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Posted on 01/10/2010 12:08:49 PM PST by Pharmboy
From Hollywood to the history shelf, the Civil War was a widescreen epic, while the American Revolution has too often been a footnote. One of the most important battles of the Revolution happened in what is now Greensboro on March 15, 1781, but, over the past century, Americans have treated that war as an afterthought.
The Civil War was "Gone with the Wind," "Glory" and 11 hours by Ken Burns. The Revolution, by contrast, was little more than a few forgettable movies, an occasional special on The History Channel and a handful of books (or more often booklets) sold at battleground visitors' centers.
When Hollywood finally tried to catch up by making a true Revolutionary War epic in 2000, it failed miserably with "The Patriot," a movie dense with such cringe-inducing dialogue as, "It's a free country ... or at least it will be." The movie portrays British officers as sadistic proto-Nazis, and the climactic battle -- based loosely on Guilford Courthouse -- is a gruesome cartoon. The reluctant warrior portrayed by Mel Gibson ends up in a mano a mano grudge match with The Thing That Wouldn't Die, a British officer loosely based on cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton, but depicted on screen as something closer to the Terminator.
The real Tarleton was quite human -- he lost two fingers when he fought here, one of many details about the battle I learned from reading "Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse" by Lawrence E. Babits and Joshua B. Howard. The book occasionally gets bogged down in thickets of detail as dense as some of the woods the soldiers fought through that late-winter afternoon in 1781. But for the most part it's a compelling read, and the first full-length book devoted exclusively to the battle that proved a Pyrrhic victory for Lord Cornwallis and the British army.
The authors present the book as a sequel to Babits' 1997 "A Devil of a Whipping," about the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina, which preceded Guilford Courthouse by two months. Babits is a professor at East Carolina University, and his collaborator on the sequel and one previous Revolutionary War book, Howard, is a research historian for the state of North Carolina. Another state historian, Mark A. Moore, created clear, detailed battle maps. The book also includes a series of modern paintings by Don Troiani that show vividly the uniforms of different types of soldiers who fought in the battle.
As a longtime Civil War buff, it took me a while to find a compelling entry point to the Revolutionary War. The real turning point was discovering the work of David Hackett Fischer, whose "Paul Revere's Ride" taught me that everything I knew about the Revolution was wrong -- and that the truth was a lot more interesting and complex than the legend.
I also appreciate the efforts of my father, Dick Huffman, who did a lot of genealogical research before he died in 2003. At the beginning of this decade, he told me that one of our ancestors -- my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Christian Hoffmann Jr. -- fought at Guilford Courthouse, along with his brother, John.
My ancestor doesn't rate a mention in "Long, Obstinate, and Bloody," but I wouldn't have been surprised to find him in the book. Babits and Howard give interesting details about dozens of people involved in the battle, including a local volunteer who helped Gen. Nathanael Greene pick the best places to set up his cannons.
Unlike some of their predecessors, the authors took care not to rely on memoirs written many years after the battle by bitter veterans with axes to grind, such as Tarleton and his American counterpart, cavalry commander Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee, father of legendary Confederate General Robert E. Lee. They get great details from unexpected sources, such as the journal of Virginian Samuel Houston, who had a bird's-eye view of the beginning of the battle from a tree he climbed along the American second line.
Wherever possible, Babits and Howard rely on letters and reports written closer to the action, and they also lean heavily on reports written after the war by veterans applying for government pensions. In many ways, their book is an expansion of an outstanding 1997 work they cite in their preface and elsewhere, John Buchanan's "The Road to Guilford Courthouse," a richly detailed, meticulously researched look at the war in the South in 1780 and 1781.
But where Buchanan's book devotes only 11 pages to Guilford Courthouse, "Long, Obstinate, and Bloody" devotes 69 pages to the battle proper, and many more to the skirmishes near present-day Guilford College the morning of the battle. If the endless detail in the preliminary chapter "Greene's Army" feels a bit like the first chapter of Matthew in the New Testament ("Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas ...."), the unflinching accounts of the battle itself make up for the excessive scene setting.
A gruesome description of a soldier getting his spine ripped away by a cannonball concludes the battle's preliminaries, and the book provides many details I don't recall learning from any other source, such as a fire that killed a number of wounded soldiers.
The biggest surprise in the book comes when the authors debunk one of the battle's most enduring legends, that Cornwallis -- over the protests of Brig. Gen. Charles O'Hara -- preserved the victory by having his artillery fire into a melee that included his own troops. Babits and Howard make a convincing argument that the legend came primarily from Lee's memoir and has little basis in reality: "The image of a draconian Cornwallis ordering his guns to cut down his own elite Guards over the pleas of his courageous, wounded subordinate became legendary in the annals of Guilford Courthouse, despite the fact that neither Cornwallis nor O'Hara, nor for that matter any actual participant in the event, actually recorded it taking place."
The legends live on in the Triad, though now with more historical accuracy thanks to the hard work of Babits and Howard. "Long, Obstinate, and Bloody" is another step forward in giving the Revolutionary War its due.
Contact Eddie Huffman at ehuffman@triad.rr.com
The new book looks like a good one...
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I kinda’ like King’s Mountain.
Great book, but he certainly overlooks the contribtions of Thomas Fleming, whose Now We are Enemies predates Paul Revere's Ride by 40 years. Speaking of Fischer , have you ever heard how/why/bywhom the PC crowd (presumably) squelched Colonial Plantations which was supposed to be installment II of his magnum opus , to follow Albion's Seed? This without so much as a whimper about academic freedom being compromised?
No...unaware of those actions. Tom Fleming is a great guy...gave him a lift home one day (in NYC). We were both memebers of the NYC RevWar Roundtable.
Thanks Pharmboy, Great Post! Knowing history is crucial- especially our own. We could do with less lawyers, and way more historians serving as our appointed employees (our representatives).
and a bit easy on Tarleton
men with reputations like that are seldom undeserving of them
Agreed. Tarleton’s actions were even too brutal for Cornwallis. As you likely know, “Tarleton’s Quarter” meant “No quarter,” meaning no prisoners.
1) I agree that generally, the RevWar has been ignored, egregiously.
2) While 1 is true, we have had more things for it in the last decade or so, including SEVERAL good “mini-series” documentaries, starting in 1994.
3) “The Patriot” was far from perfect, but it was good that it was there at all (how many RevWar ONLY movies have there ever been? And yes, I’m an OLD movie buff.). It was also good generally. Also nice that they diverted from the usual myth, that it was a war of New Englanders IN New England.
PAGE Smith . . .
Careful what you wish for. Far too many “historians” (including those that insist on “historic districts” which squelch the freedom these rebels wanted so much) are liberal as hell. Most of them have that “spin” on US history that it was all proof of how evil we are.
Well, King’s Mountain had a lot going for it: Ferguson, the brilliat Scots soldier, commanding mostly Yankee Loyalists getting massacred by over mountain men. I will visit that place before I die...
I also dispute the view that “Brits were shown as evil brutal beasts” in the movie. Yes, it was heavy on Tarleton...em...Tavington, but many of the other Brits in charge were quite sympathetic (except for the silly representation of O’Hara as an arrogant superior lackey).
C’mon, man...that “burning the patriots alive in the church” scene was pure fantasy.
BFL
Thanks for that story...very interesting.
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