lsborough....
Greene recrosses the Dan.... Loyalists under Colonel Pyle
cut to pieces.... Battle of Guilford.... Lord Cornwallis
retires to Ramsay's mills.... To Wilmington.... Greene
advances to Ramsay's mills.... Determines to enter South
Carolina.... Lord Cornwallis resolves to march to Virginia.

[Sidenote: 1780.]

[Sidenote: Transactions in South Carolina and Georgia.]

In the South, Lord Cornwallis, after having nearly demolished the
American army at Camden, found himself under the necessity of
suspending, for a few weeks, the new career of conquest on which he
had intended to enter. His army was enfeebled by sickness as well as
by action; the weather was intensely hot, and the stores necessary for
an expedition into North Carolina had not been brought from
Charleston. In addition, a temper so hostile to the British interests
had lately appeared in South Carolina as to make it unsafe to withdraw
any considerable part of his force from that state, until he should
subdue the spirit of insurrection against his authority. Exertions
were made in other parts of the state, not inferior to those of
Sumpter in the north-west. Colonel Marion, who had been compelled by
the wounds he received in Charleston to retire into the country, had
been promoted by Governor Rutledge to the rank of a brigadier general.
As the army of Gates approached South Carolina, he had entered the
north-eastern parts of that state with only sixteen men; had
penetrated into the country as far as the Santee; and was successfully
rousing the well-affected inhabitants to arms, when the defeat of the
16th of August chilled the growing spirit of resistance which he had
contributed to increase.

With the force he had collected, he rescued about one hundred and
fifty continental troops who had been captured at Camden, and were on
their way to Charleston. Though compelled, for a short time, to leave
the state, he soon returned to it, and at the head of a few spirited
men, made repeated excursions from the swamps and marshes in which he
concealed himself, and skirmished successfully with the militia who
had joined the British standard, and the small parties of regulars by
whom they were occasionally supported.

His talents as a partisan, added to his knowledge of the country,
enabled him to elude every attempt to seize him; and such was his
humanity as well as respect for the laws, that no violence or outrage
was ever attribut