First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [123]
The French alliance had now intervened, convincing Cornwallis that the doorways by which the French could enter, bringing men, money and arms to the rebels, must be closed, in particular those of Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake ports were in regular use by the Americans for the shipping of tobacco and cotton and export goods to European traders to finance the purchase of arms and ammunition. Cornwallis envisaged a major offensive to subdue the South and make an end of insurgency there, for which Clinton was obviously disinclined. What Clinton wanted was for Cornwallis to settle contentedly at a permanent base and lend his army for operations in Pennsylvania or for defense of New York. Cornwallis thought this was pointless and wrote to his colleague General Phillips the shocking suggestion that “if we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York.” Instead, we should “bring our whole force into Virginia” where “we then have a stake to fight for” and where his refrain “A successful battle may give us America” might be realized.
Proof of the dogma was not making much progress. The fighting at this time was conducted for the British by two hated and dreaded figures, the cavalry Colonel Banastre Tarleton, valued highly by Cornwallis as the spearhead of his army, and the traitor Benedict Arnold, who, having sold himself to the British for £10,000, as he thought, and fringe benefits, had to prove by his violence the value of what he had sold. (He had asked for £10,000 but received £6,000, calculated on a basis of 2 guineas per man of the West Point garrison.) Tarleton’s heavy dragoons trampled fields of corn and rye while his and Arnold’s raiders plundered and destroyed the harvested tobacco and grain in barns, spreading devastation. Tarleton was charged with driving cattle, pigs and poultry into barns before setting them afire. He was known as “no quarter Tarleton” for his violation of surrender rules in the Waxhaw massacre, where he had caught a body of American troops that held its fire too long before firing at fifty yards, too late to stop the charging cavalry. After surrender, they were cut down when Tarleton’s men, let loose to wield their knife-edged sabers, killed a total of 113 and wounded 150 more, of whom half died of their wounds. Enmity flared higher when the tale of the Waxhaw spread through the Carolinas, inflaming hatred and hostility and sharpening the conflict of Loyalists and patriots.
Owing to his wife’s serious illness, Cornwallis hurried home a second time, to be met by the misery of her death shortly after he reached England. Profoundly depressed, he wrote to his brother that the loss of his wife had “effectually destroyed all hopes of happiness in this world.” He could find nothing to live for save the army. The personal tragedy, leaving him alone and unoccupied, brought him back to the war once more, in July, 1779.
In August, 1780, Cornwallis defeated Gates in the battle of Camden. Though the English saw Camden as a pronounced victory, rebellion was not reduced and American militia and Continentals did not dissolve and leave the field to the victors. “We fight,” as Greene wrote to Luzerne, “get beat and rise to fight again.” As this was all too true, a victory in the field for the British did not appear to bring the contest any nearer to victory in the war. Greene’s simple formula kept the nucleus of an army and the coals of rebellion alive in the South, while the defeat at Camden proved almost a benefit because it led to the replacement of Gates and Washington’s appointment of Greene and Steuben to reform and command the southern army. All they had left was a remnant of the Continental militia, whose members would join together to fight for a few days or weeks and then return to care for their crops and fields, plus a saving addition of a few formidable partisans or guerrilla leaders, like the Swamp Fox and Andrew Pickens and Thomas Sumter, who kept the fighting hot and resistance to the British alive. Intensified raids of destruction by Tarleton’s men, whose cavalry gave