06:20 PM EDT on Thursday, July 6, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Nathanael Greene finally found Gen. Horatio Gates and what was left of America's Southern Army on Dec. 2, 1780. Greene was taking command of the Army from Gates, who had led it to ruin. Under these circumstances the meeting of two men who never had liked each other could have been awkward, but each was magnanimous to the other. In his last orders as Southern commander, Gates changed the next day's password to "Springfield" -- the site of Greene's triumph in New Jersey; for a countersign, Gates chose "Greene."

And on Greene's first morning as commander, Dec. 4, he returned thanks to the honorable General Gates, for the polite manner in which he introduced him to his command.

Greene then got down to business, ordering a report of the numbers of troops in camp, their enlistment terms, their condition. The results were not good: he had 2,307 men on the rolls, but just 1,482 were present and fit; of these, he wrote, the whole force fit for duty that are properly clothed and equipt does not amount to 800 men.

When Greene found these men they lived in winter quarters with no tents and a few crude huts; most of them slept outside on ground, Greene wrote, so flat that it is almost under water every rain.

For food they ate only what they could forage every day.

Gen. "Light-Horse" Henry Lee, who joined Greene's Southern troops in January 1781, wrote of Greene:

"This illustrious man had now reached his thirty-eighth year. In person, he was rather corpulent and above the common size. His complexion was fair and florid; his countenance serene and mild, indicating a goodness which seemed to shade and soften the fire and greatness of its expression. His health was delicate, but preserved by temperance and exercise."

In a sense Greene, 38, and asthmatic, had just taken over a chess game from a player who had played miserably and lost most of his pieces -- real, breathing pawns and knights, bishops and kings.

The man dominating the board on the other side of the table -- Lord Charles Cornwallis, now 42, -- was a grand master, to the military manner born. His own, well-connected father called him a "very military" boy. At 17, after being nearly blinded in one eye from a field hockey stick on the playing fields of Eton, he was commissioned an ensign in the First Foot guards; thirsting for more knowledge of war he enrolled in a military school in Turin, where he learned ballroom dancing along with mathematics, fortifications and military sciences. By 23 he was a battle-tested captain having fought the French in Europe in the Seven Years War.

As a member of the House of Lords, Cornwallis consistently opposed the king's belligerent attitude toward the American Colonies, yet when open rebellion broke out he volunteered to fight, arriving for the siege of Boston in 1776.

When he took command of England's Southern Army in 1780, Cornwallis had something in common with his overall commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton, up in New York City: both men's beloved wives had recently died, plunging them into profound grief. Cornwallis had resigned during the illness of his wife, Jemima, in 1778. After she died, he found England "quite unsupportable to me. I must shift the scene." He wrote to his brother, "I have many friends in the American army [the English army in America]; I love that army." To assuage his grief he returned to a war that as a politician he did not support.

The common bond of being widowers did not unite Cornwallis and Clinton. There had been an awkward coolness between them ever since Clinton had confided, "I cannot bear to serve under" Sir William Howe when Howe had been commander in chief. Cornwallis had passed that remark on to Howe, who waited until a strategic time to throw it back in Clinton's face.

Despite the uneasiness between them, Clinton left Cornwallis in charge of the South when he returned to New York after capturing Charleston. He left Cornwallis with a strong situation: garrisons in the cities of Savannah and Charleston, and a chain of fortified outposts arching through the South Carolina backcountry from Augusta to Georgetown.

Before he left for New York, Clinton gave Cornwallis just one command: protect Charleston and South Carolina at all costs, even at the expense of leaving North Carolina undefended.

"He will play me false, I fear," Clinton wrote of Cornwallis. And he did.

King's Mountain

Clinton had been gone just three months when, in September 1780, Cornwallis defied him by pushing into North Carolina hoping to capture the remnants of Gates' ragged army. He led a three-pronged attack: one column to take the seacoast villages; the center column, led by Cornwallis himself, to capture Gates; and the left-most column to pacify the hillbillies in the backcountry.

Cornwallis assigned an ingenious captain, Patrick Ferguson, with about 1,000 Loyalist militia men to quell the backcountry; Ferguson made a terrible blunder: he sent a message across the Blue Ridge Mountains telling the "overmountain men" that they'd better submit peacefully or he would march his army over the mountains, "hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword."

The overmountain men -- mostly of Scots-Irish ancestry, men grown rugged with living on the frontier in what is now Tennessee -- took Ferguson at his word. And rather than wait for him to come into their country, they grouped up, crossed the mountains and went looking for him.

One observer of the overmountain men noted: "I have known these fellows [to] travel 200 miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day, and the stars at night, to kill a particular person of the opposite party."

They traveled light. Each horseman carried only a long rifle, a blanket, a cup, and a pouch of parched cornmeal mixed with maple sugar which, stirred with a little hot water, made "an agreeable repast."

They sniffed out Ferguson and his band atop King's Mountain, a shoe-shaped mountain that pops above a series of ridges at the South Carolina border. On the morning of Oct. 7, 1780, about 900 overmountain men dressed in coarse, homespun hunting shirts of linsey-woolsey, and caps of greased leather and bearskin, gathered at the base of King's Mountain. One of their leaders, Col. Isaac Selby, told them: "When we encounter the enemy, don't wait for a word of command. Let each of you be your own officers and do the very best you can."

They did very well indeed. The overmountain men formed a ring around the bottom of King's Mountain, then climbed steadily up it, drawing a tighter and tighter noose around Ferguson and his men. Near the summit they opened fire with their long Deckard or Dickert rifles.

The summit wore a wreath of gunsmoke and shook with the thunder of rifle fire. Three times Ferguson's men tried to break through, and each time they were driven back into the confines of their camp. Ferguson, riding a white charger and wearing a checkered hunting shirt of blue-and-white, spurred his mount for one last dash through the lines. He was immediately shot off his horse. They counted seven musket balls in his body, testament to the accuracy of the overmountain men's fire. He died on the spot. His body was wrapped in a raw beef hide and buried. A Scottish cairn marks his grave to this day. All of his 1,018 men were killed, captured or wounded that day, stultifying efforts to recruit Loyalist militia and forcing Cornwallis to withdraw from North Carolina.

Sir Henry Clinton, then commander in chief of British forces in America, later called King's Mountain "the first link in a chain of evils that followed each other in regular succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America."

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

Bibliography

Sources consulted for today's installment:

Buchanan, John. The Road to Guilford Courthouse. Buchanan; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: New York, Chichester, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, Toronto, 1997.

Conrad, Dennis M., and Showman, Richard K. eds. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Vol. II. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1994.

Draper, Lyman C. King's Mountain and its Heroes: History of the Battle of King's Mountain, October 7th, 1780, and Events Which Led to It . The Overmountain Press: USA, 1996. copyright: Thomson, Peter G., 1881.

Greene, George Washington. The Life of Nathanael Greene, Vol. 3. New York: Hurd and Houghton. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1871.

Lee, Gen. Henry, Robert E. Lee ed. The Revolutionary War Memoirs of General Henry Lee. Da Capo Press: New York, 1998.

Showman, Richard K., ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, Vol. VI. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1991.

A continuing series.