I had a wonderful time last week in North Carolina. And so is a part of Book Eight. Everybody knows about Valley Forge and Washington Crossing the Delaware you do know, I hope, that artists of the period took considerable license, and were not, in fact, present at most of the stirring scenes they painted—including the one of General Washington standing up like a ninnyhammer in a boat making its way through a surging river full of ice-floes , and the Continental Congress in Philadelphia— and all that.
Unless you live in the Carolinas, of course. In other words, they decided to try to cut the Colonies in two, occupy and subdue the southern colonies, and thus be able eventually to attack the northern colonies from two sides, as well as to more effectively throttle trade by controlling all the southern ports. It might have worked. In fact, the British won the battle at Guilford Courthouse. But it cost them dearly. The Americans fought like demons.
The British army won the ground, but sacrificed a great many men to do so—what we call a Pyrrhic victory—and the war began to go downhill for them from this point. So much, I could get from books. That, and a lot more—biographies of the major people involved Major Banastre Tarleton, for one.
I want to know all the things you can find in books—but I still want to see where it happened. Battles are different, one from another, and not only because of the arrangement of troops, the movement of cavalry, and the array of artillery.
The personalities of the officers—and often, of individual soldiers—affect a battle, as does the condition of the two armies when it takes place.
