Annette Ranald's Blog: Annette's History Reads - Posts Tagged "banastre-tarleton"

A challenge for an author writing about a military campaign or battle is to not write like his/her audience is a class of officers at the Military Staff College, or vets who know how to keep track of all the moving pieces. Lawrence E. Babits meets that challenge in Devil of A whipping: the Battle of Cowpens.

The Battle of Cowpens was fought on January 17, 1781, between two men who were polar opposites of one another. On one side was 27-year-old Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, son of a wealthy Liverpool family, whose money and connections bought him his rank and his dreaded Loyalist Legion. Tarleton was a ruthless fighter, skilled at what he knew best, using his Legion cavalry for a crushing blow on a battlefield, and mopping-up operations afterward. Opposing him was General Daniel Morgan, 45 at the time, a barely literate sharpshooter and frontiersman with an old and awful score to settle against men who'd once dared to lay 499 lashes of a cat-o-nine on his bare back. Their armies, each partially composed of American militia fighting on either side for home turf, had scores to settle with names like Waxhaws and Kings Mountain. The stakes for these commanders and their men could not have been higher.

So how did they get there? Why was this battle important? And how badly did it impact the British cause when Bloody Ban finally met his match? Lawrence answers all these questions. The British, despite some successes at the Siege of Charleston and the Battle of Camden, were pulling out of South Carolina. It had cost them too much blood and treasure to hold. The Americans were moving in to take area for themselves, and both armies collided in an area near present-day Spartanburg. There, Daniel Morgan performed a battlefield maneuver that one might only learn about at a military academy. He twice pulled his men back to lure the British forward and encircle them, something called a double-envelopment. Rare to do with seasoned, disciplined troops, dangerous with raw militia as part of your force. The result was that, in three months, General Charles Cornwallis lost men he couldn't afford to loss. Although he would win a useless victory at Guildford Courthouse months later, he would eventually have no choice but to retreat behind his lines at Yorktown and wait for the inevitable.

Babits tells this story, from the details of the composition of the regiments, including how they were armed, their objectives, and their approach, to the climactic narrative of the battle itself and its disastrous aftermath. And he does it in a way that takes the reader along. The myriads of details don't overwhelm, they inform. This was source material for my upcoming novel, Courage and Cunning, where I leaned heavily on Babits description to create the story of members of the same family fighting each other at Cowpens, and how visceral and personal, frightening and harrowing the experience was to both.
Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens