Altho their Ignorance and want of Skill in Military Affairs may at present render their appearance Awkward

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 243. Cornwallis's retreat after Kings Mountain.

The long column set out in the late afternoon and almost immediately ran into trouble. The army’s guide was, in the words of Lieutenant Roderick McKenzie, a “Presbyterean fanatick” from Charlotte, William McCafferty, who led the troops by design onto the wrong road and then left them and rode to William Richardson Davie’s camp. The British wandered amid hills and ravines the rest of the night and left behind at least twenty wagons with supplies including the baggage of the British Legion. They found the right road but the discovery did not improve the conditions of the march. The Carolina mud remained deep, the streams high and swift, the rain incessant. The troops had no tents. Food was in short supply and for five days there was nothing to eat but Indian corn harvested on the way and cooked by parching it over campfires. Always hovering on their rear and flanks were Davie’s mounted Rebel militia, unable to do serious damage but ever ready to cut off stragglers, take advantage of sniping opportunities, and engage in running fights with Tory militia scouring the countryside for food for the army.

Cornwallis had caught a bad cold, and shortly after the retreat began he too was stricken with fever and had to be transported in a wagon. Lord Rawdon took command. Another occupant of a wagon was Major George Hanger, desperately ill with what he called yellow fever, so weak he could hardly move. Lying with him in the wagon on a common bed of straw were five fellow British officers down with fever. The streams that had to be crossed were so high that water rose over the axles and wet their straw bed. Only Hanger survived. His five comrades were dead inside a week and buried far from home in lonely and long-forgotten graves dug hastily on the side of the road in the wet red clay of the South Carolina Back Country. Hanger lost so much weight that his bones split his skin, and he felt that he survived only by taking opium and port wine.

If not a nightmare, Cornwallis’s retreat to Winnsboro was a bad dream. It also reveals in stunning detail the festering relations between the British Army and the rude Tory militia of the interior. It was a problem of attitude that eventually descended to cruel treatment. This attitude was summed up two years later in the Observations of a Tory militia colonel, Robert Gray, who wrote that “almost every British officer regarded with contempt and indifference the establishment of a militia among a people differing so much in customs and manners from themselves.” Lord Cornwallis was aware of the problem. At Charlotte, about two weeks before setting out for Winnsboro, he issued an order urging troop officers and soldiers to “treat with kindness all those who have Sought protection in the British Army, & to believe that Altho their Ignorance and want of Skill in Military Affairs may at present render their appearance Awkward in a Veteran and Experienced Army; When they are properly Arm’d, Appointed, & Instructed they Will shew the same Ardour, & Courage in the Cause of Great Britain As their Countrymen who repair’d to the Royal Standard in the Northern Colonies.” His effort had little and perhaps no effect. Five months later in North Carolina he felt the need to officially repeat the order, and his commissary Charles Stedman in his History clearly described the incredible behavior of some British officers and the alienation of many Tory militiamen during the retreat to Winnsboro.

Cornwallis was not a natural politician.