Albert Louis Zambone - Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

IT was the darkness before dawn on January 17, 1781, at a crossroads in the backcountry of South Carolina, a savannah where cattle were overnighted during their amble to the coast. It was called, like other such pastures throughout the Carolinas, a cowpens, and soon it would acquire an honorific capital C. It was a series of open pastures of the Inner Piedmont, featuring long, meandering crests with occasional rolling dips and streams; a savannah of switch grass grazed by countless herds, enclosed and dotted by large trees. A mist blanketed the undulated countryside. Joining the mist was the smoke of campfires for almost two thousand men camped at the northern end of the Cowpens. Recumbent forms stretched out around the campfires, the experienced ones with their heads closest to the embers. Men who could not sleep stared into the flames, tossing occasional kindling to stoke the fire and offset the bite of the winter air.

All night the old wagoner meandered between the groups of men huddled around the flames, chatting, joking, telling them exactlywhat he expected of them. Some later claimed he had lifted his shirt to show them his back: the white-scarred wreckage left behind by 499 lashes, well laid on by a drummer boy back in 1756. It was one of his favorite stories: how there had been a miscountshowing that he had been conscious throughout the punishment and been keeping countand that rather than the required five hundred he had been shortchanged one but chose not to argue the point. King George, he would say with a twinkle, mustnt have the opportunity to correct the oversight.

He was done now. Like everyone else on that field, he was waiting for dawn.

This was not the place where he had wanted to fight. He had meant to cross the Broad River and wait for the approaching British force on the slopes of Thickety Mountain, or on some other ground of his own choosing. But Banastre Tarleton was coming on hard and fast, as he always did. Now the old wagoner was caught in open country, six miles from the Broad. Now he had to fight.

He had been fighting his whole life, in one way or another. His body was a palimpsest of violence. Some kind of fight or quarrel had made him leave his home and parents. When he arrived in the Valley of Virginia, he fought to clear land, then fought to make his way as a wagoner. As wagoner, he fought other wagoners to establish his place in life. He fought Indians, and they left their mark on him. He struck an officer and got those 499 lashes in exchange. When there were no more wars to fight, he brawled and fought just for the hell of it. The Revolution meant more fighting, more damage to his suffering body. Now on that cold January morning, all the wounds and scars marked upon his body ached terribly as he waited for yet another fight.

A brawl was what he could expect from Tarleton, a straight-ahead, head-down fight. So he had put his plans down on paperor rather his educated aides from Maryland had done so, so that everyone could read the handwritingand shown it to all his officers. They all knew what they were to do. Now, after his nighttime rounds, his soldiers also knew what to do. There would be no ignorance or uncertainty breeding fear and anxiety, not this morning.

Daylight glimmered beneath the horizon. As men stirred and awoke, hoofbeats came hurriedly up the road from the south. Ascout dashed up to the old wagoner to report. Tarleton was five miles away with his one thousand men, moving fast. Runners began to scatter with the news and with orders. A body servant held his horse, and the old wagoner, Brigadier General Daniel Morgan, mounted. Dressed in his Continental uniform, Morgan lightly spurred his horse through the camp. He began to shout, Boys, get up, Bennys coming!

DANIEL MORGAN was one of the unique personalities of the American Revolution. In addition to engineering the victory of January 17, 1781, at the Cowpensthe most tactically perfect American victory of the warhe was an architect of the victory at Saratoga, which remains one of the most decisive and genuinely consequential military victories in all of American history. He was thus in part or fully responsible for two of the truly decisive victories of the Continental army during the American Revolution.

It was the Revolution that revealed that whatever his other abilities and gifts, Daniel Morgan was a tactical genius. He knew how to lead his menwhat to ask them to do and how to get them to do it. He also understood how to place those men on any given bit of ground. At Saratoga he used his chosen band of riflemen and sharpshooters from the Shenandoah Valley as if they were themselves one great sniper rifle under his personal control. He aimed them at the heart of the British army, killing its officers, its artillerymen, and their horses; breaking apart key formations; and allowing other Continental army regiments the opportunity to exploit the chaos he had created.

Yet, Revolution or no, Morgan was also a man of humble origins who wished to be recognized as a gentleman. When he was passed over for command of the new light infantry wing of the Continental army in 1779, he left the army in disgust. The honor of a would-be gentleman demanded nothing less. So he returned to his home, already aptly titled Soldiers Rest.

It was only the return of his friend and neighbor Horatio Gates to command in the South, and a commission as brigadier general by Congress, that drew Morgan out of his Shenandoah retirement. He had not reached the Southern Army before it was destroyed atCamden in August 1780, and Gates was disgraced for both that loss and his hasty flight from the battlefield. Despite the departure of a man he regarded as a friend, Morgan stayed. The new commander, Nathanael Greene, gave Morgan command of most of the elite formations of the Southern Army and sent him west into the Carolina backcountry to make trouble and yet avoid defeat. That was how Morgan came to be at the Cowpens the night he decided to stop running from Tarleton.