Who won the Battle of Camden?
The British won. At dawn on 16 August 1780, north of Camden, South Carolina, Lord Cornwallis's smaller army of British regulars and loyalists routed Horatio Gates's American southern army. Most of the militia fled at the first charge, the Continentals were overwhelmed, Johann de Kalb was mortally wounded and Gates rode away from the field.1
Three years after he took Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, Horatio Gates marched a hungry army into South Carolina to win back a state the British had just conquered. In the dark before dawn on 16 August 1780 his column walked straight into Lord Cornwallis's army, which had set out at the same hour to attack him. A few hours later Gates's army no longer existed.2
The South Carolina Encyclopedia calls Camden one of the worst losses the Continental army ever suffered, and the 1975 National Historic Landmark nomination calls Camden and the losses before it the lowest point American fortunes reached in the South. Yet the disaster also sent Nathanael Greene south, and the war in the Carolinas turned within months.3
This page follows both armies: Cornwallis, who chose to fight rather than give up the province; Gates, who believed he was marching to a strong position, not into a battle; the loyalist regiments on the British left; and the Maryland and Delaware Continentals who fought on after everyone else had gone. For the wider war see our guides to the American Revolutionary War and the greatest battles of the American Revolution.4
Why was the Battle of Camden fought?
By 1780 the war had moved south. Charleston surrendered on 12 May 1780, and Major General Benjamin Lincoln's southern army went into captivity with it. The British then set up posts in the interior, and Camden, a key road hub in the backcountry, became their supply depot and garrison there.5
The relief force that Washington had sent south, the Maryland and Delaware Continentals under Major General Johann de Kalb, was still on the road when Charleston fell. It became the only American army of any size left in the South. Congress then gave the Southern Department to a more illustrious commander, Horatio Gates, the victor of Saratoga. Henry Lee and the 1975 landmark nomination both repeat the warning Gates got from his old comrade Charles Lee: take care that his northern laurels did not turn to southern willows.6
The backcountry was already at war with itself. Patriot partisans, Thomas Sumter in the upcountry among them, were raiding British posts, while loyalist militia gathered to fight for the Crown. See also our page on Francis Marion, another partisan leader of the Carolinas.7
Why did Gates march on Camden?
Gates reached de Kalb's camp in North Carolina on 25 July and set the army moving two days later. There were two roads to Camden. The longer one curved through Salisbury and Charlotte, through fertile, friendly country where the army could feed itself. The shorter one cut across poor, thinly settled land where many of the few inhabitants were loyalists. De Kalb and other officers advised the longer road; Gates took the shorter one to strike before the British could gather.8
The men paid for it. They marched through thin country with little to eat. On 13 August the army reached Rugeley's Mills, about twelve or thirteen miles north of Camden, and on the 14th Brigadier General Edward Stevens joined with about 700 Virginia militia. Gates then detached 100 Maryland Continentals, 300 North Carolina militia and two small guns to help Sumter cut the British supply line along the Wateree.9
Gates believed he had more than 7,000 men. His deputy adjutant general, Otho Holland Williams, collected the returns and found 3,052 rank and file fit for duty, more than two thirds of them militia who had never maneuvered together. Gates's plan, as he explained it to Congress, was a night march of a few miles to a strong position behind a deep creek about seven miles from Camden. He expected the British to stay on the defensive or retreat; he did not expect to meet them on the road.10
There was no rum for the march, so the commissaries issued molasses instead. Williams wrote that the meal of quick-baked bread, beef and molasses “operated so cathartically” that many men kept breaking ranks all night. Kapp, de Kalb's biographer, tells the same story. The army that met Cornwallis at dawn was hungry, sick and short of sleep.11
Why did Cornwallis attack instead of retreating?
Cornwallis rode up from Charleston and reached Camden in the night of 13 to 14 August. He found Lord Rawdon's force there: as Gates came on, Rawdon had pulled in his outlying posts and concentrated at Camden. There were also about 800 sick in the hospitals and reports that Gates had 5,000 to 6,000 men, with more Virginia militia on the way. By his own count he had about 1,400 fighting men, regulars and provincials, with 400 to 500 militia and North Carolina refugees.12
He explained his choice to London a week later. He could easily have retreated to Charleston, but he would have left behind his sick and his stores, and he expected to lose the whole province except Charleston, and Georgia except Savannah. Worse, he wrote, he would have forfeited “all pretensions to future confidence from our friends in this part of America”, the loyalists on whom the whole southern strategy rested. He saw little to lose by a defeat and much to gain by a victory, so he marched at ten on the night of 15 August to attack Gates at Rugeley's at daybreak.13
Sources disagree on what he brought with him. The South Carolina Encyclopedia says he came with about a thousand reinforcements, while Fortescue, the historian of the British army, insists he brought only his staff. Henry Lee, an American officer who was not at Camden and wrote years later, judged that the British general never considered retreat, because only a victory could get him out of the dangers around him.14
What happened during the night march?
Both armies set off at ten o'clock on the same road, each meaning to surprise the other. North of Saunders Creek, roughly halfway between the two camps, the advance guards ran into each other in the dark. Cornwallis put the clash at about half past two, Tarleton a little after two, Lee about one and Williams at midnight. Armand's cavalry at the head of the American column broke and fled back into the Maryland infantry, while Lieutenant Colonel Porterfield's light infantry stood and stopped the British van. Porterfield was mortally wounded.15
Both sides stopped firing and pulled back to wait for daylight. Cornwallis questioned his guides and learned that the ground, narrowed by swamps on both flanks, was, as he wrote, “extremely favourable for my numbers”: Gates could not use his larger army to get round him. He decided not to risk a fight in the dark.16
On the American side, a prisoner told Williams that Cornwallis himself was in front with about 3,000 regulars. Gates called his generals together and asked what should be done. After a silence Stevens answered that it was too late to do anything but fight, and nobody disagreed.17
How was the Battle of Camden fought?
At first light the armies faced each other across open pine woods. Gates put the Continentals of the 2nd Maryland Brigade and the Delaware regiment under de Kalb and Gist on his right, the North Carolina militia under Caswell in the center and Stevens's Virginians on his left, with Smallwood's 1st Maryland Brigade in a second line. Cornwallis put his best regulars, the light infantry and the 23rd and 33rd Regiments under Lieutenant Colonel James Webster, on his right, opposite the Virginians. Rawdon's division on the left, facing the Continentals, was made up of provincial and loyalist corps: the Volunteers of Ireland, the infantry of Tarleton's British Legion, Hamilton's Royal North Carolina Regiment and Bryan's North Carolina refugees. The 71st Highlanders and Tarleton's dragoons waited behind.18
Seeing the American left shifting its position, Cornwallis ordered Webster to attack at once. Williams had persuaded Gates to send Stevens's brigade forward, but the Virginians met the British coming on fast, firing and cheering with fixed bayonets. In Williams's words, they “threw down their loaded arms and fled, in the utmost consternation”. The North Carolinians followed. Williams wrote that at least two thirds of the army ran without firing a shot; only part of Colonel Dixon's North Carolina regiment, next to the Continentals, stood and fired.19
Gates wrote to Congress that “to my astonishment, the left wing and North-Carolina militia gave way”. He and Caswell tried to rally them, but with the British cavalry behind them “they ran like a torrent, and bore all before them”. Williams used the same image: the torrent of unarmed militia carried Gates away with it.20
On the right, hidden by a haze that kept the smoke hanging over the field, the Continentals did not even know the rest of the army had gone. Gist's brigade held Rawdon's division, charged, and took prisoners. Webster, instead of chasing the militia, wheeled his regulars onto the open left flank of the Continentals. The 1st Maryland Brigade was driven back twice and rallied twice. Fortescue says the regulars held out for some three quarters of an hour.21
Then Cornwallis sent in Tarleton's dragoons against the flank and rear while his infantry charged with the bayonet. The last American line broke. Tarleton wrote that Gist got away with about a hundred men by wading through the swamp, the only party to leave the field in a compact body, though Williams insisted that not even a company retired in order. Tarleton's Legion chased the rest for some twenty two miles, as far as Hanging Rock, taking prisoners, the army's guns, its ammunition wagons and its baggage.22
What happened to Baron de Kalb?
Johann de Kalb was not born a baron. He was born Johann Kalb to peasant parents in 1721 in Hüttendorf, a Franconian village now in Bavaria. He joined the French army in 1743 as Jean de Kalb, rose to brigadier general and sailed to America with the young Lafayette in 1777, holding Silas Deane's promise of a major general's commission in the Continental army.23
He fought on foot with the 2nd Maryland Brigade and led a charge into Rawdon's line. He went down with some eleven wounds, most of them, the American Battlefield Trust says, from bayonets; Kapp quotes his aide, the Chevalier du Buysson, who was captured with him, on the same eleven wounds.24
De Kalb was carried into Camden and died there, a prisoner, on 19 August 1780. His captors buried him with military honors. In 1825 Lafayette laid the cornerstone of a monument to him in Camden, and his remains now lie beneath it in the yard of Bethesda Presbyterian Church.25
Did Gates run away from Camden?
He did leave the field, and he did not stop for a long time. Gates and Caswell first hoped to rally the militia a few miles back, but the men kept scattering. That night Gates was in Charlotte, about sixty miles away. He then rode on to Hillsborough, which Henry Lee put 180 miles from Camden and John Maass of the Army's Center of Military History about 200. The American Battlefield Trust reckons Gates covered nearly 170 miles in three days.26
Gates defended the ride in his letter to Congress: no force could be collected at Charlotte, so he went on to Hillsborough, the seat of North Carolina's government, to plan a new defense with the legislature. His critics did not accept it. Congress resolved that a court of inquiry should examine his conduct and told Washington to appoint a successor in the meantime. Washington chose Nathanael Greene.27
Gates went home to Virginia to wait for the inquiry. He later rejoined Washington's army in its camp near Newburgh, New York, but Camden was his last command in the field. Our page on Nathanael Greene follows the man who rebuilt the southern army.28
What did Camden mean for the loyalists?
Camden was also a battle between Americans. Colonel Samuel Bryan, a Yadkin River landowner, had raised several hundred loyalists in western North Carolina in the summer of 1780, and at Camden his refugees stood in Rawdon's division beside John Hamilton's Royal North Carolina Regiment. On the other side Griffith Rutherford, a brigadier general of the North Carolina militia, was shot through the leg, cut on the head and taken prisoner.29
Cornwallis read the victory as the end of the rebellion in the province. He sent word into North Carolina for loyalists to take up arms, and on 18 August Tarleton surprised and scattered Sumter's force, freeing about a hundred British prisoners. Fortescue, writing from the British side, saw the weakness behind the triumph: the British could place no trust in the local levies, and the partisan war went on.30
Seven weeks later a loyalist force under Major Patrick Ferguson was destroyed at Kings Mountain, which, the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography says, demoralized the loyalist militia.31
How many soldiers died at Camden?
The British return lists 68 killed, 245 wounded and 11 missing, 324 in all. The 33rd Foot, in the thick of the fight with the Continentals, lost 100 of them, more than any other unit.32
Nobody ever counted the American losses. Cornwallis reported between 800 and 900 killed and about 1,000 prisoners, many of them wounded; his ordnance return lists eight brass field guns taken. The South Carolina Encyclopedia gives about 800 killed or wounded and 1,000 prisoners, Fortescue about 1,000 killed and wounded and more than 1,000 prisoners, and the American Battlefield Trust 1,050 casualties.33
Who won the Battle of Camden, and why did it matter?
Cornwallis won one of the most complete victories of the war. Fortescue calls the defeat crushing, and the American Battlefield Trust says it cleared South Carolina of organized American resistance and opened the way into North Carolina.34
The reasons are not hard to find. Gates took the barren road, fed his men badly, marched raw militia at night and put them opposite the best British regiments. Henry Lee, as Kapp quotes him, judged that Gates had relied proudly on the weight of his name.35
Yet the victory did not hold the South. Kings Mountain in October, Greene's arrival, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse drew Cornwallis north, and in October 1781 he surrendered at Yorktown. Maass notes that within fifteen months of Camden the British held only a few enclaves on the coast. See also Washington vs Cornwallis.36
Where was the Battle of Camden fought?
The field lies about six miles north of the town of Camden, in Kershaw County, South Carolina, between branches of Gum Creek. When the National Park Service nominated it as a National Historic Landmark in 1975, the nomination described open country, light timber and marshland along the creeks.37
In the fall of 2022 archaeologists from the University of South Carolina's Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology recovered the remains of 14 men killed in the battle, some only six inches below the surface. The team's first findings pointed to twelve Continentals from Maryland or Delaware, a probable North Carolina loyalist and a soldier of the British 71st Regiment. They were reburied on the battlefield in April 2023.38
