This optimism soon faded. To the men in the field, Cowpens did not seem particularly decisive. Banastre Tarleton was soon back in action at the head of the British cavalry. On February 1, from his sick bed, Morgan wrote a despairing letter to Gov. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, describing the retreat of the Southern army before Cornwallis. “Our men [are] almost naked,” still too weak to fight him. “Great God what is the reason we can’t have more men in the field? How distressing it must be to an anxious mind to see the country over run and destroyed for want of assistance.” The civil war between the rebels and the loyalists continued in South Carolina, marked by the same savage fratricidal strife. “The scenes were awful,” Andrew Pickens recalled. Young James Collins, in his simple, honest way, told the militiaman’s side of this story. Summing up his role at Cowpens, Collins said he fired his “little rifle five times, whether with any effect or not, I do not know.” The following day, he and many other militiamen received “some small share of the plunder” from the captured British wagons. Then, “taking care to get as much powder as we could, we [the militia] disbanded and returned to our old haunts, where we obtained a few days rest.” Within a week, Collins was again on his horse, risking his life as a scout and messenger. Only years later, with a full perspective of the war, did the importance of Cowpens become clear. By destroying Tarleton’s Legion, Daniel Morgan crippled the enemy’s power to intimidate and suppress the militia. Cornwallis was never able to replace the regulars he lost at Cowpens. He had to abandon all thought of dividing his field army—which meant that British power did not extend much beyond the perimeter of his camp. When he pursued Greene’s army deep into North Carolina, the partisans in South Carolina rose in revolt. Eventually, Cornwallis was forced to unite his decimated, half-starved regiments with the British troops in Virginia, where they were trapped by Gen. George Washington’s army at Yorktown in October 1781. In South Carolina, meanwhile, Nathanael Greene combined militia with his small regular army in the style Morgan had originated at Cowpens. Though Greene was forced to retreat without victory at Guilford Courthouse (March 15, 1781), Hobkirks Hill (April 25, 1781), and Eutaw Springs (September 8, 1781), the British army suffered such heavy losses in these and other encounters that they soon abandoned all their posts in the back country, including the fort at Ninety Six, and retreated to a small enclave around Charleston. There they remained, impotent and besieged, until the war was almost over. It took nine years for the U.S. Treasury to scrape together the cash to buy Daniel Morgan the gold medal voted him by Congress for Cowpens. In the spring of 1790, this letter came to the Old Wagoner at his home near Winchester, Virginia: _New York, March 25, 1790_