DG MARTIN COLUMN: Where the Revolutionary War was won – The Stanly News & Press

Last week we celebrated the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

DG Martin

This declaration, as important as it was and is, did not bring the independence it proclaimed. The former American colonists had to fight for eight years to gain this recognition.
A new book by Alan Pell Crawford, This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War, tells the story of the last three years of that war.
Crawford is also the author of Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson and reviews books for the Wall Street Journal.
Crawford believes that the major historians of the American Revolution do not pay enough attention to the war in the South.
“Even educated Americans think of the Revolutionary War almost exclusively in terms of stirring stories about its beginnings – Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, the cruel winter at Valley Forge – in which ‘fighting farmers’ and ‘armed citizens’ under Washington’s leadership triumphed over the greatest military power in the world.”
The problem, says Crawford, is that “much of the war was fought in the South, not in the North, and that is where the most decisive battles were fought – those that forced the British surrender at Yorktown. Washington himself remained in New York and New Jersey for most of the war.
“It was not until the late summer of 1781 that he crossed the Potomac on his way to Yorktown, more than three years after the last battle in the North had taken place at Monmouth. The events that forced the British to abandon the fight are only briefly covered, and the surrender at Yorktown occurs almost magically in most war histories.”
Crawford’s account begins in March 1780 with the British siege of Charles Town in South Carolina. When the army surrendered on May 12, 5,500 Continental Army soldiers were taken prisoner by the British. When General Washington learned of the surrender, he said that the only “American army worthy of the name left in the South is lost.”
In August 1780, British troops under the command of General Charles Cornwallis faced American troops led by Horatio Gates at Camden, South Carolina. The result was that “in little more than an hour, about nine hundred men of Gates’ army had been killed or wounded.”
Gates himself fled the battlefield.
On the day of the battle, he was observed fleeing toward Charlotte, traveling 60 miles that afternoon and another 120 the next day. Officers in the Carolinas and elsewhere were astonished by the speed with which he fled the scene—and also by what they interpreted as his cowardice.
The American victory at Kings Mountain in October 1780 is well known to anyone who has studied North Carolina history in school. Crawford writes: “Something seemingly impossible had happened: an outnumbered band of totally untrained volunteers – this ‘bunch of backwoodsmen’ – had defeated a larger force of well-disciplined, well-equipped provincials and militiamen under the command of one of the most experienced and able British officers,” by which he meant Patrick Ferguson.
In December 1780, General Nathanael Greene arrived in the Carolinas to take command of the meager Southern forces. As Crawford explains, Greene knew that while it might be impossible to defeat the British in a major battle, the Americans could harass them with attacks and small victories.
The tide had turned. In January 1781, the Americans led by Daniel Morgan won an important victory at Cowpens, which led to Greene’s confrontation with Cornwallis at Guilford Courthouse.
Cornwallis claimed victory because his troops held the battlefield, but his army was so badly damaged that it had to retreat to Wilmington and then to Virginia, where it surrendered at Yorktown in the south, proving that Crawford was correct in his claim that the region was of great importance to the Revolutionary War.

DG Martin, a retired attorney, served as vice president for public affairs for the UNC System and hosted PBS-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch.”