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Chapter III - The British Move North
The British Move North
In addition to the trouble in the Carolinas, Washington had to confront the urgent problem of how to stop the British offensive moving north toward New York after their victory in Camden. He decided to give command of his southern armies to the competent Nathanael Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker. Greene, a man of "infinite patience," was well-suited to the war, for he was skilled at managing troops and saving supplies as well cautious about taking risks. However, his previous experience as quartermaster general for the Continental Army had not prepared him for the political and military chaos he discovered in the Carolinas. As he confided to a fellow officer, "the word difficulty when applied to things here is almost without meaning." He found the army "without discipline and so addicted to plundering that the utmost exertions of the officers could not restrain the soldiers."
His starving troops desperately needed food and supplies, but as Greene noted "a great part of the country [was] already laid waste and . . . in the utmost danger of becoming a desert." Greene had no choice but to move cautiously. First, he tried to enlist the loyalists and neutrals by persuading the governor of South Carolina to pardon those who would join the American militia. Second, he ordered his troops not to "loot loyalists' property and to treat the captives fairly." Third, he divided his forces into smaller units and cleverly played cat and mouse with the British rather than engaging them in a large-scale conflict.
Cornwallis, frustrated by Greene's guerilla war tactics, ignored explicit orders not to leave South Carolina unless the region was safely in British hands. Deciding to move north anyway, Cornwallis met up with Benedict Arnold near Petersburg, Virginia in May of 1781. Arnold, turned traitor in 1780, was now a British general. In a fatal mis-calculation, Cornwallis chose Yorktown, Virginia as a defensible site for his seventy-two hundred troops. He wrongly assumed that with Washington's mainland force attacking New York and the British controlling the coastal waters, his army was not in danger of being cut off.
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