Category: A Victory!
Throughout our history, Americans have repeatedly beaten long odds, inspiring generations by accomplishing the impossible.
American military history in particular offers countless examples of men standing firm against overwhelming enemies, triumphing when all logic tells us they should fail. We as a nation have largely forgotten too many of our heroes—most of us know nothing of Nicholas Biddle, Dan Daly, Littleton Waller, or Philip Kulbes, among many others.
These great men deserve to be remembered, and foremost among them stands Major-General Nathanael Greene, a little-remembered leader of the American Revolution.
Greene, always outnumbered and continually out of supply, spent a year fighting General Cornwallis and lost every battle. But every American loss, carefully planned and managed, drained the British of irreplaceable men and materiel—a strategy Greene summarized as “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again”—and ultimately forced Cornwallis to retreat to Yorktown.
By the summer of 1780, the Americans faced a very bleak military situation. The British held New York, Savannah, and Charleston. Major-General Sir Henry Clinton had just invaded South Carolina, quickly capturing Georgetown, Cheraw, Camden, Ninety-Six, and Augusta, and defeating the Continentals at Waxhaws. And in the three years since Saratoga, the American army had not defeated British Regulars in any major battles.
In mid-August 1780, Major-General Charles Cornwallis sealed British dominance in the South with his crushing victory at the Battle of Camden. In this battle, 1,500 British Regulars and 600 Loyalist militia defeated a 4,000 man Continental army commanded by Major-General Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga.
The Americans lost at least 240 killed, another 700 seriously wounded, hundreds of deserters, and lost a further thousand as prisoners, as well losing all their artillery, wagons, baggage, and horses. Washington relieved Gates of command, appointing Major-General Nathanael Greene to command the remnants of the American army in the Southern theater.
Engraving of a scene from the Battle of Camden, during the Revolutionary War, inAugust 1780. From a painting by Alonzo Chappel. (PhotoQuest/Getty Images)
When Greene joined his army at the North–South Carolina border in December 1780, he found he had only about 1,500 men fit for duty, most of whom lacked ammunition and food. Cornwallis’ 6,000 man army, pursuing the shattered remnants of the American army, encamped just 60 miles south of the Americans.
Washington had reinforcements marching to join Greene and the latter, recognizing he could not supply the few men he had, much less a larger body, made a bold move—he dispatched one-third of his army, commanded by Brigadier-General Daniel Morgan, to the southwest while Greene led the rest of the army to the southeast.
Most of his contemporaries, both British and American, saw this decision as a major blunder—conventional military thinking warns never to divide your forces in the face of a numerically superior enemy.
Greene made this decision in part to relieve his own supply crisis. Though supplies might be on the way, it would be weeks before relief would arrive in meaningful volume, and the Americans had already exhausted all the locally available resources—they had to move on.
By separating his force and keeping them in motion, Greene believed his two smaller forces might find enough food to sustain them day-by-day because they’d be making much smaller demands on the areas through which they marched.
Painting of Nathanael Greene (August 7, 1742 – June 19, 1786) by Charles Willson Peale. (Bildagentur-online/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
But Greene chose to divide his army not simply to alleviate his own supply problems, but to exacerbate supply problems for Cornwallis. By dividing his command into two very small forces, Greene believed each could move far more quickly than the larger British army, and thus both of his small groups could stay ahead of any pursuing British force.
If Cornwallis over-confidently divided his own army to chase both American forces, Greene would have the two elements of his army draw the British units ever further apart, extending Cornwallis’ supply lines through the hostile Carolina backcountry, where Patriot militias could continually harass British supply convoys, and Greene’s own forces would clear the area of all local supplies.
If Cornwallis moved his entire force after either element of Greene’s divided army, the pursued wing would simply out-run the British while the other wing would devastate the long British supply lines.
Greene’s plan worked to perfection. On December 21, 1780, Morgan left Greene’s army at Charlotte, moving 6,000 men to the southwest. Two weeks later, on January 2, 1781, Cornwallis divided his command, dispatching Lieutenant-Colonel Banastre Tarleton to pursue Morgan while he shadowed Greene.
Over the next two weeks, Morgan repeatedly withdrew, always keeping rivers between his men and the pursuing British and drawing Tarleton ever further from Cornwallis. On January 17, Morgan decided to engage the British at Hannah’s Cowpens and destroyed Tarleton’s command.
An engraving depicting American military officer William Washington and British military officer Banastre Tarleton engaged in a sword fight, both on horseback, on the Green River Road during the Battle of Cowpens, in the American Revolutionary War, at Cowpens, South Carolina, January 17, 1781. (Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
An engraving depicting the Battle of Cowpens on January 17, 1781, during the American Revolutionary War. (Prisma/UIG/Getty Images)
Cornwallis turned what remained of his command west, racing to catch and destroy Morgan before Greene could intervene. The British burned their own wagons to speed their movement, but to no avail. Greene and Morgan re-united and withdrew into North Carolina, drawing Cornwallis ever further from his base of supplies.
When Cornwallis followed the Americans into North Carolina, Greene once again divided his force, sending Colonel Otho Williams to harass the British, who now suffered from ever-increasing logistical problems. On February 22, facing critical supply problems, Cornwallis abandoned his pursuit and began again marching south towards British-controlled territories.
Greene responded by also marching south, drawing close enough to tempt Cornwallis into battle. On March 15, 1781, Cornwallis rose to the challenge, attacking the Americans at Guilford Courthouse.
The British won a tactical victory, but lost men and supplies they could not replace. For the next few weeks, Greene shadowed Cornwallis’ army at a safe distance, threatening the fragile British supply lines.
He lost more than a dozen battles as he drew the British out of the Carolinas, but weakened his enemies with every encounter, a strategy Greene summarized when we wrote, “We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again.”
By late April 1781, Cornwallis led his army out of the Carolinas on an urgent march north towards Yorktown, where he hoped finally to re-supply his battered army. And, as I suspect you know, Washington and de la Fayette trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown, where his lack of supplies finally compelled Cornwallis to surrender his army.
“Surrender of Lord Cornwallis” painting by John Trumbull depicting the surrender of the British army Cornwallis’ command at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, to the American and French forces under the command of George Washington.
American armies actually lost most of the major engagements of the Revolutionary War—Bunker Hill, Quebec, Brooklyn, Kip’s Bay, White Plains, Germantown, Brandywine, Savannah, Charleston, and more.
But men like Nathanael Greene illustrate why the Americans ultimately succeeded, despite repeated failures. He recognized his central weakness—he commanded a small army constantly struggling to supply itself—and turned that weakness into a decisive strength.
Greene’s dogged resilience typified the men who won the Revolution, in the process forging the new nation.
David Stewart currently serves as a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Military History and Strategy at Hillsdale College, where he has taught since 1993. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State and has published on a variety of topics relating to eighteenth-century military history.
Categories
What a Stud!
Astronaut Gordon Cooper climbed into a capsule barely larger than a phone booth and launched into space aboard Faith 7.
The mission was simple on paper:
Orbit Earth 22 times.
Stay in space for a full day.
Come home alive.
For most of the flight, everything worked perfectly.
Then, on the 19th orbit, the warning lights came on.
First, a faulty sensor falsely reported reentry.
Then the electrical system failed.
One by one, the automated controls died.
Guidance system: dead.
Orientation system: dead.
Reentry calculations: dead.
At 165 miles above Earth, Gordon Cooper suddenly had no functioning instruments to bring him home.
And reentry is unforgiving.
Too shallow, and the capsule skips off the atmosphere into space forever.
Too steep, and friction turns it into a fireball.
The difference between life and death was fractions of a degree.
Mission Control could only watch.
So Cooper became the computer.
He drew reference marks on the capsule window with a pen.
He stared at the stars he had memorized before launch and used them to orient the spacecraft by eye.
He strapped a wristwatch to his arm and timed everything manually.
Then he did the math in his head.
No autopilot.
No navigation system.
No backup computer.
Just a man, a watch, and the stars.
At exactly the right second, Cooper fired the retrorockets manually.
The capsule dropped into Earth’s atmosphere.
For several minutes, communication vanished as plasma wrapped the spacecraft in fire.
Nobody on Earth could contact him.
Then the parachutes opened.
Faith 7 splashed down just 4.4 miles from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge — the most accurate splashdown of the entire Mercury program.
Later, Cooper described it simply:
“I used my wristwatch for time, my eyeballs out the window for attitude.”
That’s it.
In one of the most dangerous moments in early spaceflight history, a human being outperformed the machines.
We live in a world obsessed with automation and software.
But Gordon Cooper’s flight is a reminder that when everything breaks, the final backup system is still the human mind.
Calm under pressure.
Thinking clearly.
Making the call when nobody else can.
It was true in 1963.
It still is.
Libraries are typically considered to be fairly civilized, quiet spaces conducive to learning.
However, that is not always the case. Photo by Carol Highsmith.
Most folks reading this are likely grown-ups. We have jobs, mortgages, families and responsibilities. However, for guys at least, no matter your station or means, little is more reliably entertaining than a good fart story.
There I was, a second-year medical student. For the previous year and change, I had functionally lived in the library. I should have taken my mail there. In exchange for the absurd amount of time I had logged in that accursed place, I developed some super friendships and had been privy to some genuinely bizarre goings-on. One of the more memorable was a truly gripping tale of urban survival.
Cultural mores are regional. What might be socially appropriate in one part of the world is breathtakingly offensive elsewhere. Our hero in this case was a foreign student whose idea of what was acceptable behavior in public obviously differed somewhat from our own.
This is where I went to medical school. In addition to a great many radical experiences,
I was also once nearly farted to death by a foreign student in the school library.
The Guy
I was sitting peacefully with a half dozen fellow denizens in the library’s central upstairs study zone, my head buried in a pathology text, when the hapless villain strolled by. As might we all, I looked up, nodded, and smiled. These things I did without conscious thought.
Without preamble, this vile, rotten dude responded by ejecting the most earth-shattering fart it has ever been my displeasure to survey. Witnesses to the event later attested that they observed books falling from shelves and overhead lights flickering in response to the deafening ejection. In retrospect, it was a miracle no one was killed.
The Thing
Flatus is the release of gas — predominantly methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and hydrogen sulfide — from the gastrointestinal tract. This gas is a byproduct of the chemical and enzymatic breakdown of our food. The typical adult human produces between 500 and 2000 milliliters of the rancid stuff per day. It is the hydrogen sulfide that produces the distinctive objectionable odor.
Given the volume and resonance of the discharge, I fully expected it to have blown a hole in his pants. Discreetly covering his backside with a sheaf of papers, Flatulence Man strolled blissfully on. He unleashed one more ground-shaking monster before calmly selecting a seat nearby. He then began to dig out his books nonchalantly. Our eyes burned, and our ears rang, yet this dude acted as if nothing of significance had occurred.
The Aftermath
For one pregnant trice, all remained still and peaceful. Not one sound broke the utter silence of the scene. Then, like that awesome moment during the demolition of a towering building between when the charges go off and the massive structure begins to topple, I gradually raised my eyes. There, seated directly across from me and now adjacent to the gentleman with terminal gas, sat my classmate.
His eyes, watering uncontrollably, met mine. I bit hard into my tongue, nearly drawing blood before I succumbed to the inevitable. We both then unleashed an uncontrolled torrent of pitifully-suppressed laughter. Mine felt as though it escaped through my nose and ears.
I stood up and quickly made my way to a quiet spot in the far corner of the library, now laughing so hard I thought my eyes might bleed.
My buddy met me moments later, and we both savored the hilarity of the experience. We replayed the details verbally so as to ensure that, should one of us not live through the evening, at least the epic story might survive. When we finally had regained some semblance of decorum, we purposefully made our way back to our seats.
No sooner had we resumed our places did the flatulent gentleman now retrieve one of those nasal suction devices used on congested infants and go to work zealously purging his sinuses.
The resulting snorking sound very nearly loosened the ceiling tiles. I looked on in amazement as my buddy veritably leaped from his seat, apparently fearing that some of the voluminous nasal discharge might inadvertently affix itself to his person.
All decorum was now hopelessly lost. My prospects for a profitable evening of study had perished along with it. I gathered my gear and made my way home, sincerely but fruitlessly wishing the rest of my library pals productive scholarship.
Ruminations
I don’t recall having seen the flatulent gentleman with the atypical personal hygiene habits again stalking the halls of the library after that fateful evening, his potentially lethal bowels ever ready to strike.
We all felt his scholarly pursuits might be best exercised in a better-ventilated area. Regardless, I sincerely expect to see his G.I. tract on display in a museum someday, either as a revolutionary new source of natural energy or a devastatingly effective chemical weapon system.
I think the school children of tomorrow should be able to appreciate such a remarkable medical oddity, albeit in a safe and controlled environment.
Regardless, I enjoy a certain deep and abiding kinship with Walt, Krista, Scotty, and the other survivors of that momentous evening.
Like survivors of an air crash, earthquake victims, or combat-hardened Navy SEALs, I feel that we have, by triumphing in the face of this unspeakable crucible, developed a bond that transcends the boundaries of most mortal experience.
Should I be so fortunate as to bump into one of these fellow physicians 30 years hence at some professional gathering or academic symposium, we will no doubt be reduced to tears over the retelling of that timeless evening when the mysterious stranger with the hyperactive bowels rendered the entire med school library uninhabitable.
The Supreme Court is seen Tuesday, June 30, 2026, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
WASHINGTON – Connecticut’s ban on semiautomatic weapons, passed in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, is under renewed legal threat.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it would be hearing a challenge to the law filed by two former state corrections officers, a firearms instructor and two gun advocacy groups.The court agreed to hear the case alongside a challenge to a similar law in Chicago, with arguments likely in the fall.
The decision comes less than a week after the court struck down gun restrictions in Hawaii, and the court’s conservative majority makes it possible that the state’s near ban on the sale of most semiautomatic and automatic weapons – put in place after the 2012 shootings that killed 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown – will be overturned.
Both a lower court and a federal appeals court previously blocked this challenge to the law before the plaintiffs successfully appealed to the Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, state Democrats blasted attempts to challenge the law in court, describing it as part of a national campaign against restrictions on guns.
“Connecticut’s assault weapon ban is lawful, lifesaving, and broadly supported. The gun lobby has flooded the courts in states across the country to get an assault weapons case up to this Supreme Court,” Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “We are prepared for this fight, and we are going to go in with everything we’ve got to keep these weapons of war off our streets, out of our schools, and away from our families.”
In a statement, Democratic state senate leaders Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, expressed confidence that the court would ultimately uphold the law, pointing to the lower court rulings.
Republican leaders in the state, including presumptive gubernatorial nominee Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, did not immediately weigh in on the court’s decision. Two of the three lawyers who brought the lawsuit – state Reps. Doug Dubitsky, R-Chaplin, and Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford – are also Republican lawmakers.
State Rep.Doug Dubitsky R-Chaplin during a hearing on a bill that would ban the sales of certain handguns that have the potential for conversion into automatic firearms, on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford. (Jim Michaud/Hearst Connecticut Media)
The Second Amendment Foundation, a national gun rights group that has backed the suit, praised the court’s decision on Tuesday as a step towards greater freedoms for firearm owners in the state.
“Lawmakers have long relied on fearmongering to pass laws that infringe on the Second Amendment, especially when it comes to common, semi-automatic rifles,” SAF Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb said in a statement. “We’re hopeful the Court will finally put to rest the idea that these rifles are not covered by the Second Amendment simply because of their look and features.”
The decision is a win for gun rights activists who had previously seen the case stymied in federal court.
Last August, an appeals court concluded that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was “not unlimited” in this case. The court ruled that Connecticut’s gun laws imposed reasonable restrictions on unusually dangerous weapons that were “uniquely designed to create mayhem.”
At the time, the trio of lawyers prosecuting the case vowed to bring their lawsuit to the highest court in the nation.
“The Second Circuit’s decision ignores the U.S. Supreme Court’s clear and specific directives, and elevates ideology over constitutional rights,” Dubitsky, Fishbein and attorney Cameron Atkinson said at the time. “The Supreme Court must put a stop to our courts treating the Second Amendment as if it were not part of the Bill of Rights.”
This story includes previous Hearst Connecticut Media Group reporting.