![The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “Nath [Nathanael] Greene.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.](https://www.thenmusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Screenshot-2025-12-03-at-11.32.14 AM-copy.png)
1780 marked the sixth, disastrous year for the American revolutionaries. The 1777 American victory at Saratoga and French entry into the war had forced a British strategic reappraisal. Savannah fell to a combined Royal Army-Navy expedition in late 1778. Indecisive fighting raged across the region during 1779, punctuated by a failed Franco-American assault on Savannah. A British amphibious force captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780-the worst American defeat of the war. Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga, undertook a counteroffensive, but was crushed by Lt. Gen. Earl Charles Cornwallis’s army at Camden, South Carolina in August 1780. Gates’s defeat merely worsened the summer of crisis for the Americans, with a bankrupt government, near-mutiny in the ranks and Benedict Arnold’s treason. On 3 December 1780, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene replaced Gates as commander of the Southern Department, with his headquarters at Charlotte, North Carolina.
"I arrivd here the 2d of this month and have been in search of the Army I am to command; but without much success; having found nothing but a few half-starved Soldiers who are remarkable for nothing but distress."
Nathanael Greene to Katy Greene, 7 December 1780The Papers of Nathanael Greene, VI. Edited by R.K. Showman, D. Conrad et al. (Chapel Hill: Univ.of North Carolina Press, 1991), 542.