Photo: Beyond the fence, an open battlefield filled with longleaf pines in 1780e.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Old battlefields seem more like parks. Trying to imagine cannon and cries of the wounded? Difficult, but not always. Farmers’ plows unearthed so many Minié balls at Shiloh, the soil turned white. Shiloh was of the Civil War. I’m writing of Camden, August 16, 1780, which I visited.
I walked past monuments and flags, past where Redcoats mortally wounded beloved Continental Maj. Gen. Baron de Kalb. Past where five Patriots fell. Past where a member of Fraser’s Highlanders died and is buried. The 71st Regiment of Foot, Fraser’s Highlanders, was a prominent British infantry regiment raised to serve in the American Revolutionary War. Lieutenant-General Simon Fraser composed the unit of two battalions recruited from the Scottish Highlands. They were elite and feared for their skill with the bayonet.
Tiny white wildflowers cover the battlefield. Their leaves feature stinging hairs. Think stinging defeat. A British bayonet charge here scattered Patriots like a covey of South Georgia quail, and Lord Cornwallis regulars crushed Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates’s unseasoned men. That’s the short of it.
The long of it began with dragoons. Now there’s a terrifying word, dragoon. Armand’s Legion, a Continental Army cavalry unit, i.e. dragoons, and Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons collided unexpectedly early morning here on the Great Wagon Road. They skirmished, withdrew, and waited on dawn.
As major conflict brewed, Gates positioned Maryland and Delaware Continentals on his right flank, while placing inexperienced Virginia and North Carolina militia on his left. Gates’s raw militia directly faced elite British regulars who met the advancing Virginians with a disciplined bayonet charge. The Virginia militia fled without firing a shot, followed quickly by the North Carolina militia. A disaster unfolded.
Maryland and Delaware Continentals, led by Maj. Gen. Baron de Kalb, launched successful counterattacks against Lord Rawdon’s wing. British Col. Webster, wheeled his troops to strike the exposed Continental flank. Surrounded and outnumbered, the Continentals were broken when Tarleton’s cavalry charged their rear. Retreat turned into “rout and slaughter” where Bloody Ban’s dragoons killed many over a 20-mile chase.
Baron de Kalb suffered 11 wounds—shot three times and bayonetted repeatedly. Upon seeing de Kalb, Cornwallis told him, “I am sorry, sir, to see you, not sorry that you are vanquished, but sorry to see you so badly wounded.” Cornwallis supervised the dressing of de Kalb’s wounds by his surgeons in Camden. As he lay dying, de Kalb reportedly told a British officer, “I thank you, sir, for your generous sympathy; but I die the death I always prayed for; the death of a soldier, fighting for the rights of man.” He died three days later.
General Gates fled, famously riding 60 miles to Charlotte by nightfall. A clobbering happened here, but silver lined the black cloud of defeat. Nathanael Greene replaced the Coward of Camden. Gates never held a significant military command again. Greene was the right leader at the right time. The Savior of the South executed a brilliant strategy of exhaustion and attrition that broke the British will to fight. His motto? “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.” Greene turned the war around down South, which directly led to the Patriot’s ultimate victory at Yorktown.
The Battle of Camden ranks as one of the worst defeats for an American army in United States military history. It’s widely considered the worst American Revolutionary War defeat on an open battlefield. The British swept a Southern American army out of existence, taking control of the Southern colonies, albeit temporary. The Patriots suffered approximately 1,900 casualties (roughly 900 killed/wounded and 1,000 captured), compared to 324 to 350 British casualties.
Historians often rank this engagement alongside the Siege of Charleston as one of the lower points for the Revolutionary cause. Battles like Antietam rank higher for sheer loss of life, but Camden remains a prime example of a total tactical and leadership failure.
