A Devil of a Whipping by Lawrence E. Babits

Earlier that year, in August, British forces under Maj. Nathanael Greene took command of demoralized American forces in the Southern Department, replacing Maj. Nonetheless, the Custer example seems to have indicated to Babits that a similar kind of meticulous fieldwork might be applied to Cowpens vis-a-vis pension applications and the physical battlefield itself. Because of decomposition, archaeologists are prevented from plotting unit locations and the flow of battle at Cowpens. However, eighteenth-century ammunition used paper and cloth cartridges, not metal. Recent digs at the Little Big Horn and resulting computerized databases on artifacts, sites, and terrain have refined and expanded the sources on the Custer fight and led to revised interpretations of the battle's final details. The final spur came from Babits's particular field of expertise, historical archaeology. Thus the battle's obscurity and participants' and historians' diverging standpoints provided Babits with the initial impetus for his research. Moreover, contemporary accounts and histories of the battle are conflicting, particularly regarding the number of troops involved. Babits posits that this may be due to professional and popular interest in George Washington (ibid.). Yet, despite the battle's significance in both the final American victory and its own rightful status as a 'tactical masterpiece,' it is, according to Babits, 'not well known today' (p. The Revolutionaries' victory at Cowpens was one of the brightest American tactical moments in the War for Independence and a contributing factor toward the eventual British surrender at Yorktown. Babits, an associate professor of maritime history and nautical archaeology at East Carolina State University, painstakingly combed through pension records, participants' accounts, and contemporary maps in order to produce this sophisticated and deftly written examination of one of the American Revolution's key battles. Babits's Devil of a Whipping is a model study of the 1781 Battle of Cowpens that integrates 'new military history' and its bottom-up approach with traditional operational history and a keen understanding of terrain and topography.

A Devil of a Whipping by Lawrence E. Babits