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Endurance and Triumph

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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.