Washington's General (41 page)

On the morning of September 8, Stewart dispatched more than a hundred British troops under the command of Major John Coffin to investigate a rumor, spread by two deserters, that American troops were nearby. They soon discovered that the rumor was true–Greene's entire army was only some four miles away. Stewart scrambled to get a skirmish line forward to hold off the advancing Americans closing in from the east.

Greene's troops moved through a thick forest, which at least offered the comfort of shade as the day grew hotter. British skirmishers put up mild resistance before retreating, and Greene pressed forward. Both sides saluted each other with artillery fire until Greene's men were ready to assail Stewart's line.

A “most tremendous fire began on both sides from right to left,” Greene later wrote. But the “tremendous fire” did not inspire flight among the American militia. With Marion on the right and Pickens on the left, the Carolina militia stood fast and fired disciplined volleys. Ten, twelve, fifteen, as many as seventeen times the American militia loaded their weapons and fired, taking and absorbing casualties. Suddenly, the British left, made up of the 63rd and 64th regiments, moved forward to counterattack with fixed bayonets. The militia on the American right faltered, but Greene brought up Continentals from North Carolina to bolster the line. These troops, under the command of Jethro Sumner, were among Greene's most inexperienced Continentals. They had joined Greene during his summer respite in the High Hills of the Santee.

Facing British fire for the first time, the North Carolinians did not disappoint their commander. They stood, fired, and advanced, yielding nothing when the British regulars fired back. Lee's cavalry swung into position to turn the British left flank, prompting Stewart to reinforce his endangered line with Coffin's cavalry. As Greene monitored the fierce fighting on his right, he “could hardly tell which to admire most, the gallantry of [the] Officers or the bravery of the Troops. They kept up a
heavy and well-directed fire, and the Enemy returned it with equal spirit, for they really fought worthy of a better cause.”

Greene had saved his most experienced troops for the decisive moment, and now it was upon him. The British were showing signs of reforming in the center, and the North Carolina Continentals were on the verge of falling back. Waiting for such a moment were the Maryland and Virginia Continentals. Bloodshed and carnage were not new to these veterans; they had seen what steel and shell did to human flesh. Joined by some Delaware troops, they moved forward. As they did, the British left and center began to collapse. Redcoats and Tory militia turned and fled toward their encampment near the village of Eutaw Springs. Only the British right, led by Major John Majoribanks, stood its ground.

The Americans pursued the retreating British through their camp, but there Greene's men halted, for they could not help but notice that the camp was well stocked with rum, food, and other supplies. They had been fighting for hours on a brutally hot day, and victory seemed certain–and so the militia and even some of the more disciplined Continentals paused to rest and to celebrate. There were few officers to shame them back to their duties, for the loyalist militia had successfully adopted the patriot tactic of picking off officers to create even more chaos on the battlefield. Sixty out of a hundred American officers would become casualties on this day, and of Greene's top six commanders, only Lee and Otho Williams would emerge unscathed.

Greene was unaware of the terrible breakdown in discipline and could hardly have anticipated it. The militia had been superb, the Continentals efficient and brave. They had seen the backs of British soldiers, not a familiar sight. But, living amid the deprivation that was the lot of an American soldier, they could not resist temptation.

Greene still was engaged in battle. The American left was pushing hard against Major Marjoribanks's skillful resistance. Hoping to make the rout complete, Greene ordered William Washington's cavalry to circle around the American left and finish off Marjoribanks, whose men were gathered in a thicket of trees. But Washington's men met with disaster;
they charged without waiting for infantry support, and a volley of deadly fire from the British right killed or wounded many officers. Washington himself was wounded and captured.

At the far end of the British camp was a sturdy brick mansion. Some of the fleeing loyalist militia took cover inside, outracing Greene's men who tried to occupy the house before it fell into British hands. The loyalists slammed the door just before the Americans got there, leaving behind several British officers who were immediately taken prisoner and used as shields as the Americans withdrew in the face of enemy guns pointing from the house's windows.

The Americans brought forward artillery, but the cannonballs did little damage. As the loyalists inside fired on the besieging Americans, Major Marjoribanks's men, having quietly fallen back toward their camp, launched a counteroffensive, overtaking the American guns, and then surprising the American troops who were drinking rum in the British camp.

Greene's men had been fighting for four hours, and they were now either exhausted and dehydrated or drunk and useless. In addition, their ammunition was running low. The British, on the other hand, were rallying around the stone house defenders. Greene considered and then rejected an all-out assault on the position, believing that he could ill afford more casualties. The day had been bloody enough.

Once again, Greene ordered his men to pull back from the British position. He was not conceding defeat, for he believed the British could not hold the stone house for very long and would be forced to withdraw. The Americans marched seven miles back to their own camp in a state of exhaustion and covered with sweat and grime. They left behind nearly a hundred and forty of their colleagues, dead and lying under the blazing sun. As for the wounded, some three hundred and seventy-five men, they gathered them up and transported them back on litters.

The British had suffered heavy losses: about eighty-five killed, three hundred and fifty-one wounded, and an amazingly high number of missing, some two hundred and fifty-seven, most of them taken as prisoners.

Given his sensitivity to criticism and his own sense of martial pride, Greene could not bear to admit that he once again had left the field in British hands. He stated that although the bulk of his army had retreated, he had “left on the field of action” a “strong” picket force to keep watch over Stewart, softening the impression that he had left the field entirely. He told Lafayette that he had “obtained a complete victory,” and he claimed that despite being “greatly out numbered”–that certainly was not true–he had taken five hundred prisoners, which would have amounted to about a quarter of Stewart's army. More plausible was Greene's simple characterization of the Battle of Eutaw Springs. It was, he said to Lafayette, “a most bloody battle.”

Bloody it was. And it was also the last full-scale battle of the Revolution.

As Greene suspected, Stewart and his men did not remain near Eutaw Springs very long. Having sustained enormous casualties–the number of British dead, wounded, and missing was close to seven hundred from a force of about two thousand–they began limping back to Charleston on September 9, even as the field still smoldered and some of the wounded still cried out for water. Greene and his army attempted to pursue them, but he called off the chase after hearing that they had been reinforced. The Americans returned to camp in the High Hills of the Santee.

The British rejected Greene's notion that he had won a tactical victory at Eutaw Springs. Stewart, in fact, said Greene lied about leaving a picket force on the battlefield. The Americans, however, eagerly accepted the general's version of events. In a sense, both the British and Americans were right–not surprising given the ambiguous character of the war in the South. It was true that Greene had withdrawn from the field, not the sort of tactic associated with victorious generals. But it was also true that Greene had inflicted intolerable punishment on the British, and that they themselves were forced to withdraw after holding the battlefield. A British officer named Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie noted of Greene that “the more he is beaten, the farther he advances in the end.” With
just a whiff of contempt, Mackenzie said that Greene had been “indefatigable in collecting troops and leading them to be defeated.”

Whether or not Greene won the Battle of Eutaw Springs, there is no disputing the toll he inflicted on Britain's southern strategy. The interior of the Deep South, while still plagued by hostilities between Tory and patriot, was no longer in British hands. Even before Eutaw Springs, Benjamin Rush, a member of Congress who had once been critical of Greene, told the general, “The South Carolina refugees in [Philadelphia] drink [to] your health every day” because “they view you as one of their deliverers from the tyranny of Britain.”

Washington dispatched similar hosannas to his protégé. From his headquarters outside Yorktown, where Franco-American armies and the French fleet had Cornwallis trapped, the commander in chief wrote an elegant letter of congratulations.

How happy I am dear Sir ... to congratulate you upon a victory as splendid as I hope it will prove important. Fortune must have been coy indeed had she not yielded at last to so persevering a pursuer as you have been. I hope now she is yours [and] she will change her appellation of fickle to that of constant.

It hardly mattered to Greene what the British thought of his claims to victory. George Washington believed them.

Thanks to Greene's strategic victories, civil administration under American governors and legislators was being restored to a region that, only months before, had been under British occupation. Nathanael Greene had, in fact, fought, been beaten, risen, and fought again.

Nathanael Greene was the hero of the moment. Congress, a body Greene regularly infuriated and that would have welcomed his resignation a year earlier, awarded him a gold medal “emblematical of the battle and victory” at Eutaw Springs. The medal featured a heroic profile of Greene, looking quite a bit thinner than in most portraits. On the back, in Latin, was an inscription: “The Safety of the Southern
Department. The Foe conquered at Eutaw ...” A congressional resolution continued the fiction that Greene had won a “decisive” victory with a “force inferior in number to that of the enemy.”

The recognition Greene so desperately wanted, and needed, finally was his. His old friend and former aide Thomas Paine sent him a congratulatory letter that spoke to Greene's standing as a hero and savior of the Revolution. “How you have contrived without money to do what you have done I have scarcely a conception of,” Paine wrote.

I am inclined to suppose you have acted like a judicious and honest Physician in desperate cases, that is, you have cut the matter short, and in order to save and serve the Country, have made people do what they otherwise would not have done tho' their own good was the object. ... I think we are now in the fairest way we have ever yet been.

Like the generals whose stories he read by candlelight as a child, Nathanael Greene wore the laurels of a famous victory. If the praise was exaggerated and the achievement less than advertised, perhaps it made up for all of his bad luck in previous battles, and all of his unappreciated drudge work as quartermaster general. Henry Knox summed up Greene's campaign in the South in language that was beyond debate: “[Without] an army, without Means, without anything, [Greene] has performed Wonders.”

There were more wonders to come, and although they would take place in the southern theater, the commander of the Southern Department, Major General Nathanael Greene, would have to watch them from afar.

Communications between Greene and Washington had been spotty through the summer of 1781, to Greene's surprise and annoyance. He certainly knew about the astonishing developments under way in Virginia–Lafayette was a constant correspondent–but Washington had
told him nothing. Or so Greene thought. In fact, Washington had been writing dilgently, but his letters never reached Greene. (Letters between the two men took anywhere from a week to about a month to make their way back and forth.) “This failure,” Washington told Greene on September 28, “gives me Reason to fear some foul Play on the Route.” The messages must have been intercepted.

Not that it mattered. For at two o'clock on the afternoon of October 19, the British army of Lord Cornwallis–the man who had spent the spring trying to crush Nathanael Greene and his ill-supplied band of rebels–filed out of its camp in Yorktown, stacked its arms, and surrendered.

Greene learned of the great victory on the evening of October 27, and he and his men celebrated with a daylong feast beginning the following morning. Greene received letters of congratulations from friends, politicians, and army colleagues, and he dispatched letters of his own to his brilliant subordinates in the South, like Francis Marion. His friend James Varnum, who had commanded the Kentish Guards so long ago when they were playing at war, wrote to express his “peculiar Pleasure . . . that the Brows of my worthy Friend were encircled with unfading Laurels.”

On November 2, Nathanael Greene sent a short letter to the man who had sent him to the South when all seemed lost. “I beg leave to congratulate your Excellency upon the glorious and important success of your Arms,” he wrote. “Nothing can equal the joy that it gives to this country, and I contemplate the consequences with infinite pleasure.”

A few days later, a letter arrived from Henry Knox, who was with Washington in Yorktown. Greene and Knox had known each other since the days when British troops patrolled the common in Boston and revolution was far from the minds of most Americans. They were young men, and they shared an amateur soldier's fascination with war and a radical American's belief in liberty. When war came, they both impressed their commander in chief with their passion for the cause, their competency, and their loyalty. Through the difficult winter camps, through candlelit councils of war in Washington's headquarters, and through hard and
often disappointing campaigns, they became not just colleagues but friends.