On the afternoon of 15 March 1781, at Guilford Courthouse near today's Greensboro, North Carolina, Lord Cornwallis's British army attacked the American southern army of General Nathanael Greene. After hours of hard fighting in woods and clearings, Greene withdrew and the British held the field. But Cornwallis had lost about a quarter of his men, and within weeks he gave up the Carolinas and marched toward Virginia, where the campaign ended at Yorktown.
The chase across the Carolinas
By 1780 British strategy had turned south, to recruit loyalists and win back the southern colonies. After the loyalist defeat at Kings Mountain in October 1780 and the American victory at Cowpens on 17 January 1781, Cornwallis set out to destroy Greene's army. Greene retreated north all the way into Virginia, wearing down his pursuers; Cornwallis even burned his own baggage train to move faster, and still never caught him.1
By early March Greene had gathered his forces and chose to fight at Guilford Courthouse, a few log buildings on the main road between Petersburg and Salisbury. Britannica and the Encyclopedia of North Carolina both put his army at about 4,400 men; Britannica gives Cornwallis about 2,400 veterans, the Encyclopedia about 2,000.2
Three lines in the woods
Greene drew up his army in three lines. North Carolina militia held the first line with two cannon, Virginia militia the second, and his Continental regulars, about 1,500 of them according to the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, the third. The militia were to fire two or three times and then fall back. Britannica notes that Greene kept no reserve, and that his force included at least 45 free Black soldiers.3
The British attacked at about half past one. The North Carolina militia fired and withdrew, but most of them left the field altogether. The British pushed on into thick woods, where the Virginians gave them a longer and harder fight before they too were driven back.4
Victory at a price
At the third line the battle turned into a fierce hand-to-hand fight. Counterattacks by the American cavalry of William Washington and Henry Lee's Legion stopped an assault by the Guards but could not break the British. In the end, Britannica writes, British artillery fire that killed many of Cornwallis's own men as it broke up the American line, together with a charge by his reserve cavalry, decided the day. Remembering the disaster at Camden the previous August, Greene withdrew his army intact.5
Britannica gives British losses as 93 killed, 413 wounded and 26 missing, and American losses as 70 to 80 killed, 183 wounded and 1,046 missing, most of them militia who simply went home. Both encyclopedias agree that Cornwallis had lost about a quarter of his army. According to the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, the Whig politician Charles James Fox told the House of Commons that another such victory would ruin the British Army.6
The road to Yorktown
Cornwallis did not pursue. He fell back and then marched to Wilmington on the coast to rest and refit, and from there into Virginia. Greene turned south and over the following months pushed the British out of most of the Carolinas. The National Park Service counts Kings Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse as the chain of defeats that turned the war in the South and made Yorktown possible, where Cornwallis surrendered seven months after Guilford.7
The battlefield became Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in 1917. The full story of the battle is told in our article on Guilford Courthouse; for the commander who lost the field and won the campaign, see our profile of Nathanael Greene, and for the battle that set it in motion, our article on Cowpens.8
Note: strengths and losses differ between sources, and the text names the source for each figure.
