Saturday, May 29, 2010

This Day in Revolutionary War History (Tarleton and the Making of an Atrocity Story)


May 29, 1780—The British called their brief but bloody encounter near the border of North and South Carolina the Battle of Waxhaws Creek. American patriots, however, dubbed it “Buford’s Massacre,” and blamed one commander for it: Col. Banastre Tarleton.

In his biography of Nathanael Greene, Washington’s General, Terry Golway called Tarleton, with some justice, “the most feared British commander of the war.” He was also, arguably, the most controversial: in the case of the closest possible contender, both the Americans he betrayed and the British he joined agreed that they had very little use for Benedict Arnold as a person.

British MP and man of letters Horace Walpole noted that Tarleton boasted of "having butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army.” But the colonel who headed the British Legion was not accused during and after the American Revolution of having superabundant testosterone. The question was whether or not he was a war criminal.

How you answered that question often depended on whether you were British or American. Even Hollywood has waded into the controversy, with Mel Gibson’s The Patriot featuring a villain based on Tarleton.

Tarleton’s reputation owes much, though not exclusively, to what happened in the Waxhaws District of South Carolina. He’d been assigned by General Charles Cornwallis to use his mixed force of cavalry and light infantry to catch Abraham Buford, one of the few Continental commanders still at large in the Carolinas after the disastrous rebel defeat at Charleston.

Tarleton demonstrated one of his assets as a commander--the ability to move fast--in his pursuit of Buford, covering 100 miles in 54 hours by riding day and night. When he finally got wind that Buford was in the vicinity, Tarleton sent him a note that considerably exaggerated his forces and demanded the Americans' surrender. Buford wouldn’t hear of it.

Using his troops’ speed to maximum advantage, Tarleton quickly crumpled up the Continentals at the resulting battle. When it was all over, 113 Americans were dead and 203 captured.

Tarleton’s claim in his postwar memoir—that his men began to kill indiscriminately after he’d been thrown from his horse and pinned, leading his troops to mistakenly believe he’d been fatally wounded under a flag of truce—has been taken up by his admirers/apologists since then. The colonists had their own story: that Tarleton, not wanting to bother with prisoners, ordered a renewed attack after the rebels surrendered.

The colonists were not above creating atrocity stories to fan propaganda, as had happened 10 years before with the Boston Massacre. (It had fallen to John Adams to win acquittal for the British soldiers charged in that case.) But "Tarleton's Quarter" (i.e., no mercy) became a rallying cry for the Americans in the two-year campaign of escalating intimidation and reprisals that was about to occur in the Carolinas between British troops, loyalists and patriots.(One subsequent example: "Pyle's Hacking Match," when Loyalist troops, falling for the lie by "Light-Horse Harry" Lee--Robert's father--that his legion of patriots were actually Tarleton's dragoons, allowed the rebels to come beside them on the road, where they proceeded to saber, bayonet and shoot their astonished opponents.)

Tarleton’s own actions, before and after Waxhaws, also contributed to his heinous reputation. He roamed through the Carolina countryside, pillaging crops as he went along. For his efforts, the aggressive cavalry rider was dubbed “Bloody Ban” by the Americans.

Tarleton’s comeuppance came the following year, at the Battles of Cowpens, where he lost badly, and Guilford Courthouse, where he lost much of his right hand.
One indication of Tarleton's low estimation in the eyes of the colonists came after Yorktown, when, as part of Cornwallis' defeated forces, the colonel was forced to surrender. He asked special protection from French General Rochambeau, who reluctantly acceded. At a subsequent dinner, American officers invited their British counterparts to dine, but specifically asked that "Bloody Ban" not join them.
His advocates depict Tarleton as, at worst, a bit of a rake, and because of the fog of war it is not certain how much of his villainous reputation is merited. But there was, assuredly, much in his military and political career, even aside from his exploits in the American Revolution, that was not admirable:
* He inherited a good position in life--an upper-class education at Oxford and £5,000--from his father, who had been lord mayor of Liverpool. But, like many sons of the aristocracy, Tarleton gambled the latter away, forcing him to look to the military to start over.
* He did not get along particularly well with superiors. Immediately after the war, he raised a ruckus with a memoir that criticized Cornwallis. Nearly a quarter-century later, he served in the Peninsular War under the Duke of Wellington--by several accounts, not particularly happily.
* He also served in the military in Ireland, in the period when the British tightened its grip on that country.
* In Parliament, he opposed William Wilberforce's campaign to end slavery in the empire, at least partly because so much of his family wealth was tied up in the practice.
* Many of his countrymen regarded him as a war hero when he came home, at least partly because of his wounds. When he finally won a seat in Parliament, he was not above using these to theatrical effect. "For God and country," he would exclaim at the height of debate, waving his maimed hand in the air lest anyone miss the point.
The image accompanying this post, by the famed portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, shows Tarleton as he wanted to be remembered: not as "Bloody Ban," but dashing, in the heat of battle, wearing a helmet of his own design. The "Tarleton Helmet," with its fur comb over the top and plume at the side made of metal and leather, became a familiar sight among British light cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars. Its inventor managed to live on until 1833, honored in Britain but definitely not in North America.

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