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's 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.
Historian John R. Maass recounts the bloody battle and the grueling
campaign in the South that led up to it, a crucial event on the road to
American independence.