Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

CORNWALLIS ’ S INVASION OF NORTH CAROLINA , 1780

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disaster; the British were defeated not by the professional Continental Regulars but by bands of ‘mounted crackers’ and ‘over-mountain men’. The weeks and months after the invasion saw three major problems subside, at least temporarily. The ‘sickly season’ passed, troops became healthier, and reinforcements arrived in Charles Town. Supplies also began to come into the posts at Camden and Winnsborough. However, a more pressing obstacle presented itself: the arrival of Generals Nathanael Greene and Daniel Morgan with a reconstituted American Continental Army. This new problem completely overshadowed the other ones. 113 The ‘war of posts’, so much a part of the first invasion, was abandoned wholesale along with the ‘southern strategy’ when Greene and Morgan advanced to the South Carolina border. If there were complexities and contradictions with raising Loyalists and the pacification strategy, the new option to pursue and destroy Greene’s army presented a relatively uncomplicated alternative, which aligned better with Cornwallis’s martial temperament. Before the commencement of the second invasion in 1781, Cornwallis’s confidants, Rawdon and Balfour, noted their frustrations with the first invasion. Balfour expressed exasperation over the effectiveness of the American Militia and doubted that the Loyalist Militia could ever be of any military use. 114 Rawdon questioned whether the invasion gamble justified ‘the stake of this province (South Carolina) for the uncertain advantages that might attend immediate junction’ with the Loyalists . 115 For his part, it would take Cornwallis many more months and a second invasion to come to grips with the reality of his predicament. In June 1781, he finally admitted that the ‘experiment I had made had failed’. 116 In 1783, as the Clinton-Cornwallis Controversy stirred, he disclosed that he and his force were deceived with the notion of Loyalist support. Even with the benefit of time and distance, he felt betrayed not by the ‘experts’ who provided unrealistic intelligence but by the ‘timidity and unwillingness’ of the North Carolinians to rise. 117 It is no surprise to see in Cornwallis’s post-war writings a palpable bitterness and disillusionment towards the emissaries of loyalism and about his southern campaigns as a whole. The outcome of his (and their) efforts in the Carolinas was nothing but fatigue, privation, illness, and death amongst his men. In hindsight, the instructions that required him to do so much with so little while overcoming so many major problems meant that he had been given an impossible task. In the end, if it is accepted that Cornwallis’s invasion was intended to come to the aid of Loyalists and give them their ‘fair trial’, then a more fitting epilogue would be that although not a prudent and necessary measure, it was certainly a bold, noble and valiant experiment.

113 Davidson to Martin, 27 Nov. 1780, CSRNC , XIV, pp. 759-760. 114 Balfour to Cornwallis, 5 and 15 Nov. 1780, Cornwallis Papers, III, pp. 63, 76. 115 Rawdon to Clinton, 29 Oct. 1780, in Saunders, CSRNC, II, p. 288. 116 Cornwallis to Clinton, 30 June 1781, The Campaign in Virginia, II, p. 33. 117 Cornwallis, The Campaign in Virginia, I, pp. 195, 417.