The meadow was apparently well known to frontiersmen. The previous October, a body of over-mountain men, pursuing Patrick Ferguson and his loyalist corps, made camp here and, according to another tradition, hauled the Tory Saunders out of bed at night seeking information on Ferguson’s whereabouts. Finding no sign of an army passing through, they butchered some cattle and after refreshing themselves took up the trail again.
When the troops of Continental General Daniel Morgan filed onto this field on a dank January day in 1781, they were an army on the run, fleeing an implacable and awesome enemy, the dreaded British Legion of Col. Banastre Tarleton. Their patrols reported that they were substantially outnumbered, and by any military measure of the time, they were clearly outclassed. They were a mixed force of some 830 soldiers—320 seasoned Continentals, a troop of light dragoons, and the rest militia. Though some of the militia were former Continentals, known to be stalwarts in battle, most were short-term soldiers whose unpredictable performance might give a commander pause when battle lines were drawn. Their foe, Tarleton’s Legion, was the best light corps in the British army in America, and it was now reinforced by several hundred British regulars and an artillery company.
On this afternoon of January 16, 1781, the men of Morgan’s army had run long enough. They were spoiling for a fight. They knew Tarleton as the enemy whose troopers at the Waxhaws had sabered to death Americans in the act of surrendering. From him they had taken their own merciless victory cry, “Tarleton’s quarter.” In the months after the infamous butchery, as Tarleton’s green-jacketed dragoons attacked citizens and soldiers alike and pillaged farms and burned homes, they had come to characterize him as “Bloody Tarleton.” He was bold, fearless, often rash and always a savage enemy, and they seethed to have a go at him.
Morgan chose this ground as much for its tactical advantages as from necessity. Most of his militia lacked bayonets and could not stand up to bayonet-wielding redcoats in a line of battle. Morgan saw advantage in this unlikely field: a river to the rear to discourage the ranks from breaking, rising ground on which to post his regulars, a scattering of trees to hinder the enemy’s cavalry, and marsh on one side to thwart flanking maneuvers. It was ground on which he could deploy his troops to make the most of their abilities in the kind of fighting that he expected Tarleton to bring on.
In the narrative that follows, Thomas Fleming, a historian with the skills of a novelist, tells the authentic, dramatic story that climaxed on the next morning. In his fully fleshed chronicle, intimate in detail and rich in insights, he relates the complex events that took shape in the Southern colonies after the War of the Revolution stalemated in the north. He describes the British strategy for conquering the rebel Americans and the Americans’ counterstrategy. An important part of this story is an account of the daringly unorthodox campaign of commander-in-chief George Washington’s trusted lieutenant Nathanael Greene, who finally “flushed the bird” that Washington caught at Yorktown. Upon reading Downright Fighting, one understands why the Homeric battle between two splendid antagonists on the morning of January 17, 1781, became the beginning of the end of the British hold on America.
—George F. Scheer
Scattered hardwoods gave Morgan’s skirmishers protection and helped deflect Tarleton’s hard-riding dragoons sent out to drive them in. The battle opened at sunrise, in light similar to this scene.
Part 1
“Downright Fighting”
The Story of Cowpens.
by Thomas J. Fleming