The University of North Carolina Press

320 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 16 illus., 9 maps, appends., notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-3266-0

Published: March 2009

Long, Obstinate, and Bloody

The Battle of Guilford Courthouse

By Lawrence E. Babits and Joshua B. Howard

On 15 March 1781, the armies of Nathanael Greene and Lord Charles Cornwallis fought one of the bloodiest and most intense engagements of the American Revolution at the Guilford Courthouse in piedmont North Carolina. Although victorious, Cornwallis declared the conquest of the Carolinas impossible. He made the fateful decision to march into Virginia, eventually leading his army to the Yorktown surrender and clearing the way for American independence.

In the first book-length examination of the Guilford Courthouse engagement, Lawrence Babits and Joshua Howard--drawing from hundreds of previously underutilized pension documents, muster rolls, and personal accounts--piece together what really happened on the wooded plateau in what is today Greensboro, North Carolina. They painstakingly identify where individuals stood on the battlefield, when they were there, and what they could have seen, thus producing a bottom-up story of the engagement. The authors explain or discount several myths surrounding this battle while giving proper place to long-forgotten heroic actions. They elucidate the actions of the Continentals, British regulars, North Carolina and Virginia militiamen, and the role of American cavalry. Their detailed and comprehensive narrative extends into individual combatants lives before and after the Revolution.

About the Author

Lawrence E. Babits is George Washington Professor of History and director of the Program in Maritime Studies at East Carolina University. He is author of A Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens (UNC Press). Joshua B. Howard is research historian at the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. Babits and Howard previously collaborated on Fortitude and Forbearance: The North Carolina Continental Line in the Revolutionary War, 1775-1783.