The Battle of Guilford Courthouse

A Most Desperate Engagement

John R. Maass

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439669204
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Around the North Carolina village of Guilford Courthouse in the late winter of 1781, two weary armies clashed on a cold, wet afternoon. American forces under Nathanael Greene engaged Lord Cornwallis's British army in a bitter two-hour battle of the Revolutionary War. The frightful contest at Guilford was a severe conflict in which troops made repeated use of their flintlock muskets, steel bayonets and dragoon swords in hand-to-hand fighting that killed and wounded about eight hundred men. Historian John R. Maass recounts the bloody battle and the grueling campaign in the South that led up to it, a crucial event on the road to American independence.

Chapter 1

“OUR NEXT OPERATION IN CONSEQUENCE”

The British Move South

For I must go where lazy Peace

Will hide her drowsy head,

And, for the sport of kings, increase

The number of the dead.

—William D’Avenant, “The Soldier Going to the Field,” 1644

The origins of the military campaign that ultimately led to the Battle of Guilford Courthouse on March 15, 1781, began three years earlier in 1778. It was born of disappointment and a drastically new strategic situation facing both the British government in London and the rebellious Americans.

King George III’s chief ministers and military officers were frustrated that despite British Major General William Howe’s early battlefield victories in 1776 around New York City, and in 1777 at Brandywine and Germantown near Philadelphia, small but persevering rebel armies were still in the field and the war dragged on. The momentous American victory near Saratoga, New York, in which an entire British army under Lieutenant General John Burgoyne surrendered to Patriot forces led by Major General Horatio Gates, had also prolonged the war. “Fifty thousand troops have not, in three years, been able to obtain secure possession of fifty miles of ground in America,” a wry London newspaper quipped in 1778. Even the normally ebullient king became downcast at times at the disheartening strategic situation. “The destruction of the army of Burgoyne, and the very confined state in which [General] Howe finds himself have totally changed the face of things,” Britain’s monarch ruefully concluded.¹⁴

Impatient officials of the Crown decided that after several years of not being able to crush the American rebellion in the northern and middle colonies, they would instead concentrate their efforts on defeating the disloyal insurrection in the southern American provinces. British authorities hoped that a successful invasion there would secure Georgia and the Carolinas and return them to royal authority. It was, as one modern historian concluded, “a final bid for victory in the Southern Theater.”¹⁵

This new strategic attention on the South was embraced by Lord George Germain, who, since November 1775, was the secretary of state for the American Department. Although Frederick, Lord North, was King George’s chief minister throughout the Revolutionary War, Germain was primarily responsible for directing the British war efforts in the colonies. In early December 1777, the secretary had received the shocking news of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga and that the Americans had not given in after their capital city, Philadelphia, had fallen to General Howe in September. Germain began conceptualizing a southern campaign in early 1778, albeit without soliciting the advice of top military commanders in America, and then started to put his plans into action.¹⁶

The veteran officer who would conduct the upcoming campaign in the Carolinas and Georgia was in his comfortable Philadelphia headquarters in the icy winter of 1778 when Germain’s letters about the new military strategy began to arrive from London. Sir Henry Clinton officially became the British army’s commander-in-chief in America in February 1778, upon the king’s acceptance of the resignation of Clinton’s unsuccessful predecessor, General Howe.¹⁷ The American-born Clinton had been a soldier since 1745, and most of his service had been in the elite British Guards. He fought with distinction in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and the Seven Years’ War in Europe (1756–63); during the latter conflict, he was an aide-de-camp to the Prince of Brunswick, a major British ally.¹⁸

Just before war broke out in America in 1775, Clinton was promoted to major general and was ordered to serve in the insurgent colonies at Boston under General Thomas Gage, then the Crown’s commander-in-chief. Clinton fought valiantly in the bloody battle of Bunker Hill that summer and then became Howe’s second in command after Gage departed for England in October. Clinton then led a fruitless, embarrassing expedition against local Patriot forces in the Carolinas starting in January 1776 that culminated in his humiliating defeat in a joint attack on Fort Moultrie with the Royal Navy at Charleston in late June. He returned to Howe’s main army in Canada and then fought conspicuously in the British victory at the Battle of Long Island, New York, in August 1776, for which he was promoted to lieutenant general and made a Knight of the Order of the Bath for leading the decisive flank attack. Clinton led a successful amphibious attack against the rebels on Manhattan Island shortly afterward and served in operations against Rhode Island, as well as in the Philadelphia Campaign in the summer and fall of 1777. No one could say he shied away from active duty.¹⁹

Great Britain’s King George III. Library of Congress.

Lord George Germain, architect of the British war efforts. Library of Congress.

Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton. Library of Congress.

Despite his impressive heroics, Clinton was not an easy man to get along with, particularly with his superior officers in the army and his naval counterparts. He did not have an outgoing personality—he once called himself a “shy bitch”—and he was often stubborn, insistent on his own views and positions, argumentative, and paranoid. His conduct of the war became cautious and evolved into a tentative style of operations. His relations with his subordinates were often strained, particularly with Lord Cornwallis after a time. Additionally, as historian Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy has recently argued, once Clinton assumed overall command in America, he found himself in a difficult position of having to defeat Washington’s army with fewer resources and troops than had his predecessor, all the while receiving little useful or timely directions from London.²⁰

The Battle of Bunker Hill, where General Clinton fought bravely near Boston in 1775. Library of Congress.

Soon after Germain and other British leaders began to plan for a major southern campaign, news reached them in London in March 1778 that decisively influenced how the entire war would be fought going forward: archenemy France and the fledgling United States were now allies. In Paris, representatives of King Louis XVI and the American Congress signed the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce on February 6, 1778, “to maintain effectually the liberty, sovereignty and independence absolute and unlimited, of the United States.” This pragmatic pact was not a surprise to the British; Crown officials knew that France had been informally aiding the Americans with limited military and financial support early in the revolt. Nevertheless, the official alliance significantly shifted British priorities: going forward, Germain would have to divert limited military resources and manpower from North America to the West Indies—including soldiers, ships, and supplies—where they would be needed to defend the valuable sugar islands of the Caribbean Sea and disrupt French naval operations in American waters. Far-flung British posts in the Mediterranean, Africa, and India had to be reinforced too. The British Isles were also vulnerable to a seaborne invasion. Additionally, Crown officials knew that the French would now increase their shipments of arms, artillery, gunpowder, uniforms, and countless other desperately needed military supplies to the American army. In response, Great Britain declared war on the French on March 17, 1778.²¹

Clinton received word of the portentous treaties and the drastically changed strategic situation from London in the late spring. He knew he would have to dispatch thousands of his own troops to Canada, the West Indies, and the British post at St. Augustine in East Florida, now that the hated and opportunistic French had entered the war.²² In order to do so, he had to consolidate his overexposed position in America. The British government decided to abandon Philadelphia, so in June 1778, Clinton elected to march his mixed force of twenty thousand British regulars, hired troops from Germany (the “Hessians”), and American Loyalists across New Jersey to their main base at New York City. Once Clinton and his army left Philadelphia, Washington ordered his army to leave its squalid camps at Valley Forge west of Philadelphia to pursue and engage the long enemy column headed northeast.²³

The Americans caught up with Clinton’s host in northern New Jersey. In a sprawling battle fought near Monmouth Courthouse on June 28, 1778, the two armies battled for hours in extreme heat until darkness, bloodshed, and exhaustion ended the contest. Clinton continued his march overnight, which allowed General Washington to claim a victory for the Americans, since the redcoats had vacated the battlefield. It was the last major battle of the war fought in the North. Once the British reached New York, General Clinton, Lord Germain, and other ministers focused instead on campaigning in the South, while Washington moved his army to camps at White Plains, New York.²⁴

After the clash at Monmouth Courthouse, Clinton received word from Germain urging him to shift active operations to South Carolina and Georgia beginning in October 1778. Clinton was not happy when he read the letter. He had tried unsuccessfully to resign his tiresome command several times over the past year and now had to launch this new campaign with far fewer troops than had his predecessors, in addition to maintaining a strong garrison to defend New York, a city full of Loyalist refugees. By the fall of 1778, he had 13,661 soldiers in the ranks, of whom about half were blue-coated Hessian hirelings from German principalities.²⁵

New York City, held by the British from 1776 until the end of the war. Library of Congress.

In order to augment his upcoming operations in the southern theater, Clinton had to rely on the support of Americans there loyal to King George. The British plans for a decisive southern campaign rested on the widely held assumption that thousands of southern Loyalists (called “Tories” by the Patriots) would enthusiastically come forward once British troops arrived in their colonies and join forces with them to defeat the hated rebels (often known as “Whigs”). Loyalists would presumably also restore royal government and judicial systems, garrison interior posts, disarm Patriots, and capture Whig leaders. Several times prior to 1779, Loyalists in the South turned out armed and in large numbers, such as the rising of former Highland Scots along the lower Cape Fear River in North Carolina in February 1776. Although these ill-fated Tories were crushed at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge north of Wilmington, the king’s officials still looked to this example and others as evidence that allegiance to the Crown was still widespread in the South.²⁶

Military planners and ministerial officials in London placed much weight on the supposed support British forces would receive from Loyalists in the South. Exiled Americans in London often provided exaggerated reports to the king’s ministers regarding the number of southerners in the Carolinas and Georgia who were waiting to rise up and join British efforts to subdue the rebellion. Recent research has suggested that “the British officials were indeed correct in believing that large numbers of Loyalists inhabited Georgia and South Carolina, and that they would contribute greatly to the effort to restore royal authority in those provinces.” However, reliance on these loyal subjects to contribute to British victory proved to be unrealistic for many British officers during the war, including in the South. Under the assumption that much support awaited the Crown’s troops, plans for southern military operations proceeded.²⁷

As ordered, General Clinton renewed British campaigning in the South in the late fall of 1778, conscious that every soldier he deployed weakened the garrison at New York, which Washington’s Continentals threatened from their positions north of the fortified city. Clinton began with a modest effort to capture a rebel-held port. In November 1778, the British commander sent three thousand troops led by Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell to take Savannah, Georgia.²⁸ The British soundly defeated Major General Robert Howe’s frightened American force outside Savannah on December 29 and captured the town after the rebels ignominiously fled the battlefield. Several weeks later, Campbell was joined by one thousand redcoats from St. Augustine, Florida, under Major General Augustine Prévost, who had marched north to Savannah and thereby secured the Georgia coast on his way.²⁹

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Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Prologue. “The Highest Honor to Yourself”: The South Gets a Yankee General
• 1. “Our Next Operation in Consequence”: The British Move South
• 2. “This Miserable Country”: Cornwallis in the Carolinas
• 3. “A Severe Rebuke”: Gates and the Disaster at Camden
• 4. “Resources Feeble and Ineffectual”: The American Army Regroups
• 5. “Peace and Quiet to the Country”: Setback to British Conquest
• 6. “The Greatest Degree of Anxiety”: Greene Rides South
• 7. “The Shadow of an Army”: Preparing for Victory
• 8. “A Complete Victory”: The Battle of Cowpens
• 9. “Judiciously Designed and Vigorously Executed”: The Race to the Dan
• 10. “Pillaging, Plundering and Getting Provisions”: Maneuvers in the Piedmont
• 11. “An Engagement Now Became Inevitable”: The Armies Prepare for Battle
• 12. “Dreadful Was the Havoc on Both Sides”: The Attack of the King’s Army
• 13. “A Most Desperate Engagement”: The Virginians Give Way
• 14. “The Slaughter Was Prodigious”: Desperate Fighting at the Third Line
• 15. “Nothing but Spirit, Resolution, and Perseverance”: Aftermath
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author