Southern campaigns: Guilford Courthouse

On March 15, 1781, General Nathanael Greene fought General Charles Cornwallis at Guilford Court House in North Carolina during the southern campaign of the Revolutionary War. Greene deployed North Carolina militia, Virginia militia, and Continental regulars in successive lines near present-day Greensboro. Cornwallis held the field at day's end, but British losses were so severe that the battle functioned as a strategic American success.

Guilford Court House intensified the political and military crisis of British southern strategy, which had aimed to recover the Carolinas through loyalist support and hard battlefield blows. Cornwallis won the tactical contest in North Carolina, yet the cost weakened the British army at exactly the moment Greene's campaign was exhausting imperial strength in the South. The battle therefore showed that British battlefield possession no longer guaranteed restoration of royal authority in the southern states.

Cornwallis's losses at Guilford Court House helped drive him into Virginia, where his army eventually entrenched at Yorktown in 1781. That movement linked Greene's southern campaign directly to the Yorktown siege and the negotiations that ended the war in the Treaty of Paris of 1783.