A little AmRev 101 from our friend and fellow Carolinian Herschel Smith.
What If Britain Had Won The Revolutionary War?
This is a short video that asks a false hypothetical. There is almost no need to respond, but I’ll do it anyway just in case another stupid “historian” is tempted to raise the same question.England had no chance of winning the American war of independence. Washington had fought Clinton’s troops to a standstill in the North. The only strategy the English saw forward was to send Cornwallis South to the port of Charleston, take S.C. (where they were told that there were loyalists), co-opt the support of the loyalists, retain the South, and then eventually encircle Washington.
It had no chance at all of working. The battle of Kings Mountain proved that. It was a battle of loyalists versus patriots (the over mountain men). The over mountain men had stupidly been told (by the British) that the British were coming for them. The men were harvesting crops at the time and couldn’t go to meet the British (or loyalist forces), so they sent their sons into battle. The women stood on the sides of the streets and sang hymns as their sons went off to battle. They travelled mostly at night, but virtually continuously. The average age of the fighters sent by the families to fight the loyalists was 14 years old.
They lost very few fighters, but the loyalist forces were dealt a staggering defeat. Thus ended Cornwallis’s plan to use the loyalists. His position in S.C. was no more secure. He couldn’t maintain logistics to far flung outposts because fighters using insurgent tactics were harassing them. A number of battles occurred, but eventually it all came to a head at the battle of Cowpens, where Cornwallis lost a third of his army.
Another third was in the infirmary, sick with heat exhaustion, diseases borne by mosquitos, and wounds inflicted by insurgent fighters. Cornwallis took the remaining healthy third of his army to transport the ailing third from the infirmary and headed into N.C., targeting Yorktown for resupply and reinforcements. His forces were harassed all through N.C. on the way to Yorktown, with fighters shooting from behind trees and then melting into the bush, never to be seen again (until the next skirmish, of course).
The French were there waiting at Yorktown to bombard them from the sea, but they may not have been. In the end it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the war, just prolonged it.
Plenty more to this one yet, of which you simply must read the all.
In all my long years of intently studying American history, both inside the classroom and out of it, I can’t recall ever running across anything like Herschel’s unique take on these epochal, world-altering events, and can find no room to quibble with or contradict his sure-footed reasoning. I CAN attest to the complete veracity of his assessment of South Cackalacky, where I’ve lived the last 4-5 years or so, as “a foreboding place,” particularly the various reasons why that’s the case: dangerous critters from insects to snakes to mountain lions to bears to God only knows what; pestilence-rife swamps, bogs, and/or marshes pretty much everyplace you look; miserable, nigh unbearable summertime heat, and savage humidity the whole year ‘round.
Kinda makes one feel sorry for poor doomed Cornwallis, when you think on it.
- Entries
Anyone in the area that has not visited Kings Mountain should go. A short hike, a nice way to spend a day or even just an afternoon. We used to take our younger Scouts every year and camp nearby, then hike to the park.
Kings Mountain National Military Park