The date was March 15, 1781, and one of the most important battles of the Revolutionary War was about to take place in the tiny North Carolina village called Guilford Courthouse. Guilford Courthouse was usually the scene of court pleas in the building that gave the community its name. But on that day all of this changed.
It's March 14, 1781, and Greene planned to attack the forces of British General Lord Charles Cornwallis, but he camped around the Deep River Friends Meeting House, 12 miles away. Cornwallis and his soldiers got up before dawn on the cold winter morning of March 15, 1781, to attack the rebels at Guilford Courthouse. The fate of the south- and maybe all America would rest on the result of this battle.
Since 1778 the South was the British’s major battlefield of operations in America. In a little bit more than two years the “redcoats” overran Georgia and South Carolina, destroying two rebel armies in their path. The British suffered major difficulty in October 1780, when a loyalist army was destroyed at Kings Mountain, South Carolina, and in January 1781, when a part of Cornwallis’ finest soldiers was conquered. Even with all this Cornwallis still refused to give up his assault and pushed north into North Carolina where he hoped to renew loyalist support and to destroy the last large body of established rebel soldiers in the South, Nathanael Greene’s military. Nonetheless Greene was a sly manipulator. After five years of service with the Continental Army in the North, he had been sent by General George Washington to stalk the tide of British conquest in the South. For months he worked diligently to restore the southern army to fighting condition. So he could buy time to achieve this buildup, and to avoid the British encounters that would certainly follow Cowpens, he advanced his soldiers across North Carolina and into Virginia, refusing to be drawn into an ill-timed battle until his military had grown to its peak strength.
In late February, Greene felt confident enough to send sections of his command back into North Carolina. By the second week he concluded that his army, the totality more than 4400 men, was as capable of fighting as it would ever be. The time for tactics was now over with.
Advancing “toward Guilford Courthouse early on the morning of March 15,” the progression units of Cornwallis’ military engaged in a series of heavy conflicts with the American military commanded by Lt. Col. Henry “Lighthouse Harry” Lee. Finally, around noon, the redcoats saw the first of Greene’s three battlelines west of the Guilford Courthouse. Around 1 p.m., shortly after an artillery duel, the British began their advance. The redcoats marched ahead to the beat of their drums. Hundreds of bullets whizzed by, it must have been a maze of confusion. A British officer stated that “that half of his men dropped on that spot” and a Carolinian looking through the cloud of gunsmoke noticed that the severed British lines resembled “the scattering stalks in a wheat field, when the harvest man has passed over it with his cradle.” The redcoats pushed through the first line and into the forest, the redcoats were encountered with a “fierce and fatal fire” from the second line. In the woods the British lines were thrown into chaos, one confused officer wrote that his men were often “simultaneously engaged in their front, flank, and rear.”
The British found Greene’s third line standing on a hill looking down on an arrangement of old farm fields. The most barbarous fighting took place here as the redcoat's first charged them and was attacked by the rebels. Even the hardened professional soldiers were horrified by the harshness of their effort. Lord Cornwallis dismally wrote “I never saw such fighting since God made me.”
Early in the third line competition, the 2nd Maryland Regiment ran from the field. Seeing this General Greene decided to stop the fighting. Battlefield communications were unpredictable, however, many American sections continued to struggle after the withdrawal had begun. When Cornwallis, in a reckless attempt to stop an American advance, shot into masses of struggling soldiers of both redcoats and continentals the battle ended-abruptly. The bewildered rebels withdrawed, leaving the British in possession of the battlefield, and the victory.
It was an empty win at best. Just in two hours of fighting at Guilford Courthouse 500 British soldiers were killed, which was almost one-fourth of his military. The Americans lost 260 of their men. Cornwallis’ military was damaged so much that Cornwallis was unable to chase the “defeated” rebels. Instead he removed to the sanctuary of British-held Wilmington, NC. While Greene was working in another campaign, Cornwallis marched his beaten army into Virginia in search of definite victory that had gotten away from him at Guilford Courthouse. He found his final defeat at the hands of the French and American Forces around the town of Yorktown, Virginia.
The Battle of Guilford Courthouse was an important connection in the chain of incidents leading to the American victory in War for Independence. Its location has been reserved as a National Military Park, administered by the U.S. Government since 1917, “It is the oldest Revolutionary War National Military Park in this country.” Contained in this area are 220 acres of the original battlefield, and an up to date visitor center showing museum displays of Revolutionary War artifacts. Monuments and graves of Revolutionary War soldiers and statesmen are located all over the park.
