Читать книгу "Downright Fighting". The Story of Cowpens онлайн

15 страница из 19

To delay, if not defeat, this potential disaster, Greene decided to divide his battered army and give more than half of it to Daniel Morgan. The Old Wagoner would march swiftly across the front of Cornwallis’s army into western South Carolina and operate on his left flank and in his rear, threatening the enemy’s posts at Ninety Six and Augusta, disrupting British communications, and—most important—encouraging the militia of western South Carolina to return to fight. “The object of this detachment,” Greene wrote in his instructions to Morgan, “is to give protection to that part of the country and spirit up the people.”

This was the army that Joseph McJunkin had ridden all night to warn. Lord Cornwallis had no intention of letting Nathanael Greene get away with this ingenious maneuver. Cornwallis had an answer to Morgan. His name was Banastre Tarleton.

ssss1

Daniel Morgan might call him “Benny.” Most Americans called him “the Butcher” or “Bloody Tarleton.” A thick-shouldered, compact man of middle height, with bright red hair and a hard mouth, he was the most feared and hated British soldier in the South. In 1776 he had come to America, a 21-year-old cornet—the British equivalent of a second lieutenant. He was now a lieutenant colonel, a promotion so rapid for the British army of the time that it left older officers frigid with jealousy. Tarleton had achieved this spectacular rise almost entirely on raw courage and fierce energy. His father had been a wealthy merchant and Lord Mayor of Liverpool. He died while Tarleton was at Oxford, leaving him £5,000, which the young man promptly gambled and drank away, while ostensibly studying for the law in London. He joined the army and discovered he was a born soldier.