06:16 PM EDT on Thursday, July 6, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

Charlotte, North Carolina, Dec. 7, 1780:

I arrived at this place the 2d Inst. And found the army under General Gates in a most deplorable situation, entirely without tents and almost starved with hunger and cold, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene wrote. The Virginia troops are literally naked and undisciplined. The troops are supplied with provision by daily collections, and that in a country ravaged by the enemy.

Greene, who was taking over command of America's Southern Army, knew he could not keep his men here where Horatio Gates had put them, scattered on wet ground around an old brick courthouse, foraging daily as animals in a war-wrecked country. Greene planned to split his army in two.

Those without clothes, weapons or discipline -- more than half of his 1,400 men -- he would put on the march for a new camp where he could better provision them and teach them the finer points of being a soldier.

He wrote orders to his engineer, Col. Thaddeus Kosciuszko: You will go with Major Polke and examine the Country from the Mouth of Little River twenty or thirty Miles down the Peedee[River] and search for a good position for the army. You will report the make of the Country, the nature of the soil, the quality of the water, the quantity of Produce, number of mills, and the water transportation that may be had up and down the River. You will also enquire respecting the creeks in the Rear the fords and the difficulty of passing them, all which you will report as soon as possible.

Polk, claiming "I am too far advanced in years," quit the army, but Kosciuszko poled down the Pee Dee and just over the boundary of South Carolina found a fertile area that could support the bulk of Greene's army.

The best of his men, about 600 soldiers who were properly armed and clothed, Greene put under the command of another general, Daniel Morgan. I give this, Greene proudly wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette, the name of a flying Army.

Morgan, the pilot of this Flying Army, was a heroic figure: large for his time at 6 feet tall, and strong, Morgan was an up-from-the-bootstraps brawler who ended many an argument with a punch in the mouth. He fought with his father and left the family farm in New Jersey at 17; at 19 he served as a teamster or wagoner in the French and Indian War.

Wagoners were a notorious bunch of hard-drinking, hard-driving men, and his time among them gave him the nickname of "The Old Wagoner." While hauling goods for the British in the French and Indian War, Morgan was struck with the flat of a sword by a British officer peeved about something. This was a bad mistake. Morgan punched the officer, earning him a sentence of 500 lashes across his bare back. For the rest of Morgan's life his broad back bore scars from that lashing, but he got a good story out of it: the drum major charged with applying the lashes miscounted and gave him 499. "I counted them myself," Morgan liked to say, "and am sure that I am right; nay, I convinced the drum major of his mistake . . . so I am still their creditor to the amount of one lash."

The thick stripes across his back weren't Morgan's only scars. In the French and Indian War a musket ball passed through the back of his neck, shattered his lower left teeth and exited through the upper lip, leaving a livid scar.

Greene knew Morgan and his crack corps of riflemen from the siege of Boston and from Valley Forge. He knew a good leader when he saw one.

On Dec. 16, 1780, Greene ordered Morgan to march the Flying Army, composed of cavalry and light infantry, west and deep into the backcountry, beyond the Catawba River. Greene wrote to Morgan in his orders: The object of this detachment is to give protection to that part of the country and spirit up the people, [and] to annoy the enemy in that quarter. . . .

That day Greene ordered the remainder of his army, some 800 misfits who lacked clothes, or weapons, or discipline, or all of those, to be ready to march with him when the weather cleared.

It rained for four days.

Finally on the 20th they got under way, trudging muddy roads toward "a camp of repose" where Hick's Creek met the wide Pee Dee River.

At the outbreak of the Revolution, the sum of Nathanael Greene's military knowledge had been confined to what he could glean from books. In dividing his already small force in the face of a superior army, Greene threw the books out the window. Napoleon Bonaparte, who later coined the maxim "divide to live, unite to conquer" was then just 11 years old; conventional theory still held that a general did not risk his army by splitting it.

In his two-volume history of the Revolution, 20th century historian Christopher Ward called Greene's deliberate splitting of his army "the most audacious and ingenious piece of military strategy of the war."

Greene's decision was not the lucky mistake of a novice; he did it deliberately.

It makes the most of my inferior force, Greene wrote to an unknown correspondent, for it compels my adversary to divide his, and holds him in doubt as to his own line of conduct. He can not leave Morgan behind him to come at me, or his posts of Ninety-Six [an oddly named but important frontier outpost] and Augusta would be exposed. And he cannot chase Morgan far, or prosecute his views upon Virginia, while I am here with the whole country open before me.

'A habitat of snakes'

On Dec. 26, 1780, Nathanael Greene's small army of misfits arrived at its winter camp after what he called a very tedious and disagreeable march over bad roads with weak draft horses pulling heavily through the mud.

Hicks Creek entered the Pee Dee River just below the sandy hills of the Piedmont, in a marshy area known as the Tidewater.

Hessian officers described the Carolina low country as "a habitat of snakes and crocodiles [actually alligators], strewn with bodies of stagnant water and covered with impenetrable woods."

And: "at every step in the woods one is likely to meet with a rattlesnake or some other venomous creature," which wasn't mere hyperbole. Carolina rattlesnakes grew 6 feet long and 6 inches thick; water moccasins thrived in the swamps; bull snakes added their hollow, thundering call to the cacophony of frogs, 'gators, red wolves and bugs.

Moss hung from the cypress and the live oaks, cascading from high branches to the ground. Hessian Capt. Johann Hinrichs found it "a peculiar spectacle to see cattle in the woods, eating hay from the trees."

Greene, a lifelong Rhode Islander before the war, was shocked at the wanton cruelty that he found in the South. In the North he'd known of rape and plunder and the indiscriminate burning of houses, but down here passions ran higher; in the South the war was personal.

The North still had civil government meeting in state capitals, making and enforcing laws; Georgia and South Carolina now had no governments, and North Carolina's was but a shadow, meeting rarely and in secret. Here a civil war raged, pitting neighbor against neighbor, frequently fighting for the right to plunder each other's property while settling grudges.

You can have no idea of the distress and misery that prevails in this quarter, Greene wrote to his wife, Caty, in mid-January 1781. Hundreds of families that formerly livd in great opulence are now reducd to beggary and want. . . . Human misery has become a subject for sport and ridicule. With us the difference between Whig and Tory is little more than a division of sentiment; but here they prosecute each other with little less than savage fury. . . .

A Captain who is now with me and who has just got his family from near the Lines of the Enemy had his Sister murderd a few days since, and seven of her children wounded, the oldest not twelve years of age. The sufferings and distress of the Inhabitants beggars all description. . . .

Warm weather in December also surprised this Rhode Island Yankee. From Hicks Creek Camp he wrote to his wife:

I am posted in the Wilderness on a great river, endeavoring to reform the army and improve its discipline. The weather is mild and the climate moderate, so much so, that we all live in Markees, or marques, large canvas tents split in two with a divider. Greene shared his tent with a colonel.

Greene's methods to "improve" discipline included publicly shooting a deserter, Thomas Chapman of the Maryland line. Greene signed the order to have the said Thomas Chapman shott to Death on Jan. 4, 1781, adding in the Fifth Year of the Independance of the United States.

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

Bibliography

Sources consulted for today's installment

Bartram, William. Travels. Yale University Press: New Haven, Conn., 1958.

Borick, Carl P. A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780. University of South Carolina Press: Columbia, S.C., 2003.

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, VII. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1994.

Higginbotham, Don. Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary Rifleman. University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1961.

``Redcoats, Hessians & Tories,'' exhibit: Charleston Museum, Charleston, S.C. June 4 through Dec. 14, 2003.

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

Ward, Christopher. The War of the Revolution. Vol. 2. Macmillan, New York, 1952.

A continuing series.