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By Root 901 0

the capital of North Carolina, supposedly a Loyalist center, where he raised the royal flag and issued a call to citizens to take up arms with his forces. On the principle that to declare a thing done can have the same effect as doing it, he added a proclamation that North Carolina had been recovered for the Crown. It was not persuasive. So few responded to the call to arms as to amaze General O’Hara at his government’s deceived expectations, “Fatal infatuation! When will government see these people thro’ the proper medium? I am persuaded never.” It was now February, 1781, and the British were no nearer a secure hold on the South or the “battle [that] will give us America,” though Cornwallis was still bent on achieving it by a battle with Greene that would eliminate him as the fulcrum of resistance in the South. Greene’s ever-reviving force was to Cornwallis what Gaul was to Caesar: it had to be conquered, not merely to avenge his defeats but because there was no point in his operations unless they were directed toward restoring royal government in the South as a basis for its restoration in America. Only this could justify the lives lost at King’s Mountain and Cowpens and comfort the shades of the men who had died there that they had not died emptily.

Johannes de Graaff, artist unknown

First Marquess, Lord Cornwallis, Commander of the British forces in the last campaign, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783

General George Washington at Trenton, by John Trumbull, 1792

The Siege of Yorktown, showing Williamsburg and Yorktown left of center, naval action of the Battle of the Bay, right of center, and the subsequent blockade of the Bay by the French fleet

Surrender of the British at Yorktown, October 19, 1781, by John Trumbull, 1786–87

Admiral Sir George Brydges Rodney in his last years, by Joshua Reynolds, 1789

With his losses restored by the reinforcements, Cornwallis felt fit for battle again.

In pursuit Cornwallis was always at his most vigorous, though harassed by rebel partisans and Marion’s men and hampered by poor intelligence. He could get nothing from the local Loyalists. “Our friends hereabouts,” as he wrote to Tarleton, “are so timid and stupid” as to be useless. Supplies, supposed to reach him from New York via Charleston, often failed because of the partisans’ disruption of the roads. Absent rum after a day’s cold wet march was the worst privation, leaving many of the men, weakened by malaria, to be kept alive on opium. The underfed horses were sometimes too weak to pull the artillery, and men weakened by fever and shaking with ague often had to substitute for them. Their General while keeping his army moving had to organize protection of the supply line and push his way through to confront Greene. Rivers at flood stage in the winter rains had to be forded. Delayed for two or three days at a time at the banks of swollen rivers, Cornwallis fumed as he waited for the waters to subside. At the Catawba, broad, deep and rapid, and filled with “very large rocks,” Cornwallis, deceived by faulty or false intelligence, was led to the wagon ford of “swimming water” instead of to the shallower horse ford. The strongest men and horses were swept downstream in the swift current. Leading the van on a spirited mount, Cornwallis plunged in. His horse was shot in midstream by North Carolina militia posted behind timber at the fords. With a general’s spirit, the horse managed to clamber to the banks before it went down. General O’Hara’s horse fell on the rocks and was rolled with his rider forty yards in the torrent. The river was a mass of struggling redcoats, as reported by a Loyalist observer, “a-hollerin’, a-snortin’ and a-drownin’, a-snortin’, a-hollerin’ and a-drownin’.” With their knapsacks weighted with powder and ball, and their muskets across their shoulders, the redcoats could not fire, but in the heavy fog hanging over the river the North Carolinians could not get accurate range for general slaughter.

Greene, certain that Cornwallis would not stop until he had avenged his defeat at Cowpens and recovered