Who won the Battle of Cowpens?
On 17 January 1781 Brigadier General Daniel Morgan's Americans defeated Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton's British force at Cowpens, South Carolina. Morgan's militia fired a few volleys and fell back, drawing the British into a trap; his Continentals and cavalry then struck them from the front and both flanks. Tarleton's command was destroyed in a decisive American victory.2
By early 1781 the British seemed to be winning in the American South. Their most aggressive cavalry commander, Banastre Tarleton, was hunting an American force under Daniel Morgan in the southern campaign of the American Revolutionary War. Morgan chose to stand at an open grazing ground called the Cowpens, and turned the weakness of his army into the trap that destroyed his pursuer.3
Part of The greatest battles of the American Revolution · Before: The Battle of Kings Mountain · Next: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse
The war in the South
After years of war the fighting had shifted to the American South, where the British held the upper hand. Their swiftest striker was Banastre Tarleton, a cavalry commander feared for his ruthlessness. Sent to destroy an American detachment, he pursued Daniel Morgan, a tough Virginia frontiersman and one of the best tacticians of the Revolution.4
The British had taken Savannah in 1778 and Charleston in May 1780, and in August 1780 Lord Cornwallis routed the southern American army at Camden. The tide began to turn only later that year, when backcountry militia destroyed a loyalist force at Kings Mountain. In December the new American commander in the South, Nathanael Greene, took the bold step of dividing his small army, sending Morgan southwest with a detachment to work with the backcountry militia while the main army wintered at Cheraw Hills. 5› The Battle of Kings Mountain, 1780
Cornwallis sent Tarleton after him. Only 26, Tarleton commanded the British Legion, a green-coated corps of loyalist horse and foot. Patriots hated him for Waxhaws in May 1780, where his men cut down Americans who were trying to surrender; Fleming's National Park Service history counts 113 Americans killed there and 203 captured, and "Tarleton's quarter" became a byword for no quarter at all.6
The chase
On 12 January 1781 Tarleton's scouts found Morgan's camp at Grindal Shoals on the Pacolet River. Morgan fell back north, and when Tarleton crossed the Pacolet on 16 January he retreated so fast that his men left their breakfast on the fires. That evening he halted at the Cowpens, a well-known pasture where backcountry farmers fattened their cattle, with the flooded Broad River about six miles behind him.7
Morgan chose to fight there on purpose. The ground was open woodland on a gentle rise, with no swamp to which the militia could run. He knew his adversary, he said later, "and was perfectly sure I should have nothing but downright fighting." During the night the militia under Andrew Pickens kept drifting into camp, and by morning Morgan had somewhere between about 800 and 1,065 men. In his report to Greene, Morgan wrote that "we fought only eight hundred men"; the American Battlefield Trust gives 1,065.8
Morgan's plan
Morgan knew his militia were unreliable in a stand-up fight, so he built his plan around it. He placed skirmishers and militia in lines out front with orders to fire two or three volleys and then withdraw, deliberately drawing the British forward, while his tougher Continental regulars waited on a low rise behind, with cavalry hidden in reserve.9
In front went a screen of picked riflemen from Georgia and the Carolinas. Behind them stood Pickens's militia, and about 150 yards farther back, on the rise, the Maryland and Delaware Continentals and Virginia militia under Lieutenant Colonel John Eager Howard. Behind the crest, out of sight, waited Lieutenant Colonel William Washington's cavalry, about 100 dragoons with some mounted militia.10
That night Morgan, crippled by sciatica, limped from campfire to campfire, explaining the plan to the militia and joking with them. Thomas Young, a sixteen-year-old volunteer, remembered his words: "Just hold up your heads, boys, give them three fires, and you will be free."11
The battle
Tarleton had marched his men since two in the morning. At dawn on 17 January, a clear and bitterly cold day, his column came up the Green River Road with about 1,150 men: the Legion, light infantry, the 7th Fusiliers, the 71st Highlanders and two light three-pounder guns, the so-called grasshoppers. He did not hesitate. He formed a line with the guns in the center and 50 dragoons on each flank, kept the Highlanders and the Legion cavalry in reserve, and sent his infantry forward at once.12
The riflemen emptied British saddles first. Fifty Legion dragoons sent to drive them in lost about fifteen men, by the traditional count that Fleming repeats and the historian Lawrence Babits disputes. Then the militia line delivered its volleys and fell back across the front of the Continentals. Tarleton's dragoons charged after them, and Washington's cavalry burst out from behind the hill and drove them off.13
The double envelopment
The crisis came when Tarleton threw in the 71st Highlanders against Howard's right. Howard ordered his flank company to face about to meet them; in the noise the order was taken for a retreat, and the whole line began to walk back in good order. The British, many of their officers already down, surged after them in a mob. Washington sent word to Morgan, in Fleming's telling: "They are coming on like a mob. Give them another fire and I will charge them." At Morgan's order the Continentals turned, fired a volley into the British at close range and charged with the bayonet.14
At the same moment Pickens's re-formed militia struck the Highlanders' flank and Washington's horsemen hit the British from the other side. The Continentals captured both guns, whose crews kept firing to the last, and the British infantry began to surrender in droves. The whole fight lasted less than an hour.15
The reckoning
Tarleton tried to rally his Legion cavalry, but most of it rode away. With a handful of men he fought a running clash with Washington, who rode ahead of his troopers and was nearly cut down before a young bugler fired a pistol at his attacker; Tarleton shot Washington's horse from under him and escaped down the Green River Road. The rescuer's identity, the National Park Service notes, has never been verified.16
How many died at the Battle of Cowpens?
About 110 British were killed, by the counts of the American Battlefield Trust and the National Park Service, with more than 200 wounded and between 529 and 600 captured. Morgan reported 12 Americans killed and 60 wounded; the historian Lawrence Babits puts American losses at about 25 killed and 124 wounded.17
Congress voted Morgan a gold medal and Washington and Howard silver ones; Pickens received a silver sword. Morgan did not wait for Cornwallis. He buried the dead, crossed the Broad River with his prisoners and marched north, and the prisoners were sent on to Winchester in Virginia. 18› Nathanael Greene
Why was the Battle of Cowpens important?
Cowpens was a small battle with large consequences. It destroyed much of the British light force in the South and drew Lord Cornwallis into a costly pursuit across North Carolina that wore his army down. Remembered as the turning point of the war in the South, it set off the chain of events that ended at Yorktown in October 1781.19
Determined to recover the prisoners, Cornwallis burned his own baggage at Ramsour's Mill on 24 January to move faster and chased Greene and Morgan across North Carolina. Greene won the race to the Dan River, then turned and fought at Guilford Courthouse on 15 March 1781, a British victory so costly that Cornwallis gave up the Carolinas and marched into Virginia. Morgan, worn out by illness, retired from the army. 20› The Battle of Guilford Courthouse, 1781
The battlefield today
The field is preserved as Cowpens National Battlefield, near Chesnee in upstate South Carolina. The first memorial came from the Washington Light Infantry, a Charleston militia company, which marched to the field in 1856 and raised a monument to the victors. Congress created a one-acre national battlefield site in 1929, the National Park Service took it over in 1933, and in 1972 it was designated a national battlefield, which grew to more than 840 acres and has run as a full park since the bicentennial in 1981.21
A trail of a little over a mile loops through the heart of the park, past the lines held by Pickens's militia and Howard's Continentals and along the Green River Road where the British advanced at sunrise. The Park Service has been restoring the land to the open, grassy woodland of 1781. 22› 17 January in military history: the Battle of Cowpens, 1781
