We Fight, Get Beat, Rise, and Fight Again

The letter Greene wrote to Joseph Reed after Hobkirk's Hill contains one of the most quoted sentences of the Revolutionary War: "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." It has become a kind of motto for Greene's southern campaign — printed on mugs and plaques, cited in motivational speeches, stripped of the context that makes it interesting.

What Greene was actually doing in that letter was explaining a strategic logic that most of his contemporaries found difficult to accept. He had just lost a battle. The army had retreated. The British held the field. By every conventional measure, April 25 had been a bad day. Congress needed to be reassured. His supporters needed to understand why he had not won.

His explanation was this: the loss of the battle did not mean the loss of the campaign. The British had to hold Camden with a garrison, feed that garrison, supply it, and keep it viable against sustained pressure. He did not have to hold anything. He could retreat, regroup, and apply pressure again. Every day the British held Camden cost them men, money, and political capital they could not replace. Every day he survived cost him far less.

What he did not know on April 27, when he wrote that letter, was that Rawdon was already calculating the same arithmetic and reaching the same conclusion from the other side. Within two weeks, Camden would be burning.

Greene's strategic patience — his willingness to lose battles without losing his sense of the campaign's direction — is the quality historians most admire about the southern campaign. It was not natural to him. He was a competitive man who hated to retreat and disliked losing. The letters from this period show how much effort it took to maintain his equanimity. But he maintained it, and the results justified it.