We would na have asked any mair favors at thy hands. Amen.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 332. The aftermath of the Battle of Cowpens.

The same morning that Morgan was hastening northward toward the Catawba, well on the road to Gilbert Town, Banastre Tarleton arrived at the Turkey Creek bivouac. Imagine the scene as he trotted—or did he walk his horse—to where Cornwallis stood. Certainly, all eyes had to be on him, including those of an American prisoner, Samuel McJunkin, who later related that as Tarleton reported Cornwallis placed the tip of his sword against the ground and leaned into the hilt, and leaned harder and harder, until the blade snapped. In his fury and sense of loss, Cornwallis swore that he would recover the prisoners. That episode and the letter he wrote four days later to Lord Rawdon reveal his extreme agitation over a defeat so unexpected as to be almost incomprehensible. “The late affair has almost broke my heart,” he confessed to Rawdon. The feelings of other officers were torn between grief for their fallen comrades and a sense that Tarleton, never popular, resented for his rapid promotions over the heads of older officers, had gotten his just reward. “This defeat,” wrote William Moultrie, “chagrined and disappointed British officers and Tories in Charlestown exceedingly. I happened to be in Charlestown at the time when the news arrived. I saw them standing in the streets in small circles, talking over the affair with very grave faces.” When the older British officers who had been captured arrived in Charleston on parole, they were, added Moultrie, “exceedingly angry indeed at their defeat, and were heard to say, ‘that was the consequence of trusting such a command to a boy like Tarleton.’

For ten days Tarleton endured the whispers, the looks, possibly even barely hidden gloating. He then wrote to Cornwallis asking permission to retire and a court martial to determine responsibility. Horatio Gates had asked for the same after Camden and never received it. Nor would Tarleton. On 30 January Cornwallis wrote to him: “You have forfeited no part of my esteem as an officer by the unfortunate event of the action of the 17th. The means you used to bring the enemy to action were able and masterly, and must ever do you honour. Your disposition was unexceptionable; the total misbehaviour of the troops could alone have deprived you of the Glory which was so justly your due.” None of this was true, and Cornwallis must have known it. His biographers believe he had no other choice because he knew that he needed Tarleton for the rest of the campaign. But bureaucracies—and the military is the epitome of bureaucracy—invariably protect their own regardless of the truth, and in this case the other ranks offered a convenient scapegoat. And after months of writing official reports to Clinton and Germain in which he praised Tarleton as the officer without whom they could do nothing, could Cornwallis possibly admit that he might have been wrong? Whatever the case, the words assuaged Tarleton’s wounded feelings and he withdrew his request. Another, homelier, man provided a pithier description of both Tarleton at Cowpens and the entire British effort in the Back Country. His name was John Miller, and somewhere in western Carolina he was asked to give a prayer at a meeting.

“Good Lord, our God that art in heaven, we have great reason to thank thee for the many favors we have received at thy hands, the many battles we have won.

“There is the great and glorious battle of King’s Mountain, where we kilt the great Gineral Ferguson and took his whole army. And the great battles of Ramsours’s and at Williamson’s. And the ever-memorable and glorious battle of the Coopens, where we made the proud Gineral Tarleton run doon the road helter-skelter, and, Good Lord, if ye had na suffered the cruel Tories to burn Billy Hill’s Iron Works, we would na have asked any mair favors at thy hands. Amen.”