Guilford Court House, Battle of
1781 CE
The Battle of Guilford Court House is a battle fought on March 15, 1781, at a site which is now in Greensboro, the county seat of Guilford County, North Carolina, during the American Revolutionary War.
A twenty-one-hundred-man British force under the command of Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis defeats Major General Nathanael Greene's forty-five hundred Americans.
The British Army, however, loses a considerable number of men during the battle (with estimates as high as twenty-seven percent).
Such heavy British casualties result in a strategic victory for the Americans.
The battle is “the largest and most hotly contested action in the American Revolution’s southern action, and leads to the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.
Before the battle, the British had had great success in conquering much of Georgia and South Carolina with the aid of strong Loyalist factions, and think that North Carolina might be within their grasp.
In fact, the British are in the process of heavy recruitment in North Carolina when this battle puts an end to their recruiting drive.
In the wake of the battle, Greene moves into South Carolina, while Cornwallis chooses to march into Virginia and attempts to link up with roughly thirty-five hundred men under British Major General Phillips and American turncoat Benedict Arnold.
These decisions allow Greene to unravel British control of the South, while leading Cornwallis to Yorktown and eventual surrender to General George Washington and Lieutenant General Comte de Rochambeau.
The battle is commemorated at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park and associated Hoskins House Historic District.
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Cornwallis, who had burned his baggage train at Ramsour's Mill (Lincolnton, NC), in chasing Greene had completely exhausted his men, who are also starving in wet freezing weather with little forage from locals.
All the boats for crossing the Dan River had been taken by Greene (Colonel Henry Lee in command of the rear guard cavalry had been the last to cross approximately two hours before the British arrived) so that Cornwallis was stranded on the NC side of the river.
Cornwallis had then made an exhaustive trip South, establishing a headquarters to regroup and recover at Hillsborough, North Carolina, a colonial outpost city, on February 21, also to rally Loyalists to his side.
Both the bedraggled state of his army and Pyle's massacre, however, deter Loyalists from turning out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cornwallis, with his small army, less than two thousand strong, had declined to follow Greene into the back country.
Retiring to Hillsborough, he had raised the royal standard, offered protection to the inhabitants, and for the moment appeared to be master of Georgia and the two Carolinas.
In a few weeks, however, he abandons the heart of the state and marches to the coast at Wilmington, North Carolina, to recruit and refit his command.
He immediately assumes command, as Phillips had recently died of a fever.
Cornwallis had not received permission to abandon the Carolinas from his superior, Henry Clinton, but he believes that Virginia will be easier to capture, feeling that it will approve an invading British army.