Synopsis

On 15 March 1781, the armies of Nathanael Greene and Lord Charles Cornwallis fought one of the bloodiest and most intense engagements of the American Revolution at the Guilford Courthouse in piedmont North Carolina. Although victorious, Cornwallis declared the conquest of the Carolinas impossible. He made the fateful decision to march into Virginia, eventually leading his army to the Yorktown surrender and clearing the way for American independence.

In the first book-length examination of the Guilford Courthouse engagement, Lawrence Babits and Joshua Howard—drawing from hundreds of previously underutilized pension documents, muster rolls, and personal accounts—piece together what really happened on the wooded plateau in what is today Greensboro, North Carolina. They painstakingly identify where individuals stood on the battlefield, when they were there, and what they could have seen, thus producing a bottom-up story of the engagement. The authors explain or discount several myths surrounding this battle while giving proper place to long-forgotten heroic actions. They elucidate the actions of the Continentals, British regulars, North Carolina and Virginia militiamen, and the role of American cavalry. Their detailed and comprehensive narrative extends into individual combatants' lives before and after the Revolution.

Matthew J. Wayman - Library Journal

On March 15, 1781, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene and Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis faced each other in the largest battle of the American Revolution's southern theater. Cornwallis's force of roughly 2000, mostly British regulars, drove off Greene's larger force of over 4000. But Babits (history, East Carolina Univ.) and Howard (research historian, North Carolina Office of Archives and History; coauthor, Fortitude and Forbearance: The North Carolina Continental Line in the Revolutionary War, 1775-1783) argue that Cornwallis's significant losses of over a quarter of his men led him to withdraw from North Carolina and attempt an invasion of Virginia that ultimately led to his defeat and surrender at Yorktown. The current work serves as the battle's only full-length monograph. Included are descriptions and analyses not only of the battle but also of events leading up to it, such as the engagement at Cowan's Ford. All the while, the authors provide extremely detailed depictions of the various military encounters, using all of the resources at their disposal to determine exactly what transpired at every point. Complete with endnotes, this is professional history written in an approachable manner. Recommended for public and academic libraries with Revolutionary War collections.

Biography

Lawrence E. Babits is George Washington Professor of History and Director of the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina University. He is author of Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens. Joshua B. Howard is research historian at the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. Babits and Howard previously collaborated on the book Fortitude and Forbearance: The North Carolina Continental Line in the Revolutionary War, 1775-1783.