Free The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire by III H. W. Crocker Page B

his army against the colonials in a set-piece battle, even if badly outnumbered, he turned up trumps. He was so eager to catch an American army to fight that he burnt his supply train so that his troops could move faster. It also meant they had to endure more and live off what they could find, whether a turnip patch or a field of corn. As redcoat sergeant Roger Lamb noted, “In all this his lordship participated, nor did he indulge himself even in the distinction of a tent; but in all things partook our sufferings, and seemed much more to feel for us than for himself.” 10
    A Not So Gracious South
    â€œThe violence and passions of these people are beyond every curb of religion, and Humanity, they are unbounded and every hour exhibits dreadful wanton mischiefs, murders, and violence of every kind. We find the country in great measure abandoned, and the few who venture to remain at home in hourly expectation of being murdered, or stripped of their property.”
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    British general Charles O’Hara on the partisan warfare in the Carolinas, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton 6 January 1781, quoted in Robert B. Asprey, War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History (iUniverse, 2002), p. 66

    An Eighteenth-Century Hannibal
    â€œBe a little careful, and tread softly; for depend upon it, you have a modern Hannibal to deal with in the person of Cornwallis.”
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    Patriot General Nathanael Greene to General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, quoted in Burke Davis, The Cowpen-Guilford Courthouse Campaign (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 69
    He raced to confront patriot Nathanael Greene at Guildford Courthouse (15 March 1781) in Greensboro, North Carolina, though Greene held an easily defended position on the high ground flanked by covering woods. The patriots outnumbered him more than two to one, but Cornwallis’s intelligence reports told him he was outnumbered four to one. He decided to attack regardless, trusting to the steadiness of his British regulars. His confidence and determination were well placed, as his troops charged through rebel militiamen, shot down sharpshooters, and advanced straight through canister fire until their bayonets pricked the Americans into retreat.
    The victory, of course, came at a high cost: at least a quarter of his force. Rubbing salt into the wound was that it did nothing to cement North Carolina’s allegiance to the Crown or crush the rebels’ ambitions. Cornwallis decided his only viable strategy was to plunge into Virginia, despite having only 1,400 men. He hoped to compel Washington and Greene to combine against him; then he could defeat them entire with reinforcements from some of the thousands of troops that sat idle with Clinton in New York. Events, however, betrayed Cornwallis’s hopes.

Yorktown
    Clinton had sent troops to Virginia, but they were intended to fortify a naval base at Portsmouth. Cornwallis had entirely other ideas. Forts were superfluous to winning the war; what was necessary was destroying the rebel army, and Virginia was the center of gravity of the war in the South;
force its submission and the Carolinas were secured. Clinton, however, remained convinced that New York was the center of the war. Combined French and American forces, he believed, would soon be striking against him; the Southern theatre was essentially a diversionary one. He ordered Cornwallis to locate his troops at either Williamsburg or Yorktown, where British ships could reach him; the plan was not to reinforce Cornwallis but for Cornwallis to reinforce Clinton.
    The problem was that it was the French Navy that arrived in Chesapeake Bay—disembarking French troops and rebuffing the Royal Navy. With Cornwallis’s men divided between Yorktown and Gloucester (necessary for the defense of Yorktown), he could either try to break out against the French regulars who outnumbered him or he could dig in for a siege. Cornwallis planned for a breakout—until,