Southern Campaign
The British shifted the American war to the south in 1778 on the theory that loyalist sentiment there was strong enough to hold the country once regular forces had cleared it. The opening was their greatest victory of the war. Sir Henry Clinton besieged Charleston and took it on 12 May 1780, capturing Benjamin Lincoln and around 5,000 men — the largest American surrender until 1942. Lord Cornwallis was left to complete the conquest. He destroyed a second American army under Horatio Gates at Camden in August 1780, in a rout so complete that Gates rode sixty miles before stopping. The strategy then failed for reasons the theory had not accounted for. Banastre Tarleton's killing of surrendering troops at the Waxhaws made a slogan of Tarleton's quarter, and the war in the Carolina backcountry became a civil war of raid and reprisal between loyalist and patriot militias that alienated the population the British needed. Frontier riflemen destroyed a loyalist force at Kings Mountain in October 1780, and Daniel Morgan destroyed Tarleton's legion at Cowpens in January 1781 with a double envelopment. Nathanael Greene then conducted the campaign that decided the theatre. He divided his smaller army, kept it moving, and lost battles deliberately — at Guilford Courthouse in March 1781 Cornwallis held the field and lost a quarter of his men. Cornwallis marched into Virginia to cut the supply of the war rather than hold the Carolinas, and fortified Yorktown. The French fleet arrived in September. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October 1781 after a three-week siege by Washington and Rochambeau. The southern strategy failed because holding territory required a loyalist population that the manner of holding it destroyed.
- Year: 1780 CE
- Category: Military
