But Daniel Morgan was responsible for their lives and the lives of his Continentals, some of whom had marched doggedly from battlefield to battlefield for over four years. In the company of the Delaware Continentals who served beside the Marylanders in the light infantry brigade, there was a lieutenant named Thomas Anderson who kept track of the miles he had marched since they headed south in May 1780. At the end of each day he entered in his journal the ever-growing total. By January 16, it was 1,435. No matter what the militia thought of him, Daniel Morgan was not going to throw away such men in a battle simply to prove his courage.

Seldom has there been a better example of the difference between the professional and the amateur soldier. In his letters urging militiamen to join him, Morgan had warned them against the futility of fighting in such small detachments. He had asked them to come into his camp and subject themselves to “order and discipline ... so that I may be enabled to direct you ... to the advantage of the whole.”

In the same letters, Morgan had made a promise to these men. “I will ask you to encounter no dangers or difficulties, but what I shall participate in.” If he retreated across the Broad, he would be exposing the men who refused to go with him to Tarleton’s policy of extermination by fire and sword. If they went with him, their families, their friends, their homes would be abandoned to the young lieutenant colonel’s vengeance.

This conflict between prudence and his promise must have raged in Morgan’s mind as his army toiled along the Green River Road. It was hard marching. The road dipped into hollows and looped around small hills. Swollen creeks cut across it. The woods were thick on both sides of it. At dusk, the Americans emerged from the forest onto a flat, lightly wooded tableland. At least, it looked flat at first glance. As Morgan led his men into it, he noted that the ground rose gradually to a slight crest, then dipped and rose to another slightly higher crest. Oak and hickory trees were dotted throughout the more or less rectangular area, but there was practically no underbrush. This was the Cowpens, a place where back-country people pastured their cattle and prepared them to be driven to market.

In the distance, Morgan could see the Blue Ridge Mountains, which rise from the flat country beyond the Broad like a great rampart. They were 30 miles away. If they could reach them, the army was safe. But militia scouts brought in grim news. The river was rising. It would be a difficult business crossing at Island Ford in the dark. The ford was still 6 miles away, and the men were exhausted from their all-day march. If they rested at Cowpens and tried to cross the river the next morning, Banastre Tarleton, that soldier who liked to march by night, would be upon them, ready to slash them to pieces.

Perhaps it was that report which helped Morgan make his decision. One suspects he almost welcomed the news that the army was, for all practical purposes, trapped and fighting was the only alternative. There was enough of the citizen-soldier in Morgan to dislike retreating almost as much as the average militiaman.

The more Morgan studied the terrain around him, the more he liked it. The militia leaders were right. This was the best place to fight Tarleton. Sitting on his horse, looking down the slope to the Green River Road, Morgan noted the way the land fell off to the left and right toward several creeks. The Cowpens was bordered by marshy ground that would make it difficult for Tarleton to execute any sweeping flank movements with his cavalry. As his friend Richard Winn had told him, that was not Tarleton’s style, anyway. He was more likely to come straight at the Americans with his infantry and cavalry in a headlong charge. Experience told Morgan there were ways to handle such an assault—tactics that 26-year-old Banastre Tarleton had probably never seen.

Now the important thing was to communicate the will to fight. Turning to his officers, Morgan said, “On this ground I will beat Benny Tarleton or I will lay my bones.”

6

Eleven to twelve hundred British, Daniel Morgan had written. Ironically, as Morgan ordered another retreat from this formidable foe, the British were barricading themselves in some log houses on the north bank of the Pacolet River, expecting an imminent attack from the patriots. Their spies had told them that Morgan had 3,000 men, and Tarleton was taking no chances. After seizing this strong point, only a few miles below Morgan’s camp, he sent out a cavalry patrol. They soon reported that the Americans had “decamped.” Tarleton immediately advanced to Morgan’s abandoned campsite, where his hungry soldiers were delighted to find “plenty of provisions which they had left behind them, half cooked.”