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Endurance and Triumph
51
The Tide Begins to Turn
With his huge victory at the Battle of Camden, Cornwallis thought he’d
secured South Carolina. He moved his army into North Carolina, occu-
pying Charlotte. To the west, a large Loyalist militia force moved in
tandem with Cornwallis’s army. But on October 7, American militiamen
smashed the Loyalists at the Battle of Kings Mountain. Cornwallis put
his plans to take North Carolina on hold. He pulled back to Winnsboro,
South Carolina.
After the disaster at Camden, the
Continental Congress decided that
George Washington should select
Horatio Gates’s replacement. Wash-
ington chose Nathanael Greene.
In early December, Greene
arrived in Charlotte to take com-
mand of the southern army. He was
shocked by what he found. “Nothing
can be more wretched and distress-
ing than the condition of the troops,”
he wrote to Washington, “starving
with cold and hunger, without tents
and camp equipage. Those of the
Virginia line are literally naked, and
a great part totally unfit for any kind
of duty.”
But within a couple weeks,
Greene got his shell of an army into
action. He divided his force in two,
and both groups moved across the
border into South Carolina. Daniel
Morgan, now a brigadier general,
General Nathanael Greene, one of Washington’s
most trusted subordinates, was sent to reorganize
the American army in the South after the disas-
trous defeat at the Battle of Camden in August 1780.
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