On March 15, 1781, American forces inflicted heavy losses on the British Army at Guilford
Courthouse, North Carolina. The redcoats had seemed invincible only a few months before.
Posted on 08/20/2007 6:11:20 AM PDT by Pharmboy
On March 15, 1781, American forces inflicted heavy losses on the British Army at Guilford
Courthouse, North Carolina. The redcoats had seemed invincible only a few months before.
Winter clouds scudded over New Windsor, New York, some 50 miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan, where Gen. George Washington was headquartered. With trees barren and snow on the ground that January 1781, it was a "dreary station," as Washington put it. The commander in chief's mood was as bleak as the landscape. Six long years into the War of Independence, his army, he admitted to Lt. Col. John Laurens, a former aide, was "now nearly exhausted." The men had not been paid in months. They were short of clothing and blankets; the need for provisions was so pressing that Washington had dispatched patrols to seize flour throughout New York state "at the point of the Bayonet."
At the same time, many Americans felt that the Revolution was doomed. Waning morale caused Samuel Adams, a Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, to fear that those who had opposed independence in 1776 would gain control of Congress and sue for peace with Britain. During the past two years, three American armies—nearly 8,000 men—had been lost fighting in the South; Georgia and South Carolina appeared to have been reconquered by Great Britain; mutinies had erupted in the Continental Army and the nation's economy was in shambles. Washington was aware, he wrote to Laurens, that the "people are discontented." Convinced that the army was in danger of collapse, Washington predicted darkly that 1781 would prove America's last chance to win the war. Nothing less than the "great revolution" hung in the balance. It had been "brought...to a crisis."
Yet within a matter of months, a decisive October victory at Yorktown in Virginia would transform America's fortunes and save the American Revolution. The victory climaxed a brilliant—now largely forgotten—campaign waged over 100 fateful days by a former foundry manager totally lacking in military experience at the outset of the war. Yet it would be 38-year-old general Nathanael Greene who snatched "a great part of this union from the grasp of Tyranny and oppression," as Virginia founding father Richard Henry Lee would later tell Greene, when the two met in 1783.
In the early days of the war, Britain had focused on conquering New England. By 1778, however, it was clear that this would not be achieved. England's crushing defeat at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777—British general John Burgoyne's attempt to invade from Canada resulted in the loss of 7,600 men—had driven London to a new strategy. The South, as Britain now perceived it, was tied by its cash crops, tobacco and rice, to markets in England. The region, moreover, abounded with Loyalists; that is, Americans who continued to side with the British. Under the so-called Southern Strategy as it emerged in 1778, Britain would seek to reclaim its four former Southern colonies—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia—by expelling rebel forces there; regiments of Loyalists, also called Tories, would then occupy and pacify the conquered areas. If the plan succeeded, England would gain provinces from the Chesapeake Bay to Florida. Its American empire would remain vast and lucrative, surrounding a much-reduced and fragile United States.
At first, the new strategy met with dramatic success. In December 1778, the British took Savannah, stripping the "first...stripe and star from the rebel flag of Congress," as Lt. Col. Archibald Campbell, the British commander who conquered the city, boasted. Charleston fell 17 months later. In August 1780, the redcoats crushed an army led by Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates at Camden, South Carolina. For the Americans, the desperate situation called for extreme measures. Congress removed Gates and asked Washington to name a successor to command the Continental Army in the South; he chose Greene.
AdvertisementNathanael Greene's meteoric rise could hardly have been predicted. A Quaker whose only formal schooling had been a brief stint with an itinerant tutor, Nathanael was set to work in his teens in the family-owned sawmill and iron forge. In 1770, he took over management of the foundry. In 1774, the last year of peace, Greene, then 32, married Catherine Littlefield, a 19-year-old local beauty, and won a second term to the Rhode Island assembly.
Later that year, Greene enlisted as a private in a Rhode Island militia company. When hostilities between Britain and the Colonies broke out at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, Greene was suddenly elevated from the rank of private to brigadier general—doubtless a result of his political connections—and named commander of Rhode Island's force. Although he had begun as what his fellow officer Henry Knox called, in a letter to a friend, "the rawest, the most untutored" of the Continental Army generals, he rapidly gained the respect of Washington, who considered Greene's men to be, he wrote, "under much better government than any around Boston." During the first year of the war, Washington came to regard Greene as his most dependable adviser and trusted officer, possessed not only with a superb grasp of military science but also an uncanny facility for assessing rapidly changing situations. By the fall of 1776, rumor had it that should anything happen to Washington, Congress would name Greene as his successor.
He's darn near old enough...
LOL x2
Thanks, more great Rev. War History.
BTW, Mark Levin read this on his radio talk show last week.
LOL! Great point, considering Knox was a bookseller before the war...
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Saratoga is rightly called the turning point for a few reasons: 1) if Burgoyne had won, the colonies would have been cut in half and 2) the French would not have thrown in with us. Thus, victory would likely never have occurred. Saratoga was fought mainly by northerners (with help from Morgan's riflemen to be sure). I could give other examples, but you get the idea.
The RevWar was won because the North and the South threw down together against a common enemy. This was nicely demonstrated by the State of Georgia granting that pure Yankee, Nathaneal Greene,a nice bit of land after the war.
One thing that was not mentioned in this article was that after Greene's death, another Yankee visited Kitty Greene and asked her if he could tinker in her barn with something he was working on. His name was Eli Whitney.
Nice to hear from you...and thanks for your kind words. The 230th anniversary of Saratoga is coming up this fall. Might be an excuse for you and your bride to take a ride down there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.