Pancake

This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780-1782. By John S Pancake. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985.

In This Destructive War, John S. Pancake takes a nuanced, but innovative look at the American War of Independence in the South. What sets Pancake’s work apart from the voluminous works on the topic which preceded it, is that Pancake is not interested in why the Americans won, but rather why the British lost. Pancake argues that the campaign in the South was more divisive because of the strong support Great Britain maintained from a greater portion of the local population. The large number of Loyalists in the region made the contest between American and Crown forces much more like a civil war than the war in New England.

This Destructive War begins with an examination of Charleston’s capture and the American’s defeat at Camden. The twin losses caused the collapse of most organized American resistance in the South with the exception of partisan raids lead by Patriot Francis Marion. The raids culminated in the Battle of King’s Mountain, which saw the bulk of Britain’s highly mobile forces killed. This opened up the countryside to Marion’s troops and hindered any ability for Loyalist militias go gather effectively. Patriot General Nathaniel Greene entered the area of operations and began to wear down British regular army units in a series of spoiling attacks, which drew the British into battle only long enough to inflict casualties on them before a hasty American retreat. The constant harassment was destructive to British moral and drew the them into the countryside away from their depots. Greene finally engaged Cornwallis directly at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse when the British were low on supplies. Cornwallis decided that he needed to bring the war to Virginia, where most of the Continental supplies came from. This left the Carolinas open for reconquest by Greene throughout 1782.

Pancake goes into great depth to describe the numerous small, but important, actions between rebel guerilla groups and loyalist militias. “This Destructive War” was actually a term coined by the British to describe the harsh nature of the conflict as it invaded the personal lives and interactions of a great portion of the citizenry. The book is an excellent study of how partisan and main force units depended on each other to conduct their operations from both camps. Neither the American or British army’s could have survived without their irregular operations component’s abilities to keep supply lines open, provide higher commands with information, and counteract the other sides ability to carry out similar operations.

This Destructive War is written from a plethora of archival sources that give voice and emotion to the conflict at the ground level. Pancake is an excellent writer and the prose is extremely clear and crisply written. The wealth of information and the clear way in which Pancake presents it would lend the book not only to assignment in graduate level programs, but portions of it could easily be used in undergraduate courses at the upper level.

This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780- 1782. By John S. Pancake. University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1985.

John S. Pancakes’ This Destructive War details the American Revolution’s military and civilian impact in the Carolinas during the years 1780 – 1782. Rather than glorifying American commanders and strategy, Pancake chooses to approach the problem from the British point of view, answering the question: “why did the British lose the Revolution?” Through an excellently written narrative, he comes to a couple main conclusions about the war in the south. Foremost, Pancake believes the American Revolution in the south constituted a civil war rather than a revolution. He believes British policy failed to see the conflict as a political and diplomatic war, and this helped such a civil war wage on between Tories and Whigs in the Carolinas during the revolution. Finally, the author believes that General Nathanial Greene was able to harness the people’s will and that the American campaign in the south directly influenced the defeat of British determination back home.

Unlike the states north of the Carolinas, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina remained hesitant about independence even after the declaration. Pancake states that this hesitancy came from divided opinions, and no one side having complete control in the affairs of government. Although the Carolinas both had Whig governments by the Declaration of Independence, loyalist sentiment was retained throughout both states. The author believes that this led to a state of civil war in the Carolinas. The extent of partisan violence surpassed even the cruelest acts perpetrated by the British. Pancake makes a note of numerous instances where citizens took matters of justice into their own hands because neither the British nor the Americans established civil order or protection to their own partisans during the occupation of the Carolinas. Retaliation raids and murders ran rampant in the south during the whole revolution. Pancake believes this neighbor against neighbor violence defined the southern conflict, and neither side truly comprehended what transpired in the region.

The author states that a British failure to establish a civilian government after the fall of Charleston in 1780 directly influenced the outcome of the war. The British refused to look at the war in America as more than a war of conquest. Official policy dictated that all of the continent was to be subdued, and only then would new civil government take form. Pancake believes that this error in thinking led to the loss of loyalist support in the south. Indeed, the British believed that overwhelming amounts of King’s friends would surface once they took territory by force. Unfortunately for the British, loyalists became smarter over the course of the revolution, realizing that by proclaiming their allegiance to the king they would become targets for the Whigs. With no civilian infrastructure, and an army constantly on the move, the British were in no position to help their loyalist allies. Furthermore, the British believed Americans unworthy of soldiering or civilian government and never fully developed the resources they had in America. Treating the war as one of conquest, rather than using diplomatic tactics resulted in weakened British rule and ended with loss of support back in Great Britain.

The Americans under General Greene began to take advantage of British miscalculations. They provided security for their followers; they provided minor, but politically uplifting victories; and they remained a presence in the region. By keeping an army in the field, although an often defeated army, the Americans kept the war at a stalemate. Pancake credits Greene and the Carolinas campaign as the most important series of events leading up to the surrender of the British at Yorktown. The author believes that Greene’s willingness to wait Charles Cornwallis out in the Carolinas led to the later commander becoming impatient and advancing into Virginia. Cornwallis, like many of his counterparts in the British Government, believed that the Carolinas would only be subdued after the fall of Virginia. This eventually led to the British becoming trapped at Yorktown, and to the end of Parliament’s patience with the Lord North administration; whose removal led to the end of the war.

Although Pancake credits the southern campaign as a vital part of the American Revolution, he attributes victory to French sea power more than any other factor. He believes the British squandering of North Atlantic superiority eventually allowed the allies to win. The southern campaign merely drew out the war long enough for this to happen. Pancake reveals an excellent narrative of the Carolinas campaign, and sheds light on a darker side of the war. It is his detailed account of partisan violence in the campaign and his civil war thesis that make this book valuable to any scholar studying the American Revolution.

This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780-1782. By John S. Pancake. University, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1985. 245 pp.

In his 1985 book, This Destructive War, the late John S. Pancake focuses on the failed “Southern strategy” adopted by the British in the latter stages of the Revolutionary War, seeking to discover “not why the Americans won the war but why the British lost it?” (p. xiv.) Pancake concludes that not only were English political and military leaders afflicted with “a paralysis of will and lack of energy,” (p. 241) but, more importantly, they failed to realize that the war was as much political as military in nature.

With the war in the North having stalemated following the American victory at Saratoga in 1777, Pancake recounts how the British took the offensive in the South, seizing Savannah in 1778 and Charleston in May of 1780. Next, the British routed the poorly led forces of General Horatio Gates at Camden, South Carolina in August of 1780, but failed in succeeding months to pacify that state’s countryside where regular and irregular militia groups who supported the Revolution continually assaulted their Tory counterparts. On October 7, 1780, a large group of Patriot militiamen squared off against a similarly sizable Loyalist contingent of Tories on King’s Mountain; the Patriots’ resounding victory in that “American vs. American” clash helped turn the tide against the British in the South as did the December, 1780 appointment of General Nathaniel Greene as the overall commander of American forces in the South.

On January 17, 1781, a combined force of regular and irregular Patriots led by General Daniel Morgan decisively defeated Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s British and Tory forces at Cowpens, South Carolina. Morgan then outmaneuvered a British pursuit led by General Charles Cornwallis and united his men with Greene’s troops. Their combined forces then fought a pitched battle with Cornwallis at Guilford Court House, North Carolina on March 15, 1781 with both sides suffering heavy casualties and Greene ordering a tactical retreat. Over the next few months, Greene engaged the British in a series of bloody but indecisive battles in South Carolina that nonetheless showed the resiliency of the Patriot forces.

Meanwhile, as Pancake explains, Cornwallis became wedded to an evolving “domino strategy” in which “the conquest of South Carolina depended on a successful invasion of North Carolina and, at last, that both Carolinas would fall if Virginia were conquered.” (p. 139.) Hence, Cornwallis headed for Yorktown, Virginia. But Greene did not pursue him; instead, Greene turned back south and led a “reconquest” of South Carolina while Washington and his French allies triumphed at Yorktown, forcing England to the peace table.

Besides describing the obvious tactical flaws of the British in the war’s latter stages, Pancake explains that their “southern strategy” overestimated the breadth and depth of Tory sentiment in the Carolinas. Moreover, such sentiment as did exist was only diminished when the British failed to follow-up their early military successes in the South by establishing civil governments and by tolerating the indiscriminate looting of Tory and non-Tory citizens alike by British regulars. As Pancake points out, many Southerners were simply apathetic about the Revolution while others would switch their support from one side to the other as socially chaotic circumstances dictated. Soldiers too shifted their loyalties; General Greene noted that the armies of both sides were heavily populated with deserters by war’s end (p. 217). According to Pancake, political “loyalty” is “preeminently a matter of give and take,” i.e., people will only be loyal to a government that will lead them on “the path to security and safety.” (p. 83.) Try as they may, the British were unable to convince enough people that they could lead them on that path, especially in light of their failure to bring American military forces, both regular and irregular, to heal. Consequently, they lost the war.

Pancake’s thesis is fairly well set forth in his book, which is smoothly written and well-researched. His narrative is pleasantly spiced by numerous quotes from contemporary letters and eyewitness accounts. Still, Pancake does occasionally make a sweeping generalization that goes beyond the confines of his narrative. For example, he asserts that “the United States has never been able to raise enough volunteers to fight a war of any consequence.” (p. 46.) Since Pancake died in 1986, we will never know if he would have deemed either the Persian Gulf War or the “post-9-11” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as wars of “consequence” that would disprove his supposed maxim. But, as an elderly scholar who had taught history at the University of Alabama for several decades when This Destructive War was published, perhaps Pancake was entitled to make such generalizations in what would be his last book.

This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780-1782, by John S. Pancake, analyzed the military tactics of both sides during the British southern offensive. Pancake, holder of a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and a faculty member at the University of Alabama, proposed to ask not why the Americans won but why the British lost. The War of Independence represented a first stage of development in modern warfare in which large armies staffed by citizen-soldiers replaced small, professional forces.

Pancake argued that the victory at Yorktown could only be understood in the context of the southern campaign, that “Yorktown was the denouement of a drama that began in the Carolina backcountry in the fall of 1780.” (241) He suggested that Greene’s men should claim a large share of credit for the decisive victory because the significance of Yorktown was not found in terms of its military success but in destroying the British commitment to resist, a process begun by the survival of the American forces in the Carolinas. He noted that from 1776 to 1779 the internal war had only smothered in South Carolina but the British conquest of Georgia changed that, a process accelerated by the fall of Charleston and the victory at Camden, South Carolina. By the spring of 1781 Cornwallis had driven every American force from the field (except at the Cowpens) but the victories had been won at a great cost and had done nothing to stop the stubborn colonial resistance.

Pancake displayed an open approach, confirming some conceptions and disputing others. He agreed that the southern conflict was, more than any other theater, a civil war and admitted surprise at the degree to which Carolinians switched, sides, quoting American General Nathaniel Greene that “we fought the enemy with British soldiers: and they fought us with those of America.” (217) Pancake dismissed the idea that guerrilla tactics adopted from Indian wars were significant, arguing instead that “{t}he major factor in the American success was the tenacity and skillful strategy of Nathaniel Greene.” (204) Greene’s persistence and planning eroded British field power and his strategy recognized the political nature of conflicts, that wars are as much about winning public opinion as clashes of arms.

Pancake’s perspective focused more on why the British lost than why the Americans won. He suggested that the English failed to apply the eighteenth century understanding of conflicts, that war was a tool of diplomacy to resolve disputes and not a blunt force, choosing instead to attempt the total subjugation of the colonies by military means. Pancake acknowledged the importance of the French navy to Yorktown but suggested that its contribution was not simply a singular and accidental lapse by a dominant British navy but a reflection of the decline of English sea power and the growth of the French fleet, which had, by 1777, reduced Britain’s mastery of the Western Atlantic. The degree that luck was involved at all was to the benefit of the British which, coupled with overly cautious French admirals, allowed England to escape several potential disasters before 1781. The British also repeatedly overestimated the strength of loyalists and failed to protect them by establishing effective control of the American interior, a violation of the “iron rule” that people tend to support political structures that protect their lives and property. (244) The Revolutionary War broke the existing military pattern in that no towns of fortresses provided the keys to victory, requiring that the British not only win victories but also occupy territory.

Pancake’s study is admirable, reflecting serious research, effective presentation, and interesting themes. He tries very hard to maintain objectivity, only peripherally asserting the primacy of the struggle in the Carolinas for the colonial victory, admiral restraint in a field where each scholar tends to insist on the overwhelming importance of whatever topic they study. This Destructive War is very competent study of the Revolution in the Carolinas with little of which to complain.

This Destructive War: The British Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780-1782. By John S. Pancake. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Pp. 293.

In This Destructive War, John S. Pancake looks specifically at the British decision to take the war against Revolution to the southern colonies in 1780. His examination argues that some of the more common stereotypes are accurate while others are much less so. For instance, he shows that the war in the South was indeed a civil war, much more so than in the North, while disproving the notion that it was the action of partisans that carried the day for the Americans.

He begins the book with a look into the background of the southern conflict, lasting some few chapters. First, Pancake examines the British men who would take the stage in his discussion, mainly, George Germain, Henry Clinton, and Charles Cornwallis. He shows how they came to their positions of power, plus the misconceptions and hindrances that, unfortunately for their side, led to their ultimate defeat. Chapter 2, “The Evolution of Southern Strategy,” deals with the first few expeditions into the South, mainly the taking of Savannah and the abortive attempts by the patriots and French to wrest it from British control.

Next, Pancake gives his readers a picture of what the war was like in general. He discusses the precedent of eighteenth-century warfare and then shows how the War for Independence departed from that standard. It thereby became one of the first modern wars. He also gives a description of the opposing armies. The British, at the beginning of the war, had a very small standing army, and had to expand it rapidly in order to meet the demands of a transatlantic war. They recruited anyone they could, which usually meant the dregs of society, but the iron discipline of the regular service made them, man for man, the best in the world. The Continentals, on the other hand, were of a better sort socially, but not subject to the rigorous training of the Redcoats. As such, they usually were not a match for the British on the field. Aiding the Continentals was a motley conglomeration of militia from the various colonies. Almost always of dubious value, these part time soldiers could swell the rebel numbers high above that of their enemy, but were apt to run at the drop of a hat. Having no legal term of service, they also came and went as they pleased. Still, they would render useful service in quite a few southern engagements, including King’s Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse.

By Chapter 4, Pancake begins his look at the southern campaign with the taking of Charleston in 1780. After this, he discusses the British and American views of the Whigs, or patriot sympathizers and Tories, or loyalists. Central to the failure of the British campaign was their consistent over estimation of the amount of support they would receive. There were not as many loyalists as they had at first supposed, and those that did exist were unwilling to take up arms unless Cornwallis could prove that he could provide protection against patriot reprisals, something the redcoats were never consistently able to do.

Next, the book follows the initial American attempts to stop Cornwallis under Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga. After his failure at Camden, the American army was reconstituted under Nathaniel Greene, Daniel Morgan, and William Washington. Though defeated in nearly every engagement, Greene managed to thwart Cornwallis’s main goal: occupation. Unable to pin Greene down, Cornwallis lost all the territory he had gained in the Carolinas and moved north into the Chesapeake against orders. There, he was trapped at Yorktown.

This Destructive War is a very interesting look at portion of the War of Independence that might seem to be almost embarrassing to the Americans at first glance. After all, Gates made a total fool of himself, and even though Greene was victorious, it was not on the battlefield. Pancake points out that the Americans in the South did not simply hold out, but rather succeeded against amazing odds. They did so by cunning rather than brute force.

One of Pancake’s most interesting contentions, which at first seems to run contrary to Mel Gibson’s movie The Patriot, is that partisan actions played no decisive role in the southern conflict. Instead, it was Greene’s men who were the real movers and shakers. Neither Greene nor Pancake would venture to say that these smaller battles were not important contributors to British defeat, but only that they in and of themselves could not have brought it about.

In reviewing the book for the Journal of American History (Vol. 72, Issue 3, Dec. 1985), E. Wayne Carp takes issue with the fact that this “is a concise popular history [that] will be of little use to serious historians” (681). In a sense, this is an accurate criticism; those who are well read in the historiography of the war will likely find that there is little they have not seen before. Yet, this can only be carried so far before he enters into the realm of the absurd. For instance, he later complains that this “work never penetrates below the surface of events and often sacrifices historical complexity for the sake of narrative” (681). Here, Carp provides his readers with simply a refined euphemism for saying that Pancake’s book is actually readable by someone below the level of a Ph.D. student and prefers the old (but worthwhile) penchant of historians to actually reach solid conclusions. These are both laudable goals, no matter what Carp may say.

Overall, this is a very interesting and worthwhile book. Though not likely to please the newer breed of historians, it is a solid, basic read for anyone interested in the topic.