At Charlotte, N.C., Gen. Nathanael Greene found his resources even scantier than he had expected. “Given scope to your imagination and form… as bad a picture as you can draw and still it will fall short of the real state of things.” He had 2,300 men on paper—950 of them Continentals, of whom 1,482 were preset and fit for duty, but only eight hundred were adequately equipped. The men were “in rags or literally naked, housed in makeshift shelters.”
NATHANIEL GREENE AND THE SOUTHERN CAMPAIGNS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION by James Haw, SCHM, Vol. 109, #3, 2008
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City Directories and History: Erected to commemorate the Revolutionary Battle of Cowpens and its hero, General Daniel Morgan. Sculpture by J. Q. A. Ward.
The Rock Hill Herald reported on May 19, 1881 – “The centennial celebration of the Battle of Cowpens was held on May 11, 1881 – The monument of General Morgan was unveiled. Great crowds assembles in Spartanburg and accommodations were filled to capacity.”
The Battle of Cowpens: In 1781 Cornwallis tried again and gave orders to the most hated and feared of the British cavalry leaders, Colonel Barnastre Tarleton, to destroy the rebel forces in the back country. This order pitted Tarleton against Colonel Daniel Morgan of the regular American army. On January 16,1781, realizing that Tarleton was on his heels and that he could not escape, Morgan took his men to Hannah’s Cowpens, named for the man who had grazed his cattle there. Because, like other regular army officers, he thought militia unreliable, Morgan placed them on the top of a gentle sloping hill about five miles away from the swollen Broad River, an action which prevented any escape for the rebel troops. As Tarleton later admitted, the disposition of Morgan’s troops and the lay of the land were all in the British officer’s favor. Due to a mix-up in orders during the battle, part of Morgan’s troops retreated when they were supposed to charge. The British troops gleefully pursued, but Morgan’s quick recovery in ordering a turnabout left the British troops facing a wall, only ten feet away, of firing troops. The British fled the field, and the rebels won a complete victory. Cowpens was the last battle in the back country, and it thwarted the plans of Cornwallis, whose movement to Virginia ended at Yorktown. Although American generals had contempt for the militia, it proved its worth in the South Carolina piedmont.
Pictorial History of Spartanburg County by Philip N. Racine – 1980
Postcard images courtesy of the Willis Collection – 2016
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