A deep, Stygian gloom that existed between sundown and sunup

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 61.

The British numbered 1,400. The plan was simple: the British Legion and American Volunteers, Tarleton in command, would proceed swiftly and silently at night and attempt to take the Americans by surprise. Webster and the main body would follow to provide any necessary support. As we will see, Tarleton’s postwar History must be used with care, but there is no need for strictures with regard to his description of the action. An attack in the night was judged most advisable,” he wrote, and the small advance detachment of horse and foot set out, with “Profound silence . . . observed on the march.” It was 10:00 P.M., according to the diary of Lieutenant Anthony Allaire, a Tory from the Huguenot community of New Rochelle, New York, who served in Ferguson’s command.

Living as we do in a world in which our waking hours are spent in almost constant light, to capture the full flavor of that eventful night and other nights two centuries ago we must try to imagine darkness we never know, a world whose nights were filled with almost constant dark, not the half dark to which we are accustomed but a deep, Stygian gloom that existed between sundown and sunup, relieved, if the weather was right, only by the moon and the stars. The difference between that night in 1780 and our time can be measured in silence as well as light. People made noises, and so did animals and the wind and the rain and other sounds of nature, but there were no motors, no constant hum of traffic in the distance. There was a stillness both day and night that are rare today, found only in the great empty places.

That is what it was like at 10 o’clock on the night of 13 April 1780 when Banastre Tarleton and the vanguard took the road to Monck’s Corner with the aim of letting loose Milton’s “brazen throat of war.” It was very dark and the only sounds were of marching feet and horse hooves on the dirt road and the creak of saddles. Scouts captured a black man who tried too late to move off the road to avoid them, which indicates how quietly the British were marching.