Remarks by Robert Morgan
Cowpens
January 17, 2004
It is a great honor to be asked to speak at this historic site, on this occasion. I can think of no ground more hallowed in the Carolinas, no battlefield more significant in the American Revolution. Because of what Daniel Morgan and his men did here 223 years ago today, we have been free to test our strengths and weaknesses, discover our possibilities, explore our opportunities, and grapple with our limitations, our challenges, our character as Americans, our genius, our destiny.
Two years ago I addressed a group of Cornell University alumni in Boston. One of the questions after my talk was, "Professor Morgan, what are you working on now?" I told them that I was writing a novel about the battle of Cowpens. There were blank looks all around the room. None of those doctors, lawyers, ceo's had heard of the battle of Cowpens. Except for one, who had been a major in the Marine Corps. He said that on the first day of war college they studied the battle of Cowpens and Morgan's three-line deployment as one of the outstanding examples in history of tactical brilliance and resourcefulness.
One of the challenges to our culture is our lack of knowledge of our own history. We are a people who tend not to look back, but rather concentrate on the possibilities of the present. At our best we look pragmatically at the world around us and move forward. We are neither chained to the past nor crippled by tradition.
And yet, to know ourselves fully and wisely we must know something of what came before and the events and people who made us what and who we are. During the past few months it has been my pleasure to travel around much of the United States talking to audiences about my new novel Brave Enemies, a story set in the Revolution in the Carolinas and culminating at the battle of Cowpens.
Again and again educated people, book lovers, even some interested in the American Revolution, have told me they know nothing of the battle of Cowpens. For them the Revolution occurred in the Northeast, and mysteriously ended at a place called Yorktown. The Cornwallis campaign in the South, the battles of Kings Mountain, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, are just dimly recalled names.
In the popular imagination, fed by films, television, mass market fiction, the American Revolution has been almost hidden behind the cataclysm of the Civil War. From its beginnings Hollywood has loved the Civil War, and created cycles of romances set in the Civil War era. Beautiful ladies in flowing gowns, great mansions with white columns, chivalrous young officers, colorful servants like Old Mammy and Prissy, The Lost Cause, have been the staples of an extremely successful literature and legend.
No comparable mythology exists for the Revolutionary period. When we think of the Revolution we think of three-cornered hats, of Yankee Doodle Dandy, the ballad of Paul Revere, Betsy Ross and the flag, and Washington's size 14 boots and his wooden teeth.
But I am happy to say there has been a surge of interest in the Revolutionary era in recent times, in the movie The Patriot, in biographies of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, in the best selling books of many historians such as Joseph J. Ellis, and the recent novel by former President Jimmy Carter, The Hornet's Nest.
I grew up on a farm in Henderson County just about 35 miles from whre we stand. Even though we were somewhat isolated in the country and didn't have television, I was lucky to belong to a family of storytellers. At night we sat by the fireplace in winter, or on the porch in the summer, and my grandpa and my dad and my mother told stories. My grandpa especially loved to tell stories about ghosts, and panthers, snakes and mad dogs. He sent us to bed night after night terrified by accounts of rattlesnakes that came out from under hearths, and panthers that followed travelers and screamed in the dark. My dad, though he had little formal education, loved to read geography and history, local history and regional history, family history and American history. He loved to talk about the Cherokee Indians, the Civil War and the Revolution. One of his favorite stories was about General Daniel Morgan's great victory over Bloody Tarleton at the battle of Cowpens. He thought we were related to Daniel Morgan, and he loved to describe Morgan's three-line deployment of his troops, and his command, "Two shots and fall back." While I never found any family connection with Daniel Morgan, I did find that I am descended from William Capps, who fought here with the Virginia militia and later took a land grant in Western North Carolina. And later I visited the battlefield here and walked over the ground where the great victory was won.
I began to think about writing about warfare when I read at the age of fifteen Tolstoy's War and Peace with its great description of battles in the Napoleonic wars. Tolstoy made those vast scenes of combat more real than anything I had ever read. A little later I discovered Hemingway's Nick Adams stories about World War One, and the novel A Farewell to Arms, and discovered the power of Hemingway's use of economy, precision, indirectness, to evoke the drama and horror of war. Later still I read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, the stories of Ambrose Bierce, the Russian writer Isaac Babel, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Wars fascinate us because they are so terrible, because they are so much a part of human history, and because wars often define the turning points in human history. Wars are the points where great cultural, political, economic and religious differences clash and forge the future. Wars certainly bring out the worst in people, and some of the best.
I knew I would write a novel that included the battle of Cowpens about twelve years ago when I read Banastre Tarleton's memoirs of his campaign in North America. Describing why he pitched directly into battle after marching his men much of the night through swamps and thickets in the dead of winter, he said his scouts had warned him that a company of Green River Rifles were on their way to join Morgan's forces. These were mountain sharp shooters who could pick off officers at great distances, as they had proven at Kings Mountain the October before. Tarleton didn't know they were already here in the front line, waiting for him. And they did exactly what he feared most, emptying fourteen or fifteen dragoon saddles in the first cavalry charge.
I am from Green River in North Carolina, and reading that explanation I felt an even closer personal connection with this battle. In the early 1990s I read all the books I could find about Daniel Morgan and Banastre Tarleton, John Eager Howard of Baltimore, Andrew Pickens, William Washington, and the campaign in the Carolinas from Charleston to Guilford Courthouse. I studied the battle of Cowpens minute by minute and wrote the battle scenes later used in the novel. But I could not decide who my main characters were, and I had to put the project aside. Novels are about people, about lives, not just historical events. I wrote, The Hinterlands, The Truest Pleasure, Gap Creek, and This Rock.
The day after I finished This Rock I knew I had to return to my Cowpens story, and I knew that my main character would be a sixteen-year old girld named Josie Summers, dressed up as a man in the North Carolina militia in the front line that morning of January 17, 1781. And I knew the novel would be the story of how she ended up in that unlikely role.
In writing Brave Enemies I tried to blend history with fiction in a seamless whole. My ambition was to make the imagined characters as real, as convincing, as the historical figures. I tried to study the known facts, and stick with the known facts as much as was possible. Where the historians disagreed I attempted to pick the more plausible version. For example, some accounts describe the morning of the battle as damp and overcast; others say it was clear and very cold. I decided to refer to the sky as partly cloudy. Some historians say the North Carolina militia ran back from the second line in a panic with the other militia groups around the left flank of the third line. Others say they must have gone around or through the right flank. I compromised by having my main character get lost from her unit and run with the South Carolina militia around the left flank.
Any researcher will tell you that it is often the trivial questions that can take the most time to answer. For example, I wondered if Fraser's 71st Highlanders were wearing pants or kilts at Cowpens. I combed through every history I had and could not find that relevant detail. Finally a ranger at Guilford Courthouse Battlefield told me that the Highlanders had packed their kilts away with their summer gear in Cornwallis's baggage trains. And then I realized that of course, they were wearing pants. No one would march through winter cold and brush and swamps in kilts.
The battle of Cowpens was important to my dad, as it was to the people of the region at the time, because it was an example of the local forces standing up to and defeating the best soldiers the Crown had in North America. Morgan's victory had a far-reaching psychological impact on the colonies and the American cause. Cowpens is studied in military academies and war colleges all over the world as an especially fine example of what tactical genius and a little luck and a lot of courage can do. Morgan's victory gave new impetus and resolution to the American struggle just when it was most needed. And for us here in the Carolinas it was not just a great victory in the Revolution, it was our victory. The battle of Cowpens proved that ordinary men, inspired by leadership and necessity, can do extraordinary things.
It has been a privilege for me to try to bring the events of January 17, 1781 alive in a fictive narrative. My hope is that readers of this story will be entertained, moved, delighted, but also that they will be struck by the significance of what happened here where Morgan and his men defeated the best of the British army. I hope readers will want to find out more about the conflict and the era that served as the gateway, the threshold, of our Republic.
What Morgan and his men did here helped change the course of history, and their courage, their resourcefulness, their sacrifice, still resounds, not just in the history books, but in the way we live our lives today, in the way we meet our own challenges, see our potential to be better, to do right, to preserve the great freedoms which they helped win for us, and which are still threatened. They inspire us today to not be diminished or silenced by fear, to face the dangers that are at hand, and move toward an even greater future.
http://www.nps.gov/cowp/remarks.htm; Last Updated: 1/24/2004 5:07 PM; Virginia Fowler