Bonus Game: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse

Mark H. Walker | September 21, 2004  | 0 comments  | Print  | E-mail

Grab the free bonus game Guilford Courthouse using this link. You will need to enter the username of "gch" and the password is the "download key" found on P. 61 of the November 2004 issue of Armchair General magazine. This game comes in the form of a PDF file and is a hex-based tabletop wargame. You will need to print the map and units (counters) before you can play the game.

For Our Freedom: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse
Mark H. Walker
Game Artwork by Nicolas Eskubi

Introduction

The Battle of Guilford Courthouse occupies a unique place in American history. It is one of the least well known, yet most influential battles, ever fought by our soldiers. Nathan Greene’s tactical defeat in the bare woods and muddy fields of North Carolina heralded a strategic triumph that would eventually lead to Cornwallis’s retreat, encirclement, and surrender at Yorktown—an event that signaled the end of armed conflict in the freshly born United States of America.

Despite the momentous consequences of Guilford Courthouse few would list it in the annals of Revolutionary War history. Concord, Bunker Hill, Yorktown, these are the battles taught in High School history books and the confrontations that most often stick in our minds. Not so, however, in southern Virginia. Guilford Battleground is 60 miles from my door, and the family treks south each March to see the 23d Foot, Hessian Jaegers, and Campbell’s Rifles duke it out once again. These treks, coupled with the colorful writing of Burke Davis (The Cowpens-Guilford Courthouse Campaign) fired my enthusiasm. But Guilford Courthouse was more than just a pivotal battle; it was a battle of courage, a battle of personalities. For example, Charles Lynch—the Colonel in command of the rifle regiment on the north flank of the American’s first line, was a fervent patriot with a burning hatred of Tories. In fact, he so hated the Tories that he would hang them from the nearest tree on sight. So, the act of hanging a man from a tree became known as lynching.

Personalities or not, it was a battle decided by the common man. Men blasting three-quarter inch thick balls of lead at each other over distances better measured in feet than yards. The battle saw the heroism of the British Guards and North Carolina’s Surry County Militia, the grim determination of the 23rd Foot and the 1st Maryland, and the fear of the North Carolina militia staring at the British gleaming bayonets.

The battle proper started at 1:30 PM on March 15th, 1781. Lee’s Legion had been skirmishing with the British since the dark hours of the morning, but it was early afternoon before the British force approached the American’s first line of resistance. The Americans were arrayed in three lines. It was a trick Greene had learned from his trusted general, Daniel Morgan, and it was a trick that had earned Morgan’s troops victory over the British cavalry commander, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, at Cowpens, South Carolina. In the first, or western, line stood the men of the North Carolina militia. There was about a thousand men—farmers and clerks mainly—arrayed behind rail picket fences. On the North Carolinian’s right flank, Colonel William Washington’s cavalry and Lynch’s riflemen stood. Light Horse Harry Lee’s (father of Robert) Legion and Campbell’s rifles covered the left flank.

A few hundred yards behind this first line were the Virginia militia under generals Robert Lawson and Edward Stevens. Some were farmers and clerks like the Tarheels to their front, but many others were former Continentals who had heeded Steven’s call to return to arms. Furthermore, embarrassed by his troop’s flight at Camden, Stevens had placed forty marksmen behind his line with orders to shoot any man who ran from the British. Continentals comprised the third, final, and most eastern line. These Continentals were the object of Cornwallis’s attack. Guilford Courthouse meant nothing to the British, but if he could destroy Greene’s Continentals his army would dissolve, and victory in the south would be Britain’s.

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