WAR IN THE SOUTH

307

came again, and at length the British were exhausted; they huddled together on the hill, their ranks melting before the sharpshooters' bullets like snow beneath a summer's sun. Ferguson was a man of desperate valor. He refused to surrender. A white flag, raised by one of his men, he struck down with his sword. Then with foolhardy daring he made a dash through the encircling columns for liberty. Five sharpshooters leveled their pieces, and the British officer fell with five mortal wounds in his body. The remnant of the force surrendered; 4561 of their number lay dead upon the field, to say nothing of the wounded, while but 28 of the Americans were slain.

The battle over, the men who had won it, taking their prisoners with them, hied away again to their crude civilization beyond the Alleghanies, disappearing as suddenly and noiselessly as they came. This was their only service in the war, but it was a noble service. At King's Mountain they turned the tide of the war, and insured the ultimate independence of America.

During the following months Marion and Sumter were extremely energetic in their peculiar mode of warfare, and the latter gained a victory over Tarleton. But this was not all; Daniel Morgan came down from the North, Morgan, whose romantic career we have noticed, and at his hands the scourge of the South, Tarleton, was to suffer the most crushing defeat of his life. General Nathanael Greene was appointed to succeed Gates at the South. He arrived in December, 1780, and with the aid of Thomas Jefferson, Governor of Virginia, raised some two thousand men from that state, and these, with fifteen hundred whom Gates had collected after Camden, gave him a respectable army. Greene's first important move was to send the free lance, Daniel Morgan, to raid the back country. Morgan, with nine hundred men, was soon confronted by eleven hundred under Tarleton. The two met at the Cowpens, not far from King's Mountain. Morgan's tactics were perfect; the battle was furious, and Tarleton's army was almost annihilated, he and a few followers alone escaping through the swamps on horseback. Greene had the services of some of the best men of the Continental army - Steuben, whom he left in Virginia to watch the traitor Arnold, Kosciusko, and the brilliant cavalry leaders, Henry Lee and William Washington, the latter a distant relative of the commander in chief. Cornwallis was greatly weakened by the defeat

1 Sloane gives this number.

Battle of

Cowpens.

at the Cowpens, and he determined to strike Greene as soon as possible and revive the waning spirits of the regulars and loyalists. Perceiving this, Greene decided to lure the British general as far as possible from his base of supplies, and then to give him battle. He began an apparent retreat northward. Cornwallis fell into the trap, destroyed his heavy baggage, and followed. The chase continued for two hundred miles. At Guilford Courthouse, but thirty miles from the Virginia border, Greene, having joined Morgan's forces with his own, wheeled about, and, after some days of sparring for position, offered battle. Greene placed his raw militia in front with orders to fire two or three volleys before giving way, after which the brunt of

Guilford
Courthouse.

the battle was to be borne by the regulars. This plan had been adopted by Morgan at the Cowpens with great success, and Greene found it highly useful. At one time during the battle the Americans were on the point of being routed when they were saved by a cavalry charge of Colonel Washington. After the battle had continued for some hours the British planted their columns on a hill, from which they fought with great valor and could not be dislodged, and at nightfall they were left in possession of the field. From this cause the battle of Guilford has been considered a British victory. But the real victory lay with Greene. He had lured his enemy far from his base of supplies, and had destroyed one fourth of his army, six hundred men, himself losing but four hundred. Cornwallis saw that he was entrapped, refused Greene's challenge for a second battle, and marched in all haste to the seacoast, leaving his wounded behind.

By the flight of Cornwallis North Carolina was left in the hands of the Americans, and South Carolina was soon to share the same good fortune; for Greene, instead of pursuing the enemy toward Wilmington, turned to the latter state, and in three months he and his subordinates had driven the enemy from every stronghold-Camden, Augusta, Forte Motte, Orangeburg, Ninety-six-all except Charleston; and all the energy that the British had expended in two and a half years to possess those states came to naught.

1 Greene's flight was prompted also by the fact that he did not feel able, without reënforcements, to fight Cornwallis. He offered battle only after making a detour into Virginia and gathering several hundred recruits.

2 Colonel Stewart, however, who succeeded Lord Rawdon, remained in South Carolina till September 8, when occurred the battle of Eutaw Springs. This has been pronounced a British victory; but, strange to say, the victors fled and were pursued for thirty miles by the vanquished.

On reaching Wilmington, North Carolina, Cornwallis did not go southward and begin a reconquest of the state he had lost; he proceeded, without orders from Clinton, into Virginia, in the hope of conquering that state, and in the belief that if he did so the Carolinas would easily fall again into his possession. Lafayette, with a thousand men, had come down from the North to join Steuben and watch Arnold and Phillips, while Wayne, with an equal number, was moving south from Pennsylvania. With great skill the young French marquis, with an inferior army, held the enemy in check for a month, when he was joined by Wayne. Cornwallis arrived on May 20. Arnold was sent back to New York, and Phillips died of fever. Then began a long series of maneuvers, marches, and countermarches, Lafayette harassing the enemy in every way, but avoiding an engagement. The British general expected to make a brilliant stroke. "The boy cannot escape me," said he; but the boy had been schooled under Washington for four years, and no strategy of Cornwallis could entrap him. In one of Tarleton's raids Governor Jefferson was barely able to escape from his house at Monticello before it was surrounded by cavalry. Lafayette's army steadily increased. Early in August Cornwallis moved down the York River and occupied Yorktown, while the marquis stationed his army at Malvern Hill; and here they remained until the inaugurating of a great and unexpected movement that was to end the campaign and the war.

For three years, since the battle of Monmouth, Washington had held his army as a watchdog, guarding the great valley of the Hudson, while Clinton, in the city of New York, was ever threatening to invade it. Washington longed to attack the enemy in his stronghold, and would have done so during Clinton's brief absence in the South, but for the fact that he had weakened his own army by sending troops southward. During the spring of 1781 this scheme of attacking the city was revived. Count Rochambeau had arrived in Rhode Island the year before with six thousand French troops, and now, after nearly a year of enforced idleness, this army was to be joined to that of Washington for a combined attack. The two commanders conferred with this end in view, when suddenly the news reached them that Count de Grasse, with a powerful French fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line and six frigates, bearing twenty

thousand men, was about to sail from the West Indies to Chesapeake Bay. The whole plan was at once changed. Washington determined to take a French-American army to Virginia, and to endeavor with the support of the fleet to capture the British army.

ward.

So necessary was it to deceive Clinton that Washington and Rochambeau kept their plan secret even from their officers until Washington secrecy was no longer possible. Leaving General Heath moves south with four thousand men to guard the Hudson, they crossed that river with four thousand Frenchmen and two thousand Americans on the 19th of August. Moving down the Jersey shore, they made a feint on Staten Island and led Clinton to believe that the intention was to attack it; but suddenly the army wheeled to the west, and it almost reached the Delaware before the object of the expedition was known. By the time the army reached Philadelphia it was generally known that the aim was to capture Cornwallis, and the rejoicing of the people of the city was loud and long. While en route to the South, Washington made a flying visit to his home at Mt. Vernon, which he had not seen for six years.

De Grasse.

Meantime De Grasse reached the mouth of the York River and sent four thousand men ashore to augment the army of Lafayette. The British also had a powerful fleet in the West Indies, under the command of Admiral Rodney, a very able man; but Rodney returned to England, owing to sickness, and sent the fleet northward under Admiral Hood. Reaching Sandy Hook, Hood joined his fleet to that of Admiral Graves, and the two sailed for the Chesapeake to meet De Grasse. An action took place on September 5 in which several of the English vessels were so damaged that Graves and Hood sailed to New York for repairs and left De Grasse complete master in the Chesapeake. This was a matter of vital importance to Washington, as it prevented the escape of Cornwallis by sea. His only escape lay in a retreat upon North Carolina, but this was prevented by Lafayette, who lay across the peninsula with eight thousand men. Clinton, hearing of Washington's departure for the South, was deeply perplexed. In the hope of luring Washington back, he sent Arnold to harass the coast of Connecticut, but the traitor was driven away by the swarming minute men.

The allied armies reached the vicinity of Yorktown late in August. The approaches were made by means of parallel trenches, the first of which was completed on October 6, when the bombardment of the city began. Side by side labored the French chasseurs

Yorktown.

and the American continentals and militia, tightening the coils about the imprisoned British army. On the river bank below the town were two strong redoubts. One of these was captured by Baron de Vioménil, and the other by the Siege of youthful Alexander Hamilton, who was destined yet to play a great part in American history. Day by day the British works crumbled beneath the incessant fire of the allied cannon, and on the 17th of October, four years to a day after the surrender of Burgoyne, the white flag was seen waving above the parapet at Yorktown. The cannonade ceased and the surrender was effected two days later, the terms being exactly those accorded to LinSurrender, coln at Charleston. And it was Lincoln who was now October 19, sent to receive the sword of Cornwallis, who, playing 1781. sick, sent it by the hand of General O'Hara. The British arms were soon stacked, and the entire army of more than eight thousand men, including

a few hundred seamen, became

prisoners of war.
Everybody
knew, on both
sides of the At-
lantic, that this
master stroke
had ended the
war and that
America had
Clinton

won.
held New York
for two years
longer; but hos-
tilities had

ceased, and he

only waited for peace to be arranged by treaty.' The rejoicing over the surrender of Cornwallis was unbounded throughout America. The news reached Philadelphia in the early morning hours of the 24th, and the German watchman, continuing his rounds, added to

1 Soon after the surrender Washington returned to the Hudson Valley. The French army embarked for France in December. Guerrilla warfare continued in parts of the South and on the frontier for some time, but Yorktown ended hostilities between the regular armies.