"Downright Fighting": The Story of Cowpens

by Thomas J. Fleming

Although their reputation among the patriots was good, the Legion had several times exhibited cowardice unthinkable to a 17th dragoon. When the British army advanced into Charlotte in the fall of 1780, they had been opposed by 75 or 80 back-country riflemen. Tarleton was ill with yellow fever and his second in command, Maj. George Hanger, had ordered them to charge the Americans. The Legion refused to budge. Not even the exhortations of Cornwallis himself stirred them until infantry had dislodged the riflemen from cover. They apparently remembered the punishment they had taken at Blackstocks, when Tarleton’s orders had exposed them to sharpshooters.

As dawn began turning the black night sky to charcoal gray, Tarleton ordered a select group of cavalry to the front of his infantry. They soon collided with American scouts on horseback and captured two of them. These captives told them that Morgan and his men were only a few miles away. Tarleton immediately ordered two troops of the Legion cavalry, under one of his best officers, Capt. David Ogilvie, to reinforce his vanguard. Ogilvie galloped into the murky dawn. Within a half hour, one of his troopers came racing back with unexpected news. The patriots were not retreating! They were drawn up in an open wood in battle formation.

Tarleton halted his army and summoned his loyalist guides. They instantly recognized the place where Morgan had chosen to fight—the Cowpens. It was familiar to everyone who had visited or lived in the South Carolina back country. They gave Tarleton a detailed description of the battleground. The woods were open and free from swamps. The Broad River was about six miles away.

The ground, Tarleton decided, was made to order for the rebels’ destruction. In fact, America could not produce a place more suitable to his style of war. His bloodhound instinct dominant, Banastre Tarleton assumed that Morgan, having run away from him for two days, was still only trying to check his advance and gain time to retreat over the Broad River. Morgan failed to stop him at the Pacolet. He would fail even more disastrously here. With six miles of open country in the Americans’ rear, Tarleton looked forward to smashing Morgan’s ranks with an infantry attack and then unleashing his Legion horsemen to hunt down the fleeing survivors. Tarleton never dreamt that Daniel Morgan was planning to fight to the finish.

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While Tarleton’s troops spent most of the night marching along the twisting, dipping Green River Road, Daniel Morgan’s men had been resting at Cowpens and listening to their general’s battle plan. First Morgan outlined it for his officers, then he went from campfire to campfire explaining it to his men.

The plan was based on the terrain at Cowpens and on the knowledge of Tarleton’s battle tactics that Morgan had from such friends as Richard Winn. Morgan probably told his men what he repeated in later years—he expected nothing from Tarleton but “downright fighting.” The young Englishman was going to come straight at them in an all-out charge.

To repel that charge, Morgan adopted tactics he had himself helped design at Saratoga. There was a similarity between the little army he commanded at Cowpens and the men he led in northern New York. Like his old rifle corps, his militia were crack shots. But they could not stand up against a British bayonet charge. It took too long to load and fire a rifle, and it was not equipped with a bayonet.

He had complete confidence in his Continentals. No regiment in the British army had a prouder tradition than these men from Maryland and Delaware. They and their comrades in arms had demonstrated their heroism on a dozen battlefields. Above all, Morgan trusted their commander, Lt. Col. John Eager Howard of Maryland. At the battle of Germantown in 1777, he had led his 4th Maryland Regiment in a headlong charge that drove the British light infantry in panicky flight from their battle line back to their tents. After the American defeat at Camden, Howard had rounded up the survivors of his own and other regiments and led them on a three-day march to Charlotte through swamps and forests to elude British pursuit. Someone asked what they had to eat during that time. “Some peaches,” Howard said.