A powder horn and linstock like these were essential tools for artillerymen. They primed the cannon by pouring powder into a vent leading to the charge and fired it by touching the burning hemp on the tip of the linstock to the vent. The gunners serving the two 3-pounder “grasshoppers” at Cowpens used such equipment.
Another South Carolinian, 17-year-old James Collins, had fought with Sumter and other militia leaders since the fall of Charleston. He remembered with particular anger the swath of desolation left by loyalists when they plundered rebel Americans on the east side of the Broad. “Women were insulted and stripped of every article of decent clothing they might have on and every article of bedding, clothing or furniture was taken—knives, forks, dishes, spoons. Not a piece of meat or a pint of salt was left. They even entered houses where men lay sick of the smallpox ... dragged them out of their sick beds into the yard and put them to death in cold blood in the presence of their wives and children. We were too weak to repel them....”
Morgan’s Army
On paper Morgan’s army was inferior. The British numbered some 1100, all regulars and most of them tested in battle. Morgan had at best a little over 800 troops, and half of them were militia. Numbers, though, deceive, for Morgan’s army was in fact a first-rate detachment of light infantry, needing only leadership to win victories.
The core of Morgan’s army was a mixed brigade of Maryland and Delaware Continentals under Col. John Eager Howard, about 320 men. They were supported by 80 or so Continental dragoons under Col. William Washington.
Maryland Continental Dragoon, 3rd Continentals
These Continentals were tough and experienced. Morgan’s militia were better material than the green troops who folded at Camden and later ran away at Guilford. Some 200 were ex-Continentals from Virginia. Morgan thought enough of them to employ them in the main battle line. The other militia were recruited by that wily partisan leader, Andrew Pickens, and William Davidson, a superb militia general. It’s unlikely that such able commanders would have filled their ranks with the wavering and shiftless.
Morgan knew the worth of these troops and deployed them in a way that made the most of their strengths and minimized their weakness. They rewarded him with a victory still marveled at two centuries later.
These figures represent the units in Morgan’s command.
Virginia militiaman Carolina militiaman
Collins and his friends had joined Sumter, only to encounter Tarleton at Fishing Creek. “It was a perfect rout and an indiscriminate slaughter,” he recalled. Retreating to the west, Collins described how they lived before Morgan and his regulars arrived to confront the British and loyalists. “We kept a flying camp, never staying long in one place, never camping near a public road ... never stripping off saddles.” When they ate, “each one sat down with his sword by his side, his gun lying across his lap or under the seat on which he sat.” It soon became necessary “for their safety,” Collins said, to join Morgan. At Cowpens, men like James Collins were fighting for their lives.