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"Then, of course, it is out of the question for you to show yourself in Cornwallis's headquarters." I rose and buttoned my borrowed coat. "On the contrary, Colonel Davie, I am more than ever at your service. Let me have a cut of your venison and a feed for my horse, and I shall be at my Lord's headquarters as soon as the nag can carry me there." "Tis a very pretty hazard, Captain Ireton.
But it was now dark, and Cornwallis's troops having marched fifteen miles, the commander postponed the attack till the morrow, and the two armies bivouacked for the night on opposite sides of the brook, within a hundred and fifty yards of each other. "My Lord," protested Sir William Erskine, when the order to encamp was given, "may not the enemy escape under cover of the night?"
It was decided by the land and sea officers concerned to attempt the relief of Cornwallis, and that it was expedient for Graves to remain in command until after this expedition. He could not start, however, until the 18th of October, by which time Cornwallis's fate was decided. Graves then departed for Jamaica to supersede Sir Peter Parker.
But Colonel Ferguson, with whom Leslie was to cooperate, had been defeated at King's Mountain, and when Leslie learned of the consequent change in Cornwallis's plans, he returned to New York on the 24th of November. His departure was regarded as a victory by General Muhlenberg, and the Virginia militia, who were called out to meet him.
Because of the state of his army, chroniclers have found Ferguson's movements, after leaving Gilbert Town, difficult to explain. It has been pointed out that he could easily have escaped, for he had plenty of time, and Charlotte, Cornwallis's headquarters, was only sixty miles distant. We have seen something of Ferguson's quality, however, and we may simply take it that he did not want to escape.
"It was no new message. The British had heard it as they tramped again and again up the bullet-swept slopes of Bunker Hill; Washington rang it in the ears of the Hessians on the snowy Christmas morning at Trenton; the hoof-beats of Arnold's horse kept time to it in the wild charge at Saratoga; it cracked with the whip of the old wagoner Morgan at the Cowpens; the Maryland troops drove it home in the hearts of their enemies with Greene at Guilford Court House; and the drums of France and America beat it into Cornwallis's ears when the end came at Yorktown.
Horace Walpole, on Lord Cornwallis's capitulation in 1781, wrote: 'The newspapers on the Court side had been crammed with paragraphs for a fortnight, saying that Lord Cornwallis had declared he would never pile up his arms like Burgoyne; that is, he would rather die sword in hand. Walpole's Journal of the Reign of George III, ii. 475. See ante, i. 342.
This representation, which he makes with as much fairness as he represents himself to be in a state of the most miserable poverty and distress, he alone made to the Company, because his colleagues would not countenance him in it; and we find, upon looking over Lord Cornwallis's last examination into the whole state of this unhappy family, that this woman was able to lend to Mobarek ul Dowlah twenty thousand pounds.
But they had just found Lord Cornwallis's letter in my pocket, still sealed and undelivered. And the tenor of it was precisely opposite to that of an order calculated to delay the major's march, as Mr. Jennifer could see if he would read it. While Sevier was talking, the old borderer was fumbling in the breast of his hunting-shirt, and now he produced a packet of papers tied about with red tape.
His strategy, in dividing his army and thereby compelling the division of Cornwallis's force, led to Daniel Morgan's victory at the Cowpens, in the Back Country of South Carolina, on January 17, 1781 another frontiersmen's triumph.
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