US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0028/00280.txt

Text File | 1990-12-23 | 22KB | 355 lines

$Unique_ID{USH00280}
$Pretitle{23}
$Title{Cowpens
Chapter 5, 6    Morgan's Strategy}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Fleming, Thomas J.}
$Affiliation{National Park Service}
$Subject{morgan
tarleton
british
river
army
infantry
legion
militia
tarleton's
south}
$Volume{Handbook 135}
$Date{1988}
$Log{Tarleton's Legion, left panel*0028001.scf
Tarleton's Legion, right panel*0028002.scf
}
Book:        Cowpens
Author:      Fleming, Thomas J.
Affiliation: National Park Service
Volume:      Handbook 135
Date:        1988

Chapter 5, 6    Morgan's Strategy

     Until he got this information on the numbers and composition of
Tarleton's army, Morgan seems to have toyed with the possibility of ambushing
the British as they crossed the Pacolet.  He left strong detachments of his
army at the most likely fords.  At the very least, he may have wanted to make
the crossing a bloody business for the British, perhaps killing some of their
best officers, even Tarleton himself.  If he could repulse or delay Tarleton
at the river, Morgan hoped he could gain enough time to retreat to a ford
across the upper Broad, well out of reach of Cornwallis on the other side of
the river.  Pickens had kept Morgan well informed of the sluggish advance of
the main British army.  He knew they were far to the south, a good 30 miles
behind Tarleton.

     North of the Broad, Morgan reasoned they could be easily joined by the
500 North Carolina militia William Davidson had promised him as well as South
Carolina men from that district.  If Tarleton continued the pursuit, they
could give battle on the rugged slopes of Kings Mountain, where the cavalry of
the British Legion would be useless.

     Morgan undoubtedly discussed this plan with the leaders of the militiamen
who were already with him, Joseph McDowell of North Carolina, whose men had
fought at Kings Mountain, James Jackson and John Cunningham of Georgia, James
McCall, Thomas Brandon, William Bratton and other South Carolinians, perhaps
also Andrew Pickens.  They did not have much enthusiasm for it.  They warned
Morgan that at least half the militia, especially the South Carolinians, would
be inclined to go home rather than retreat across the Broad.  In the back
country, men perceived rivers as dividing lines between districts.  Most of
the South Carolina men in camp came from the west side of the Broad.
Moreover, with Sumter hostile, there was no guarantee that they would be able
to persuade many men on the other side of the river to join them.

     In this discussion, it seems likely that these militia leaders mentioned
the Cowpens as a good place to fight Tarleton on the south side of the river.
The grazing ground was a name familiar to everyone in the back country.  It
was where the militia had assembled before the battle of Kings Mountain the
previous fall.  Messengers could be sent into every district within a day's
ride to urge laggards to join them there.

     Morgan mulled this advice while his men guarded the fords of the Pacolet.
As dusk fell on January 15, Tarleton and his army appeared on the south bank
of the river.  He saw the guards and wheeled, marching up the stream toward a
ford near Wofford's iron works.  On the opposite bank, Morgan's men kept pace
with him, step for step.  Then, with no warning, the British disappeared into
the night.  Retreating?  Making camp?  No one knew.  It was too risky to
venture across the swollen river to follow him.  The British Legion cavalry
always guarded Tarleton's flanks and rear.

     On the morning of the 16th, a militia detachment miles down the river in
the opposite direction made an alarming discovery.  Tarleton was across!  He
had doubled back in the dark and marched most of the night to cross at
Easterwood Shoals.  He was only 6 miles from Morgan's camp on Thicketty Creek.
Leaping on their horses, the guards galloped to Morgan with the news.

     Morgan's men were cooking breakfast.  Out of his tent charged the general
to roar orders at them, the wagoners, the infantry, the cavalrymen.  Prepare
to march immediately!  The men grabbed their halfcooked cornmeal cakes and
stuffed them into their mouths.  The militia and the cavalry ran for their
horses, the wagoners hitched their teams, the Continentals formed ranks, and
the column got underway.  Morgan pressed forward, ignoring the pain in his
hip, demanding more and more speed from his men.  He headed northwest, toward
Cowpens, on the Green River Road, a route that would also take him to the
Island Ford across the Broad River, about 6 miles beyond Cowpens.

     All day the men slogged along the slick, gooey roads, Morgan at the head
of the column seeing a relentless pace.  His sciatic hip tormented him.
Behind him, the militiamen were expending ny a hearty curse" on him, one of
them later recalled.  As Nathanael Greene wryly remarked, in the militia every
man considered himself a general.

     But Daniel Morgan was responsible for their lives and the lives of his
Continentals, some of who had marched doggedly from battlefield to battlefield
for over four years.  In the company of the Delaware Continentals who served
beside the Marylanders in the light infantry brigade, there was a lieutenant
named Thomas Anderson who kept track of the miles he had marched since they
headed south in May 1780.  At the end of each day he entered his journal the
ever-growing total.  By January 16, it was 1,435.  No matter what the militia
thought of him, Daniel Morgan was not going to throw away such men in a battle
simply to prove his courage.

     Seldom has there been a better example of the difference between the
professional and the amateur soldier.  In his letters urging militiamen to
join him, Morgan had warned them against the futility of fighting in such
small detachments.  He had as asked them to come into his camp and subject
themselves to "order and discipline ... so that I may be enabled to direct you
to the advantage of the whole."

     In the same letters, Morgan had made a promise to these men.  "I will ask
you to encounter no dangers or difficulties but what I shall participate in."
If he retreated across the Broad, he would be exposing the men who refused to
go with him to Tarleton's policy of extermination by fire and sword.  If they
went with him, their families, their friends their homes would be abandoned to
the young lieutenant colonel's vengeance.

     This conflict between prudence and his promise must have raged in
Morgan's mind as his army toil along the Green River Road.  It was hard
marching.  The road dipped into hollows and looped around small hills.
Swollen creeks cut across it.  The woods were thick on both sides of it.  At
dusk, the Americans emerged from the forest onto a flat, lightly wooded
tableland.  At least, it looked flat at first glance.  As Morgan led his men
into it, he noted that the ground rose gradually to a slight crest, then
dipped and rose to another slightly higher crest.  Oak and hickory trees were
dotted throughout the more or less rectangular area, but there was practically
no underbrush.  This was the Cowpens, a place where back-country people
pastured their cattle and prepared them to be driven to market.

     In the distance, Morgan could see the Blue Ridge Mountains, which rise
from the flat country beyond the Broad like a great rampart.  They were 30
miles away.  If they could reach them, the army was safe.  But militia scouts
brought in grim news.  The river was rising.  It would be a difficult business
crossing at Island Ford in the dark.  The ford was still 6 miles away, and the
men were exhausted from their all-day march.  If they rested at Cowpens and
tried to cross the river the next morning, Banastre Tarleton, that soldier who
liked to march by night, would be upon them, ready to slash them to pieces.

     Perhaps it was that report which helped Morgan make his decision.  One
suspects he almost welcomed the news that the army was, for all practical
purposes, trapped and fighting was the only alternative.  There was enough of
the citizen-soldier in Morgan to dislike retreating almost as much as the
average militiaman.

     The more Morgan studied the terrain around him, the more he liked it.
The militia leaders were right.  This was the best place to fight Tarleton.
Sitting on his horse, looking down the slope to the Green River Road, Morgan
noted the way the land fell off to the left and right toward several creeks.
The Cowpens was bordered by marshy ground that would make it difficult for
Tarleton to execute any sweeping flank movements with his cavalry.  As his
friend Richard Winn had told him, that was not Tarleton's style, anyway.  He
was more likely to come straight at the Americans with his infantry and
cavalry in a headlong charge.  Experience told Morgan there were ways to
handle such an assault-tactics that 26-year-old Banastre Tarleton had probably
never seen.

     Now the important thing was to communicate the will to fight.  Turning to
his officers, Morgan said, "On this ground I will beat Benny Tarleton or I
will lay my bones."

     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 patriots.  Their spies had told
them that Morgan had 3,000 men, and 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 reported that the Americans had "decamped."
Tarleton immediately advanced to Morgan's abandon campsite, where his hungry
soldiers were delighted to find "plenty of provisions which they had left
behind them, half cooked."

     Nothing stirred Banastre Tarleton's blood more than a retreating enemy.
British soldier famed for their tenacity in war, have often been compared to
the bulldog.  But Tarleton was more like the bloodhound.  A fleeing foe meant
the chance of an easy victory.  It was not only instinct, it was art of his
training as a cavalryman.

     "Patrols and spies were immediately dispatched to observe the Americans,"
Tarleton lat recalled.  The British Legion dragoons were order to follow
Morgan until dark.  Then the job was turned over to "other emissaries"
loyalists Tarleton had about 50 with him to act as scouts and spies.  Early
that evening, January 16, probably around the time that Morgan was deciding to
fight at 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 Cowpens and gather more militia.  But the captive
said that Morgan then intended to get across the Broad River, here 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 mountain men who had
helped destroy the loyalist army at Kings Mountain.  It became more and more
obvious to Tarleton that he should attack Morgan as soon as possible.

     About three in the morning of the 17th of January, Tarleton called in his
sentries and ordered his drummers to rouse his men.  Leaving 35 baggage wagons
and 70 Negro slaves with a 100-man guard commanded by a lieutenant, he marched
his sleepy men down the rutted Green River Road, the same route Morgan had
followed the previous day.  The British found the marching hard 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 the 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, most of whom had been fighting in America since the beginning of the
war.  One company was from the 16th Regiment and had participated in some of
the swift, surprise attacks for which light infantry was designed.  They had
been part of the British force that killed and wounded 150 Americans in a
night assault at Paoli, Pa., in the fall of 1777.  The light company of the
71st Regiment had a similar record, having also been part of the light
infantry brigade that the British organized early in the war.

[See Tarleton's Legion, left panel: Tarleton's Legion, left panel]

[See Tarleton's Legion, right panel: Tarleton's Legion, right panel]

     With these 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.  Northern loyalists, they had been in the war since 1777.
They had seen little fighting until they sailed south in 1780.  After the fall
of Charleston, Cornwallis had divided them into detachments and used them to
garrison small posts, with disastrous results.  In August 1780 at Hanging
Rock, Sumter had attacked one detachment, virtually annihilating it.  The
colonel of the regiment was cashiered for cowardice.  Another detachment was
mauled by Francis Marion at Great Savannah around the same time.  It was
hardly a brilliant record.  But this company of light infantry, supposedly the
boldest and best of the regiment, might be eager to seek revenge for their
lost comrades.

     Behind the light infantry marched the first battalion of the Royal
Fusiliers of the 7th Regiment.  This was one of the oldest regiments in the
British army, with a proud history that went back to 1685.  Known as the "City
of London regiment, it had been in America since 1773.  A detachment played a
vital part in repulsing the December 31, 1775, attack on Quebec, which wrecked
American plans to make Canada the 14th State.  Among the 426 Americans
captured was Daniel Morgan.  Few if any of the men in Tarleton's ranks had
been in that fight.  The 167-man battalion were all new recruits.  When they
arrived in Charleston early in December, the British commander there had
described them to Cornwallis as "so bad, not above a third can possibly move
with a regiment."

     The British government was having problems recruiting men for 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 in America growing more and
more unpopular, army recruiters were scouring the jails and city slums.
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"), it must have been an unnerving experience for these men, little more
than a month after a long, debilitating sea voyage, to find themselves deep in
the backwoods of South Carolina, marching through the cold, wet darkness to
their first battle.

     Undoubtedly worsening the Fusiliers' morale was the low opinion their
officers had of Banastre Tarleton.  The commander of the regiment, Maj.
Timothy Newmarsh, had stopped at a country house for the night about a week
ago, during the early stage of the pursuit, and had not been discreet in
voicing his fears for the safety of the expedition.  He said he was certain
they would be defeated, because almost every officer in the army detested
Tarleton, who had been promoted over the heads of men who had been in the
service before he was born.

     Behind the Royal Fusiliers trudged a 200-man battalion of the 71st
Scottish Highlanders (Fraser's), who probably did not find the night march
through the woods as forbidding as the city men of the Fusiliers.  At least
half were relatively new recruits who had arrived in America little more than
a year ago.  The rest were veterans who had been campaigning in the rebellious
colonies since 1776.  They had sailed south to help the British capture
Georgia in 1778 and had fought well in one of the most devastating royal
victories of the southern campaign, the rout of the Americans at Briar Creek,
Ga., in early 1779.  They were commanded by Maj. 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 the 7th Regiments plodded some 18 blue-coated royal
artillerymen, leading horses carrying two brass cannon and 60 rounds of round
shot and case shot (also known as canister because each "case" was full of
smaller bullet-size projectiles that scattered in flight).  These light guns
were considered an important innovation when they were introduced into the
British army in 1775.  Because they could be dismantled and carried on horses,
they could be moved over rough terrain impassable to ordinary artillery with
its cumbersome ammunition wagons.  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 for their carriages.  With
the shafts, they resembled grasshoppers, and this was what artillerymen, fond
of nicknames for their guns, called them.

     The cannon added to Tarleton's confidence.  They could hurl a 3-pound
round shot almost 1,000 yards.  There was little likelihood that Morgan had
any artillery with him.  All the southern army's artillery had been captured
at Camden.  These guns with Tarleton may have been two of the captured pieces,
which had originally been captured from the British at Saratoga in 1777.

     Behind the infantry and artillery rode the cavalry of the British Legion
and a 50-man troop of the 17th Light Dragoons, giving Tarleton about 350
horsemen.  In scabbards dangling from straps over their shoulders were the
fearsome sabers that could lop off a man's arm with a single stroke.  The
Legion cavalry were, relatively speaking, amateurs, with only their courage
and belief in their cause to animate them.  The 17th Dragoons were regulars to
the core, intensely proud of their long tradition.  On their brass helmets
they wore a death's head and below it a scroll with the words "or glory." They
and their officers were somewhat disdainful of the British Legion.

     Although their reputation among the patriots was good, the Legion had
several times exhibited cowardice unthinkable to a 17th dragoon.  When the
British army advanced into Charlotte in the fall of 1780, they had been
opposed by 75 or 80 backcountry riflemen.  Tarleton was ill with yellow fever
and his second in command, Maj. George Hanger, had ordered them to charge the
Americans.  The Legion refused to budge.  Not even the exhortations of
Cornwallis himself stirred them until infantry had dislodged the riflemen from
cover.  They apparently remembered the punishment they had taken at
Blackstocks, when Tarleton's orders had exposed them to sharpshooters.

     As dawn began turning the black night sky to charcoal gray, Tarleton
ordered a select group of cavalry to the front of his infantry.  They soon
collided with American scouts on horseback and captured two of them.  These
captives 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, Capt.  David Ogilvie, to reinforce his vanguard.  Ogilvie
galloped into the murky dawn.  Within a half hour, one of his troopers came
racing back with unexpected news.  The patriots 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.
It was familiar to everyone who had visited or lived in the South Carolina
back country.  They gave Tarleton a detailed description of the battleground.
The woods were open and free from swamps.  The Broad River was about six miles
away.

     The ground, Tarleton decided, was made to order for the rebels'
destruction.  In fact, America could not produce a place more suitable to his
style of war.  His bloodhound instinct dominant, Banastre Tarleton assumed
that Morgan, having run away from him for two days, was still only trying to
check his advance and gain time to retreat over the Broad River.  Morgan
failed to stop him at the Pacolet.  He would fail even more disastrously here.
With six miles of open country in the American's 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 to fight to the finish.