Finally, in this most frustrating war, Britain had a hero. And America a villain.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 83. Battle of Monck's Corner, an American lost battle but also a prod to victory. The loss was of the nature of the Alamo, Pearl Harbor, and the like.

Tarleton dashed off a brief report to Cornwallis that very day, and on the following morning a more complete recounting. Cornwallis forwarded both to Clinton on 2 June with his own letter of praise for Tarleton, and on 5 June Clinton sent them to Lord Germain in London. Exactly one month later all the letters were printed in a London Gazette Extraordinary, and then reprinted in newspapers throughout England. Finally, in this most frustrating war, Britain had a hero. And America a villain.

For the fighting that took only minutes was followed by a massacre that lasted longer. The British Legion, Americans all, began butchering their vanquished countrymen. Some writers consider the American charges typical wartime propaganda. One points out that cavalry charges followed up by infantry bayonet attacks are messy, and there is no doubt that in hand-to-hand fighting the line between massacre and a wild instinct for survival is shadowy. The most complete statement charging a massacre did not appear until 1821, in a letter from Dr. Robert Brownfield to William Dobein James. Brownfield was a surgeon with Buford. Very early in the fight, apparently almost as soon as his line was broken, Buford decided to surrender and sent forth Ensign Cruit with a white flag. Brownfield charged that Cruit was instantly cut down” by the British, and that “the demand for quarters, seldom refused a vanquished foe, was at once found to be in vain; not a man was spared, and it was the concurrent testimony of all the survivors that for fifteen minutes after every man was prostrate they went over the ground plunging their bayonets into every one that exhibited any signs of life, and in some instances, where several had fallen over the other, these monsters were seen to throw off on the point of the bayonet the uppermost, to come at those beneath.”

Dr. Brownfield also described the terrible ordeal of Captain John Stokes, who “received twenty-three wounds, and as he never for a moment lost his recollection, he often repeated to me the manner and order in which they were inflicted.” Stokes was engaged in swordplay with a dragoon when another dragoon with a single blow “cut off his right hand through the metacarpal bones.” Both dragoons continued their attack on Stokes, cutting off his left forefinger and hacking his left arm in “eight or ten places from the wrist to the shoulder. His head was then laid open almost the whole length of the crown to the eye brows. After he fell he received several cuts on the face and shoulders. A soldier, passing on in the work of death, asked if he expected quarters. Stokes answered, ‘I have not, nor do I mean to ask quarters. Finish me as soon as possible.’ He then transfixed him twice with his bayonet. Another asked the same question and received the same answer, and he also thrust his bayonet twice through his body.” A British sergeant offered him protection, and Stokes asked to be laid down beside a British officer who was having his wounds attended, “that I may die in his presence.” The sergeant carried out his wish, but while engaged had to “lay him down and stand over him to defend him against the fury of his comrades.” Doctor Stapleton, Tarleton’s surgeon, was dressing the wounds of the British officer, and Stokes, “who lay bleeding in every pore, asked him to do something for his wounds, which he scornfully and inhumanely refused until peremptorily ordered by the more humane officer, and even then only filled the wounds with rough tow, the particles of which could not be separated from the brain for several days.” (Tow is rough cloth—flax, hemp, or jute—broken up for spinning.) Captain John Stokes had an iron constitution and a strong will to live. He survived the war, became a federal judge in North Carolina, married and had children, and died in his eighties. Stokes County, due north of Winston-Salem, is his memorial.

If we had only Brownfield’s account, the charge of wartime propaganda would ring truer than it does. The brutalities of the British Legion at Monck’s Corner were never denied; and Cornwallis’s strong letter of 25 April to Tarleton (quoted in Chapter 6) on preventing his troops from “committing irregularities” tells us that both Cornwallis and Clinton were aware of the Legion’s behavior after that earlier fight. There is further evidence, also from British sources. Charles Stedman, the Philadelphia Tory who became Cornwallis’s commissary general, had seen the British Legion in action at Monck’s Corner and described the travail and fate of Chevalier Vernier. He was also with Cornwallis’s main force marching to Camden, but he most certainly spoke to British troops who had been present at the Buford fight. In his history of the war he wrote that “the king’s troops were entitled to great commendation for their activity and ardour on this occasion, but the virtue of humanity was totally forgotten.” The other British source was Tarleton himself, and his words leave no doubt that terrible things happened after the Americans tried to surrender. Keep in mind that he went down “when his horse was killed during the charge. “The loss of officers and men was great on the part of the Americans, owing to the dragoons effectually breaking the infantry, and to a report amongst the cavalry that they had lost their commanding officer, which stimulated the soldiers to a vindictive asperity not easily restrained.”

Tarleton’s reputation in America never recovered. He became immediately Bloody Tarleton and Bloody Ban. The American cry of “Tarleton’s Quarter” and “Buford’s Quarter” would be heard again and again on southern battlefields. It would be an exaggeration to state that the fight in the Waxhaws began the savagery that marked the war in the South, for it had started as early as 1775, Rebels savaging Tories, Tories savaging Rebels. But Tarleton and his Legion stoked embers that became a fire nearly raging out of control, for it roused a people whose heritage was border fighting in all of its barbaric excesses.