With Greene came another famous officer, General Daniel Morgan, the man who had marched with Arnold to Canada, and who commanded the infantry at Stillwater and Saratoga.
General Greene taking Command of the Southern Army.
This was the man who, when he heard of Lexington, led his riflemen six hundred miles in twenty-one days, from Virginia, to join Washington in Cambridge.
Morgan was of gigantic stature, vast physical strength, and wonderful powers of endurance. In his youth he was a teamster. One day by order of a tyrannical British officer he was given five hundred lashes for some slight offense. He walked away saucy and defiant as before.
Of a gentle and unselfish nature, resolute, fearless in battle, a born fighter, Morgan was the ideal leader of the riflemen of the frontier. His force was smaller than Greene's, who had detached him to occupy a post in South Carolina.
229. How General Morgan defeated the British at Cowpens.—Cornwallis in January, 1781, sent Tarleton with eleven hundred troops to meet Morgan and dispose of him. They met at Cowpens, but Morgan, with a smaller army, reversed the order and disposed of Tarleton! He killed a large number, ten officers and more than one hundred men, took over five hundred prisoners, with all the artillery and stores.
It was at Cowpens that Colonel Washington, a distant relative of the Commander-in-Chief, wounded Tarleton in a hand-to-hand combat. Shortly afterwards this hated British officer said to a lady:—
"You seem to think very highly of Colonel Washington; and yet I have been told that he is so ignorant a fellow that he can hardly write his name."
"It may be so," quickly replied the lady; "but no man can testify better than yourself that he knows how to 'make his mark.'"