Following an abysmal year the task of trying to get everything in the South back on track falls to Nathanael Greene.

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Hello, and welcome to the political history of the United States.

Episode 4.60 Nathaniel Greene and the Southern army by the beginning of October, it was clear to everybody that things were not going well for the United States.

The economy was in shambles.

The Southern army had collapsed for the second time in a year with its General Hightail.

Get out of there.

And as a cherry on top, Benedict Arnold had just attempted to sell out West Point to the British.

All in all, it was a pretty bad time.

Despite all of that, though, the war was not over and in fact, the British position was not as secure as they would have probably liked.

On the surface, it was hard to deny that things seemed to be looking very good for the British.

They had, after all, won key victories over the past year at Savannah, Charleston and then at Camden.

Yet as satisfying as these victories surely were, what the British needed to get was control over the Carolina backcountry.

Unlike what we have mostly talked about, this battle for the backcountry did not involve those big engagements.

Rather, these were far smaller, often brutal encounters.

For the British, this proved to be a particular problem.

The British were desperate to curb the violence throughout the backcountry and saw it as a prerequisite to securing the South.

For their part, the goal for the Americans was simply not to lose.

Now, although these may sound like the same thing, they certainly were not.

At the end of the day, neither the Americans nor the British would ever be able to claim a complete victory in the backcountry.

However, in a theater of the war where the British needed a victory, the Americans being able to deny the British the ability to exercise free dominion over the backcountry was more or less the functional equivalent to an American victory.

The failure of the British to defeat the Americans meant that the Americans won by default.

By the end of September, even this partisan war that had engulfed the Carolinas seemed to be slipping away from the Americans.

Cornwallis and the bulk of the army was heading north towards Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he hoped to seize key American magazines.

The march was considerably slowed by illness which was racing through the British ranks.

This illness, as we are going to see momentarily, would hit Tarleton especially hard.

He was barely able to stand, let alone fight.

Although I don't want to give the idea that Tarleton was some super soldier or some Alexander the Great like strategic mind, the problem for the British is that the man filling in for him was very much not up to the task.

As the British army pulled into Charlotte to recover Tarleton's stand in a Major George Hanger took control over the cavalry.

Part of the job for Hanger was to ride forward and, you know, make sure that it was safe for the British to stroll into Charlotte.

Now, rather than doing literally any kind of reconnaissance of the situation, Anger decided to take another path.

He chose the path of just strolling into town and seeing what happens.

Now, this went about as well as you might imagine, as detachments of militia under the command of William Davy were busy covering the road that Hinger rode in on.

From behind a nice sturdy stone wall.

At just around 60 yards out, the militia opened fire on Hanger, and almost instantly, Hanger's unit devolved into a bunch of men doing their best to not get slaughtered.

The British would make a few more attempts to drive off the defenders of Charlotte and indeed would be successful in the endeavor.

They did capture the city.

Really, though, the British were always going to end up capturing Charlotte.

On that late September day, what the militia under Davy had done was make the British victory an expensive one.

American losses on the day ranged from between five killed, if you believe Davy, to as many as 30 British losses.

Though again, varying.

Some appear to have been more than double the American losses.

Okay, so for Cornwallis, maybe that was not the best showing that he could have hoped for.

The Americans had caused him much more of a headache than he would have liked.

But hey, he had captured the town.

And it was not as though the losses were catastrophic.

In what must have been incredibly frustrating to Cornwallis, Davey did not simply retreat and then head off somewhere far, far away.

Instead, he and his men stayed put and would take every opportunity to harass the British foraging parties.

They were not looking for some large scale engagement that would always go poorly for them.

However, they were more than happy to harass anybody who rode away from the main line of the army.

This would prove to be a particular problem for Cornwallis, as couriers bringing vital information to their commander began to have a real bad habit of ending up dead prior to their arrival.

Well, Cornwallis fretted over his situation in Charlotte.

Just days later, he would see that despite it looking like the British war making headway in the Carolina backcountry, the situation there was anything but settled.

The loyalist militia in the region was under the command of Patrick Ferguson, an intelligent man who adored army life and had brave to the point of being somewhat reckless.

Although not wanting to adopt his cool futuristic rifle.

Those members of his loyalist militia absolutely loved the guy.

Per historian Robert middle Cuff, what made Ferguson a popular commander was that in a war where British leadership distrusted the loyalist militia, they found a commander in Ferguson who valued their contributions and would listen to their grievances.

As much as the loyalist militia liked Ferguson, the South Carolina planter class who had chosen the American cause hated Ferguson with a fiery passion.

They had been forced to flee from their homes and property and were essentially strong armed by necessity to become the leaders in the South Carolina backcountry.

Among the problems for Ferguson and there were others that we are going to discuss is, again, the guy was recklessly brave.

By the middle of September, Ferguson and his men had reached Gilbert Town, North Carolina, some 40 miles to the north of the South Carolina North Carolina border.

A prudent man could have just easily hunkered down there, collected reinforcements, and just waited to see how things played out.

Or you could send a threatening letter to the South Carolina leadership letting them know that they either needed to quit the war or that you were going to march right over the mountains and hang the lot of them.

Ferguson chose the latter.

As has so often been the case, nothing encouraged the American recruiting efforts more than British threats.

Ferguson was unaware that over a period of about two weeks, largely as a result of his saber rattling, the Americans were able to significantly grow their forces.

Now, thankfully for Ferguson, he did learn of the growing American force and further found out that rather than sitting still, the Americans, under the mixed command of William Campbell, Isaac Shelby, and John Seaver, decided that they felt like crossing the mountains into North Carolina, where they planned to smack Ferguson around a little bit.

With Ferguson aware of this growing threat, he prudently realized that the correct move would be to withdraw towards the safety of Cornwallis and Charlotte.

Among the American forces, there was a fair bit of grumbling as they found themselves wandering all over the place looking for Ferguson.

Shelby made clear that he was going to find Ferguson regardless of where he went.

If he needed to march right into Cornwallis's lines, then, well, so be it.

As the Americans marched around looking for Ferguson, Ferguson himself decided that, you know what?

Forget prudence.

Where is the valor imprudence?

Instead, he decided that this was the correct time to teach those intransigent Americans a lesson that they would not soon forget.

Around 30 miles away from Charlotte, Ferguson decided to detour and form a defensive perimeter atop King's Mountain, right along the border between North Carolina and South Carolina.

Today, the generally held belief is that had Ferguson just kept going, he would have made it to Cornwallis safely, but instead he decided that it was past time that he win himself a share of glory.

The first problem is that when Ferguson decided to send his men on the detour, he sent his men on a hard 16 mile march, a 16 mile march that took him up a literal mountain that was heavily forested.

Now, unfortunately for Ferguson, he succeeded in his objective of tracking down the Americans.

In fact, they were all around him.

The Americans had managed to find Ferguson's defensive position and quietly they had completely surrounded him.

By 3pm on October 7, the Americans had come, completely unbeknownst to Ferguson or his Loyalists, managed to surround their enemy, quietly closing in on Ferguson and moving into positions of COVID behind trees.

It was not until the Americans were very nearly on the ridge that the British held that Ferguson would first become aware that he had a very serious problem on his hands.

Although Ferguson had managed to build some respectable defensive positions, the fact that he was completely surrounded by the Americans pretty much sealed the deal.

Before the fighting even started.

The Loyalists fought in a traditional fashion, forming ranks and firing in volleys and then leading bayonet charges, which is all fine and good except for the fact that the Americans were firing from positions of COVID behind those pine trees.

The British volleys were stopped by the trees and then the Americans were easily able to mow down Ferguson's army as they advanced with their bayonets.

The fighting lasted for about an hour, during which time the outcome was never really in question.

The recklessly brave Ferguson himself was killed.

During the fighting, the Americans proved to be more than a little bit vengeful and decided that there would be no surrendering or quarter given.

As the Americans killed those trying to surrender, they shouted Tarleton's quarter.

Ensuring that the British be reminded that the Americans had not forgotten about Tarleton's actions some months before.

As the smoke settled, the British had suffered around a thousand casualties, wounded, captured and killed.

The Americans, in comparison, suffered fewer than 100 losses.

In later reports, Tarleton claimed that the Americans had stripped Ferguson naked and had urinated on his corpse.

Although it seems that Tarleton was not opposed to exaggerating when describing American behavior following British defeats, Cornwallis blamed the defeat directly on Tarleton, who had failed to ride over to King's Mountain to bail out the beleaguered and surrounded Ferguson.

John Buchanan, author of the Road to Guilford Courthouse, the American Revolution in the Carolinas, writes that the first criticism was unfair.

First, we already know that Tarleton was sick.

Second, Cornwallis never seems to have had much faith in Ferguson, which, if that was the case, the blame for sending Ferguson out into the backcountry was on him.

For Cornwallis, he was admittedly in a bit of a precarious position, considering that Tarleton was seemingly out of commission and the backup plan would have been Hanger, whom he also distrusted following his questionable actions in Charlotte.

Right at the same time that Cornwallis was learning about the catastrophe the had occurred at King's Mountain, he would learn about other frontier battles that had gone only marginally better than at King's Mountain.

In short order, the partisan war that was looking pretty positive just days before was now looking worryingly bleak in the village of 96, a place where months earlier it had been now the late Patrick Ferguson defeating the Americans.

The commander of the local garrison was now feeling increasingly insecure by the seemingly revitalized local supporters of the American cause.

Meanwhile, even further in the South, Francis Marion and his militia were causing headaches in Charleston as he had managed to disrupt the communication within the city to the point that there were real concerns over the British ability to resupply.

Although Cornwallis would not learn all of these things prior to making his decision, his knowledge of Ferguson's defeat at King's Mountain and the knowledge that things in the backcountry were at best unsettled was enough to make him decide that moving north to Hillsborough was going to leave South Carolina dangerously exposed.

Likely muttering curses under his breath, Cornwallis pulled out of North Carolina on October 14th and arrived at Winnsboro, South Carolina on October 29th.

The year had easily been the darkest times for the American army, an army that had twice been destroyed over the course of a year.

Both Lincoln and then later Gates failed to maintain their commands, and the actual Continental army in the south was comprised of those who were lucky enough not to have made it to Charleston before the fall of the city and to have escaped Camden.

For the army, things were about as bad as they could be.

And to make it worse, they were now virtually leaderless.

Now, as I said at the beginning of this episode, I don't necessarily want this to be taken as evidence that the Americans were winning the fight along the frontier.

The British were still causing plenty of grief for the Americans.

The fact remained, however, that the British needed an unqualified win in the South.

Anything less than that was not going to cut it.

Even if the American militia did not score an outright victory, they were denying the British the victory that they needed, which for them was enough.

While the Americans were certainly causing Cornwallis indigestion, the irregular backcountry fighting was not going to be enough to secure a victory in the war for the Americans either.

Therefore, yet again, the Americans were left with the prospect of having to rebuild the Southern Army.

Now, as to the actual rebuilding of the army, well, that is going to be a bit of a problem, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes.

What was a far easier decision was that Horatio Gates was no longer going to be the guy leading that army.

Everybody, Gates included, knew that Camden served to pour cold water over the career of the hero of Saratoga.

Unlike in the spring, when Congress had ignored Washington's recommendation of Nathaniel Greene in favor of Gates, this time the Congress decided to defer to the Army's commander.

Washington, somewhat predictably, was quick to do the thing that he had suggested back during the spring, promoting Nathaniel Greene to the now critical Southern Command.

Just weeks prior to the promotion, Greene had been appointed by Washington to act as the presiding judge in the trial of John Andre, the British handler for Benedict Arnold.

The decision of the trial was that Andre had acted as a spy.

The decision, as expected by everybody, including Andre, was that he was going to be executed.

Although the necessity of the death of Andre was never really in question, there was some question as to how it would be done.

Would Andre face the firing squad as a soldier, or would he hang like a criminal?

Andre, and many of the American officers who took a liking to him, argued for a more honorable death by firing squad.

Greene argued that the law was clear.

Washington agreed, and on October 2nd, John Andre was hanged in New York.

Just two weeks after Andre's execution, Washington promoted Greene to the somewhat unenviable task of having to pick up the pieces in the South.

Greene was surely an ambitious man.

However, what he was facing down was a nearly impossible task.

To say that he was in command of the Southern army was a bit of a misnomer because the Southern army was in a particularly dismal state.

Washington, in a letter to a congressman from South Carolina, remarked that Greene was expected to lead without men, arms, clothing stores, or provisions.

Even before leaving to take up the command, Greene was aware that the army he was inheriting was really an army in name only.

What he really was getting were the remnants of what had once been an army.

Greene was likewise well aware of the fact that he was unlikely to get any huge source of reinforcements that would better bolster his numbers.

This knowledge would, almost as soon as the command became his start to influence his command choices.

He was well aware that he was not going to have the numbers necessary for a direct confrontation.

Risking the few men that he did have could result in the south being left without an army at all, a risk that the Americans could not take.

The primary objective, therefore, was simply to not lose.

Keep an army in the field, cause the British pain whenever possible, and then just survive.

Greene had too few men for a direct assault and supply lines that were stretched all the way to Virginia, putting the army in constant danger of being cut off entirely.

The solution to all of this, you ask.

What Nathaniel Greene envisioned was normalizing the partisan war that had managed to stymie the British ambitions and reconquer the Carolinas for the last year.

What this means is that rather than going out and looking for those direct confrontations like what we had seen in the North, Greene wanted to encourage the partisan war that had proved to be so successful.

To be sure, Greene had no particular love for the militia.

He distrusted them and knew well that when in the face of danger, the militia was more likely to turn around and run rather than stay and fight.

Camden had done a good job of proving this as well.

However, what else was he going to really do?

Washington assured Greene that there were not going to be reinforcements.

The army that he was getting, as we are going to see shortly, was in absolute shambles.

He might not knock the British out of the war, but maybe he could simply outlast them long enough that they just went away.

On his way to the South, Greene and his second in command, Baron von Steuben, tried to collect supplies in Philadelphia.

First, it was the Congress that told Greene that there was no money for supplies.

Desperate, he turned directly to the merchants, who let him know that they were busy and that they would get back to him when they could.

This would indeed be the story of Greene's trip to the South.

He stopped everywhere that he could, too big for supplies.

And although he found plenty of support and well wishes from the Southern political leadership, he found little else.

Unfortunately, an army cannot subsist on well wishes alone.

Making matters all that more Confusing was the fact that local state politics were often a contentious battle.

That Greene had little to no intelligence of meaning that when begging for supplies and manpower, he needed to ensure that he was begging the right people.

In one notable instance, Green would end up rejecting a regiment of militia from Virginia.

Green complained that the men who were provided were dressed in rags without adequate weapons.

Thomas Jefferson at this point was certainly nervous about how things were going and likewise was probably not too terribly eager to send too many men or supplies away from Virginia, just in case he needed them himself.

Cornwallis and the British were slowly but surely conquering Jefferson's southern neighbors, and eventually one of them was bound to come knocking at his door.

This was the state of the promotion that Nathaniel Greene had received when he reached his army at Hillsborough on November 27.

It must have been a complete gut punch.

Greene and separate letters to both Jefferson and Washington describes the state of the mint, a mixture of continental troops and militia, as being dismal.

He writes specifically to Washington that to give your excellency an idea of the state and condition of the army, if it deserves the name of one, nothing can be more wretched and distressing than the condition of the troops starving with cold and hunger, without tensing camp equipment.

Those of the Virginia line are literally naked and a great part totally unfit of any kind of duty and must remain so until clothing can be had from northward.

I have written to governor Jefferson not to send forward any more until they are well clothed and properly equipped.

The troops mentioned from Virginia, those who apparently showed up to service naked, were those same men who we talked about a moment ago that Greene decided to return to Virginia.

The situation in Hillsborough was just about as bad as could be.

The men were feeling mighty dejected, and there was more than a little bit of anger going around towards general Gates for what had occurred at Camden.

About a week after reaching Hillsborough, Green would make his final push to the south, towards Charlotte, where, if you will recall, Cornwallis had been hanging out before himself.

Heading back into South Carolina following the British defeat at King's Mountain that October.

It was in Charlotte that Greene found general Gates, whom he quickly dispatched with Gates, who had been hoping for the exoneration of a court martial.

A court martial that Congress seemed interested in conducting was going to have to wait for now.

The army was pretty much a train wreck, which, yeah, wasn't great.

But that is not to say that Greene had nothing going for him.

The partisan leadership was still going strong and posed a very real threat to the British ability to secure their dominance over the Carolinas.

Greene was able to recognize the importance of men like Francis Marion and Thomas Sumner, in addition to the others who knew the Carolina backcountry like the back of their hands.

This knowledge was so critical because it was something that neither Greene nor his adversary in Cornwallis possessed.

It was through this that one of the first actions by Greene upon getting his command was to write to Francis Marion and encourage him to continue his campaign of harassment against the British.

He went so far as telling Marion that he was hoping to recruit men to act as spies and report back on what Cornwallis was doing.

Well, Marion and company were flattered by the encouragement from Greene.

It really was not as though he had much of a choice in the matter.

The remaining army that he was in command of was in a bad place.

If Greene was going to make any headway against the British in the south, he knew that he was going to have to depend upon the militia which he had long distrusted.

What did quickly become clear to Greene is that he was going to have to employ very different tactics in the south as compared to what he was used to in the North.

First, he needed to get a better grasp over the waterways.

We have spent a significant amount of time thus far talking about the critical importance of the Hudson river in the North.

Really, though, there is no single critical waterway in the south that Green needed to control.

Rather, there was a whole lot of smaller waterways that ran through the Carolinas.

These rivers provided a double edged sword for the new Southern commander.

On the one hand, it made boats a far more important supply.

Getting control of the rivers meant quick access to the interior of the state.

Well, likewise making it possible to quickly move an army across the river.

The danger came from the possibility that Green would misstep and find himself unexpectedly trapped up against a river with Cornwallis bearing down on him.

Making matters more complicated was that many of these small rivers were prone to sudden and sometimes severe flash floods, which just enhanced the potential danger that they posed.

As a result of this, Green quickly took to the job of procuring and building as many boats as he could, while at the same time sending men out to study the rivers and provide a clearer idea of what he was facing.

Greene likewise realized, unlike Horatio Gates, the importance of cavalry in the Southern theater.

The revelation that cavalry in South Carolina could do some serious damage should not really come as that big of a surprise.

Bariston Tarleton was well on his way to becoming an American boogeyman.

Having Shown just how effective a mobile force could be over the past year, in charge of the American cavalry would be light horse Harry Lee and William Washington, a cousin of the more famous Virginian.

Knowing that large scale pitched battles were probably out of the question for the time being at least, and that hit and run tactics against the British would be the order of the day, a mobile cavalry made a whole lot of sense.

The Americans could ride in, cause some damage, and then get out of dodge before the British could adequately respond.

With the reorganization of the Southern army well underway, Greene would make one of the most consequential decisions of his early command, one that on the surface seems to be counterintuitive.

The general rule of the day was that you do not divide your army.

Just don't do it.

You are reducing your effective force and the enemy is going to have an easier time defeating your now smaller army.

This was really emphasized in the case of Greene's Southern army, because even as a whole unit, it was still going to be outnumbered by Cornwallis larger force, dividing a small army would do nothing more than increase the British manpower advantage.

Greene, who was very aware of the myriad of reasons one should not divide his army, went ahead in mid December and divided his army anyway.

So why did Nathaniel Greene just decide to blow off military convention and divide his forces?

The answer is that it provided him with both strategic and practical advantages.

Beginning with the latter, as it turns out, armies generally enjoy things like eating and not starving to death.

The American supply lines were already badly exposed due to their length, and moreover provided little of the food that the Americans needed to survive.

Instead, it was foraging parties that were necessary to keep the army fed.

Knowing that, Greene realized that two smaller armies with significant separation between them would mean that there would be less competition for food within the American army.

Considering that the countryside already had limited supplies when it came to foraging, dividing the army was a way to ensure that in the face of food shortages, it would be easier to keep everybody fed strategically.

Greene saw a second advantage as well.

It would force Cornwallis to decide what he wanted to do.

He could send troops to chase down Daniel Morgan, who would be in command of the contingent that had split off, which would then expose Charleston.

If Cornwallis instead decided to move on Greene, they would leave many of those critical forts throughout South Carolina open for Morgan.

If things really went sideways, Miller could swing around and rush in reinforcements to attack either the flanks or the rear of Cornwallis army.

Finally, Bream believed that by sending Morgan deeper into South Carolina, it would provide a much needed morale boost to those citizens and backcountry farmers who had been doing so much of the heavy lifting, a reminder that they were not alone and that despite the British occupation, the American army was still fighting for them.

With that, Greene and the majority of the American army made their way to a camp near Churaw Hill on the banks of the Pedy River.

Morgan, with some 600 men under his command, would march to the southwest along the Pacolet River.

In the end, the two armies would end up separated by some 120 miles, with Lord Cornwallis perched right in between them.

Now, it was not as though Greene sent Morgan out there to secure some huge victory.

After all, he only had 600 men with him.

Rather, his expectations were simply that Morgan would keep poking at the left flank of Cornwallis's army.

As Nathaniel Green biographer Terry Galway states, Greene was aware that Morgan's men were too weak to make any opposition of consequence.

Next time, Daniel Morgan would indeed poke at the British left flank, except he would poke much harder and with a much sharper stick than anybody could have anticipated.

Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you back here next time for the Battle of Cowpens.

It.