Repercussions of the Battle of Camden

The War Years (1775-1783)

May 20, 2013
by Jim Piecuch Also by this Author

WELCOME!

Journal of the American Revolution is the leading source of knowledge about the American Revolution and Founding Era. We feature smart, groundbreaking research and well-written narratives from expert writers. Our work has been featured by the New York Times, TIME magazine, History Channel, Discovery Channel, Smithsonian, Mental Floss, NPR, and more. Journal of the American Revolution also produces annual hardcover volumes, a branded book series, and the podcast, Dispatches

Battle_of_CamdenOne of the most striking aspects of the Battle of Camden is the vast amount of material that was written about it. Officers and soldiers who fought in Revolutionary War battles always wrote something about their experiences, but in regard to the Battle of Camden, they wrote much more than they did about other battles: a greater number of participants wrote about this battle, and they wrote at greater length and in more detail. Even more unusual is the amount of commentary on the battle written by those who did not fight at Camden. This is true of American, British, Hessian, and French observers, and extended to a variety of accounts from newspaper reports to letters and diary entries. The commentators ranged from members of Congress, General George Washington, several state governors including Thomas Jefferson, and ordinary people who recorded their thoughts and observations. British government officials and the Loyalist press in America also commented extensively on the battle and its expected consequences. But the repercussions of the Battle of Camden were more than just newsworthy – they had serious effects on the lives and careers of several important officers on both sides, as well as for the future course of the war.

One reason why this battle was considered so important was the high hopes that General Horatio Gates’s operations had raised among American revolutionaries, and the corresponding concerns that developed among the British and Loyalists. After the British capture of Charleston in May 1780 and the subsequent occupation of South Carolina and Georgia, American morale plummeted while British hopes for victory soared. When Gates took command of the combined force of Continental troops and militia, Americans had great confidence in his ability to reverse the tide of defeat in the South. Gates was the hero of Saratoga, and his success there had added a new word to the American vocabulary: “burgoyne,” meaning to surround and capture a British force as Gates had done to General John Burgoyne’s army in October 1777. Such a maneuver was called a “burgoynade,” and many Americans expected Gates to repeat his success. Only one former officer seems to have expressed concern; Major General Charles Lee, cashiered after his dispute with George Washington at the June 1778 Battle of Monmouth, is said to have told Gates when the victor of Saratoga passed through Lee’s home state of Virginia on the way to his new command, “take care that your northern laurels do not turn into southern willows.”

That is in effect what happened, as Gates’s defeat at Camden not only dashed American hopes of quickly regaining control of the South, but ruined Gates’s own career as well. Gates was on tenuous ground when he assumed the southern command. After his victory at Saratoga, which stood in sharp contrast to Washington’s nearly uninterrupted string of defeats in New York and Pennsylvania, Congress appointed Gates to the Board of War, a joint civilian-military commission charged with formulating strategy, among other tasks. Many members of Congress believed that Gates, who was popular with his troops and a highly capable administrator, should replace Washington. So did General Thomas Conway, who expressed his thoughts in a letter to Gates. Gates wrote a cautious, noncommittal reply, but Washington and his protégés in the army, especially his aides Alexander Hamilton, John Laurens, and independent field commander Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, believed that Conway, Gates, and several Congressmen were conspiring to replace Washington with Gates. Although no shred of evidence has ever been found to prove the existence of this so-called Conway Cabal of 1777-1778, Washington and his supporters believed the conspiracy was real, and succeeded in having Conway dismissed from command. Gates was too popular to be undermined, so Washington’s supporters eagerly awaited an opportunity to attack Gates. That opportunity would come after the Battle of Camden.

The American defeat at Camden was disastrous, and Americans recognized this. William Dobein James, a teenage soldier in Francis Marion’s partisan corps, later wrote that “no event which had yet happened, was considered so calamitous.” George Washington observed, with characteristic reticence, that “the stroke is severe,” and that it would be very difficult to rebuild the southern army. New York Congressman James Duane lamented “so deplorable a catastrophe.”

Advertisement


Horatio Gates by Gilbert Stuart
Horatio Gates by Gilbert Stuart

Gates’s abilities were immediately called into question. Some Americans believed he had advanced into South Carolina too rapidly, some said “recklessly.” Others questioned his choice of route, and his deployment of the militia on the left of his front line rather than on the right. In fact, Gates had good reasons for what he did. He chose the route toward Camden that would unite his army with General Richard Caswell’s North Carolina militia, which was roaming about in northern South Carolina and in danger of being cut off and annihilated by the British. Caswell had ignored orders from both Baron De Kalb, and later Gates, to unite with the main army. Also, a rapid advance would deprive the British of the time they needed to consolidate their positions and organize Loyalist forces, while inspiring South Carolinians and assisting Marion’s and Thomas Sumter’s partisans. As for his deployment of the militia, they would have fared no better had they been posted on the left flank, where the British fought the best of the Continentals to a standstill and certainly would have routed the militia.

Perhaps Gates could have retained his command despite these accusations, but another circumstance ruined him. When the militia broke, Gates and the militia commanders, Caswell and General Edward Stevens of Virginia, rode in among the fleeing men to try and rally them. Not only did their efforts fail, but they were swept up in the tide of running men and carried from the battlefield. By the time Gates had extricated himself from the mob, the sound of firing from the battlefield had ceased. Deciding that he could accomplish nothing with the battle over, Gates rode to Charlotte to rally any survivors and organize a defensive position. But when he got there, he found only a handful of militia and no equipment, so he rode to Hillsborough, to seek help from the North Carolina legislature that was meeting there. That took him 180 miles from the battlefield in three days, and it was this that his enemies seized upon to discredit him. Alexander Hamilton was among the most vociferous critics of “so precipitate a flight,” and what was a justifiable if unwise move was cast as an act of cowardice. American accusations were supported by even wilder charges in the Loyalist press. One account described Gates as having hidden in a cellar to escape pursuing British cavalry, and another asserted that he had been arrested for misconduct. Perhaps the most humorous, and similarly damaging, jab at Gates came in the form of an advertisement like those placed by people seeking the return of lost or stolen property. The ad offered a reward  of “Millions” in Continental paper currency for information leading to the recovery of “a whole army, consisting of horse, foot, and dragoons, with all their baggage, artillery, wagons, and camp equipage.” The missing army was reported to have been last seen near Camden, South Carolina, and the notice stated that the advertiser has strong suspicions “that a certain Charles Earl Cornwallis was principally concerned in carrying off the said army.” The ad went on to say that no reward would be paid for the return of the militia, as it was useless in battle, and the ad bore Gates’s alleged signature.

As a result, Congress removed Gates from command in October, and Washington’s last rival was gone. Washington named Nathanael Greene as Gates’s replacement, and Congress ordered Greene to hold a court of inquiry to judge Gates’s conduct. In fact, by the time Greene arrived in December, Gates had done much to rebuild the southern army. He had created a corps of light troops that would prove of great value to Greene, had inspired many formerly demoralized southerners to return to the field as partisans by showing that Congress and the Continental Army had not abandoned the south, and most important of all, he had convinced Congress to bring his old friend Daniel Morgan out of retirement and promote him to brigadier general. Morgan arrived too late to fight at Camden, but he would win a decisive victory at Cowpens in January 1781. Had Gates not been given the southern command, Morgan would have remained home in sulky retirement and the war might have taken a different course. Greene, who had supported Washington, was, if not an outright enemy of Gates, certainly not well disposed to his predecessor. However, after seeing the ground where Gates fought, he declared that he could not see that Gates had made any errors, and said that he would have fought the Battle of Camden the same way. He then refused to try Gates, claiming that he did not have enough high ranking officers to convene a court of inquiry. After his own defeat near Camden, at Hobkirk’s Hill in April 1781, Greene went even further, and opened a correspondence with Gates, commiserating in the failures both had suffered in the same area.

Gates was not the only American officer to suffer ill consequences from the battle. Major General William Smallwood, who commanded the 1st Maryland Brigade at Camden and after the battle was the highest ranking officer in the southern army, expected to succeed Gates. However, when inquiries were made about his leadership at Camden, it turned out that not a single American soldier could recall seeing him on the field from the time he ordered his brigade to advance until he arrived in Charlotte a few days later. This took him out of consideration for the command, and after learning of Greene’s appointment, he left the southern army and returned to Maryland to supervise recruiting.

Advertisement


Baron Johann De Kalb, the major general commanding the two Continental brigades, was mortally wounded and emerged as the greatest American hero of the battle. His death, while tragic, may have saved his reputation. As the ranking officer after Gates during the battle, he had responsibility for both Continental brigades, an important role considering Smallwood’s mysterious absence. But De Kalb remained with the 2nd Maryland Brigade throughout the battle, fighting bravely but ignoring the other brigade that he commanded. He was probably unaware that Gates had left the field, but his failure to maintain any contact with his second brigade, especially after he received no orders from Gates concerning it, was a serious lapse. Yet it has never been seriously questioned.

While Congress, Washington, Gates, and later Greene dealt with the consequences to the army, governors Abner Nash of North Carolina and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia had to deal with the possible threat of British invasion, as well as the indignity of their militia’s behavior. Both made great efforts to send additional militia to reinforce Gates. Maryland Governor Thomas Sim Lee and his counterpart in Delaware, Caesar Rodney, scrambled to find accurate information of what had happened in South Carolina, while the families of the troops in their states’ regiments clamored for information about the fate of their loved ones. Nearly a month passed before they could obtain reliable information, and even then it was incomplete. No accurate tally of American losses at Camden was ever made.

The repercussions for the Americans extended across the Atlantic, where their French allies began to doubt the Americans’ ability to hold the South or even to win the war. In Amsterdam, John Adams had nearly finalized a loan from the Dutch government to Congress, but when the Dutch learned of the disaster at Camden, they decided not to make the loan.

The reaction was quite different in Britain, where public support for the war soared and predictions of imminent victory abounded. Lord Cornwallis was praised for his success, and some of his subordinates: Lord Rawdon, Banastre Tarleton, and James Webster, were also lauded for their parts in the victory. Loyalists and British troops in New York and Charleston celebrated the victory with toasts and artillery salutes. As noted, Gates was ridiculed, as was the rebel army. Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for the American Department and minister responsible for directing the war, declared that the victory at Camden had guaranteed Britain’s hold on Georgia and South Carolina. He also relayed King George III’s opinion that Cornwallis’s victory over a much larger American force “distinguished this victory from all that have been achieved since the commencement of the rebellion,” because it showed that despite all their improvements in training, equipment, and experience, the Americans, no matter how many, could never triumph over the skill, valor, and spirit of British troops, even when the King’s soldiers were badly outnumbered.

Events, however, did not turn out as either side expected. Daniel Morgan, learning from the militia’s terrible performance at Camden, devised a better system of employing the militia, tested it successfully at Cowpens, and it was later adopted by Greene. Cornwallis was confirmed in his belief that the war could be won by British and provincial troops alone, and that the best tactical plan was a frontal assault. This led him to neglect the Loyalist militia, contributing to its near annihilation at Kings Mountain in October 1780. Cornwallis again resorted to a frontal assault at Guilford Courthouse in March 1781. It worked, as he drove Greene’s larger army from the field, but at a cost of more than a quarter of his army. These heavy losses contributed to Cornwallis’s decision to march to Virginia and unite with a stronger British force there, and his subsequent surrender at Yorktown. Greene, meanwhile, marched to South Carolina. Rawdon had been fighting a fairly successful but costly series of campaigns against the partisans there, partisans, Rawdon noted, who had been inspired by Gates. “The approach of General Gates’s Army unveiled to Us a Fund of disaffection in this Province, of which we could have formed no idea; and even the dispersion of that force, did not extinguish the ferment which the hope of its support had raised,” Rawdon observed two months after the Battle of Camden. Barely able to keep these partisans in check after Cornwallis left South Carolina with the bulk of the British mobile forces (not in garrisons), Rawdon found he now had to contend with Greene as well. Rawdon won battles, but he could not end the rebellion that Gates had reignited. Once Rawdon returned to Britain because of illness in the summer of 1781, Greene and the partisans badly bloodied his less competent successors and soon forced the British back to the vicinity of Charleston. If Rawdon were to assess the most important consequence of the Battle of Camden, he would probably say that Gates sowed the seeds of American victory, leaving first Daniel Morgan and then Nathanael Greene to reap the harvest.

15 Comments

  • Thanks for the great insights. I had opportunity to review your Camden book a year or so ago. I remember being struck that several of the Patriot accounts link Otho Holland Williams to the decision to move the militia units forward just as the battle opened. I’m working from memory here but I think Cornwallis indicated this movement as a tactical mistake that he took advantage of. Just wondering what, if anything, you might think of his observation.

    1. Wayne, you’re right about Otho Williams leading a small detachment of militia forward at Camden, ahead of the planned main attack by the militia on the American left. Williams believed the move would smooth the way for the larger force following. However, when Cornwallis saw the movement, he thought that the Americans were not yet fully positioned and saw it as an opportunity to attack with his right. That move, of course, led to the flight of most of the militia and gave the British a major advantage.

      1. I tend to agree with your sympathetic attitude toward Gates at Camden. His actual plan to take up fortified positions close enough to menace Rawdon at Camden seemed like a realistic way to make use of his militia heavy army. Bad luck to get caught out in the open without the ability to get out of the way. I have wondered about that also. Do you find the explanation that retreat was not an option after bumping into Cornwallis in the dark particularly compelling?

        1. I do think that retreat was not a viable option for Gates and his army after the night encounter with the British. By the time the night battle ended (which varies according to different sources) Gates had only 2-3 hours to turn his army around and begin a withdrawal. Such a maneuver in the dark, with a large number of poorly trained militiamen, and with the baggage train in front of the troops would have resulted in slow progress at best. The army could have been destroyed in detail by a British pursuit; at the very least Tarleton’s cavalry would have scattered the militia, and the baggage and artillery would probably have had to be abandoned to allow the Continentals to escape. I don’t think the final result would have been much different from the outcome of the actual battle, except that the Continental regiments might have gotten away intact.

  • Perhaps Williams could have gained his reputation for sacrificing militia to spare the Continentals a few months earlier. 🙂

  • Thanks for a most compelling article. I do, however, feel that you give too much credit to Gates. Gates’ blunders, both tactically and strategically, make him in my opinion not worth the ‘positive press’ of Saratoga. His performance reminds me of another tactical and strategic failure of another American general. Fortunately, for Washington and Greene, it was ‘Gates’ Last Stand’ although he didn’t stand very long. Generals, like CEOs, often get credit for success but they also then deserve the full credit for failure. At Camden, Gates’ unceremonious departure removed the last rival to Washington and enabled an opening filled by Greene. Even if Gates had fared better at Camden, do you believe, with his British training of fixed piece battle, that he could have waged a guerilla war as Greene did?

    1. Steven,
      I think Gates would have used the partisans to supplement his Continental forces, perhaps to an even greater extent than Greene did. Before the Battle of Camden, Gates had already opened communication with Marion and Sumter and was relying on their assistance to put his plan into effect. Contrary to many accounts and because Gates was so secretive that he shared his plan with only a few people, Gates didn’t intend to attack Camden directly; instead, he wanted to take a strong position near the town, wait for Sumter and Marion to cut the town’s lines of supply and communication, and thus force the British to attack him on ground of his choice or withdraw from Camden. Gates actually trusted militia more than Washington or Greene did, which was part of the reason for his undoing on Aug. 16.

    2. I wonder if either of Gates or Greene actually deserve credit for having waged a guerilla war against the British? I see a fantastic grass roots campaign in 1780 from the likes of Clarke, Sumter, Shelby, Marion, etc. They rose on their own accord and choice. I believe they are the real heroes of the southern campaign. The men who kept faith even after Camden with resistance at Charlotte, Augusta, King’s Mountain, Fishing Creek, and Blackstocks. Even before Cowpens the South Carolina back country was such a dangerous place that Cornwallis gave word for travel only in groups of 125 men. Additionally, by the end of the year, communications between the British posts was almost nonexistent. These guys set the table for Cowpens, the Dan, and Guilford. But, they did it without much help from Gates and they didn’t even know Greene yet.

      Greene’s later campaign agains Rawdon seems a little more traditional in a movement and strategy between armies kind of way. I’m wondering if this is yet another myth that should be addressed by someone. Is Greene’s Campaign really a Guerilla Campaign?

      1. I don’t think Greene intended his campaign to be a guerrilla war, but he certainly benefited from the actions of the partisans, saw their value, and supported them. His flexibility paid off, particularly after the Battle of Hobkirk’s Hill when it appeared Greene’s conventional warfare approach was failing, only to be redeemed by the partisan operations of Marion and Henry Lee that severed Rawdon’s supply line. This forced the British to evacuate Camden, something Greene hadn’t been able to achieve through open battle with the enemy’s main army.

  • Thanks for the great article. First off, I would LOVE to get a reproduction of that advertisement. Hilarious.

    I appreciate the rather pro Gates stance here. As far as the opinion that Gates ‘sowed the seeds of American victory’, I’ll concede this with the caveat that those seeds were sowed by the plow of American military disaster. In other words, much of the good that came of this battle was inadvertent.

    Overwhelmed and carried away by routing milita, and abandoning his army to go get help, Gate’s behavior reminds me of an episode of Band of Brothers where Lieutenant Dike, labeled as ‘an empty suit’ by his men, ran away to get help during a artillery shelling. His leadership eventually led to more men being killed and his removal from the front.

    The best thing that could of happened was Gates’ replacement before something even worse happened than Camden. The ultimate result of this battle (as you pointed out so well),would put the Americans in a much better position to win the war.

    Thanks again for the great read.

    1. Editors

      The Real Person!

      Author Editors acts as a real person and passed all tests against spambots. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk.

      says:

      Ask and you shall receive. Click here to view a reproduction of the ad, which appeared in the September 16, 1780, Royal Gazette (NY), James Rivington’s loyalist mouthpiece.

  • Hopefully not getting too far off topic but, I noticed some reference to Smallwood’s departure from the south for service in Maryland. I am currently writing about Arnold’s January 1781 Virginia raid and found a reference to General Smallwood joining with Von Steuben for defense of Virginia immediately following the actual burning of Richmond. The reference is in a letter to Steuben from Jefferson of January 9, 1781. The quote is “I am very happy to hear you have General Smallwood’s assistance, tho’ the means wih which you are furnished are not likely to add to your reputation, except that by undertaking to make the most of them your zeal will be still more fully displayed.”

    I see a story behind this quote but don’t see anything else here (the Thomas Jefferson Papers) telling me what exactly Von Steuben did that is “not likely to add to your reputation.”

    I am planning to get access to the Von Steuben Papers via inter-library loan but, just wondering, any idea what Jefferson is talking about?

    1. My guess from the context is that Jefferson means that von Steuben lacks the means to succeed against Arnold, and therefore his efforts to defend Virginia won’t enhance his reputation.

  • Thank you! I have been trying to research the Battle of Camden for 3 days and this is the only article I found that differed in originality and creative thinking from the standard wikipedia pap.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *