Independence - Two Volleys

After Charleston and Camden, the Continental Army in the South was a wreck — and George Washington sent it a limping Rhode Island foundryman named Nathanael Greene, who promptly did the one thing every rule of war forbids: with a stronger enemy in front of him, he divided his army. This is the story of how the Americans finally learned to beat the British in the South by refusing to fight them the British way. It is the story of Daniel Morgan, the scarred old wagoner who turned the militia everyone had written off into the trap that destroyed Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens — three lines, two volleys, and a double envelopment that erased nine-tenths of Bloody Ban’s command in an hour. It is the race to the Dan, with Cornwallis burning his own baggage to run Greene down and Greene slipping across the river on boats the British didn’t have. And it is Guilford Courthouse, where Cornwallis won the field by firing grapeshot into his own men — and lost a quarter of his army doing it, until a British statesman said the thing that summed up the whole campaign: “Another such victory would ruin the British army.” Greene lost nearly every battle he fought. He won the South.