The Revolutionary War History Forgot
By Alan Pell Crawford
This article appears in the Winter 2026 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
Even many of the best general histories of the American Revolution leave too much unsaid and unexamined. Just one example—there are plenty of others—is the late Robert Leckie’s estimable book George Washington’s War.
The title alone tells us that the focus will be the role of the commander in chief of the American forces in the Revolution. For far too long, we’ve viewed the war as Washington’s story, leaving Americans unaware of the fact that during some of the war’s crucial battles, our future first president was hundreds of miles away from the action. The decisive events—those that forced the British to surrender—took place in the South. In Leckie’s book, the war in the South is confined to the last 100 pages or so of a 650-page book. Other histories follow a similar pattern, confining “The Southern Campaign,” as they might call it, to a chapter way back near the index.
Washington was nowhere near South Carolina’s Kings Mountain in 1780, for instance. Even a brief look at that battle will help us correct some misunderstandings about the Revolutionary War, leading to a better understanding of our nation’s past—and, in that way, of ourselves.
In October 1780, just below the North Carolina / South Carolina border, near the intersection of present-day I-85 and Highway 161, about 1,000 supporters of American independence attacked an encampment of maybe 1,200 loyalists. The attackers, known as the “Overmountain Men,” assembled for the occasion and were not, strictly speaking, members of George Washington’s Continental Army. Theirs was what unimaginative histories of the American Revolution insist on calling a “ragtag” force, wearing whatever clothing they brought from home and carrying the same weapons they would use back on the farm.
The British officer Banastre Tarleton called them a “swarm of backwoodsmen” and rated them no threat. He was mistaken. The Overmountain Men prevailed—and promptly went back to their homes in Kentucky and Tennessee.
More Than a Run-up to the Civil War
The force the Overmountain Men defeated will strike most readers as unusual, too. They were, as mentioned, loyalists. That means they were Americans, just like the men who whupped them. They weren’t redcoats, as we like to imagine those who fought for the British Crown. There was only one Brit in the battle, Major Patrick Ferguson, from Scotland, who commanded the loyalists, and he was shot and killed on Kings Mountain.
Battles like this one lead many Americans to a conclusion that, while not without some foundation in fact, is a little glib. They decide that the campaign in the South was a “civil war”—America’s first civil war, and a run-up to the one that would commence some eighty years later.
The more useful conclusion to draw, however, requires us to rid ourselves of myths we have come to cherish. The story we grew up with begins in late 1773, with the Boston Tea Party. There’s Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775, followed by Bunker Hill a few weeks later, and then, in late 1776, Washington crosses the Delaware. Then comes Brandywine and Saratoga and Monmouth. Then there’s Valley Forge and, after that, a defeated Cornwallis surrenders to Washington at Yorktown. Voilà!
The problem with this narrative is that more than three years passed between Monmouth and Yorktown. Monmouth was the last major battle in the North. So what happened? What went on in those three years that convinced the British to give up the fight—and the colonies? They obviously had not been persuaded to do so after all those celebrated battles up north.
What we’re rarely taught is that by late 1778, the war in the North had reached a stalemate. Up in New Jersey, Washington had managed to pen the British in New York, hoping for a cataclysmic battle that never happened. With no better option, the British decided to take the war to the South, where, they believed, large numbers of loyalists would help fight the war. Loyalists would do so, though without success, at Kings Mountain.
It was in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia that the war was won, though you won’t learn that from most standard histories of the war. These books might have that chapter toward the end where Kings Mountain and other battles are mentioned. They may include glancing references to Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse and Fort Watson and other equally compelling engagements—and to the colorful characters who fought there, like Nathanael Greene, Daniel Morgan, Francis Marion, and Light Horse Harry Lee.
Such accounts might also mention the Race to the Dan, which, while rousing in itself, also sheds light on why the British threw in the towel.
In early 1781, Morgan defeated Tarleton at the Battle of Cowpens. Despite the victory, the American troops were exhausted. Greene, Washington’s handpicked commander in chief of the Continental Army in the South, began leading his men through the North Carolina backcountry toward the Dan River, at the Virginia border. In Virginia, the army could rest and regroup.
Greene led not only his own troops but, in a sense, Cornwallis’s as well. The British pursued Greene, hoping to head off his forces before they reached Virginia. During the six-week pursuit, the redcoats moved farther and farther from their inland supply depots—and farther from Atlantic ports where British ships, with fresh troops and provisions, could land. Cornwallis never caught up to Greene’s men. Before long, the British troops were more worn down than the Americans. Once Greene’s forces were ready for action again, they recrossed the Dan, and the “war of posts” began.
This war of posts involved a series of hit-and-run raids on British outposts, which further depleted what was left of the enemy army. On August 1, Cornwallis took his position at Yorktown, hoping to use the port as a base for resupply. Unfortunately for the British, the French navy prevented the British ships from resupplying the redcoats.
Washington was still up north at this time, hoping to attack the British in Manhattan. He did not change his plans until, on August 14, he received a message from French admiral Comte François de Grasse. In the letter, sent on July 28, de Grasse reported that he was sending up to twenty-nine ships and 3,200 troops to the Chesapeake Bay, but that he could keep the fleet there only until mid-October. As Washington reported in his diary, the French admiral urged the Americans “to have everything in the most perfect readiness” to begin ground operations as soon as the French navy arrived.
Washington and Rochambeau, the French general, got the message. Days later, they began the four-hundred-mile march to Yorktown. The troops arrived the following month, and the combined American and French forces surrounded the British encampment on September 28. Cornwallis surrendered on October 19.
The Great Delegator
None of this is to diminish Washington’s importance in the war. Rather, we should view his role differently. The commander in chief was a superb judge of character, except in the case of the traitor Benedict Arnold. Washington saw promise in men like Greene and Morgan when others did not. He made sure they had the authority to prosecute the war as they saw fit, and he left them alone to do so.
Washington knew his limitations. When he appointed Greene to replace Horatio Gates, he readily admitted that he didn’t know much about the strength of the British forces in the South or even of the American troops Greene would lead. “Uninformed as I am of the enemy’s force in that quarter, or our own or of the resources which it will be in our power to command for carrying on the war,” Washington told Green, “I can give you no particular instructions but must leave you to govern yourself entirely according to your own prudence and judgment and the circumstances in which you find yourself…. I rely upon your abilities and exertions for everything your means will enable you to effect.”
Following Washington’s example, Greene left Morgan and others under him alone to get the job done. And we all know how the story ends.
The Southern Campaign was a major factor in the war, but it is convenient to forget that the British at this time also had soldiers and sailors at war in Europe, India, and Africa. “A compleat history of the American war,” John Adams wrote in 1783, would constitute “nearly the history of mankind for the whole epocha of it. The history of France, Spain, Holland, England, and the neutral powers, as well as America, are at least comprized in it.”
No wonder the British cut their losses. But they would not have done so without the campaign in the South, which depleted their resources and exhausted their patience.
Alan Pell Crawford is the author of This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, and other books. He has been a resident scholar at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
This article appears in the Winter 2026 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.