The Battle That Almost Was

The battle had gone better than any engagement Greene had fought in the south. The militia — the militia — had held through two British volleys before the Continentals came forward. The British line had buckled, then broken. The American infantry was pushing through the abandoned camp, the enemy in apparent rout.

Then it stopped.

The rum in the British camp was part of it. Men who had been marching and fighting for months broke ranks to take what was in front of them. More consequential was the brick house. Marjoribanks had positioned his battalion there with military precision, and every American attack on it failed. The British regulars, rallied behind his position, counterattacked. The momentum that had seemed irreversible reversed itself in perhaps an hour.

Greene pulled back. When he counted his casualties — roughly 500 men, almost a quarter of his force — he understood what the battle had produced and what it hadn't. The British had lost similar proportions. Stewart was withdrawing to Charleston. The South Carolina interior was effectively clear of British field forces.

He had won again without winning. He had never, in the entire southern campaign, won a decisive engagement. He had won the campaign. The distinction mattered a great deal to him, and it mattered to the men who had fought for him through nine months of defeats that added up to victory. The gold medal Congress sent him was, in its way, an acknowledgment that the kind of war he had fought was not fully captured by the tactical record.