The fancy of the American General already beheld the army of Lord Cornwallis in full flight. His great solicitude seems to have been how to secure his captives. He had, strangely enough for a military man, never taken counsel of the farm-yard proverb, which we need not here repeat for the benefit of the reader.* With the departure of Marion, his better genius left him, -- the only man, who, in command of the militia, might have saved him from destruction. Leaving our partisan, with his little squad, to make his way cautiously through a country infested with Tories, we follow for the present the progress of the Continental army.
On the night of the fifteenth of August, 1780, the Americans moved from Rugely's Mills. At midnight, without dreaming of an enemy, they encountered him. The first intelligence communicated to either army of the presence of the other, was from the fire of the British advance upon the Americans. The two armies recoiled and lay upon their arms the rest of the night. So far the affair was indecisive.
The Americans had sustained themselves in the face of some disadvantages, chiefly the result of their leader's imprudence. A night march of raw militia in the face of a foe, and in column of battle, was itself an error which a sagacious commander would never have made. It is not to be denied, that the Americans were not satisfied with their situation.
Some of their officers openly declared their discontent.
But it was too late for a retrograde movement, nor is it likely, feeling as he did and sanguine as he was, that Gates would have believed any such movement necessary. The ground was equally unknown to both commanders; but Cornwallis had one advantage: he was in the command of veterans, who are generally cool enough in such situations to look about them, and make the most of their exigencies.
The American line was soon formed and in waiting for the dawn and the enemy.
The first Maryland division, including the Delawares under De Kalb, was posted on the right; the Virginia militia under Stevens on the left;the North Carolinians, led by Caswell in the centre; and the artillery, in battery, upon the road. Both wings rested on morasses, and the second Maryland brigade was posted as a reserve, a few hundred yards in the rear of the first. The British formed a single line, with each wing covered and supported by a body in reserve.
They were much less numerous than the Americans, but they were picked men, the choice of the regiments in Charleston and Camden. The American militia, of which the greater part of Gates' army consisted, had never felt an enemy's fire. The Maryland and Delaware troops were good soldiers, well trained and in confidence of their leaders. With the break of day, and the advance of the American left, the action began.
This division of the army consisted of Virginia militia under Stevens.
Handled with unexpected severity by the British fire, they yielded before it and fled in panic, many of them without even discharging their pieces.
The wretched example was followed by the North Carolina militia, with the exception of a single corps, commanded by Major Dixon.
The cavalry under Armand, a foreign adventurer, broke at nearly the same moment; and a charge of the British cavalry, happily timed, put an end to all hope of rallying the terror-stricken fugitives.
The devoted Continentals alone kept their ground and bore the brunt of the action. They were led by the veteran De Kalb -- the Commander-in-Chief having hurried from the field in a vain attempt to bring the militia back.
The artillery was lost, the cavalry dispersed; -- the regulars, numbering but nine hundred men, were required to bear the undivided pressure of two thousand of the best troops in the British service. With the example before them, the desertion of their General, and their own perfect isolation, they would have been justified by the necessity of the case, in instant flight. But, as if the cowardice of their countrymen had stung them into a determination to show, at all hazards, that they, at least, were made of very different stuff, they not only resisted the attack of the enemy, but carried the bayonet into his ranks.
The combatants rushed and reeled together with locked weapons.
But this struggle could not last. The conflict was prolonged only until the British cavalry could return from pursuing the fugitives.
Their sabres gave the finishing stroke to the affair.
De Kalb had fallen under eleven wounds, and nothing remained, but flight, to save this gallant body from the mortification of surrender on the field of battle. It was no consolation to Gates, while fleeing to North Carolina, to be overtaken by messengers from Sumter, announcing a gallant achievement of that brave partisan, by which forty wagons of booty and nearly three hundred prisoners had fallen into his hands. Such tidings only mocked his own disaster.
He could only, in reply, relate his own irretrievable defeat, point to his fugitives, and counsel Sumter to immediate retreat from his triumphant and now returning enemy. Unhappily, ignorant of Gates' disaster, and of a bold, incautious temper, Sumter was approaching, rather than hastening from, danger.
His flight, when he did retire, was not sufficiently rapid, nor sufficiently prudent. He was one of those men who too quickly feel themselves secure. He was surprised by Tarleton, but two days after, his troops utterly dispersed, he, too, a fugitive like Gates, with all the fruits of his late victory taken from his grasp.
In almost every instance where the Americans suffered defeat, the misfortune was due to a want of proper caution -- an unobservance of some of the simplest rules of military prudence. In a brilliant sortie, a manful charge, a sudden onslaught, no troops could have surpassed them --nay, we find as many examples of the sternest powers of human endurance, under the severest trials of firmness, in their military history, as in that of any other people. But to secure what they had won --to be consistently firm -- always on their guard and beyond surprise, --were lessons which they were slow to acquire -- which they learned at last only under the heaviest penalties of blood. Marion was one of the few Captains of American militia, that never suffered himself to be taken napping.
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* As farm-yards are becoming rare, it may benefit future readers to know that this proverb is almost certainly, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch." -- A. L., 1996.
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