Banastre Tarleton

Regarded as among the most skilled leaders of the British military during the American Revolution, Banastre Tarleton waged a vicious campaign against patriots in the south. Sophie has chosen a similarly controversial 20th century military leader whose origin coincidentally begins in the very place where "Bloody Ban's" ruthless tactics inspired the slogan Tarleton's Quarter.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Banastra Tarlatin and the Brilliant Discomfort of the Wrong Side, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of people who made history under circumstances that history subsequently found inconvenient, wearer of a scarf that my American visiting fellow described this morning as very British, to which I responded, Thank you, I was aiming for that, and which exchange feels on reflection precisely appropriate for the episode we are about to record, because today we are going to do something that I suspect a portion of my American listeners will find, depending on their temperament, either admirably even handed or mildly provocative. We are going to talk seriously and without apology about one of the most gifted cavalry commanders of the eighteenth century, who is remembered primarily as a villain, specifically as the villain of the American Revolution, the man the American narrative most needs to be unreservedly bad in order to work as cleanly as it prefers to work. He was not unreservedly bad. He was, like most gifted and ruthless soldiers in history, a great deal more complicated than the role assigned to him, and the complications are, as usual, more interesting than the simplification. I should say immediately that I am English, and that England lost the American Revolution, and that the English relationship to that defeat has historically been one of studied indifference, occasionally interrupted by genuine bewilderment, in the way that the English tend to respond to things they did not expect. We did not expect to lose America. We were not entirely sure what to do about it. We moved on, built a different empire, and quietly decided that perhaps democracy was the sort of thing that suited the colonies rather better than it suited us, and got on with the business of governing a quarter of the world's land surface through other means. This is a characteristically English response to historical catastrophe, and I mention it because it helps explain why Bernastra Tarlton, who is a significant figure in American history, is a relatively minor one in British history, not because he did not deserve attention, but because the war he fought in is, from the British perspective, a somewhat embarrassing chapter that the national narrative prefers to summarize briskly and move past. He does not deserve to be summarised briskly. He deserves an honest account. This is it. Bonastray Tarlton, born august twenty first, seventeen fifty four, in Liverpool, England, died january sixteenth, eighteen thirty three, at Lintwadine, in Herefordshire, seventy eight years old. He outlived the war by fifty years, outlived his infamy by fifty years, outlived the reputations of most of the people who had formed their opinion of him in the burning backcountry of South Carolina in seventeen eighty, and died a baronet, a knight grand cross of the Order of the Bath, a general, a former Member of Parliament, and a man whose portrait hangs in the National Gallery, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in the green coat and distinctive helmet of the British Legion. The portrait is worth looking at. We will return to it. He came from Liverpool, which in the seventeen fifties was not primarily the musical city of later mythology, but primarily a commercial city of enormous, morally uncomfortable wealth, a great deal of which derived from the transatlantic slave trade. His father, John Tarleton, was a merchant and slave trader who became mayor of Liverpool. His grandfather was a shipowner and slaver. The Tarleton family wealth was built substantially on the bodies of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic, and this fact is not incidental to Banastre Tarleton's biography. It is central to understanding both the world he came from and the political positions he would later take in parliament, where he became one of the most vehement defenders of the mm slave trade against the abolitionists who were trying to end it. He was not defending an abstraction. He was defending his family's commercial foundation, which he understood perfectly well, and which is one of the less flattering things about him, and which I am mentioning now rather than burying at the end because it is part of the honest account and not a footnote. He was educated at the Middle Temple in London, the law school, and at University College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1771. He did not predictably complete the degree. He appears to have been the sort of Oxford student who found the social and sporting dimensions of the university more compelling than the academic ones, which is a tradition that the university has accommodated across the centuries with remarkable institutional patience. His father died in seventeen seventy three, leaving him the substantial sum of five thousand pounds. He gambled most of it away within a year. This again is characteristic. Throughout his life, Tarlton displayed an absolute and entirely consistent inability to manage money with anything approaching prudence, a quality that sat oddly alongside his military discipline, and that suggests the presence of two distinct and largely unacquainted halves of the same personality. Facing financial ruin at twenty one, he purchased a cavalry commission, a cornetse in the first Dragoon Guards, in April 1775, with his mother's financial assistance. The timing was either fortunate or well calculated, depending on whether you believe in his instinct for finding where the action was. The American Revolution had begun at Lexington and Concord the same month. Tarlton volunteered immediately for American service. He reached Cape Fear, North Carolina with Lord Cornwallis in the spring of 1776. What he did in America between 1776 and 1781 is the core of his reputation, and the reputation requires some disentangling from the legend that has accumulated around it, because the legend, which is the legend of Bloody Ban, the massacre at Waxhawse, the man who gave no quarter, and inspired the phrase Tarlton's Quarter as a synonym for merciless killing, is not exactly false, but it is not exactly complete either. And the incompleteness is doing a great deal of political work. His early years in America, from 1776 to 1779, were distinguished by a quality of daring and energy that made him unusually effective in the irregular, fast moving operations that American backcountry warfare required. He was personally brave to a degree that his contemporaresc, and that the evidence suggests was in fact calculated. He understood that cavalry command in this era required the commander to lead from the front, that men would not follow into positions they would not follow their officer into, and that the officer's physical courage was therefore a military asset, rather than a personal indulgence. In December 1776, he participated in the capture of American General Charles Lee at Basing Ridge, New Jersey. A significant coup since Lee was at that moment considered by many the most capable American general in the field. The operation demonstrated Tarleton's talent for rapid movement and surprise. He was promoted captain in 1777 and served in the Pennsylvania campaign, building a reputation for aggressive scouting and light cavalry operations that brought him to the attention of senior commanders. In 1778, he was appointed Lieutenant Colonel and given command of the newly formed British Legion, a unit whose composition and character are essential to understanding what followed. The British Legion was not a unit of regular British Army soldiers. It was composed primarily of American loyalists, colonists who remained loyal to the crown, who were fighting for a Britain they believed in, against neighbors who had chosen rebellion. This distinction matters enormously, and it is almost entirely absent from the American popular narrative of Tarlton, which presents the Legion as a British force terrorizing American patriots. The Legion was, in large part, an American force. Many of its members had suffered personally at the hands of patriot neighbours, had property destroyed, families threatened, social positions dismantled. They were fighting with the intensity and the bitterness of people engaged in a civil war, which is what the American Revolution, particularly in the South, substantially was. Tarlton led the Legion in green coats, his men became the Green Dragoons, the Green Horse, in a series of rapid operations across South Carolina and North Carolina in 1780 that were militarily devastating, and that built the reputation, as reputations in war always do, on a combination of genuine achievement and genuine atrocity, in proportions that are genuinely difficult to separate at this distance. The Battle of the Waxhawse on may twenty ninth, seventeen eighty, is the event most associated with his name in American memory, and it requires the most careful handling. Tarleton's legion intercepted a force of Continental soldiers under Colonel Abraham Buford, near Lancaster, South Carolina. Buford had refused Tarleton's demand for surrender. What followed when Tarlton's cavalry charged Buford's infantry was the destruction of the Continental Force. Somewhere between one hundred and thirteen and three hundred of Buford's approximately three hundred and fifty men were killed, with a disproportionately small number taken prisoner. American accounts charged that Tarlton's men had continued killing after a white flag was raised. That quarter had been asked and refused, hence Tarlton's quarter. The British account, and specifically Tarlton's own account, offered a different explanation. His horse was shot and fell, pinning him beneath it, and his men, believing him killed, were overtaken by a vindictive fury and continued fighting past the point of military necessity. He wrote in his own history of the campaign with a candour that is either admirable or calculated, that his soldiers engaged in a vindictive asperity not easily restrained. This account has been debated by historians for two centuries and has never been definitively resolved. Was Waxhawse a massacre of surrendering soldiers or a continuation of a battle not yet surrendered? The evidence is genuinely ambiguous, genuinely contested, and genuinely important, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I will say is this. In the context of the Southern Campaign of 1780, atrocities were committed by both sides. The Patriot militia in the Carolinas committed acts of violence against loyalists that were at least as brutal as anything Tarlton's legion did, and in some cases considerably more so. The execution of loyalist prisoners after the Battle of King's Mountain in October 1780, for example, was not a case of soldiers losing control in the chaos of battle. It was the deliberate execution of men who had surrendered, conducted with a thoroughness that contemporary accounts describe without evident discomfort. The Southern Campaign of the American Revolution was a civil war of unusual ferocity, and Tarlton was operating within it, not above it or apart from it. This is not exculpation, it is context. Context is what distinguishes history from mythology. His subsequent operations in 1780, at Fishing Creek, at Camden, at Blackstocks, demonstrated a pattern of swift movement and tactical surprise that was genuinely innovative for American theatre warfare. At Camden in August 1780, the British victory over General Horatio Gates was one of the most decisive engagements of the Southern Campaign, and Tarleton's cavalry pursuit of the broken American army after the battle was a major factor in its completeness. Camden was, in military terms, a serious American defeat, and Tarlton's role in it was significant and effective. And then CowPens, january seventeenth, seventeen eighty one. CowPens is the battle that undid the reputation that Waxhawse had made, and it is, in its own way, one of the most instructive engagements in the history of the American Revolution, not because it demonstrated the invincibility of the Patriot cause, but because it demonstrated with painful precision the specific limitations of Tarleton's style of command. Tarlton was pursuing General Daniel Morgan's mixed force of Continental Regulars and militia through the Carolina backcountry. He moved fast, as he always moved fast, covering ninety-five miles in five days in winter conditions, pressing Morgan to prevent him from linking up with Nathaniel Green's main army. When Morgan stopped and offered battle at a place called Hannah's Calpens, Tarleton attacked immediately, before his men had rested, before he had fully reconnoitred the position, before he had considered why Morgan, a seasoned soldier, had chosen to stand and fight at this particular moment. The reason Morgan had chosen to stand was that he had designed a trap, and Tarleton's aggressiveness was the trap's mechanism. Morgan placed his militiamen in forward lines, knowing that they would not stand long under pressure, but could deliver controlled fire and then retreat without breaking, using the militia's unreliability as a tactical tool rather than fighting against it. The Continental Regulars were in the rear. When the British advance drove the militia back and the British infantry followed in pursuit, what appeared to be a route suddenly became a controlled retrograde movement, and the Continental Regulars, fresh and formed, delivered a devastating volley at close range. The British infantry broke. Tarton's cavalry, arriving to support, was caught in the confusion. The result was the most complete British tactical defeat of the Southern Campaign. Of Tarton's force of approximately eleven hundred men, perhaps eight hundred were killed or captured. Tarton himself escaped with a cavalry remnant, fighting a personal sabre jewel with American cavalry commander William Washington in the process, which is the kind of detail that belongs in a novel, but is in this case documented by multiple witnesses. He escaped, his army did not. He was twenty six years old. He'd lost his first set piece battle by being exactly what he always was aggressive, fast, certain, against an opponent who had studied him precisely and designed the battlefield to use those qualities against him. It is one of the cleaner illustrations of the military principle that a commander's greatest strength, pushed beyond its appropriate context, becomes his greatest vulnerability. Tarleton was brilliant at the raid, the pursuit, the surprise attack. He was not, as Cowpins demonstrated, a set piece battle commander of equivalent quality. He wrote about Calpins in his History of the Campaigns, published in 1787, with a frankness that managed simultaneously to acknowledge the defeat and to distribute blame for it to Cornwallis's broader strategic dispositions, a piece of literary and self-protective ingenuity that caused a considerable public row with Cornwallis, and that did not, it is fair to say, entirely repair his military reputation, but that demonstrated a capacity for self-justification in prose that he would continue to deploy in Parliament for the next two decades. He returned to England in 1782, he was twenty seven years old, he was a national hero. This is the part that the American narrative tends to omit, because it is inconvenient for the clean moral structure that requires him to be a villain, and villains are not supposed to come home to parades. He returned to a Britain that viewed the American War as a loss, but viewed Tarleton personally as a figure who had fought brilliantly in a lost cause, and the British relationship to people who fight brilliantly in lost causes is, as I have mentioned in previous episodes, a specifically warm and specific one. He was befriended by the Prince of Wales. He was painted by Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, two of the foremost portrait painters of the eighteenth century, men who did not waste their considerable reputations on people who did not deserve them. The Reynolds portrait, in which Tarlton stands in his Legion green coat with his distinctive dragoon helmet, smoke from a battle visible in the background, is one of the great portraits of the period. He looks in it exactly what he was, young, handsome, confident, and entirely aware of the impression he is making. He also began around this time, a relationship with Mary Robinson, the actress and poet known as Perdita, who was famous for having been the mistress of the Prince of Wales, and who was, by seventeen eighty two, available and interested. The relationship lasted approximately fifteen years. Which is considerably longer than most of his other commitments, and it was, by the evidence of their correspondence, genuinely affectionate as well as mutually useful. She helped write his parliamentary speeches, and he provided her with social protection and the specific status that attachment to a celebrated soldier conferred in Georgian London society. The story of Tarton and Robinson is the subject of Robert Bass's 1957 biography, The Green Dragoon, which I recommend to anyone who finds Georgian England's entanglement of celebrity, politics, and romantic drama as appealing as I do, and which I confess to having read on a train journey to Edinburgh with considerable enjoyment. He became MP for Liverpool in 1790. Liverpool, his home city, the city built on the slave trade that his family had helped to build, the city that wanted a man in parliament who would defend its commercial interests against the abolitionists, who were beginning to make those interests electorally uncomfortable. He served as MP for Liverpool with a single brief interruption from 1790 to 1812, twenty years in Parliament. His parliamentary record is, to put it charitably, mixed. He spoke on military matters with genuine knowledge and some effect. He defended the transatlantic slave trade with a consistency and a vigour that reflected his constituents' economic interests and his family's commercial foundations, and that reflected nothing admirable about him. He was on the wrong side of the most important moral question of his era, and he was on it not from ignorance but from interest, and the distinction between those two grounds for being wrong is, in my view, ethically significant. He rose through military ranks he never again deployed in battle. Major General in 1794, Lieutenant General in 1801, General in 1812. He was made a baronet in 1815. He married Susan Bertie in 1798, had no legitimate children, and died in 1833 in the Herefordshire countryside, old and decorated and largely forgotten by the public that had celebrated him forty years before. He was, in summary, a man of extraordinary gifts, deployed in deeply compromised service of a cause that failed on behalf of an empire that was simultaneously building the legal and commercial infrastructure of one of history's greatest crimes. He was also, within that context, one of the most gifted light cavalry commanders of his era, a man who understood mobile warfare with an instinctive clarity that his opponents eventually had to design a specific trap to defeat, and whose personal courage under fire was documented by people who had every reason not to admire him. Holding all of that simultaneously as the historian's job, I find that I can do it, and that doing it produces a more interesting account than either the villain narrative or the rehabilitation narrative would allow. Now the tease. What happens to a gifted military professional of complex moral legacy, who is made by the narrative needs of a particular historical conflict, into the face of everything the other side finds most threatening and most objectionable, and who then, having served that narrative purpose, is substantially forgotten by the very tradition that made him famous. Picture a skilled military professional operating in an asymmetric conflict, a conflict in which one side has conventional military superiority, and the other has popular legitimacy, at least in the eyes of international opinion. Someone who employed aggressive tactics, operated with exceptional speed, and achieved a series of military successes that were genuinely impressive by any objective standard, and that were also, at various points, accompanied by conduct that the laws of war, as understood by the opposing side and by international observers, characterised as excessive or unlawful. Picture someone who became, in the popular consciousness of the opposing side, the human face of everything they were fighting against. Not because their personal conduct was uniquely terrible in the context of the conflict, but because they were visible, named, and available to serve as a symbol in a way that anonymous policy and institutional violence are not. Picture someone who was, in the eyes of their own side, not a war criminal, but a highly effective professional doing a difficult job in circumstances of considerable operational pressure, whose tactics were regarded as legitimate adaptations to the specific demands of the conflict, and whose critics were regarded as people who either did not understand the operational realities or who were motivated by political rather than military considerations. Picture someone whose post-conflict career continued without the prosecution that the other side occasionally demanded, who rose in institutional standing, and whose legacy remains bitterly contested between the two traditions that claim ownership of the conflicts meaning Who is this? It is General William Westmoreland. I see some of you nodding and some of you frowning. And I want to address both groups, because this comparison works on a different axis than most of the others in this series. William Childs Westmoreland was born on March twenty sixth, nineteen fourteen, in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, which is, as it happens, approximately seventy miles from the Waxhawse district, where Tarlton's most notorious engagement took place, which is either a coincidence I find delightful, or a piece of geographical irony that I have arranged deliberately for narrative purposes, and I will let you decide which. He attended West Point, graduated in 1936, served with distinction in the Second World War and Korea, and became commander of United States Military Assistance Command Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, the period of the largest American military buildup in Vietnam, and the period that included the Tet Offensive of early 1968, which is the engagement most associated with the dissonance between official military optimism and operational reality that defines the public understanding of Westmoreland's command. He was a professional soldier of genuine ability within conventional military parameters. His critics, and they were numerous and included many within the military establishment, argued that his strategy, the strategy of attrition through search and destroy operations and measured by body count, was fundamentally misconceived for the specific conflict he was fighting, that it was calibrated to the kind of war in which conventional metrics of military success, territory controlled, enemy casualties inflicted, material destroyed, corresponded to actual strategic progress, when in fact the Vietnam War was a conflict in which those metrics were almost entirely disconnected from the actual question of whether the South Vietnamese state would survive, which required political rather than military solutions, and in which the alienation of the civilian population through the methods of search and destroy was directly counterproductive to the political objective. The parallel with Tarlton, his structural and precise. First, the gifted professional in the wrong kind of war. Tarton was a brilliant light cavalry commander, whose skills, speed, aggression, the raid, the pursuit, were precisely suited to certain kinds of engagements and catastrophically unsuited to others, as Cowpens demonstrated. Westmoreland was a capable conventional army commander, whose approach, firepower, attrition, the operational metrics of conventional warfare, was precisely suited to certain kinds of conflicts and demonstrably unsuited to the specific insurgency and civil war he was managing in Vietnam. Second, the conduct controversy. Talton's wax horse created Tarlton's quarter as a phrase and a symbol. Westmoreland's command coincided with and his operational approach created the conditions for incidents including the Milai Massacre of March nineteen sixty eight, in which between three hundred and five hundred Vietnamese civilians were killed by American soldiers. Westmoreland did not order Milee. Tarlton's personal culpability for wax horse is similarly ambiguous. In both cases, the question of command responsibility how far up the chain of command the accountability for atrocity in the field extends is genuinely difficult and genuinely important, and in both cases the official military response was substantially to contain rather than to confront that question. Third, the symbol of the opposing narrative. Tarton became in American revolutionary mythology, the face of British imperial brutality, more than Cornwallis, more than any other British officer, because his aggressiveness made him visible and his visibility made him available. Westmoreland became in the anti war movement's narrative the face of American military hubris and the failed strategy of attrition more than any single politician, in some ways more than McNamara, because the general is a more satisfying symbol of militarism than the Secretary of Defense. Fourth, the genuine military achievement in the context. Tarton won every significant engagement except Calpens, and Calpens was a specifically designed trap. His operational record in the Southern campaign was, by the standards of the conflict, impressive. Westmoreland's management of the American military buildup was professionally competent in the conventional sense. The logistical achievement of deploying half a million American troops to Southeast Asia and sustaining them in the field was not trivial. The professional criticism is not that he was incompetent, but that he was competent at the wrong things. Fifth, the post-conflict trajectory. Tarleton returned to England, was celebrated, entered Parliament, rose in rank, and died honored by the establishment that had sent him to America. Westmoreland returned to the United States, served briefly as Army Chief of Staff, ran unsuccessfully for Governor of South Carolina in 1974, and died in 2005, after decades in which his reputation was almost entirely defined by Vietnam and by the CBS documentary that accused him in 1982 of deceiving civilian leadership about the strength of enemy forces, an accusation that led to a libel trial that was settled without verdict. He was, like Tarlton, a man whose extraordinary professional gifts were exercised in a losing cause under circumstances that generated a mythology of blame, and whose post conflict life was shaped by the weight of that mythology. Where do the parallels strain? The scales are different in ways that matter morally. Tarleton commanded a force of perhaps a thousand men at its largest. Westmoreland commanded half a million. The death toll of the Vietnam War, approximately fifty eight thousand American servicemen and women, and somewhere between one point five and three point five million Vietnamese military and civilian deaths operates in a different register from the Southern Campaign of the American Revolution, however brutal that campaign was. The moral weight of strategic command is not proportional to tactical command, and I want to be precise about that. Tarlton was also in a specific and verifiable sense braver than Westmoreland in the personal physical sense. He led his cavalry from the front, was present in the heat of engagements, fought the sabre duel at Cowpins while his force was collapsing around him. Westmoreland commanded from headquarters this is not a criticism. Commanding half a million men from headquarters is the appropriate method, and a theatre commander who leads cavalry charges is not doing his job. But it means the nature of the courage involved is different, and the nature of the accountability is different. And Talton's slave trade advocacy in Parliament is a dimension of his biography that Westmoreland's career does not replicate. The specific commercial evil that Talton defended and the specific family interest he was defending in defending it gives his post war record a moral quality distinct from anything in Westmoreland's life. The verdict Talton. And I say this as an English woman, with every personal reason to prefer a subject who does not represent the losing side in a conflict that my country has preferred to forget, and who does not carry the specific commercial evil of the Liverpool slave trade as his biographical foundation. But Tarleton is the more compelling figure because he is the more purely concentrated expression of the type. He is the brilliant cavalry commander in miniature, personal, physical, present, operating at the scale where his gifts were visible and his failures were human sized. His story has the quality of a story about a person rather than an institution. Cowpins is a better story than any equivalent moment in Westmoreland's biography, because at Calpins you can see the man, the speed, the aggression, the overconfidence, the sabre jewel in the moment of defeat, in a way that is simply not available in the abstract machinery of strategic command. He is also more compelling because the gap between his reputation and his reality is larger, and bridging it is more instructive. Westmoreland's reputation, however contested, is broadly proportional to his actual historical role. Tarton's reputation, Bloody Ban, the monster of the wax horse, the villain of the patriot, in which he appeared fictionalized as a character who commits acts that Talton himself is not documented to have committed, is substantially a construction of narrative necessity, built by a revolutionary tradition that needed a human face for British brutality, and found one in a twenty five year old cavalryman from Liverpool, who moved too fast and hit too hard and stopped at nothing, and who had the misfortune of being exactly what a good villain needs to be. Present, named, and recognizably vividly himself. He would have found the comparison to Westmoreland either baffling or satisfying, depending on whether anyone explained to him who Westmoreland was. He would have found the villain mythology entirely unsurprising, and probably would have managed it with the same combination of published self justification and aristocratic indifference that he applied to his actual critics. Banastra Talton, born Liverpool, 1754, died Lentwardine, 1833, Lieutenant Colonel of the British Legion, Green Dragoon, Bloody Band, Member of Parliament, Baronet, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, the man who gave no quarter, and then lived for fifty years in the quiet English countryside, breeding race horses and defending the slave trade, while America made him into a legend. He was not as bad as the legend, he was not as good as the portrait. He was a man of his time, comprehensively, which is both the most accurate and the most unsatisfying verdict available. But I prefer unsatisfying truth to satisfying fiction, and I think after eight or nine episodes of this series you might have gathered that about me. I'm Sophie Manners. Thank you for being here. The Joshua Reynolds portrait is in the National Gallery and is absolutely worth a detour. Do look at it. Look at the face, look at the confidence, the youth, the absolute self possession of a man who has spent two years destroying armies and who fully expects to spend two more doing the same. Then look up what happened at Cowpen's. History has a very fine sense of irony when it chooses to deploy it. Good night.