens, Sumner, Sumter, Wade Hampton, Francis Marion, William Davie, William Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and others, to Greene alone must go the glory for victory in the Southern campaign, which ended the war. "The campaigns of Greene and his army in the south, which brought about the overthrow of British power in Georgia and the Carolinas, have been ably summarized and brilliantly characterized by three historians of note - one an American, the other two Englishmen. Major General Francis Vinton Greene writes: The eleven months campaign - January to December 1781, from the Catawba to the Dan and from the Dan back to Charleston and Augusta - received at the time the enthusiastic commendation of Washington and his comrades on the one hand and of Tarleton and Stedman on the other. It has always been considered one of the most brilliant in American annals, and it has been quite as much praised by English as by American writers. Though the numbers on each side were small, yet from the military standpoint it is full of interest and instruction and well repays examination in all its details. The marches, the manoeuvres, the sieges, the raids and scouting by both Lee and Tarleton, the improvised pontoon-trains, the proper use of the topography of the country for defense and offense - were all admirable. There was but little artillery on either side, but it was well handled. The four battles were fiercely contested and the percentage of loss on both sides was large. The British had the advantage of well-trained and well-armed troops, but this was more than counter-balanced by the superiority of American generalship. In only one respect can Greene be criticized, and whether the criticism is just or unjust it is hard to say. He lost every battle. Morgan, under similar circumstances, gained a great victory. If Greene had possessed the same temperament as Morgan or Wayne [or, it may be said, as Benedict Arnold] he would probably, both at Guilford and at Eutaw, have made one more effort and risked everything on the result of it. If unsuccessful, he would have been destroyed; if successful, he would have hastened by a few months what he finally accomplished. The general opinion is, and it is probably well founded, that the circumstances did not justify the risk, and that his prudence - in saving his little army while there was yet time and after he had, in each case, inflicted such loss on his adversary as to compel the adversary's retreat - was not the least of the many exhibitions of good judgment which characterized the whole campaign. Sir George Otto Trevelyan in his history of the Revolution presents this appreciation of Greene's services and the services of his men: Nathaniel Greene, while he was securing those great and decisive results, had depended mainly on his own resources, and had taken all his measures entirely on his own responsibility. So far as any combined action between the Northern and Southern armies was concerned, they might just as well have been operating in two different hemispheres. The intervening spaces were so enormous, and the obstacles to free and rapid communication so formidable, that news of victory or defeat did not arrive at Washington's headquarters in New Jersey until three or four weeks after a battle had been fought in South Carolina; and Washington's letters of advice and criticism, even if he had been unwise enough to write them, would have taken as long, and longer still, to find Greene in one of his shifting bivouacs on the banks of the Santee or the Catawba. Greene's handful of Continental troops had performed wonders ... Between April 1780, and April 1781, they had marched above two thousand six hundred miles, besides being engaged in many skirmishes and two pitched battles. They had passed through, or over, a score of streams many of which ... would have been reckoned large rivers in any other country in the world. Shoeless and in rags, and laden with their heavy firelocks, they plodded through the wilderness for month qfter month of a never-ending campaign without showing any perceptible diminution of their martial ardor. After a lost battle - which was a familiar experience to them - they almost instantaneously recovered their self-confidence and their self-complacency, with the invariable elasticity of the American soldier.... At Eutaw Springs many of the Continental infantry, the cloth of whose coats had long ago rotted off them in fragments, 'fought with pieces of [Spanish] moss tied on the shoulder and flank to keep the musket and the cartridge-box from galling. They sometimes got nothing for ten or twelve days running except half a pound of flour and a morsel of beef "so miserably poor that scarce any mortal could make use of it" and were fain to live upon green corn and unripe apples and peaches. During the pursuit of Cornwallis, after Guilford Court House, many of them fainted on the road for lack of food. Of Greene himself, Sir John Fortescue has this to say: "Greene's reputation stands firmly on his campaign in the Carolinas, his luring Cornwallis into a false position, and his prompt return upon Camden after the retreat of Cornwallis to Wilmington. His keen insight into the heart of Cornwallis' blunders and his skillful use of his guerilla troops are the most notable features of his work, and stamp him as a general of patience, resolution and profound common sense, qualities which go far towards making a great general. One gift he seems to have lacked, namely, the faculty of leadership, to which, as well as to bad luck must be ascribed the fact that he was never victorious in a general action . . . Saving this one small matter, Greene, who was a very noble character, seems to me to stand little if at all lower than Washington as a general in the field. " After the war, the state of Georgia gave General Greene a plantation near Savannah, where he resided until his death. 'The Union Bag-Camp Paper Corporation plant now occupies part of the old plantation site. General Greene's body was interred in Savannah and a magnificent obelisk erected in the square on Bull Street. When he joined the Continental army, his Quaker brethren ousted him from membership in Rhode Island, but his unfaltering service and devotion to his country immortalized his name. BIBLIOGRAPHY This sketch was made from The War of the Revolution (2 Vols), by Christopher Ward (MacMillan Co., New York, 1952). References and quotations may be found therein. Top of Page