Guilford Courthouse
2/3/2014 – Hard to imagine, I know, but having grown up in New England I had never visited a Revolutionary War battlefield. I solved that four years ago when I visited Greensboro, North Carolina and the Guilford Courthouse battlefield. I wanted to revisit the site and take some time to see more of Greensboro, so I went back today. The trip from Williamsburg could have been gorgeous, but it rained the whole way. I checked into my hotel, found the same great restaurant-Danny’s-where I ate the last time, and just as I headed to the site, it stopped raining.
Before Greensboro was founded, there was Guilford Courthouse, a few miles to the north. Greene had gathered an Army there, regular and militia. He had recently taken over the southern rebel armies, ending years of political fights over military appointments. Gates had failed at Camden and ran (or rode his horse at a gallop) from the field. He was Congress’ man. Greene was Washington’s man, his trusted aid, quartermaster, and friend. He was tasked to reorganize a shattered force after the surrender at Charleston and disaster at Camden. He sent Morgan to harass the British while he reconstructed the southern force and let Cornwallis chase him around. The British and their Loyalist militia then suffered two defeats. Now it was March and a weakened but not weak Cornwallis was headed for him. He organized lines of defense, the first two in thickly wooded areas and the last on the top of a ridge near the log building county courthouse, overlooking open ground. The fighting was intense but only lasted two hours. In the end, the British won the battle but a quarter of their forces were killed or wounded here, inspiring a member of Parliament to comment “Another such victory would ruin the British Army”, paraphrasing Plutarch, who coined the term Pyrric victory in 279 BC. Cornwallis retreated across North Carolina and up the coast, headed to a river port in Virginia to recuperate and wait for reinforcements. This was the second to last piece of the puzzle to fall into place leading to American victory at that port seven months later, the British southern army’s October surrender at Yorktown.
One great character from that battle is Peter Francisco. Pedro Francisco turned up, abandoned, in Virginia as a boy. He may have been kidnapped from his family’s home in the Azores and spoke no English. He was raised by a relative of Patrick Henry. He grew to be a large teenager- 6’8” and 250 pounds volunteered for the Virginia militia at 16, fought in battles from New York to South Carolina, and was wounded five times. At Stony Point he suffered a nine inch gash in his stomach and still fought. At Guilford Courthouse, he two, four, or eleven British with his sword, depending on which account you read. After the war, the Azorean “Hercules of the Revolution” married into a plantation owner’s life, was visited by the Marquis de Lafayette (a hospital roomie while recuperating from one of his wounds), and was appointed the Virginia House’s Sergeant-at-Arms. He died in 1831 and is buried in Richmond, VA.