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

17 страница из 19

Banastre Tarleton, only 26, was a short, thick-set, rather handsome redhead who was tireless and fearless in battle. Unlike Morgan, he had been born to privilege. Scion of a wealthy Liverpool mercantile family, he was Oxford educated and might have become a barrister except that he preferred the playing field to the classroom and the delights of London theatres and coffee houses to the study of law. After squandering a modest inheritance, he jumped at the chance to buy a commission in the King’s Dragoons and serve in America. Eventually he came into command of the British Legion, a mounted and foot unit raised among American loyalists. Marked by their distinctive green uniforms, they soon became known as Tarleton’s Green Horse. It was their ruthless ferocity that earned Tarleton the epithet, “Bloody Tarleton.”

After the war, Tarleton fell in love with the beautiful Mary Robinson, a poet, playwright, and actress. Tarleton’s memoir, The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces, owes much to her gifted pen.