It is January 19th. Welcome to Episode 19 of History in a Year. Today, the Americans stop running and start fighting smart. General Nathanael Greene takes command of the shattered Southern army and unleashes “The Old Wagoner,” Daniel Morgan. We witness the tactical masterpiece at the Battle of Cowpens, where a cow pasture becomes a death trap for the British cavalry. We follow the exhausted armies in the desperate “Race to the Dan,” and we end with the bloody slugfest at Guilford Courthouse that bled the British army dry.
STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is January 19th. Welcome to Episode 19. Yesterday, we watched the tide begin to turn in the South with the guerilla war of the Swamp Fox and the victory at Kings Mountain. But despite those successes, the main American army was still a mess.
LEAH:
Actually, “mess” is too polite. It was a disaster. After Horatio Gates ran away from the Battle of Camden, the Southern army was broken, starving, and leaderless.
STEPHEN:
George Washington knew he had to send his best man to fix it. He couldn’t send himself—he had to stay in New York to watch the main British army—so he sent his right hand. Nathanael Greene.
LEAH:
Greene is one of the most underrated figures in American history. He was a Quaker from Rhode Island who walked with a limp. He had no military experience before the war—he learned everything by reading books. But he had a brilliant strategic mind.
STEPHEN:
When Greene arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina, in December 1780, he found a “shadow army.” He had only 2,000 men. Only 800 of them had proper clothes. They had three days of food left.
LEAH:
Greene wrote to Washington: “The appearance of the troops was wretched beyond description, and their distress, on account of this lack of provisions, was insupportable.”
STEPHEN:
Lord Cornwallis, the British commander, had a massive, well-fed army. Conventional wisdom said Greene should keep his tiny force together for protection. But Greene decided to break the rules.
LEAH:
He split his army.
STEPHEN:
He took the main force east to rebuild. And he sent a smaller force—about 600 regular soldiers and some militia—west. He gave command of this western wing to a living legend: Daniel Morgan.
LEAH:
We have to pause and talk about Daniel Morgan. They called him “The Old Wagoner.” He was a giant of a man, rough, uneducated, and tough as leather. He hated the British with a burning passion.
STEPHEN:
Years earlier, during the French and Indian War, a British officer had struck Morgan with the flat of his sword. Morgan punched the officer out cold. For that, he was sentenced to 500 lashes.
LEAH:
He survived the beating—which would have killed most men—and he always joked that the drummer miscounted and only gave him 499, so he “still owed the King one lash.” He carried the scars on his back for the rest of his life.
STEPHEN:
So now, you have Morgan in the west and Greene in the east. This drove Cornwallis crazy. He couldn’t chase both. If he chased Greene, Morgan would attack his rear. If he chased Morgan, Greene would attack Charleston.
LEAH:
So Cornwallis split his army too. He sent his favorite attack dog, Banastre Tarleton—the butcher of the Waxhaws—to hunt down Daniel Morgan.
STEPHEN:
Tarleton was young, arrogant, and fast. He pushed his men hard, crossing swollen rivers, desperate to catch the “Old Wagoner.”
LEAH:
Morgan knew he couldn’t outrun Tarleton forever. He had to fight. But he wanted to fight on his own terms. He chose a place called “The Cowpens.”
STEPHEN:
It was exactly what it sounds like—a grazing pasture for cattle in South Carolina. It was open woods with no swamps or thickets to hide in.
LEAH:
His officers thought he was crazy. They said, “General, there is a river at our back. If we lose, we can’t retreat. We’ll be slaughtered.”
STEPHEN:
But Morgan said that was the point. He said, “I know my men. If they have a swamp to run to, they’ll run. If they have a river at their back, they’ll fight like demons.”
LEAH:
Morgan also understood the psychology of his militia. He knew that untrained militia were terrified of bayonets. In every previous battle, the militia had fired one ragged volley and then run away in panic.
STEPHEN:
So, Morgan came up with a revolutionary plan. He went around to the campfires the night before the battle. He joked with the boys. He showed them the scars on his back. And he gave them a simple order.
LEAH:
He said, “I don’t need you to be heroes. I just want two shots. Look for the officers. Kill the men with the epaulets. Fire two shots, and then you can run away, and I won’t blame you.”
STEPHEN:
He set his army up in three lines.
Line 1: Sharpshooters hiding behind trees to pick off officers.
Line 2: The Militia. Their job was to fire the “two shots” and then run.
Line 3: The battle-hardened Continental regulars, waiting on the hill behind them.
LEAH:
On the morning of January 17, 1781, Tarleton arrived. He was tired, his men were hungry, but he saw the Americans and immediately ordered a charge. He didn’t even wait to form proper lines.
STEPHEN:
The British Dragoons charged the first line. The sharpshooters fired— *Bang! Bang!*—emptying saddles. Then they retreated.
LEAH:
The British cheered and charged the second line—the militia. The militia waited. They fired a devastating volley at close range. Then they fired a second. And then, exactly as ordered, they turned and ran behind the hill.
STEPHEN:
Tarleton thought it was a rout. He thought, “Here we go again, the cowardly Americans are running.” He ordered his entire infantry to charge. They broke ranks, screaming, expecting to chase down a fleeing mob.
LEAH:
But as they crested the hill, winded and disorganized, they didn’t find a fleeing mob. They ran face-first into the third line: The Maryland and Delaware Continentals.
STEPHEN:
The Continentals stood like a stone wall. They leveled their muskets and fired a massive volley right into the faces of the British.
LEAH:
At that exact moment, the American cavalry—which had been hiding—slammed into the British from the right. And the militia—who hadn’t run away, but had circled around—slammed into them from the left.
STEPHEN:
It was a “double envelopment.” A perfect trap. The British were surrounded.
LEAH:
Panic set in. The British soldiers threw down their guns and begged for mercy. They yelled “Tarleton’s Quarter!”—hoping the Americans wouldn’t butcher them like they had butchered Americans.
STEPHEN:
But Morgan stopped the slaughter. He took over 800 prisoners. The battle was over in less than an hour. Tarleton’s legion was destroyed. Tarleton himself barely escaped, galloping away with only a handful of men.
LEAH:
When Cornwallis heard the news, he was furious. He had lost his light troops. He had lost his cavalry. But instead of retreating, he became obsessed. He wanted revenge.
STEPHEN:
He decided to chase the main American army under Nathanael Greene. And this began the famous “Race to the Dan.”
LEAH:
The Dan River sits on the border of North Carolina and Virginia. Greene knew that if he could get across that river, he could get supplies and reinforcements.
STEPHEN:
So the race was on. It was the middle of winter. It rained constantly. The roads were turning into red clay mud.
LEAH:
Cornwallis was moving too slow. So, in a moment of madness, he ordered his army to burn their own baggage wagons.
STEPHEN:
Think about that. He burned their tents. He burned their extra uniforms. He burned their rum supplies. He turned his army into a lean, mean, desperate hunting machine. He was gambling everything on catching Greene.
LEAH:
For weeks, they marched. Greene’s men were leaving bloody footprints in the snow, just like at Valley Forge. They would cross a river just hours before the British arrived.
STEPHEN:
Finally, Greene crossed the Dan River. Cornwallis couldn’t follow. He had to stop. He had pushed his army to the breaking point.
LEAH:
Greene rested, got reinforcements, and then re-crossed the river. He was ready to fight. He picked the ground at Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina.
STEPHEN:
On March 15, 1781, the two armies met. Greene tried to use the same tactic as Morgan—the three lines.
LEAH:
It worked, mostly. The British had to fight through three layers of defense. It was a brutal, bloody slugfest in the woods. The British were attacking uphill. They were exhausted and hungry.
STEPHEN:
At the climax of the battle, the fighting was hand-to-hand. It was a confused swirling mass of men stabbing each other with bayonets.
LEAH:
Cornwallis saw that his lines were faltering. He saw the Americans pushing back. He did something that is still debated today.
STEPHEN:
He ordered his artillery to fire grapeshot—basically shotgun blasts from cannons—right into the middle of the fight.
LEAH:
His officers screamed, “My Lord, you will kill our own men!”
STEPHEN:
Cornwallis replied, “It is necessary.”
LEAH:
The cannons fired. The grapeshot tore through both the Americans and the British. It killed friend and foe alike. But it broke the American charge.
STEPHEN:
Greene, seeing the carnage, decided to withdraw. He wanted to save his army to fight another day.
LEAH:
Technically, the British won the Battle of Guilford Courthouse because they held the field at the end of the day.
STEPHEN:
But the cost was staggering. Cornwallis lost 25% of his army. 500 men killed or wounded. He had “won,” but he had wrecked his fighting force.
LEAH:
A British politician in London, Charles James Fox, later said famously: “Another such victory would ruin the British Army.”
STEPHEN:
Cornwallis was stuck. He was deep in enemy territory with a battered army. He couldn’t stay there. He needed to get to the coast. He needed the Royal Navy to resupply him.
LEAH:
So, he turned his back on the Carolinas and marched toward the sea. He marched toward a quiet tobacco port in Virginia.
STEPHEN:
A place called Yorktown.
LEAH:
He thought he would be safe there. He thought the Navy would protect him. But he didn’t know that the chess pieces were moving all over the world.
STEPHEN:
He didn’t know that a massive French fleet was sailing north from the Caribbean. And he didn’t know that George Washington was about to leave New York.
LEAH:
The trap is about to snap shut.
STEPHEN:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 20. The climax of the war. Washington marches 500 miles in secret. The French fleet seals the Chesapeake Bay. And Alexander Hamilton leads a bayonet charge over the walls of Redoubt Number 10.
LEAH:
I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
And I’m Stephen.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.