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Soon after the battle of Cowpens, repeated attacks of his old enemy, sciatica, so disabled Morgan that he was forced to retire from the service and go back to his home, in Virginia. During the summer of 1780, when the British invaded the Old Dominion, he again took the field. With Wayne and Lafayette, he took part in a series of movements which led to the capture of Cornwallis.
But a passage of that river being effected at a ford about six miles below him, he made a precipitate retreat; and, on the evening of the same day, his pursuers occupied the camp he had abandoned. Morgan retired to the Cowpens, where he determined to risk a battle.
During the latter part of the year 1780 Gen. Forney was almost constantly in service in different portions of county. When Cornwallis entered the county in the last week of January, 1781, endeavoring to overtake Gen. Morgan with his prisoners captured at the Cowpens, he was providentially arrested in his march by the swollen waters of the Catawba river.
"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.
But as General Lee, "Light-Horse Harry," afterwards remarked, the hill was much easier assaulted with the rifle than defended with the bayonet. The backwoodsmen, on leaving the camp at the Cowpens, marched slowly through the night, which was dark and drizzly; many of the men got scattered in the woods, but joined their commands in the morning the morning of October 7th. Pioneer," II., 67.
This was their rallying cry from the day they left the Sycamore Shoals, on the Watauga, to the present opportune moment for accomplishing their patriotic purpose. For the last thirty six hours they had alighted from their horses but once at the Cowpens for one hour's rest and, refreshment.
V: The Boy of the Cake One is unthankful, I suppose, to call a day so dreary when one has lunched under the circumstances that I have attempted to indicate; the bright spot ought to shine over the whole. But you haven't an idea what a nightmare in the daytime Cowpens was beginning to be.
He said he trembled at Quebec, and in the gloom of early morning, when approaching the battery at Cape Diamond, he knelt in the snow and prayed; and before the battle at the Cowpens, he went into the woods, ascended a tree, and there poured out his soul in prayer to the Almighty Ruler of the Universe for protection.
By letter from General Greene, dated Guilford Court House, February the 10th, I learn that Lord Cornwallis, rendered furious by the affair of the Cowpens and the surprise of Georgetown, had burned his own wagons, to enable himself to move with facility, had pressed on to the vicinity of the Moravian towns, and was still advancing: The prisoners taken at the Cowpens were saved by a hair's-breadth accident, and Greene was retreating.
That officer was at first disposed to dispute Tarleton's passage of the Pacolet river, but being informed of the superiority of his numbers, and that a portion of the British army had already crossed above him, he hastily retreated northward, and took post for battle on the north side of Thicketty Mountain, near the Cowpens.
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