No one can form an idea of the character of the roads in winter, at the South, where the red clay abounds, without passing over them.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 340.

It was when he arrived at Ramsour’s Mill only to find that Morgan was two days ahead of him and across the Catawba that Cornwallis probably felt most deeply the primary consequence of the Battle of Cowpens. “The loss of my light troops could only be remedied by the activity of the whole corps,” he later wrote to Lord Germain, in explanation of his solution to his problem. Almost all of Cornwallis’s remaining units were regiments of the line, accustomed to a traditional way of war, to tents at night and all the other impedimenta of an eighteenth-century European army, transported by a long, cumbersome, slow-moving baggage train of wagons pulled by teams of horses that had to be cared for and fed. In the Carolina Back Country that winter, under pelting rains on wretched red clay roads that were quagmires by day and frozen moonscapes by night, Cornwallis faced a logistical nightmare. Benson Lossing traveled those roads in the winter of 1849. They had not changed, and he wrote, “No one can form an idea of the character of the roads in winter, at the South, where the red clay abounds, without passing over them. Until I had done so, I could not appreciate the difficulties experienced by the two armies in the race toward Virginia, particularly in the transportation of baggage wagons or of artillery.” Rain, roads, rivers, and fords were the critical factors in that winter campaign, and to deal with them Cornwallis chose a solution even more unorthodox than Greene’s division of his army.

Cornwallis burned his baggage train. He kept only enough wagons for medical supplies, salt, and ammunition, and four empty wagons for the sick and wounded. Otherwise everything went. At the Catawba a few days later Cornwallis told the troops that “The Supply of Rum for a time will be Absolutely impossible.” This was the cruelest cut of all, for rum was very important to eighteenth-century soldiers. Recall Morgan’s plaintive sentence: “We have nothing to drink.” A huge bonfire was built, and into it went wagons, tents, excess clothing, anything deemed not vital to the army’s functioning. What the troops needed they would carry on their backs. The officers did not escape the sacrifice, for Charles O’Hara reported to the Duke of Grafton, “Lord Cornwallis sett the example by burning all his Wagons, and destroying the greatest part of his Bagage, which was followed by every Officer of the Army without a murmur.” All the fine china and plate and silver and wine and other luxuries that officers then considered their due when they took the field—all were thrown into the vast conflagration.