The British “Experiment” to Use Loyalists in the Southern War

A hallmark of the Revolutionary War in the South was the drive by the British to use Loyalist militia to augment the British army, in combat with the American army and in keeping the peace behind the front lines. The army’s use of Loyalist militiamen in the south arose immediately after the fall of Charlestown in May 1780, and permeated British military efforts in the campaigns in the Carolinas over the next year. The Tories’ record of performance disappointed their British overlords. The fault for their record of poor achievement was complicated, but largely attributable to mismanagement by the British army.

Throughout the war, the British benefited from Loyalists mustered into regiments of Provincials. These formations, often commanded by a British officer, received training and discipline similar to British regulars. Banastre Tarleton, commander of the British Legion, was a tremendously successful leader of Provincials, as was Francis Rawdon, commander of the Volunteers of Ireland. The British army grew to accept the Provincials as members of the team fighting the war in America.

The Loyalist militia did not share in the benefits enjoyed by the Provincials. Like the Patriot militia, the Tories were part-time soldiers who did not receive the intense discipline and training of professional military men. They were commanded by their own officers. Nevertheless, in the early days of planning the southern campaign, the British government mandated that their generals make use of Loyalist militia to extend the strained manpower of the army.

The fountainhead of the plan to use the Loyalist militia lay in the orders given to Gen. Henry Clinton upon his assumption of the position of commander-in-chief of British forces in America. Lord George Germain, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, gave Clinton written instructions in a letter dated March 8, 1778. The orders were remarkably detailed in directing the course of the southern campaign. Germain told Clinton to open the fight with Georgia in the fall.[1] South Carolina would follow, with an attack on Charlestown. Clinton obeyed his orders, loading men for the invasion of Georgia in December. He followed the conquest of Georgia with an attack on Charlestown. He embarked men and equipment in December 1779, and concluded the mission with victory the following spring.

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Germain was equally specific in his orders for the use of Loyalist manpower in the new war, now radically expanded into the south. In this regard, Germain made it clear he spoke for the king: “I am commanded” to issue these orders.[2] What the king and the government wanted was an “experiment,” its tentative nature a fact Germain openly acknowledged. In the northern war, use of Loyalists focused on Provincial units of the British army. Two-thirds of the Loyalists under arms in the north were mustered into Provincial regiments.[3] Germain proposed a complete reversal for the new war in the south. He wanted a mass movement of Loyalist militiamen, partisan fighters who would bear the heavy lifting of the imperial burden. The government admired the way the Americans used Patriot militia to extend the capabilities of the stretched Continental army. Germain wanted the British army to use Tory militia the same way, as the only feasible means to fight the Patriots and garrison the large swaths of North America about to come under British military jurisdiction.

The government foresaw the Loyalist militia employed across the strata of military affairs: “they would readily enough take up arms as an embodied Militia, officered by their own Countrymen, and act with the King’s Troops throughout a Campaign, or defend a Post in the Absence of the Army.”[4]

Although entirely reasonable in its concept, the “experiment” failed to produce results on the ground. The summer of 1780 saw the incendiary civil war between the Loyalists and Patriots in the south. Logically, the Tories, beneficiaries of British favor as well as British supplies, should have triumphed easily, but the Whigs beat their enemies time and again. For the British looking to put the experiment to the test, the results were discouraging. The examples abound. At Ramsour’s Mill, North Carolina, on June 20, a Whig force of 400 soundly defeated a contingent of 1,300 Loyalist militia.[5] At Fort Thicketty, South Carolina, on July 30, a force of ninety-four Tory militia surrendered a heavily fortified position without firing a shot.[6] On August 19, 200 Whigs defeated a much larger force of Loyalist militia and Provincial troops at Musgrove’s Mill, South Carolina, an astounding result against a detachment that included trained, professional soldiers.[7]

The reasons for the poor showing by the Loyalists are manifold. One overriding point is that in the period of Patriot domination preceding the loss of Charlestown, Whigs suppressed Loyalist activity in the backcountry. The Tory militia in the field in the summer of 1780, new to the game, lacked experienced leaders. For the purposes of the experiment, what the British saw, regardless of the realities, was that the Loyalist militia was ineffective and unreliable.

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One-half of the experiment was the prospect of using Tory militia to “defend a Post in the Absence of the Army.” By the end of the summer of 1780 the Tories, defending posts, had suffered losses that the British would never forgive. The Whig victories on the ground both drove and reflected the attitudes of the population in the backcountry. The trends did not bode well for the British. On June 30, Cornwallis confidently reported “an end to all resistance in South Carolina.”[8] On August 6, a shaken Cornwallis told Clinton, “the whole country between Pedee and Santee has ever since been in an absolute state of rebellion. Every friend of Government has been carried off and his plantation destroy’d.”[9] While Cornwallis remained hopeful, many officers believed this part of the experiment a dead letter.

Although the Tory militia found itself front and center in the ongoing disaster for the government in South Carolina, the fault lay with British mismanagement. Before he left South Carolina in early June 1780, Clinton, victorious at Charlestown, had issued a series of proclamations intended to bring the population into compliance. The third, issued on June 3, proved a grotesque misstep. Clinton revoked the paroles of the Whig militiamen who had hoped to live peacefully under the British occupation. Instead, “all persons should take an active part in settling and securing His Majesty’s government.”[10] Charles Stedman, an officer on Cornwallis’s staff and a reliable exponent of his commander’s views, wrote that much of the population was “very early disgusted” by the proclamation, which annulled their paroles without their consent, and in one stroke “converted them either into loyal subjects or rebels.”[11] Within two months, the backcountry was in flames.

August 1780 saw the first trial of the other half of the experiment, the possibility of integrating Tory militia formations into the lines of the regular army in conventional battles. Col. Samuel Bryan was a Loyalist militia commander in western North Carolina. In June, facing harassment from local Whigs, he took 800 men into South Carolina to join with the British forces headquartered in Camden.[12] Cornwallis, lining his men for the Battle of Camden in August, gave Bryan a sector of his left flank.[13] The battle soon proved a rout of the Americans, and a poor place to test the mettle of the Tory militia. There was, however, one overwhelming fact: almost 500 of Bryan’s men, facing frustration in dealing with their British overlords, had melted into the countryside before the battle began.[14]

A more grueling test of the integration of militia with regulars followed shortly, in Cornwallis’s first invasion of North Carolina. Bryan, in command of only 317 men, marched with the army.[15] The invasion was a disaster, torn by illness and beset by an unwelcoming population in North Carolina. After the loss at King’s Mountain, Cornwallis withdrew into South Carolina. The trip, up and back, was a catastrophe for Bryan and his men. Stedman detailed their plight, writing that the militia were “maltreated, by abusive language, and even beaten by some officers.” They deserted in droves, choosing “to run the risque of meeting the resentment of their enemies rather than submit to the derision and abuse of those to whom they looked up as friends.”[16] By the time Cornwallis reached his winter quarters at Winnsboro, Bryan’s men had vanished from the rolls.[17]

Cornwallis encapsulated the British thinking on the experiment to this point, branding the South Carolina Tories “useless.”[18] Even Stedman believed them “faithless,” an odd label for a body of men who had received no incentives for faithfulness.[19] The experiment, never a sure thing, was on shaky ground.

The Battle of Kings Mountain provided a watershed in the history of the experiment. Maj. Patrick Ferguson was an officer in the British army serving as Inspector of Militia for South Carolina, in which capacity he supervised the raising and training of Loyalist militia units. He also commanded 125 Provincial soldiers called the American Volunteers, with men recruited mostly from New York and New Jersey. Around the core of his Provincials, he formed a force of a thousand Loyalist militia.[20] Cornwallis, skeptical of the militia, nevertheless invested great faith in Ferguson. He tasked Ferguson with protecting his army’s left flank on the move into North Carolina. Once there, Ferguson was to operate independently in western North Carolina, encouraging Tories and suppressing Whigs.[21] When Georgia militia colonel Elijah Clarke failed to seize Augusta from the Tory garrison, he escaped into western North Carolina, and the search to punish Clarke fell to Ferguson.[22]

Once in North Carolina, Ferguson’s presence created an outcry. A group of militia commanders banded together to get rid of him and his thousand men. At the Battle of Kings Mountain on 7 October, Ferguson was killed and almost all his men were killed or captured.[23] It was a painful loss for the occupying power. Once more, regardless of the realities, what the British saw was a failure of the experiment. To the British, the Loyalist militia, even when mentored by a cadre of professional soldiers and commanded by a British officer, could not meet the Patriot militia successfully. Thus far, from the British point of view, the experiment had failed. Tory militia units had been unable to defend posts in the British rear area. They had failed in combat with Patriot militia.

From the Loyalist standpoint, things actually looked worse. Ferguson was imprudent to the point of recklessness at Kings Mountain. He had orders to return to join the main army if he met resistance outside the capabilities of his force.[24] He stubbornly refused, instead taking a position of questionable defensibility on Kings Mountain in defiance of his orders. Had Ferguson obeyed orders, or simply been more circumspect, the loss of a thousand Loyalist militia would never have occurred. The Tories felt this pain acutely, and after Kings Mountain, Loyalist recruitment plummeted. For example, Cornwallis lamented that the militia of Ninety-Six, before Kings Mountain the only one “on which alone we could place the smallest dependence,” had become “so totally disheartened by the defeat of Ferguson that of that whole district we could with difficulty assemble one hundred, and even those, I am convinced, would not have made the smallest resistance if they had been attacked.”[25] From this point forward, the British army, extended only by German and Provincial soldiers, would do the heavy lifting in the southern war.

The effect on the conflict in the backcountry was electrifying. The Loyalists continued their tit-for-tat civil war with the Whigs, but they were absent from operations with the regular army.^[26] At Blackstock’s Farm on November 20, Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, commanding a force of Provincials and British regulars, without militia, lost in a battle against Whig militia commanded by Brig. Gen. Thomas Sumter.^[27] At the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781, Tarleton, again only with Provincials and British regulars, met an army of a few Continentals and a great number of Patriot militia, and lost to Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan.^[28] The Loyalists were paying attention, and did not like what they saw.

Blackstock’s Farm and Cowpens strongly indicated the British war effort was suffering for the Loyalist’s decision to opt out of assisting the occupying power. Cornwallis’s plight in Winnsboro summarized the situation abundantly well. He complained to Tarleton, “the friends hereabouts are so timid and stupid that I can get no intelligence.”^[29] Timid and stupid expressed a great deal of frustration with the Tories. After King’s Mountain, the Loyalists would reserve the best performances for themselves, leaving timid and stupid as the best they would do for the British.

After the utter failure of the first invasion of North Carolina, Cornwallis determined to try a second time. He received 1,500 reinforcements, but as he was getting underway, Tarleton lost 800 regulars and Provincials killed or captured at Cowpens.^[30] Despite this huge loss, Cornwallis moved northward into North Carolina. There were many problems evident in Cornwallis’s plan. The losses at Cowpens were severe. Tarleton lost four companies of light infantry, an irreplaceable loss to a commander planning an invasion of North Carolina, at the time much of it a sparsely settled wilderness.^[31]

A larger problem was the absence of Tory militiamen. Before Kings Mountain, Ferguson had boasted he could deliver 1,500 South Carolina militiamen anywhere the British wanted.^[32] After Kings Mountain, none showed up for the critical move of the southern war. While the experiment was failing, the personnel shortages that had fueled it continued. Ferguson’s thousand Tories were painfully missed in the second invasion, as was the enthusiasm and support the British had enjoyed. “Timid and stupid” assistance from the King’s friends would not win the war.

Cornwallis’s despair from Winnsboro spoke for the majority of British officers. Like the bulk of his colleagues, he believed the experiment in South Carolina had failed. North Carolina offered little better. Cornwallis’s army had been in North Carolina and had been frustrated and disappointed by the Loyalist response. Rawdon expressed these feelings to Clinton: while the British held Charlotte, the Loyalists “did not even furnish us with the smallest information respecting the force collecting against us.”^[33] He surmised that while there may be valuable friends in North Carolina, “they have not given evidence enough either of their numbers or their activity to justify the stake of this province for the uncertain advantages that might attend immediate junction with our North Carolinian adherents.”

Despite its poor outlook at the outset of the second invasion of North Carolina, and its unpopularity with the run of British officers, the experiment still resonated deeply within the upper echelons of the British command structure. The generals wrote off the South Carolina Tories as “dastardly and pusillanimous.”[34] North Carolina beckoned. Clinton was cautiously optimistic: “it remains to be proved whether we have friends in North Carolina … That experiment, now will, however, be fairly tried.” Cornwallis’s hope was equally resilient: the second invasion “will then give our friends in North Carolina a fair trial.”[35]

The experiment’s fair trial proved more of a kangaroo court. It started with the phase of the campaign commonly referred to as the Race to the Dan. Morgan, on the way to Virginia with the prisoners of war from Cowpens, was the hare to Cornwallis’s hound in a chase across central North Carolina. Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, Morgan’s superior, took personal command of the American forces on January 30. The British effort faltered, and Cornwallis failed to halt Greene before he made his escape over the Dan River to safety in Virginia. In what was by this point a familiar pattern, the British saw the Loyalists, not their own mismanagement, at the heart of their problems. Brig. Gen. Charles O’Hara, an officer in Cornwallis’s command, summed up the sense of the British officers at the time. He placed fault for the failure squarely on the Loyalists, and in doing so, blamed the experiment by name: “without the experiment had been made, it would have been impossible to conceive, that Government could in so important a matter, have been so grosely deceived.”[36]

Cornwallis, stymied at the Dan, moved to Hillsborough, North Carolina, on February 20. He raised the King’s standard with a proclamation for all loyal subjects to rise and help the British army restore royal government.[37] While the local Tories showed up in huge numbers to shake the hands of British officers, material support was thin on the ground. The Tories, rightly as it turned out, suspected the British would quickly pass through the area. They had no intention of raising their heads to draw the ire of the Whigs once the British withdrew. Tarleton, like Rawdon before him, expressed disappointment and frustration: the Loyalists “seemed desirous of peace, but averse to every exertion that might tend to procure it.”^[38] Tarleton’s disdain was especially poignant in light of his failure to stop the slaughter of 200 Loyalist militia under Col. John Pyle on February 25, 1781, literally at Tarleton’s doorstep. Rather than “averse to every exertion,” hundreds of Loyalists had ventured out on the thin ice of support for the British army, only to find personal disaster. Tarleton, of all people, should have known the reasons for the Tories’ hesitation.

After the failures of the first invasion of North Carolina, the Race to the Dan, and Pyle’s Defeat, Cornwallis still carried a torch for the experiment. After all that had happened, he remained optimistic he could “succeed in that great object of our arduous campaign, the calling forth the numerous loyalists of North Carolina.”[39] On March 13, he moved west from Hillsborough into a region near the Deep River, which he believed rich in Loyalist sentiment.[40] Once again frustrated by the weak Loyalist support, he fought Greene at Guilford Courthouse on March 15 with no Tory militia on the field, a stark contrast to Greene’s army, which mustered 2,000 Whig militiamen.

After Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis moved to Cross Creek, present-day Fayetteville. The region had been a center of Loyalist support in the early days of rebellion, and Cornwallis hoped, at last, to find eager subjects of the King ready to help. Cross Creek proved another huge disappointment. When he arrived there he found a town and countryside dominated by Whigs. Supplies sent to Cross Creek were intercepted on the way and used to sustain Whig militias, exactly the opposite of the result he intended.

He abandoned the paucity of Cross Creek for Wilmington, arriving on April 7. Wilmington had proven problematic for the British. Maj. James Henry Craig had seized a post there on Cornwallis’s orders in January. The Whig resistance proved too strong, and Craig was unable to secure the town. Cornwallis’s much larger force succeeded in occupying the town, but did little to stem Patriot support in the countryside.[41] Cornwallis remained only briefly in Wilmington, departing on April 25 for Petersburg, Virginia.

As Cornwallis left North Carolina, the British generals were more guarded than optimistic about the experiment’s chances further north. Clinton acknowledged a lack of success in the Carolinas, but foresaw “trying the same experiment” among friendly populations farther north.[42] He pronounced the inhabitants of Virginia “universally hostile,” those of Maryland “supposed to be not quite so much so,” but those of Pennsylvania “are represented to me to be friendly.”

The idea of bodies of friends in Pennsylvania proved seductive. William Rankin, a local Loyalist officer, fueled the British imagination with tales of Tories waiting to help an invasion force as he suggested plans for the invasion.[43] Cornwallis, asked to comment on Rankin’s plans, finally acknowledged “the experiment I had made had failed.”[44] He was little more sanguine of the experiment’s prospects in Pennsylvania: “I would cautiously engage in measures depending materially for their success upon active assistance from the country.” Ultimately, Rankin’s proposed invasion “would do more harm than good.”

Germain never ceased to pressure the generals to continue the experiment. In this regard, William Willcox, Clinton’s biographer, noted that the government lived in a bubble of “self-interest, lethargy and groundless optimism.”^[45] Germain, the special target of Willcox’s barb, argued from necessity in equal measure with optimism. He believed Loyalist manpower was essential to a British victory. Without their numbers, British attempts to subdue America “will be fruitless.”[46] As late as October 12, as Cornwallis was considering surrender, Germain pushed Clinton to try the experiment in the Chesapeake. It was as if Germain had heard nothing in the previous year.

The summer of 1781 saw some discussion about trials of the experiment in the region around Cornwallis.[47] Ultimately, these discussions were overtaken by events that required diverting British soldiers from the experiment. Throughout the summer, Clinton’s plans arrived in rapid succession: first, a demand for reinforcements from Virginia to defeat a feared encirclement in New York, then, a plan to attack Philadelphia, and lastly, an attack on the French base at Newport. Clinton’s plans came to naught with the arrival of the French fleet, marking the end of British naval superiority in the Chesapeake.[48] With the French now masters of the bay, allied land operations against Cornwallis could commence in earnest. The experiment was permanently shelved.

The experiment died in the turmoil preceding the fighting at Yorktown. Clinton never believed Cornwallis gave the experiment a fair trial in the Carolinas.[49] For example, he derided his subordinate’s quick move through North Carolina. As he viewed events, Cornwallis gave the Loyalists no hope of support, and stayed only long enough to invoke the punishment of the Whigs after leaving. Cornwallis disagreed, asserting his arrival in the backcountry with a huge force should have turned out loyal supporters by the hundreds. He blamed the Tories. He was chronically short of manpower and supplies, and insisted he moved on only because the Tories did not offer help.[50]

Either way, the experiment started as an exercise in optimism and ended in the harsh realities of the war. The recriminations between the generals did not reach the heart of the matter. The historical record bulges with events, like Clinton’s proclamation and the Battle of King’s Mountain, where the British army’s conduct made it unlikely, if not impossible, for the Loyalists to come out in support of the government.

A second problem was leadership. Daniel Morgan was a Continental officer who achieved victory at Cowpens with an army composed mostly of militiamen. Morgan was acutely aware of the limitations of his militia soldiers. Unlike his British counterparts, he made creative use of the militia, and designed a battle plan that maximized their strengths while limiting exposure of their shortcomings. Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion, among many others, were Patriot militia commanders who regularly defeated the British and Loyalists. The British army in the south produced no regular officer like Morgan, capable of effective and imaginative use of the militia, just as the Loyalist militia produced no Sumter or Marion. The best-known Tory militia officer to arise in the south, David Fanning, achieved more notoriety than fame. One may puzzle over the reasons for this disparity, but the fact remained that the prominent leaders from southern communities gravitated to the Patriot forces.

Numbers proved a third, overriding problem for the Loyalists. While there was no polling in the eighteenth century, the best estimates from modern historians place Loyalist strength in the backcountry in the range of 15 to 20 percent of the white population, no more than 25 percent of the total, including Native Americans and enslaved people.[51] The Loyalists supported a cause that lacked traction among the population. In the final analysis, the Tories never mustered the strength needed to overpower their adversaries.

[1] George Germain to Henry Clinton, March 8, 1778, in B.F. Stevens, ed., B.F. Stevens’s Facsimiles of Manuscripts in European Archives Relating to America, 1773–1783, with Descriptions, Editorial Notes, Collations, References, and Translations (Malby & Sons, 1892), 11:13, 16−17.

[2] Germain to Clinton, March 8, 1778, in Stevens, Facsimiles of Manuscripts, 11:14.

[3] Ricardo A. Herrera, “The King’s Friends: Loyalists in British Strategy,” in Donald Stoker, Kenneth J. Hagan, and Michael T. McMaster, eds., Strategy in the American War of Independence: A Global Approach (Routledge, 2009), 108.

[4] Germain to Clinton, March 8, 1778, in Stevens, Facsimiles of Manuscripts, 11:14.

[5] William A. Graham, General Joseph Graham and His Papers on North Carolina Revolutionary History (Edwards & Broughton, 1904), 216−224.

[6] Lyman C. Draper, King’s Mountain and Its Heroes (Dauber & Pine Bookshops, 1929), 87−88; Michael C. Scoggins, The Day it Rained Militia: Huck’s Defeat and the Revolution in the South Carolina Backcountry, May–July 1780 (The History Press, 2005), 141.

[7] James Williams, “Williams’ Report on the Battle of Musgrove Mill,” in William T. Graves, Backcountry Revolutionary: James Williams (1740−1780) with Source Documents (Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution Press, 2012), 197.

[8] Charles Cornwallis to Clinton, June 30, 1780, in Ian Saberton, ed., The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Theatre, 6 vols. (The Navy and Military Press Ltd, 2010), 1:161.

[9] Cornwallis to Clinton, August 6, 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 1:177.

[10] Banastre Tarleton, History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, in the Southern Provinces of North America (London, 1787), 73.

[11] Charles Stedman, History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War, 2 vols. (London, 1794), 2:198−199.

[12] Cornwallis to Clinton, 14 July 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 1:168.

[13] Stedman, History of the American War, 2:207−208; Tarleton, History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 105.

[14] Tarleton, History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 137.

[15] Tarleton, History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 138.

[16] Stedman, History of the American War, 2:225.

[17] Those few not deserting joined John Hamilton’s Provincial regiment, Cornwallis to James Wemyss, 28 August 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 2:208.

[18] Cornwallis to Clinton, 14 July 1780, 1:169.

[19] Stedman, History of the American War, 2:206.

[20] Draper, King’s Mountain, 237; Jonas Howe, “Major Ferguson’s Riflemen ─ The American Volunteers,” Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, archives2.gnb.ca/exhibits/forthavoc/html/Ferguson-riflemen.aspx; William Campbell, Isaac Shelby, and Benjamin Cleveland, “A State of the Proceedings of the Western Army, from the 25th of September, 1780, to the Reduction of Major Ferguson, and the Army Under His Command,” in Draper, King’s Mountain, 523.

[21] Cornwallis’s Instructions to Ferguson, May 22, 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 1:103.

[22] Stedman, History of the American War, 2:220; Tarleton, History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 164.

[23] Campbell et al., Proceedings of the Western Army, 522−524.

[24] Cornwallis to Clinton, December 3, 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 3:24.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Nathanael Greene to Catherine Greene, June 23, 1781, in Dennis M. Conrad, Roger N. Parks, Martha J. King, and Richard K. Showman, eds., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 8: 30 March–10 July 1781 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 443; Nisbet Balfour to Cornwallis, April 26, 1781, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 4:177.

[27] Charles S. Myddleton to Camp, November 20, 1780, in Richard K. Showman, Dennis M. Conrad, Roger N. Parks, and Elizabeth C. Stevens, eds., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 6: 1 June 1780 –25 December 1780 (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 499.

[28] Daniel Morgan to Nathanael Greene, January 19, 1781, in Richard K. Showman, Dennis M. Conrad, Roger N. Parks, and Elizabeth C. Stevens, eds., The Papers of General Nathanael Greene, vol. 7: 26 December 1780–29 March 1781 (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 152.

[29] Cornwallis to Banastre Tarleton, December 18, 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 3:352.

[30] The casualty estimates from Cowpens varied widely. A summary of several sources is in Lawrence E. Babits, A Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 142.

[31] Roderick Mackenzie, Strictures on Lt. Col. Tarleton’s History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North America (London, 1787), 112; Stedman, History of the American War, 2:220.

[32] Cornwallis to Germain, August 20, 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 2:8.

[33] Francis Rawdon to Clinton, October 28, 1780, 2:58.

[34] Cornwallis to Alexander Leslie, November 9, 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 3:40.

[35] Clinton to Cornwallis, December 13, 1780, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 3:32; Cornwallis to Leslie, November 12, 1780, 3:40.

[36] Charles O’Hara to the Duke of Grafton, April 10, 1781, in George C. Rogers, Jr., ed., “Letters of Charles O’Hara to the Duke of Grafton,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 65:3 (July 1964), 176−177.

[37] Cornwallis to Germain, March 17, 1781, 4:15.

[38] Tarleton, History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, 230.

[39] Cornwallis to Germain, March 17, 1781, 4:16.

[40] Cornwallis to Germain, March 17, 1781, 4:15.

[41] See James Craig to Nisbet Balfour, February 10, 1781, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 4:33.

[42] Clinton to William Phillips, April 26 and 30, 1781, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 5:52.

[43] “William Rankin’s Proposals,” n.d., in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 5:61.

[44] Cornwallis to Clinton, June 30, 1781, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 5:105.

[45] William B. Willcox, Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 370.

[46] Germain to Clinton, October 12, 1781, in Benjamin Franklin Stevens, The Campaign in Virginia 1781. An Exact Reprint of Six Rare Manuscripts on the Clinton-Cornwallis Controversy with Numerous Very Important Unpublished Manuscript Notes by Sir Henry Clinton K.B. and the Omitted and Hitherto Unpublished Portions of the Letters in Their Appendices Added from the Original Manuscripts, 2 vols. (London, 1888), 2:179.

[47] E.g., Clinton to Germain, April 23, April 30 and May 1, 1781, in Stevens, Clinton-Cornwallis Controversy, 1:460; Clinton to Germain, June 9, 1781, in William B. Willcox, ed., The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782 (Yale University Press, 1954), 529.

[48] Clinton to Cornwallis, June 8, 1781, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 5:96; Clinton to Cornwallis, June 11, 1781, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 5:123; Clinton to Cornwallis, June 28, 1781, in Saberton, Cornwallis Papers, 5:114; Willcox, American Rebellion, 327, 330.

[49] Clinton to Germain, August 9, 1781, in Stevens, Clinton-Cornwallis Controversy, 2:121.

[50] “A Parting Word,” in Stevens, Clinton-Cornwallis Controversy, 1:192.

[51] Herrera, “The King’s Friends,” 100; Paul D. Montanus, “A Failed Counterinsurgency Strategy: The British Southern Campaign—1780–1781; Are There Lessons for Today?” (Master’s thesis, U.S. Army War College, 2005), 8.