Battle of Spencer's Ordinary: Lafayette's Nearly Decisive Strike

On June twenty-sixth, seventeen eighty-one, at a tavern crossroads about six miles north of Williamsburg, a sharp cavalry skirmish unfolded that could have changed the final act of the Revolutionary War. The Battle of Spencer's Ordinary, named for the tavern on the corner, brought together two of the war's most capable light commanders in a fight that neither could quite finish.

Lord Cornwallis had been marching his British army eastward through Virginia after abandoning the Carolinas campaign. The Marquis de Lafayette, just twenty-three years old and commanding the American forces shadowing Cornwallis, had learned that Lieutenant Colonel John Graves Simcoe's Queen's Rangers had become separated from the main British column. Lafayette saw an opportunity. He sent Colonel Richard Butler with a combined force of Continental dragoons and light infantry to cut Simcoe off before he could rejoin Cornwallis.

Simcoe was alert. When Butler's advance guard, about fifty dragoons and fifty light infantry under a Captain McPherson, came up on Simcoe's rear guard near the tavern, Simcoe's cavalry turned and charged. McPherson's formation broke. Several American soldiers were unhorsed and taken prisoner before the main body of Butler's force began arriving.

Both commanders then pulled back. Each feared the other's main army might be close enough to intervene, and neither was willing to commit to a full engagement under those conditions. Lafayette reported to Washington that his men had killed sixty and wounded more than one hundred of Simcoe's Rangers. Cornwallis, in his own account, admitted to thirty-three killed and wounded. American losses were reported as nine killed, with the wounded and captured varying by source, far smaller than the British claims suggested.

The engagement was inconclusive, but it was one of Lafayette's most aggressive moves during his Virginia campaign. Within weeks, Cornwallis would be bottled up at Yorktown. Spencer's Ordinary stands today as a footnote to the war's final chapter, a moment when the road between two armies briefly narrowed to a tavern corner.