Who won the Battle of Guilford Courthouse?
The British held the field, but the Americans won the campaign. At Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, on 15 March 1781, Lord Cornwallis's roughly 2,000 veterans attacked Nathanael Greene's 4,400 Americans, drawn up in three lines. They broke through all three and Greene withdrew, but Cornwallis lost about a quarter of his army. Too weak to hold the Carolinas, he marched to the coast and then into Virginia, toward Yorktown.5
Nathanael Greene lost the Battle of Guilford Courthouse and still came out ahead. For two months he had led Lord Cornwallis on a chase across two states. When he finally turned to fight, he let the British win the field and made the winning so expensive that it broke their army in the South. In the American Battlefield Trust's words, it was a pyrrhic victory for Cornwallis; in Britain, the opposition leader Charles James Fox told the House of Commons that another such victory would ruin the British army.6
Part of The greatest battles of the American Revolution · Before: Battle of Cowpens · Next: Siege of Yorktown
Greene takes command
From 1778 Britain shifted its war effort south, counting on Loyalist support that never fully appeared. It still won a string of victories: it took Savannah and Charleston and destroyed two American armies, the second at Camden in August 1780. In late 1780 George Washington sent his most trusted subordinate, Major General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, to command what was left of the southern army.7
The tide had begun to turn even before Greene arrived. At Kings Mountain in October 1780 frontier militia destroyed Patrick Ferguson's Loyalists, and at Cowpens on 17 January 1781 Daniel Morgan, commanding a detachment of Greene's army, routed Banastre Tarleton's legion. Cornwallis set out to catch Morgan and then Greene, convinced that resistance in the South would collapse once Greene's army was destroyed.8 › Battle of Cowpens, 1781
The race to the Dan
What followed is remembered as the Race to the Dan. To move faster, Cornwallis reached Ramseur's Mill on 25 January and burned his army's nonessential baggage. Greene and Morgan retreated northeast across the flooded rivers of North Carolina, taking the boats with them; on 4 February Cornwallis was stopped at Salisbury because the Americans had carried off every boat on the Yadkin. At Cowan's Ford on the Catawba the Patriot militia leader William Lee Davidson was killed trying to block the British crossing.9
Greene's army reunited at Guilford Courthouse on 7 February and then made for Virginia, while a rear guard under Otho Holland Williams drew the British off toward the wrong crossing. On 14 February Greene's men crossed the Dan at Boyd's and Irwin's Ferries in boats collected there weeks earlier. The British reached the south bank hours later and found the river in flood and no boats to cross it. The chase cost Cornwallis men to desertion and skirmishing and left his army of about 2,000 short of everything; one British officer wrote of living on "green corn and carrion."10
Greene turns to fight
Cornwallis fell back to Hillsborough. Greene, resupplied and reinforced in Virginia, recrossed the Dan on 22 February with his army and followed him. For three weeks the two sides maneuvered and skirmished between Hillsborough and the Deep River settlements, at places like Weitzell's Mill and Clapp's Mill.11
By mid-March Greene had about 4,400 men, roughly 1,700 Continentals and 2,700 militia, more than twice Cornwallis's strength. On 14 March he brought his army to Guilford Courthouse, a hamlet of fewer than 100 people around the county courthouse, with small fields cut out of the forest. He had decided he was ready to fight.12
The three lines
Greene borrowed his plan from Daniel Morgan's victory at Cowpens. He drew up three lines about 400 yards apart across the Great Salisbury Wagon Road, which ran southwest toward the British camp. In front, nearly 800 North Carolina militia stood at the edge of a cleared field, resting their muskets on a rail fence, with veteran riflemen and the cavalry and infantry of William Washington and Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee on their flanks. Behind them, in dense woods, waited nearly 850 Virginia militia. The third and strongest line was held by the Continental regulars of Maryland and Virginia.13 › Daniel Morgan
The idea was a defense in depth. As at Cowpens, the North Carolina militia were ordered to fire two volleys and then fall back behind the Virginians. Each line would cost the British men and order before they ever reached the Continentals.14
The first line
Cornwallis broke camp at the Deep River Meeting House early on 15 March. His advance guard under Banastre Tarleton clashed with Lee's men around the New Garden Meeting House, a few miles from Greene's lines. By noon the British were within striking distance, and after about half an hour of artillery fire Cornwallis's infantry advanced at around 1:30 in the afternoon on both sides of the road.15
The North Carolinians opened fire at about 150 yards and hit the redcoats hard. One British officer recalled that when a volley struck the 71st Highlanders, "one half of the Highlanders dropped on that spot." But when the British charged with the bayonet, the militia fired once more and ran, many of them leaving their equipment behind and most of them leaving the battlefield altogether, to Greene's dismay.16
The fight in the woods
The second line proved much harder. In the thick forest the Virginia militia, with sergeants posted behind them under orders to shoot anyone who ran, fought the British for about an hour in what a British writer later called "a number of irregular, but hard fought and bloody skirmishes." One American recalled the British falling "like the stalks of wheat" before a harvester's cradle.17
The woods broke up the British line. Separate fights developed on each flank, units were drawn away from the center, and by the time the redcoats pushed the Virginians back they had lost much of their cohesion.18
The third line
The first British regiment to reach the Continentals, the 33rd Foot, was driven back. Then the 2nd Battalion of Guards, among the best troops in the British army, turned the flank of the 2nd Maryland, and some of the newer Continentals gave way. The 1st Maryland and William Washington's dragoons counterattacked and stopped the Guards, and a savage hand-to-hand melee followed in the center.19
The guns and the end
What happened next is one of the most famous episodes of the war. In the version told by the National Park Service's lesson on the battle, Cornwallis, seeing his men caught between two attacks, ordered two cannon to fire grapeshot straight into the mass of struggling soldiers, killing some of his own men, though General Charles O'Hara begged him not to. Britannica likewise says the British artillery killed many of Cornwallis's own troops while breaking up the American line.20
Later research has qualified the story. Joshua Howard, coauthor of a book-length study of the battle, writes in NCpedia that the tale of Cornwallis firing into the melee against all warnings is apocryphal: the guns did fire into the crowd, but only after the American cavalry joined the fight and threatened the British artillery itself.21
Whatever its form, the fire broke up the struggle. More British infantry came up from the fighting in the woods, and Greene, determined not to risk his army as Horatio Gates had done at Camden, ordered a retreat. The Americans fell back in good order to the Troublesome Ironworks, about 15 miles away, leaving their artillery behind because all the horses had been killed. The battered British did not pursue.22
A victory too dear
Cornwallis reported 93 killed, 413 wounded and 26 missing, some 27 percent of his army, and the Guards lost more than half their men, including nearly all their officers. American losses came to 79 killed and 185 wounded, with 1,046 listed as missing, most of them militiamen who simply went home, which is why most historians put the real American loss at about 264.23
The two commanders' reports tell the story. Cornwallis wrote to London of "a signal victory" and praised his men's endurance on "a march of above 600 miles." Greene wrote that the battle had been "long and severe," that the enemy's loss was "much more than ours," and that he was "not without hope of turning their victory into defeat." In London, Fox's verdict carried the day: "Another such victory would ruin the British army!"24
Toward Yorktown
Cornwallis could not stay. Too weak to hold even outposts in North Carolina, he buried his dead and marched away on 18 March toward the British base at Wilmington on the coast. In late April he left Wilmington and marched north into Virginia, a decision that led him in October 1781 to surrender at Yorktown.25 › Siege of Yorktown, 1781
Greene did not follow him. He turned south instead and fought the battles that freed South Carolina and Georgia from British control. When his report of Guilford reached Philadelphia, it was printed under the headline "Good news from the South."26 › Washington vs Cornwallis
The battlefield today
The battlefield lies within the northwestern edge of modern Greensboro, North Carolina, preserved as Guilford Courthouse National Military Park. Among its monuments is the equestrian statue of Nathanael Greene, erected in 1915 on the line held by the Virginia militia, which declares the battle "second to no battle fought on American soil."27
