Fire, fall back, fire again

Rothbard’s account

From Conceived in Liberty, chapter 58, pp. 1442–1445 (2011 edition). Every sentence here comes from Rothbard’s text; the words in quotation marks are his.

Rothbard says Greene, like Morgan, grasped “the necessity for a guerrilla strategy” and split his inferior army in “a daring and highly unorthodox maneuver” (p. 1442). The classical rule against splitting an inferior force, he explains, assumed frontal battles, but Greene’s Americans were to be “swift and mobile, and to avoid frontal battles” (p. 1443). Cornwallis sent Tarleton to crush Morgan “in a frontal engagement” (p. 1443), and Tarleton forced him onto “open ground at the plain of the Cowpens,” where he “seemed doomed” (p. 1444).

Morgan put 150 frontier riflemen in front and 300 Carolina militia behind them, each to fire and fall back in turn behind Howard’s Continentals on the crest. Rothbard writes that “Morgan brilliantly incorporated the militia’s propensity to flee under the fire of an open confrontation into a favorable aspect of the plan of battle itself” (p. 1444). Morgan spent the night exhorting his troops and explaining “his subtle battle plan to all his men” (p. 1444).

On January 17, 1781, Tarleton’s cavalry charged, “the riflemen shattered and drove off the assault,” and each line fell back “as prearranged” (p. 1445). When a mixup in orders started Howard’s line retreating, the British rushed in for the kill, and Morgan ordered the line to wheel about and fire. A bayonet charge and “a crushing double envelopment by Pickens and Washington” followed, and Rothbard calls it “perhaps the most brilliant battle tactics of the war” (p. 1445). The British lost no fewer than 900 men, “nearly nine-tenths of their force,” the Americans only 70 (p. 1445).