Colonial Campaigns Club (CCC)

<b>Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse </b>
by Lawrence E. Babits (Author), Joshua B. Howard (Author)
The University of North Carolina Press
Product Description
<i>"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.

Basically, our book is the sequel to Babits's analysis of Cowpens, Devil of a Whipping. We analyze Guilford from the bottom up, demonstrating the evolution of the battle, analyzing the tactics demonstrated and showing the engagement as much as possible from the participant's perspective. We've also spent a great deal of time showing the origins of, and dispelling, certain mythologies that have persisted about the battle (i.e. the Cornwallis firing on the melee incident)"</i>