Two days before, on August 16, the main Continental army under General Horatio Gates had collapsed at Camden in one of the worst American defeats of the war. Cornwallis, freshly victorious, turned his attention to the Patriot militia harassing his rear. Sumter had been having an unusually good summer - twice in the days before Camden he had fallen on British supply convoys, and his column was now slowed by some eighty captured wagons, a long string of prisoners, and the heat. Cornwallis sent Tarleton north with the British Legion and elements of the 71st Foot to find Sumter and finish him off. The hunt began on August 17. Tarleton rode for Rocky Mount, found that Sumter had moved on, crossed the Catawba, found that he had moved on again, then cut his force down to 160 of his best mounted men and pressed forward.

Sumter heard about Camden as he marched north toward Charlotte, and the news should have frightened him into hard riding. Instead, his column halted on August 18 for what they expected to be a brief rest near the mouth of Fishing Creek, where it meets the Catawba. The day was hot. The men were exhausted. Stands of arms were piled to one side. Some unsaddled their horses. Some bathed in the river. A few advance pickets were posted up the road - too few, too close to camp. Sumter himself crawled under a wagon to sleep. When Tarleton's lead riders crested the ridge and saw what was before them, they could not believe their luck. Two of his vedettes were silenced before they could fire.

Tarleton formed his cavalry in line and charged. The British Legion came down on the unprepared camp at a gallop, sabers out, before the militia could reach their stacked muskets. Some men fought back with whatever was at hand. Most ran for the trees. The killing was brief and one-sided: roughly 150 Patriots dead or wounded, 300 taken prisoner, the recaptured British wagons rolled back the way they had come. Sumter himself, jolted awake by gunfire, grabbed a horse and rode off bareback and without coat or hat. He reached Charlotte two days later, alone. The men he had recruited and trained were dead, captured, or scattered into the woods.

Fishing Creek was, by any honest accounting, a personal humiliation for Sumter - and he carried the shame of it for the rest of his long life. But it did not end him. Within weeks he was raising another militia. In November 1780, at Blackstock's Farm on the Tyger River, he caught Tarleton in turn and gave the British Legion the bloody nose he had owed them since August - though Sumter himself was wounded early in the fight and his Georgia subordinate, Colonel John Twiggs, finished the battle. The larger lesson of Fishing Creek belonged to the British, who learned that even surprised and broken, the southern militia could not be killed off. Sumter outlived almost everyone. He died in 1832, the last surviving general officer of the Revolution, ninety-seven years old.