7 Leadership Lessons of the American Revolution by Antal John;

Author:Antal, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS036030, HISTORY / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 1590731
Publisher: Casemate Publishers (Ignition)
Published: 2013-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

General George Washington, the “indispensable man” of the Cause of American Liberty and the “Father of our Country” (portrait by Rembrandt Peale, 1850).

Chapter 7

THE GREAT DUTY I OWE MY COUNTRY: Washington at Newburgh, New York, 1783

The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.

—Thomas Jefferson on George Washington in 1784

LEADERSHIP REQUIRES CHARACTER.

After eight long years of bitter struggle, from 1775 to 1783, the war was nearly over. After General Morgan’s brilliant victory over Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781, British Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis was determined to reverse the situation in the South and revive the British Southern Strategy. His goal was to defeat the army led by American Gen. Nathanael Greene operating in North Carolina.

Greene, like Morgan before him, continued to withdraw as Cornwallis approached. To speed up the chase, Cornwallis burned his supply wagons in order to move as swiftly as Greene’s fast-moving force. On March 14, 1781, Cornwallis discovered that Greene was encamped near the Guilford Court House with four to five thousand men, mostly militia and within a few miles march of Cornwallis’s army. Although Cornwallis had only nineteen hundred men, he felt he had finally caught Greene’s army, and attacked the American force on March 15, 1781.

Greene was ready and used similar tactics to those used by Morgan at Cowpens. Cornwallis, much like Tarleton at Cowpens, rushed into a battle that the Americans had prepared for. After ninety minutes of hard fighting, Cornwallis won a pyrrhic victory at Guilford Courthouse, but the Americans withdrew in good order. Cornwallis had gambled on a decisive victory, and was now out of options. Having burned his supply wagons and with Tarelton’s mobile force destroyed, he was unable to continue the chase Greene’s elusive army further into the wilds of North Carolina. Reluctantly, Cornwallis was forced to move off the field battered and bloodied, to fall back to resupply. The hard fighting at Guilford Courthouse caused British Whig statesman Charles James Fox to exclaim: “Another such victory would ruin the British Army!”

With the earlier British defeats in South Carolina at Kings Mountain (October 7, 1780) and Cowpens (January 17, 1781) the British Southern Strategy was in shambles and Cornwallis’s goal of crushing the American army in the South had evaporated. Accordingly, he moved toward the coast of Virginia in order to draw support from the Royal Navy. Once in Virginia Cornwallis chased around a small force under the Marquis de Lafayette for several weeks then moved to the river port of Yorktown. By late May 1781, Cornwallis’s foot-sore and reduced army linked up with reinforcements, dug defensive positions around the village of Yorktown and waited for the navy.

Washington and the French Army were lined up against Gen. Clinton’s British forces defending New York. Washington wanted to take New York City, and Clinton knew this, but in August 1781, with Cornwallis ensconced at Yorktown and licking his wounds, George Washington saw a strategic opportunity.

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