Guilford Courthouse: Another Such Victory

On the morning of March fifteenth, seventeen eighty-one, Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis marched his twenty-one-hundred-man British force onto a clearing in the Piedmont woods where Major General Nathanael Greene had positioned forty-five hundred Americans. The British were outnumbered by more than two to one. They attacked anyway.

The battle lasted less than ninety minutes. When it was over, Cornwallis held the field. He called it a victory. The British Parliament, reviewing the casualty figures, called it something else.

Cornwallis had lost about five hundred thirty men, roughly a quarter of his entire army. One of his wing commanders, Lieutenant Colonel James Webster, died of his wounds. Charles James Fox stood in the House of Commons and said: 'Another such victory would ruin the British Army.'

Fox was right. Cornwallis retreated south toward Wilmington to refit and resupply. He never resumed the campaign in the Carolina interior. Instead he marched north to Virginia, where a combined American and French force trapped him on the Yorktown peninsula. He surrendered in October of seventeen eighty-one. The war effectively ended on the same ground that Guilford Courthouse had broken open.

The city that grew up near the battlefield was named Greensborough in eighteen oh eight, in honor of Nathanael Greene, the general who lost the battle and won the war. It lost the 'ough' somewhere along the way, but the name held. You are in a city named for a man who never won a significant engagement in the American Revolution and whose strategic genius lay in knowing precisely when to retreat.