♪ (mortar fire booming] ♪ ♪ (musket fire popping) ♪ (mortar fire booming) ♪ (mortar fire booming) ♪ (mortar fire booming) Professor Henry Lumpkin> Kings Mountain had been fought...and lost by the British.

The wild mountaineers, the grim frontiersmen from east and west of the mountains, had destroyed the best light elements in Cornwallis' army and killed one of his finest commanders, Patrick Ferguson.

At Blackstocks... Thomas Sumter... fell very seriously wounded indeed, but he and his men took the measure of Banastre Tarleton for the first time.

American militia had stood against British regulars, and the British regulars had been checked in rather a savage little battle here in upper South Carolina.

Nathanael Greene was beginning to form the army... the army which was to march down through South Carolina, to retreat up through North Carolina to fight the battle of Guilford Courthouse, and to come back again for the final battles and the final victory in the South... or here in South Carolina.

Now we come to that key time in American history when Nathanael Greene's army, divided into a strong reconnaissance force under Daniel Morgan, and the main force under Greene worked out through the state, worked out through the state of South Carolina, to raise the state, to encourage the patriotic Americans, to cow the Loyalists, to meet and defeat, if possible, separated elements of the British army.

We're coming on toward the Battle of Cowpens... the Battle of Cowpens where the old teamster, Daniel Morgan, with a long memory dating back to his punishment, by lash in the British army during the Seven Years' War, the French and Indian War, Daniel Morgan, the genius of riflemen, aging, ill, is to take command in a set battle against Banastre Tarleton... the wealthy, young English officer, the brilliant English genius of cavalry, opposed to the rugged frontier rifle commander.

And the Americans are to win, to win Cowpens.

Now let us go to Cowpens.

♪ ♪ The Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina has been called the turning point of the Revolution.

Whether such a claim is justified or not may be a matter of some question.

It certainly was a culminating event, beginning with the savage defeat and death of Major Patrick Ferguson at Kings Mountain the previous year, events which led to Cornwallis' pursuit of Greene across North Carolina, to his Pyrrhic victory at Guilford Courthouse and the final actions of the siege and surrender at Yorktown, Virginia.

Cowpens was a major American victory.

It also was a military encounter between two of the most colorful leaders of the Revolutionary War: Brigadier General Daniel Morgan, of Morgan's Rifles fame; Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, Cornwallis's dashing commander of cavalry, whose legion was the chief British counter-guerilla weapon in the southern theater.

It would be well, briefly, to talk about these two leaders so completely different in background and training.

Daniel Morgan was born in 1736 of Welsh parentage, probably on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.

At the age of 17, Daniel Morgan practically was an illiterate.

He ran away from home and wandered down to the frontier of western Virginia, where he worked as a teamster, hauling supplies from Fredericksburg, Virginia, over the mountains.

Brought up in the roughest of societies, Morgan was noted as a tough man among very tough men.

He became a hard-drinking, hard-cursing frontier brawler, adept in the eye-gouging, face-stomping techniques of frontier fighting.

Daniel Morgan joined Braddock's army as a wagoner in the supply train on the march to Fort Duquesne.

Surviving the massacre of Braddock's army, he managed to antagonize a British lieutenant, who struck him with the flat of his sword.

Daniel Morgan promptly knocked the lieutenant down.

He was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to 500 lashes.

These were administered so expertly that his back thereafter was covered with deep scars and ridges where the whip literally had torn the flesh away.

It is a wonder that he survived such a punishment.

Many men who received it did not.

But his enthusiasm for the British after this event was somewhat dampened.

He used to say that the solider assigned the task of administering the whipping had miscounted.

Only 499 lashes were given, and the British government still owed him one.

This single lash he proceeded to collect-- applied in the opposite direction-- whenever his riflemen met the British army.

When western Virginia came under French and Indian attack, Daniel Morgan joined the army.

This was in 1757, and over the next six years, he proceeded to develop a reputation as an expert woodsman and Indian fighter.

The French and Indians had evolved a doctrine of wilderness fighting which the British took a long time to learn.

Morgan, in spite of his skill, was ambushed.

His two companions were killed, and he was hit in the neck and face by a musket slug, which carried away all the teeth in his left lower jaw.

Daniel Morgan, thus, was an experienced soldier and a noted fighter well before the American Revolution.

After the Seven Years' War, he took up land near Battletown, Virginia, some 10 miles east of Winchester.

Legend has it that Morgan was responsible for Battletown's name, a rough tavern center which Daniel Morgan ruled as king of the fisticuff-gouge-and-stomp set.

He also married a local farmer's daughter, who proceeded to civilize him.

By 1771, he had become, under her firm guidance, a respectable and reasonably prosperous frontier landowner.

Also in that year, he was given a commission by the acting royal governor of Virginia as a captain in the militia, the royal militia, of Frederick County, Virginia.

Thus, when the Revolution came in 1775, Daniel Morgan, quite naturally, was selected to be captain of one of the ten companies of riflemen raised in Pennsylvania, western Maryland, and Virginia.

He served with his 96 rifles at Boston and was chosen by Washington to go with Benedict Arnold on his terrible march up the Kennebec River and across the height of land to Quebec.

Daniel Morgan was captured in the unsuccessful attack on that city but paroled in late 1776.

Returning to the American army, he was made a colonel, and George Washington formed a regiment of 500 picked riflemen and placed them under Morgan's command to be trained as rangers.

With this soon-to-be-famous corps, Daniel Morgan maintained a constant pressure on the British in the middle states until George Washington detached him to the northern theater when John Burgoyne, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, marched south from Canada to split the New England colonies from the middle states via Lake Champlain and the Hudson River Valley.

Washington told Israel Putnam that the people of the northern army were so frightened by the Indians serving with Burgoyne that he was sending up Daniel Morgan and his corps of rifles "who will fight them in their own way."

It was Daniel Morgan and, strangely, ironically, if you look at later events, Benedict Arnold who stopped Burgoyne, although Gates, Horatio Gates, took the credit and received the eclat, which was later to prove his undoing at Camden, South Carolina.

Daniel Morgan was a bitter and resentful man and felt that his brilliant efforts at Quebec and Saratoga were largely ignored by the Continental Congress, which was quite true.

He was a 44-year-old colonel and asked for promotion, which George Washington tried to get for him from Congress and failed.

Morgan then resigned and went home to his farm near Battletown.

After the unhappy Horatio Gates was so badly beaten at Camden, South Carolina, Washington called on Morgan and Nathanael Greene to go down and save the day in the South.

Daniel Morgan said yes, if he could be made a brigadier.

This was granted, and he rode south to Cowpens...right here.

What about his opponent, his British opponent, the dashing Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton?

His background was entirely different, since he came from a wealthy, socially prominent, Liverpool family.

The young Tarleton attended Oxford University and was destined for the legal profession when the American Revolution occurred.

He promptly then obtained a commission in the cavalry and accompanied Cornwallis to the rebellious colonies.

Here is his portrait, painted after the war by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

As you see, he was a handsome, stocky, but obviously a vain and somewhat dramatic person.

According to one story, prior to his sailing with his regiment, he swaggered into his favorite London coffee shop in uniform and wearing a huge dragoon saber, which he drew and brandished, proclaiming all the dire things he planned to do to the ingrate colonists of North America.

As a matter of fact, he proved to be a completely ruthless, if somewhat too impetuous, commander in the field, who understood the grim, if true, fact that the only way to win a war is to defeat and destroy the enemy.

Placed in command of the British Legion, a mixed force of green-uniformed dragoons and light infantry recruited mainly from the Loyalists, the New York and New Jersey areas, he came south with Sir Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis in 1779.

As I have related before, he defeated and scattered Isaac Huger and William Washington's cavalry at Moncks Corner and Lenud's Ferry on the Santee River and practically destroyed Lieutenant Colonel Abraham Buford's command at the Waxhaws.

This last engagement is carried out with such sanguinary fury that "Tarleton's quarter" became a byword in the Carolinas and set the tone for the intense savagery of war in the South.

This is the man who is to meet and be defeated by Daniel Morgan, the ex-teamster, frontier brawler, and brilliant commander of riflemen.

After Horatio Gates' defeat, Nathanael Greene and Daniel Morgan were sent south to retrieve, if possible, the almost hopeless military situation in that theater.

George Washington was stalemated by Sir Henry Clinton in the North.

The French alliance so far had proved to be of no concrete help, and victory or defeat for the rebellious colonies hung in the balance, with the latter eventuality the far more likely conclusion at this time.

Loyalist elements were strongest in the South, a fact the British were relying on.

And if the South could be pacified and separated from the northern states, there seemed small hope for independence.

This was General Sir Henry Clinton's plan and, later, Lord Cornwallis' plan, although Clinton probably correctly felt that South Carolina was the way to victory, and Cornwallis considered Virginia more important, a strategic decision which was to lead him to Yorktown and final surrender.

When Nathanael Greene took command, he only found a shattered remnant of an army, the survivors of Camden and the lost fight at Fishing Creek.

His regulars did not exceed 1,100, and only 800 of these had weapons and clothing fit for service.

Some of William Washington's all-too-few cavalry were ordered back to Virginia because they were too naked to be given active combat duty.

Since Lord Cornwallis outnumbered Greene around 2,000 effectives, by more than 3 to 1, there was no hope that the American general could meet the entire British force in open battle and defeat them.

The British, however, were stationed in various key posts throughout South Carolina and Georgia: at Savannah, Charleston, Beaufort, and Georgetown in the Lowcountry; Camden, Ninety Six, Winnsboro, and Augusta in the back country; with garrison outposts like Fort Watson, Fort Motte, Orangeburg, and Granby, and the present Columbia, on the lines of communication.

The British, thus, held the main roads and key towns.

But the hinterland, the mountains, the forests, and swamps, belonged to Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, Elijah Clarke, and other great partisan leaders.

Nathanael Greene, with markedly inferior forces, now made what turned out to be an eminently wise decision.

He divided his small army... and marched with one section from the Charlotte, North Carolina area, which had been almost denuded of food, to the Cheraws in South Carolina, thus directly threatening Camden, South Carolina.

He sent Daniel Morgan with an independent force around Cornwallis's left flank, with a corps of light infantry, a detachment of militia, and William Washington's light dragoons, to threaten Ninety Six and intimidate the strong Loyalist elements in that area.

Morgan had contracted malaria during his stay in North Carolina and also was so tormented by sciatica that he could hardly sit his horse.

One may only speculate that his physical condition may have been one of the reasons he stopped and gave battle here at Cowpens, but we'll discuss that later.

Greene had instructed Morgan explicitly to employ his force against the enemy on the west side of the Catawba River, "either offensively or defensively as your own prudence and discretion may direct."

He should act with caution and avoid surprise "by every possible precaution."

Nathanael Greene also gave Morgan the entire command in his assigned area and requested all officers and soldiers in the American camp to be subject to Daniel Morgan's orders.

Greene continued in his instructions to Morgan that the object of his special detachment was to protect "that part of the country," "annoy the enemy," "spirit up the people," "collect provisions and forage out of the way of the enemy," "prevent plundering," and give receipts for whatever was taken, at least to all friends of the American cause, a very good advice to a guerilla column now or then.

Morgan also was instructed to fall back on Greene if the enemy moved in force against his commander and to maintain a steady flow of intelligence as to British movements, something Lord Cornwallis and Banastre Tarleton failed to do for each other.

A fortnight after Morgan's expedition started, he received intelligence... that a force of 250 Georgia Loyalists had moved into South Carolina and were attacking and burning out Patriot families in the area between Ninety Six and Winnsboro.

Morgan ordered William Washington and his dragoons, supported by James McCall's force of mounted South Carolina and Georgia militia, to pursue the Loyalist Colonel Waters and his band.

Washington and McCall caught up with Waters at a small settlement called Hammond's Store.

Attacking from all sides, they literally butchered the Loyalists.

Cornwallis lay at Winnsboro with about 3,500 fighting men.

General Alexander Leslie was marching up from Charleston with 1,530 additional British reinforcements.

But by Cornwallis's order, by Cornwallis's order, these relief troops, these reinforcements, were moving by the old road via Nelson's Ferry to Camden, thus placing a deep river and impenetrable swamps between Leslie and the main army.

The winter rains had been heavy, and Leslie's progress was slow and labored.

On January 1, 1781, Tarleton was ordered to cross the Broad River to its western bank with his legion of 550 men, dragoons and light infantry; the first battalion of the 71st Infantry Regiment, Highlanders 200 strong; and two 3-pounder tripod-mounted grasshopper fieldpieces.

They called them grasshopper fieldpieces because they leaped on their tripods when they were fired, with, of course, the unit of royal artillery.

Tarleton pushed forward and asked for units of the 17th Light Dragoons, the 7th Infantry Regiment of 200 men, and another fieldpiece to join him and bring his baggage at the same time.

He also suggested that when he advanced up the west side of the Broad River, Lord Cornwallis, with Alexander Leslie, should move up the east side.

Thus, with Daniel Morgan driven over the Pacolet River, the Americans would be forced to cross the Broad River and retreat on Kings Mountain, only to find Lord Cornwallis and Leslie, Alexander Leslie, waiting.

It was an excellent plan and should have worked, except Banastre Tarleton lost the Battle of Cowpens, and Lord Cornwallis delayed his march and was not where he should have been to intercept Daniel Morgan.

♪ We have talked much about military doctrine and military concept... the fact that the British high command, on the whole, never understood what historians have called the influence of the wilderness on warfare; the fact that as long as the Americans controlled the hinterland, the swamps, the forest, the mountains, they could interdict the British supply lines, surround British outposts, control the populations, and, thus, eventually place the British in the position where they had to win to stay even, where victories meant very little as long as the Americans still held the field, as long as the American armies could be reconstituted from the peoples of the surrounding territory.

On the whole, on the whole, most set battles fought in the Revolution were British victories... or at least were not American victories.

The Americans might have held the field, the Americans might at least have retreated in good order, but with the exception of Saratoga... and Bennington... and Cowpens, most of the battles until Yorktown, fought as classic European battles, were British victories, not American victories.

This is something we seldom understand.

Kings Mountain, for example, had been an ambush of a British or Loyalist force trapped on a mountaintop by frontiersmen moving in from all sides using the long Dickert rifle and killing at long range against troops organized to fight in the European style, in hollow square, volley fire, and bayonet charges, a totally wrong concept for that kind of fighting.

At Blackstocks, Tarleton, with slightly less than 300 men, had attacked a greatly superior force in a prepared position and been checkmated and driven back.

But Cowpens... Cowpens was a set, classic, battle on the European model, where Tarleton, Banastre Tarleton, drew up his forces as he would have drawn them up on the battlefields of France or Germany or Poland or Great Britain for that matter, and Daniel Morgan, the fighting teamster, drew up his forces in a classic formation to counter the formation of Tarleton.

A set European battle with almost equal forces, where the American army, probably one of the finest armies we ever have fielded, defeated a British army of regulars.

Defeated them in a regular battle because, as I shall point out again and again, the American army on that day was the better army... better led, better commanded, better disciplined, with a better tactical doctrine.

The use of American weapons was superior to the use of British weapons.

Tarleton, with superior cavalry in a cavalry area, did not use that cavalry.

Tarleton with artillery, with light artillery which could have broken the American militia, did not use that artillery properly.

We don't know why.

We don't know why Tarleton didn't back Daniel Morgan up against the Broad River and hold him there, waiting for Cornwallis to come up.

There are many big questions to be asked about Cowpens, but the biggest concept of all here, question and answer,is, the American army met a British army, equal forces, and the Americans won that battle.

Cowpens, thus, is not only... an important link, if not the most important link, in the chain of defeats leading up to Guilford Courthouse and Yorktown.

Cowpens also is the test of an American field army in battle, as Saratoga was a test, though at Saratoga we outnumbered the British, and here at Cowpens the forces were equal.

For that reason, Cowpens is a most important battle in the American Revolutionary War and one we should study very closely and frankly, as Americans, very proudly.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪