What Was the Southern Campaign? A Beginner’s Guide to the Revolution in the Carolinas

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The Southern Campaign is the name historians give to the last major phase of the Revolutionary War, when the fighting shifted to Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. It was not simply “the war moving south.” It was a new British strategy, and it produced a more personal kind of war, fought between neighbors.

Why did Britain move the war south?

By 1778 the war in the North had stalled, and France had joined the American side. British leaders believed the southern colonies held deep Loyalist support. If the army seized the ports and restored royal governors, local Loyalists could hold the countryside while British regulars moved on.

At first the plan worked. Savannah fell on December 29, 1778. On May 12, 1780, Benjamin Lincoln surrendered Charleston and his entire army, the largest American surrender of the war. Three months later Cornwallis crushed a second American army at Camden.

Taking cities proved easier than governing the countryside. British demands for oaths and military service, and raids by both sides, turned the Carolina backcountry into a civil war. Families split. Militia burned farms and settled scores. Many people who had tried to stay neutral were pushed into choosing.

Who fought it?

• British commanders: Sir Henry Clinton took Charleston. Charles, Earl Cornwallis led the field army through the Carolinas. Banastre Tarleton commanded the fast-moving British Legion, and Patrick Ferguson organized Loyalist militia.
• American commanders: Benjamin Lincoln and then Horatio Gates lost armies in 1780. Nathanael Greene took over in December 1780 and Daniel Morgan served as his most effective subordinate.
• Partisan leaders: Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, Andrew Pickens, Elijah Clarke and William R. Davie kept resistance alive when no Continental army was in the field.
• Loyalists: thousands of Southerners fought for the Crown, many of them in provincial and militia units.
• France: French troops fought at Savannah in 1779, and the French fleet and army made Yorktown possible in 1781.
• Others caught in the war: enslaved people who fled to British lines or were forced to labor for both armies, and Cherokee and Catawba communities whose lands and choices the war reshaped.

Three battles that turned the campaign

Kings Mountain, October 7, 1780

Frontier and Carolina militia surrounded Patrick Ferguson’s Loyalist force on a wooded ridge on the border of the Carolinas. Ferguson was killed and nearly his entire force of about 1,000 men was killed, wounded or captured. Cornwallis pulled back from Charlotte to South Carolina. Read Rifles on the Ridge: The Story of Kings Mountain.

Cowpens, January 17, 1781

Daniel Morgan placed riflemen, militia and Continentals in successive lines, with cavalry in reserve, and asked the militia for only two volleys before falling back. Tarleton’s command was nearly destroyed. See Cowpens and the Collapse of the British Southern Strategy.

Guilford Courthouse, March 15, 1781

Cornwallis won the field near present-day Greensboro, but the National Park Service timeline records that he lost 28 percent of his army doing it. He retreated to Wilmington and then left the Carolinas for Virginia. Read The Battle of Guilford Courthouse: What You Need to Know.

Where does Lake Norman fit?

Before Duke Power built Cowan’s Ford Dam and flooded the valley in the 1960s, the Catawba River here was crossed at fords and ferries that armies had to use. After Cowpens, Cornwallis chased Greene north toward Virginia. On February 1, 1781, General William Lee Davidson died trying to stop the British crossing at Cowan’s Ford, a site described in NCpedia’s account of the battle. Hours later or the next day (sources differ), Tarleton’s cavalry scattered gathering militia at Torrence’s Tavern, near present-day Mooresville.

How did it end?

After Guilford Courthouse, Cornwallis marched into Virginia. Greene turned south and, with Marion, Lee, Sumter and Pickens, took apart Britain’s chain of inland posts. The first to fall was Fort Watson in April 1781. Camden, Fort Motte, Fort Granby and Augusta followed. The battle at Eutaw Springs on September 8, 1781, ended serious British campaigning inland.

The final blow needed France. On September 5, 1781, the comte de Grasse’s fleet held Chesapeake Bay against the Royal Navy. Washington and Rochambeau trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown, and he surrendered on October 19, 1781. The British still held Savannah until July 1782 and Charleston until December 1782. The Treaty of Paris, signed September 3, 1783, recognized American independence.

Key dates

Three common misconceptions

• “Militia won it alone.” Partisans kept the war alive, but Greene’s Continentals, the French navy and French troops were just as necessary.
• “Guilford Courthouse was an American victory.” Cornwallis held the field. The American gain was strategic: his army never recovered.
• “Yorktown had nothing to do with the Carolinas.” The army that surrendered in Virginia had been worn down by a year of marching and fighting in the Carolinas.

Where to read next

• The full story: The Southern Campaign of the American Revolution: A Complete History
• Lake Norman path: Cowan’s Ford, then Torrence’s Tavern, then Guilford Courthouse
• Turning points: Charleston, Kings Mountain, Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse, Eutaw Springs

Historical interpretation draws on the linked sources; surviving evidence and accounts may differ, and some dates in the campaign remain disputed.