Greensboro Guilford North Carolina United States

While encamped in the forks of the Deep River, Cornwallis is informed on March 14, 1781, that Greene is encamped at the Guilford Court House.

With him is a body of North Carolina militia, plus reinforcements from Virginia, consisting of three thousand Virginia militia, a Virginia State regiment, a corps of Virginian eighteen-month men and recruits for the Maryland Line, totaling between four thousand and five thousand men.

Cornwallis decides to give battle, though he has only nineteen hundred men at his disposal.

He detaches his baggage train, one hundred infantry and twenty cavalry under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, to Bell's Mills further down the Deep River.

Cornwallis sets off with his main force before breakfast can be eaten, arriving at Guilford at midday.

The battle lasts only ninety minutes.

The British are outnumbered more than two to one, yet defeat the American force.

In doing so, however, they lose over a quarter of their men.

The British, by taking ground with their accustomed tenacity when engaged with superior numbers, are tactically victorious.

Cornwallis takes unsustainable casualties and ultimately withdraws, leaving the Americans with the strategic victory.

The British had spread across a large expanse of woodland without food and shelter after the battle, and during the night torrential rains start.

Fifty of the wounded die before sunrise.

Had the British followed the retreating Americans they might have come across their baggage and supply wagons which had been left where the Americans had camped on the west of the Salisbury road prior to the battle.

Cornwallis reports his casualties two days after the battle, on March 17, as three officers and eight-eight of other ranks killed, and twenty-four officers and three hundred and eighty-four of other ranks wounded, with a further twenty-five men missing in action.

Lieutenant Colonel James Webster of the 33rd Regiment of Foot had been wounded during the battle and will die two weeks later.

Lieutenant-Colonel Tarleton, commander of the loyalist provincial British Legion, is another notable wounded officer, having lost two fingers after taking a bullet in his right hand.

Greene reported his casualties as fifty-seven killed, one hundred and eleven wounded and one hundred and sixty-one missing for the Continental troops and twenty-two killed, seventy-four wounded and eight hundred and eighty-five missing for the militia, a total of seventy-nine killed, one hundred and eighty-five wounded and one thousand and forty-six missing.

Of those reported missing, seventy-five are wounded men who had been captured by the British.

When Cornwallis resumes his march, these seventy-five wounded prisoners are left behind at Cross Creek, Cornwallis having earlier left seventy of his own most severely wounded men at the Quaker settlement of New Garden near Snow Camp.

Sherman's Carolina Campaign, in which his troops had marched four hundred and twenty-five miles (six hundred and eighty-four kiometers) in fifty days, had been similar to his march to the sea through Georgia, although physically more demanding.

However, the Confederate forces opposing him are much smaller and more dispirited.

When Joseph E. Johnston meets with Jefferson Davis in Greensboro in mid-April, he tells the Confederate president: Our people are tired of the war, feel themselves whipped, and will not fight. Our country is overrun, its military resources greatly diminished, while the enemy's military power and resources were never greater and may be increased to any extent desired.... My small force is melting away like snow before the sun.