Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

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ARMY HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Maintaining adequate supplies or logistical services in the Carolina interior, hundreds of kilometres from Charles Town, was a fifth major problem hampering the invasion. As prevalent in British correspondence as problems with Loyalist Militia and illness were difficulties with supplies and the lack of them. The movement into North Carolina itself was delayed by the condition of wagons and horses as well as lack of forage and even food. In the weeks before the invasion, Cornwallis had to assume the work of both his quartermaster and his commissary, who were sick, noting the task ‘occupies me almost entirely’. 39 A week later, he bitterly complained of the quartermasters general lining their own pockets to the detriment of his troops, who were, as a result, ‘perpetually within a few hours of starving’. 40 The shortage of food and forage became so acute that parts of his army were forced to camp apart. Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton, commander of the British Legion, noted that the ‘scarcity of forage in the district of the Waxhaws was the principal reason for this temporary movement [20 kilometres westwards across the Catawba River]. Flour, cattle and forage were collected with difficulty by the main army’. 41 These circumstances were exacerbated when both the American Militia were present and/or a calamitous weather event occurred. Both happened during the retreat from Charlotte, when Cornwallis’s men ate ‘Indian corn which was collected as it stood in the field’ and drank water that was ‘frequently thick as a puddle’. 42 During the retreat, John Robert Shaw, private of the 33rd Regiment, ‘saw an English guinea offered for a bit of cornbread not larger than my two fingers. Hard times with us indeed, sixteen days without a morsel of bread’. 43 The lack of supplies created and contributed to other problems such as soldiers being captured while searching for food. Shaw was taken prisoner when foraging in 1781 and declared, ‘[F]or my part, I thought it very good fortune’. 44 Just as illness drew away men from searching out the enemy, the continual search for food and provisions also drew men away from that task. The American Militia was the sixth major problem. During the first invasion of North Carolina, Cornwallis lamented he could never ‘get at’ the American Militia, meaning he could not engage them where his men had any discernible advantage. More often than not the opposite conditions applied, and British forces became the ‘prey’ instead of the ‘predator’. Aside from General Horatio Gates’s stumbling into battle at Camden in August, there were no Continental Army forces for the Militia to supplement. For the better part of six months (May to November 1780), the Carolina Militia was on its own to face both Cornwallis’s men and the Loyalist Militia. The nearest elements of the Continental Army were 39 Cornwallis to Balfour, 31 Aug. 1780, Cornwallis Papers, II, p. 66. 40 Cornwallis to Balfour, 3 Sept. 1780, Cornwallis Papers, II, p. 71. 41 B. Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North America (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1787), p. 158. 42 Stedman, American War , II, p. 224. 43 Spring, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only, p. 37. 44 Ibid. , p. 44.