The Battle of Guilford Courthouse: A Most Desperate Engagement
Presenter: John R. Maass, Educator at the National Museum of the U.S. Army at Fort Belvoir
Join us as Historian John R. Maass recounts the bloody battle of Guilford Courthouse and the grueling campaign in the South that led up to it, a crucial event on the road to American independence. Around the North Carolina village of Guilford Courthouse in the late winter of 1781, two weary armies clashed on a cold, wet afternoon. American forces under Nathanael Greene engaged Lord Cornwallis' British army in a bitter two-hour battle of the Revolutionary War. The frightful contest at Guilford was a severe conflict in which troops made repeated use of their flintlock muskets, steel bayonets and dragoon swords in hand-to-hand fighting that killed and wounded about eight hundred men.