Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

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ARMY HISTORICAL RESEARCH

knowledge he could not ‘hold’ much territory without additional men? To these questions there appear to be no answers in his correspondence, nor are there limiting principles as to where his expedition would or could end. Two themes, which were abundantly clear, were his consummate faith in the force of military action to bolster loyalism and win over neutrals and revolutionaries alike and his concern for their ‘poor distressed friends’ in North Carolina. 61 The urgency to come to the aid of the latter seemed to provide suitable justification for the first invasion. All of these major problems were present when Cornwallis’s army left Camden on 7 September 1780. That day, the 23rd Regiment, 33rd Regiment, British Legion and the Volunteers of Ireland marched 16 kilometres north to Rugeley’s Mill, nearly one-sixth of the way to their future post at Charlotte. 62 The army was intended primarily to draw its food and forage from the country as it advanced, the supply train consisting of only ‘twenty wagons with a puncheon of rum in each and eighteen with salt and flour’. 63 Cornwallis left Lieutenant-Colonel George Turnbull in Camden with his New York Volunteers, the 71st Regiment, part of the 63rd Regiment, Hamilton’s Corps, and Bryan’s Militia. 64 Most of this ‘second division’ would be brought up in segments with the recovering sick of the other regiments, who would guard the supplies travelling with them. The relatively gradual advance of Cornwallis’s army came with the knowledge that the remnants of Gates’s army were over 240 kilometres away and that American Militia Generals Jethro Sumner and William L. Davidson were in the vicinity with only some ‘very bad Militia’. 65 On 2 September, Major Patrick Ferguson of the 71st Regiment, the Inspector of Militia, was dispatched from Camden to lead 70 Provincials and several hundred Loyalist Militia into Tryon County, North Carolina. 66 His purpose, according to Cornwallis, was to ‘secure the left of our March’, although also noting reservations about Ferguson’s chances of success in raising Militia. 67 Ferguson was already 10 kilometres inside the border of North Carolina by the time Cornwallis left Camden. 68 Perhaps a greater concern should have been Ferguson’s extreme distance from the main army, over 145 kilometres west of Cornwallis and over 160 kilometres from the British post at Ninety-Six in South Carolina, an unsupportable distance in the event of an emergency. The problems of sickness, failures to raise Loyalist Militia, and interference by the enemy Militia persisted during the march of the main body. Nearly everywhere else where British forces were present, there were either attacks from 61 Cornwallis to Clinton, 6 Aug. 1780, The Campaign in Virginia, 1781 , I, pp. 237-238. 62 Lt. John Money’s Journal, 7 Sept. 1780, Cornwallis Papers, II, p. 361. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Cornwallis to Balfour, 27 Sept. 1780, Cornwallis Papers, II, p. 101. 66 J. Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), p. 204. 67 Cornwallis to Clinton, 6 Aug. 1780, The Campaign in Virginia, I, p. 239. 68 A. Allaire, “Diary of Lieut. Anthony Allaire, of Ferguson’s Corps, Memorandum of Occurrences during the Campaign of 1780,” printed as an appendix in L.C. Draper, King’s Mountain and its Heroes: History of the Battle of King’s Mountain (Cincinnati: P. G. Thompson, 1881), p. 506.