The Battles of Spencer's Ordinary and Green Spring, 1781 (Small Battles

The decisive Yorktown campaign of 1781 in Virginia, in which an American and French army and navy forced the surrender of the last major British field force in America, was the final Patriot victory of the Revolutionary War. The campaign was an immense and complicated series of operations, a sprawling set of marches, encampments, sea voyages, skirmishes, battles, and a decisive siege that played out from early January to late October 1781. In the weeks before the victorious siege began, a little-known preliminary contest was fought in the Piedmont and Tidewater regions of Virginia between General Charles Cornwallis’s powerful army of redcoats and Hessians, and a small, scrappy force of Continental Army veterans and Virginia militiamen led by the Marquis de Lafayette. From late April to mid-June, a cautious Lafayette avoided fighting a battle against Cornwallis’s far superior force, which was roaming central Virginia destroying Patriot supplies. But after being reinforced in early June, he followed the redcoats more closely, looking for long awaited opportunities to strike the enemy. Lafayette got his chance at Spencer’s Ordinary and Green Spring. Although neither small engagement was an American victory, they demonstrated Lafayette’s maturity as a commander and a renewed capability for Patriot offensives.
            In The Battles of Spencer’s Ordinary and Green Spring, 1781, historian John Maass demonstrates how these overlooked but significant actions reveal a key aspect of the Yorktown campaign. In late June, surprised near a crossroads tavern (also called an ordinary) not far from Williamsburg, British commander John Graves Simcoe and his seasoned subordinate, Johann Ewald, with a mix of Queen’s Rangers, Hessians, and Loyalists, were able to avoid being enveloped, holding off Lafayette’s advanced force long enough for them to be able to fall back into Cornwallis’s main army. Ten days later, on July 6, the British turned the tables, surprising General Anthony Wayne near the Green Spring plantation, forcing Wayne to lead a spirited defense until Lafayette’s main force could arrive and enact a successful retreat for his troops. Full of major characters and exemplary of the smaller battles that helped shape the American Revolution, this volume offers the most detailed look at these two engagements to date.

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