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Among Greene’s few encouraging discoveries in the army’s camp at Charlotte was the news that Daniel Morgan had returned to the war and at that very moment was within 16 miles of the British base at Camden with a battalion of light infantry and what was left of the American cavalry under Lt. Col. William Washington. Angered by Congress’s failure to promote him, Morgan had resigned his colonel’s commission in 1779. The disaster at Camden and the threat of England’s new southern strategy had persuaded him to forget his personal grievance. Congress had responded by making him a brigadier general.

Studying his maps, and knowing Morgan’s ability to inspire militia and command light infantry, Nathanael Greene began to think the Old Wagoner, as Morgan liked to call himself, was the key to frustrating British plans to conquer North Carolina. Lord Cornwallis and the main British army were now at Winnsborough, S.C., about halfway between the British base at Camden and their vital back-country fort at Ninety Six. The British general commanded 3,324 regulars, twice the number of Greene’s motley army, and all presumably well trained and equipped. Spies and scouts reported the earl was preparing to invade North Carolina for a winter campaign. North Carolina had, if anything, more loyalists than South Carolina. There was grave reason to fear that they would turn out at the sight of a British army and take that State out of the shaky American confederacy.