Book Review: Long, Obstinate, and Bloody

Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse

by Lawrence E. Babits & Joshua B. Howard

University of North Carolina Press, 2013 

Fed a steady diet of Lexington and Concord, many Americans tend to forget the enormous Southern component of their Revolutionary War, and yet it's the crucial theater: among other things, it's where the British and their generals were counting on the most support from the enormous Loyalist faction of the American populace itself. It was in the American South that the British were hoping to begin to win the war, and the South is where they lost it, famously, at Yorktown.

The man who surrendered at Yorktown, Lord Charles Cornwallis, had been driven to that last extremity over the course of a very bad year. In January of 1781, a detachment of Cornwallis's army under the command of flamboyant young Banastre Tarleton had been mauled at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina by the Americans commanded by the legendary Brigadier General Daniel Morgan. And Cornwallis himself had been continually taunted by the feint-and-flee tactics of Major General Nathaneal Greene - to the point where Cornwallis, maddened in his pursuit, burned his army's baggage train (and, to the grim displeasure of his rank-and-file, destroyed their supply of rum) in order to increase its mobility to something approaching Greene's as the British chased the retreating Americans into North Carolina and eventually confronted them, on 15 March, at a tiny town called Guilford Courthouse. There Greene's forces and Cornwallis' forces met and fought a loudly fierce battle that became a pivot-point for the entire war.

In Long, Obstinate, and Bloody, the Battle of Guilford Courthouse gets its definitive narrative and analysis. Historians Joshua Howard and Lawrence Babits (who previously wrote A Devil of a Whipping, the equally-definitive account of the Battle of Cowpens) pause briefly at the beginning of their endeavors to point out how odd it is that such an important battle has had no such exhaustive treatment prior to now, then they dive right in. Their recreation of events, buttressed by first-hand sources, infrequently-consulted pension records, and battlefield archeology, is scrupulous down to the hour and the minute whenever possible, and yet the whole thing remains surprisingly engaging reading from start to finish.

When Cornwallis finally caught up with the main body of Greene's troops, almost everything about the encounter was an inversion of the norm in the Souther theater: Greene's troops not only enjoyed a considerable numerical superiority, but, thanks to Greene's superb tactical skills, they also occupied an enviable position, carefully deployed on a rise of ground with an unimpeded command of much of Greene's approach route. A headstrong charge under such circumstances was as bad an idea for Cornwallis in 1781 as it would be for General Lee at Gettysburg in 1863, and Cornwallis made it for much the same reason: because his 'blood was up,' and because he wanted a resolution.

After initial skirmishes involving the mounted troops of General "Light Horse" Harry Lee, the British drove the Americans into a concentration of three lines around the wooded elevation near Guilford Courthouse, and then Cornwallis proceeded to batter away at the Americans until their lines broke. The battle was technically a British victory - Greene's forces retreated - but it was also a British disaster: Cornwallis lost far more men than Greene, including the cream of his officer corps, leading a British politician back in London to quip that another such victory would cost them the entire North American army. Cornwallis had no real choice other than to retire and lick his wounds, but his army was still suffering months later when generals Washington and Rochambeau trapped and took it at Yorktown in October.

Babits and Howard flesh the story out with lavish and fascinating amounts of detail, and - in the book's frequently-recurring strong suit - they always remember what so many military historians forget: the human elements of their story. They are fair and perceptive almost to a fault:

Cornwallis, as well as most of his men, was fully convinced that he faced a force of nearly 7,000 men. British intelligence of course was wrong; however, the Americans still outnumbered their enemy two to one. Facing such odds, having had little to eat in nearly twenty-four hours, and having marched roughly ten miles fighting numerous running skirmishes prior to engaging Green's fist line, it is a wonder that the British army didn't fully collapse at Guilford. Yet they didn't. Instead, Cornwallis' men persevered with the kind of courage and tenacity that did them great honor.

The authoritative feel of the account is wonderfully enhanced by the authors' decision to follow the lives of the battle's main participants after they'd long left Guilford Courthouse. By doing this they're able to knit two eras together in ways that are almost eerie, as in the case of "Light Horse" Harry Lee, who went on to serve in the House of Representatives from 1788 to 1801 but fell on evil times:

Lee's life spiraled downward after his congressional service. Following the death of [his wife] Matilda in 1790, Lee married Anne Skipworth Carter, the cousin of fellow Guilford veteran Henry Skipworth. With Anne, Lee fathered six children, in addition to the two surviving children he had with Matilda. Caring for such a large family, coupled with losses from ill-advised land speculations, destroyed Lee's finances. In 1807, just as his fifth child, Robert Edward Lee, the future commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, was learning to walk, "Light Horse Harry" Lee was marched off to debtor's prison.

And Cornwallis himself? Again, the casual student of American history would be surprised to learn that his career didn't end at Yorktown. He saw action in India and Ireland, and his service was steadily honored by King George III even though the two men mostly detested each other. He died in India in 1805 shortly after his second posting there as Governor General, and he lies in a mausoleum in the Uttar Pradesh town of Ghazipur. The mausoleum is a pretty little building with a view of the Ganges and nothing about it to suggest the cyclone of violence into which its occupant marched with foolish bravery a quarter-century before.