Many Were Sore Chased
And Some Cut Down
Fighting Cornwallis with the Rockbridge Militia
by Odell McGuire, © Oct '95
You may go to top and return here to 'End of the Light Infantry'
That evening, after the British halted their advance,
Lee wrote General Greene outlining the Army's options if
Cornwallis pressed the pursuit next day: retreat back to Virginia, stand and
fight, etc. Then referring to them all, he said: '...Do what you will, I pray you to organize your army on the
principles mentioned by you the other day...' He had first
learned of Greene's reorganization plan just after the
fiasco on the Alamance. It proposed disbanding the Light Infantry and
sending Williams with his continentals back to the main army. But as
events fell out, the expiration of the Light Corps was already well
underway. Pickens, who had not been at Weitzel's Mill, said that when he went to his militia camps the night following the battle he was told by his officers that 'their men were determined to stay no longer.' He was scheduled to leave in 'a few days' anyway, so he was able to get orders from Greene and head south on the eighth with his Georgians, South Carolinians and Indians. His Salisbury North Carolinians had been deserting in droves for a week and had already gone home. As for Preston's men, pension applicant James Gilmour of Christian County, Kentucky, swore in 1832 that he: 'was drafted from Montgomery County in 1781 under Col. Preston to go a tour against Cornwallis. They marched to North Carolina where they had a skirmish with the British Army on Haw River. About eight days before the battle of Guilford, Col. Preston's regiment got so dispersed that he could not get them collected in time to join the American army before the battle of Guilford. Col. Preston had eight killed in that engagement..'. And John Tate of Botetourt, who had already fought with Major Rowland on the Alamance, swore also in 1832, that on the morning after Col. Campbell's arrival: '....there was a battle on Reedy Fork, when Capt. Mays and all his men except applicant and thirteen others left the battlefield and went home. A day later, Captains Tate and Smith, from Augusta, joined the army at Speedwell Iron Works. They wanted applicant to join them, but he declined and went home...' James Gilmour was no close relation to James Gilmore of Rockbridge, but John Tate had once served under Captain James Tate of Augusta in a frontier campaign and was probably his brother.
Charles Magill, Governor Thomas Jefferson's liason officer at Greene's
headquarters, who was usually kept better uninformed by Greene's staff, wrote
to his chief:
Preston and Crocket soon despaired of finding and convincing any sizeable
number of their Virginia riflemen to remain for the impending battle
and left the army. Colonel Preston wrote to Governor Jefferson over a
month later on April 13th: No blankets? They would have been piled for Williams' forward wagons when Preston's men disencumbered themselves for rear guard action; lost somehow in the general retreat. Straitened provisions? Overpowered by numbers? Preston scrupulously avoids theories. Better to let the wise one of Monticello have convincingly bare facts. With them he would discover the truth for himself. So the the Light Infantry died by mass desertion. This should have posed General Greene a life-threatening dilemma. He had lost a magnificent corps of riflemen. He had no chance against Cornwallis without replacements for them and, if the reasons given for the defection in Magill's letter became generally known and believed, he wouldn't have any. But Williams' action on the Reedy, however much resented by the riflemen, had thwarted Cornwallis' main objective: to closely engage the continentals and force Greene to come to their rescue. It was a quick, accurate decision and could not be censured in any way. So Greene could do nothing directly and overtly to resolve his predicament, and in any case it was not in his nature to overtly and directly do things. The Fighting Quaker was at his paradoxical best, however, in situations of great subtlety Whether by prescience, happenstance or godsend, his reorganization plan was at hand. Putting it into effect did three necessary things: it laid out the corpse of the Light Infantry Corps to look as though it had died of natural causes; it got the riflemen out from under Williams who, deservedly or no, had a reputation for throwing them as sops to Cornwallis' war dogs; it found better employment for them of the kind Dan Morgan had recommended: fighting on the flanks under officers 'who is acquainted with that kind of fighting.' Like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, Greene published orders for the reorganization on March 10th. Colonel Charles Lynch had brought 360 men down from the mountain fastness of Bedford County, Virginia, all but 60 armed with rifles. (He is the same Lynch for whom lynch law is named, from his habit of executing Tories after somewhat accelerated trials and courts martial.) According to Greene's new plan of organization, these were combined, in a so called 'corps of observation' with William Washington's cavalry and Robert Kirkwood's famous company of Delaware Continentals, regulars who had fought at the Cowpens. The makeup of the other corps is less certain. The rifle component was commanded by Colonel William Campbell, victor of King's Mountain. It included the sixty frontiersmen he had brought with him from the ridges and hollows of southwest Virginia. Major Joseph Winston's and Capt. John [or Martin] Armstrong's North Carolinian stayed for the battle and possibly a few with Colonel John Peasley of Guilford and Colonel Joseph Williams of Surry: perhaps 150 in all. A few of Major Rowland's Botetourts remained. Of the riflemen from Augusta County, Virginia, who had recently come to the army, the companies of Thomas Smith, James Tate, and David Gwin to a total of about 130 men, all under Colonel George Moffett, were assigned to Campbell's command. Campbell was originally from the Tinkling Spring district of Augusta and still well known in the region. He and Tate had attended Liberty Hall together and, with Smith and Moffett, they had all served in the Augusta militia, fighting Indians on the frontier. Now with 350 or 400 rifles altogether, Campbell was assigned to cooperate with Lee's Legion in a second 'corps of observation' on the left flank of Greene's army. Finally, on March 9th, too late to figure in the reorganization but in good time for the impending battle, Colonel Samuel McDowell sent a letter from the Dan to General Greene reporting his arrival there with 150 militiamen, most of whom carried rifles, from Rockbridge County, Virginia. He requested guides to be sent, 'as I am Intirely unacquainted with the Country'. McDowell was one of the two or three oldest surnames in Rockbridge County. The Colonel was son, by her midmost marriage, of the well-to-do, influential and redoubtable Magdelena Woods Borden McDowell Bowyer. His father, Captain John McDowell, was killed in 1742 commanding militia in a fight with Iroquois near Balcony Falls on the James in southeast Rockbridge. His stepfather, Colonel John Bowyer, was Rockbridge County Lieutenant, chief administrator of the Militia. All of which is to say that McDowell's rank and position derived in some part from wealth and influence. He had, however, captained a company of rangers on the Ohio in 1774 and served as Major and Colonel in western Virginia campaigns of '76 and '78. He was seconded by Major Alexander Stuart, an experienced soldier. McDowell's company commanders were Captains Alexander Tedford, John Paxton, David Cloyd, and an officer named Gilmore. This is quite possibly Captain James Gilmore who fought at the Cowpens. Cloyd's wife was Elizabeth Woods, Magdelena's sister, so that he was his Colonel's collateral uncle. McDowell, Stuart and Tedford were Liberty Hall graduates. Tedford's brother John was ensign in his company. Among the private soldiers was one named Sam Houston. Sam and his more famous namesake of the next generation were the sons of first cousins. The Sam of our story, at the time of these events, was 22 years old, either a student or very recent graduate of Liberty Hall, and in preparation for the Presbyterian ministry. He marched to Guilford with Archibald Stuart as messmate. Archie was also a Liberty Hall man, now studying law at William and Mary, son of Major Alexander Stuart, and, coincidentally, grandfather-to-be of JEB Stuart, the Confederate cavalry leader. Archie carried a commission to serve as aide to Gen. Greene, but, according to tradition, chose to fight in the ranks with Sam at Guilford. The two were probably in the company of Captain Tedford. The story can now be turned over to Private Houston, who kept a terse diary of the campaign on a folded sheet of foolscap:
Monday Feb 26th--We marched from Lexington to Grigsby's
and encamped. What they heard was vicious skirmishing between the Campbell/Lee observation corps and the van of Cornwallis' army led by Tarleton. The British were by now less than four miles west, marching hard up the Moravian Towns-Hillsborough Road which ran west to east through the middle of Greene's army. General Greene, feeling that his army was as strong as it would ever be, had invited the fight by moving to Guilford Court House the day before, no more than twelve miles from Cornwallis. He had well over 4500 men, around 1700 of them continentals and perhaps 1100 or so militia riflemen in units with experienced officers and sergeants; most of these were assigned to the two corps of observation under Lynch and Campbell. There was a section of 'butterflies', six pounder brass cannons, manned by gunners from the Virginia Artillery Regiment. The rest were green Virginia and North Carolina militia of uncertain quality. And Greene had already inspected the heavily wooded, hilly ground around Guilford Courthouse in February. He pronounced it an ideal place to stand against the British. He had picked his own battlefield. Cornwallis also wanted the fight. His recruiting and provisioning were not going well at all, and if he was going to stay in North Carolina much longer, he would have to chase Greene out again. He was outnumbered more than two to one, having less than 2200 men altogether and, after telling off the sick and a wagon guard, something over 2000 to put on the battlefield. But almost all of them were regulars, organized in some of the fiercest regiments of professional killers anywhere. And wet weather favored British arms. The 'brown bess', a fast-loading smoothbore musket fitted with a 14 inch bayonet, was the redcoat's standard weapon. It was a wretched work for accuracy, but was unequalled for rapid, point-blank, massed fire or close-in shock action. The American rifleman fought best at a marksman's distance and, like the Indians who had taught him how, in loose order and preferably from cover. The wet morning would slow and diminish rifle fire, giving greater play for Cornwallis' bayonets. He was camped in Quaker country at Deep River Meeting House when he heard of Greene's march to Guilford. He sent his wagons south to Bell's Mill on Deep River before daylight and, in the welcome rain, had his Army on the march by 5 o'clock.
Lee's troopers, around 9 o'clock, ambushed a section of Tarleton's
cavalry where the roads passed through a woods three miles west of
Guilford Court House. Neither side had infantry up. There was saber
fighting on horseback and pistols were fired but there wasn't much
bloodshed. Several of the British dragoons were knocked off their 'small
weak horses' and made prisoner. Their leader ordered a retreat. He
took a parallel fork of the
road after a short canter, but Lee, hoping to cut
him off a mile west at New Garden Meeting where he knew the routes would
rejoin, kept to the main road. He beat his quarry to the meeting house, but
there ran head on into the Guards light infantry and that of Tarleton's Legion
who, in Lee's words: Lee does not refer to sunrise, as others have said; it was 9:30 or 10 o'clock, and the sun had just come out after the rain. Tarleton's account says that the guards light infantry 'made impression upon their center' before the arrival of the 23rd Regiment of Foot, also called the Royal Welch Fuzileers. Then: 'Colonel Lee's dragoons retreated with precipitation along the main road and Colonel Campbell's mountaineers were dispersed with considerable loss. Also Tarleton notes that among his own dead and wounded were 'between twenty and thirty guards, dragoons and yagers [Hessian light infantry].' Strangely, Tarleton does not mention the well known fact that he, himself, was shot through the hand during the fight, lost two fingers. Among those wounded whom Lee's retreat 'necessarily left on the field' were James Tate and several of his Augusta riflemen. Tate's thigh bone was broken by a musket ball. He died at New Garden before the Americans returned a few days later. He may have lived and kept consciousness for some time after the Quaker women came out to comfort the wounded and dying. His name was remembered by them and he was buried in a single, marked grave under the meeting house oaks. Some of the rest were under unmarked mounds, and many were in a mass grave. Tate's remains were taken to Guilford Battlefield and reinterred over a hundred years later.
Captain Tate and many of his men were from Bethel
Church on the old Borden Tract, just north of the Rockbridge County line near
the modern hamlet of Middlebrook. Men from that place had also been in the
thick of the fight at The Cowpens, and survivors of the New Garden action
would, again that day, fight other Guards and other Hessians and be chased
once more by dragoons. John Wasson, one of the survivors, remembered in
1832: |