Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

CORNWALLIS ’ S INVASION OF NORTH CAROLINA , 1780

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complete opposite of the intended result: Cornwallis’s army, on the defensive, forced to fight the decisive battle of the war behind the ramparts of Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781. The siege of Yorktown by combined American and French forces began one year and two days after the British entered Charlotte, North Carolina (26 September). Could Cornwallis’s first invasion have worked? Could his relatively small army have defeated the Continental Army and American Militia, recruited sufficient Loyalist Militia, and reinstituted Crown control of the Carolinas as was his plan? It was certainly completely within the realm of eighteenth-century military doctrine, which emphasised a ‘war of posts,’ defeating the enemy on their own ground, occupying their territory, and forcing them to negotiate an end to hostilities. What could not be accounted for, or planned, were the serious and numerous problems Cornwallis encountered which rendered his goals almost impossible to achieve and for which there was no solution or contingency plan. As time progressed, Cornwallis’s forces faced an enemy that would take advantage of these failures while remaining resilient, unconventional, and adapted to the unique socio-cultural conditions of America. This work identifies the major problems Cornwallis faced in the first invasion of North Carolina: the fatal flaws in his ‘southern strategy’, political and public policy failures, illness among the regiments, difficulties in supply and logistics, the effectiveness of the American Militia, and the failure to raise sufficient, useful Loyalist Militia to combat their American counterparts. Certainly, the lurking, pervasive, over-riding problem with the first invasion of North Carolina lay within British strategy itself. The ‘southern strategy’ of a ‘clear and hold’ counter-revolution was deeply flawed in premise and implementation. 4 Stanley D. M. Carpenter succinctly stated the strategy as ‘once American forces, both regular and irregular, were destroyed, removed, or otherwise neutralized in a specific geographic area, Crown regular forces would move on to the next targeted region. Local Loyalists would then take over, restore royal government, and provide security against any rebel resurgence’. 5 In what must be viewed as the biggest intelligence misinterpretation of the American War, several southern ‘experts’ reported that there was substantial Loyalist support in the southern colonies and that they would not be difficult to reconquer. 6 One of these men, former Royal Governor of North Carolina Josiah Martin, made unbelievable and unverifiable claims of loyalty among southerners, maintaining that two-thirds of backcountry inhabitants were loyal to the Crown. 7 Another ‘expert’ was former Attorney General of South Carolina James Simpson, who was not so effusive of Loyalist support but concluded, finally, that if a British force 4 D.K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775-1780 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005 ), p. xiii. 5 S.D.M. Carpenter, Southern Gambit: Cornwallis and the British March to Yorktown (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), Kindle edition, location 267. 6 Carpenter, Southern Gambit , location 1152. 7 Wilson, The Southern Strategy, p. 3.