Location
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Coordinates: 34.6856, -78.7843.
Type: Stop
Tour: Tory War
County: Bladen
Full
The triangle in the southwest corner of NC 131 and Perdie Church Road, at the coordinates, can accommodate any passenger vehicle. Park facing the highway if you want to stay inside your vehicle.
Description
Walk near the highway if you wish, and look north (to the right when facing it).
Hoping to recover from damage inflicted on his army at the Battle of Guilford Court House in modern Greensboro, British Lt. Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis took his army to Cross Creek (today’s Fayetteville). However there weren’t enough supplies or Loyalist allies there, so he decided to continue to Wilmington, occupied by a British force. On the way, his army of perhaps 1,800 plus followers arrived from the north and camped here near Black Swamp, the waterway to the left, on Monday, April 2, 1781.
From here, as at other stops along the route, the British sent out foraging parties to collect food. Helping were people who had escaped slavery by joining the march. A British major complains some cannot resist “‘Plunder’g and Using Violence to the Inhabitants’” in these early days of their freedom.[1]
In this camp Lt. Col. James Webster, whose right knee and thigh were badly wounded at Guilford, finally succumbs to his wounds. He had been traveling two weeks in a litter, probably a blanket slung between two horses, no doubt in agony. On hearing of his death, a British sergeant writes later, Cornwallis “looked on his sword, and emphatically exclaimed, ‘I have lost my scabbard.’”[2] Three weeks later, from Wilmington, Cornwallis would write the terrible news to Webster’s parents, saying:
“It gives me great concern to undertake a task, which is not only a bitter renewal of my own grief, but must be a violent shock to an affectionate parent…