17th Dragoons Private, 16th Light Infantry Legion cavalry Private, 7th Fusiliers Royal Artillery Private, 71st Highlanders
Behind the light infantry marched the first battalion of the Royal Fusiliers of the 7th Regiment. This was one of the oldest regiments in the British army, with a proud history that went back to 1685. Known as the “City of London” regiment, it had been in America since 1773. A detachment played a vital part in repulsing the December 31, 1775, attack on Quebec, which wrecked American plans to make Canada the 14th State. Among the 426 Americans captured was Daniel Morgan. Few if any of the men in Tarleton’s ranks had been in that fight. The 167-man battalion were all new recruits. When they arrived in Charleston early in December, the British commander there had described them to Cornwallis as “so bad, not above a third can possibly move with a regiment.”
The British government was having problems recruiting men for America. It had never been easy to persuade Englishmen to join the army and endure its harsh discipline and low pay. Now, with the war in America growing more and more unpopular, army recruiters were scouring the jails and city slums. Cornwallis had decided to use these new recruits as garrison troops at Ninety Six. Tarleton, as we have seen earlier, had borrowed them for his pursuit. Although the 7th’s motto was Nec aspera terrent (“hardships do not frighten us”), it must have been an unnerving experience for these men, little more than a month after a long, debilitating sea voyage, to find themselves deep in the backwoods of South Carolina, marching through the cold, wet darkness to their first battle.
Undoubtedly worsening the Fusiliers’ morale was the low opinion their officers had of Banastre Tarleton. The commander of the regiment, Maj. Timothy Newmarsh, had stopped at a country house for the night about a week ago, during the early stage of the pursuit, and had not been discreet in voicing his fears for the safety of the expedition. He said he was certain they would be defeated, because almost every officer in the army detested Tarleton, who had been promoted over the heads of men who had been in the service before he was born.
Behind the Royal Fusiliers trudged a 200-man battalion of the 71st Scottish Highlanders (Fraser’s), who probably did not find the night march through the woods as forbidding as the city men of the Fusiliers. At least half were relatively new recruits who had arrived in America little more than a year ago. The rest were veterans who had been campaigning in the rebellious colonies since 1776. They had sailed south to help the British capture Georgia in 1778 and had fought well in one of the most devastating royal victories of the southern campaign, the rout of the Americans at Briar Creek, Ga., in early 1779. They were commanded by Maj. Archibald McArthur, a tough veteran who had served with the Scottish Brigade in the Dutch army, considered one of the finest groups of fighting men in Europe.
Between the 71st and the 7th Regiments plodded some 18 blue-coated royal artillerymen, leading horses carrying two brass cannon and 60 rounds of round shot and case shot (also known as canister because each “case” was full of smaller bullet-size projectiles that scattered in flight). These light guns were considered an important innovation when they were introduced into the British army in 1775. Because they could be dismantled and carried on horses, they could be moved over rough terrain impassable to ordinary artillery with its cumbersome ammunition wagons. The two guns Tarleton had with him could also be fitted with shafts that enabled four men to carry them around a battlefield, if the ground was too muddy or rough for their carriages. With the shafts, they resembled grasshoppers, and this was what artillerymen, fond of nicknames for their guns, called them.
The cannon added to Tarleton’s confidence. They could hurl a 3-pound round shot almost 1,000 yards. There was little likelihood that Morgan had any artillery with him. All the southern army’s artillery had been captured at Camden. These guns with Tarleton may have been two of the captured pieces, which had originally been captured from the British at Saratoga in 1777.
John Eager Howard, Citizen-soldier
