Camden: Britain's Bloodiest Backcountry Victory

The open-air site just outside Camden preserves the ground where Britain handed American forces one of the worst defeats of the entire Revolution. On August sixteenth, seventeen eighty, General Horatio Gates led roughly four thousand American troops into the Carolina backcountry, only to collide with Lord Cornwallis before dawn. The British routed the Americans in under an hour, killing, wounding, or capturing nearly half of the force and scattering the militia into the swamps.

Congress soon removed Gates, and George Washington sent Nathanael Greene south to rebuild from almost nothing. Camden had been in British hands since June of that year, serving as their main interior supply post. The site today spans one hundred seven acres, with reconstructed stockades, original earthworks, and a museum telling the story of both the battle and the town that made it possible.