The campaign that culminated at Guilford Court House began with a British disaster sixty miles to the southwest. At the Battle of Cowpens on January 18, 1781, Cornwallis lost one-quarter of his army. Rather than retreat, he doubled down. At Ramsour's Mill, he burned his own baggage train -- everything except wagons carrying medical supplies, salt, ammunition, and the sick -- and set off in pursuit of Greene. His subordinate Charles O'Hara described the decision with dark humor: "Without Baggage, necessaries, or Provisions of any sort...it was resolved to follow Greene's army to the end of the World." What followed was the "Race to the Dan" -- a grueling chase across the rivers and winter roads of North Carolina as Greene led Cornwallis further and further from his supply base at Camden, South Carolina. By February 14, Greene had crossed the Dan River into Virginia, his army intact. The British, exhausted and far from support, camped at Hillsborough and resorted to plundering local farms, losing soldiers who straggled out of camp "in search of whiskey."

Greene recrossed the Dan on February 22, reinforced by militia and Continental regulars, and chose his ground near Guilford Court House. When Cornwallis learned Greene's position on March 15, he marched from New Garden to meet him. The advance guards clashed near the Quaker New Garden Meeting House before dawn -- Banastre Tarleton, the feared British cavalry commander, took a musket ball through his right hand and lost two fingers in the opening skirmish. The main battle that followed was, in the words of historians, "the largest and most hotly contested action" of the Revolution's entire southern campaign. Greene deployed his 4,500 men in three defensive lines. Cornwallis attacked with 2,100, driving through each line at terrible cost. The British eventually held the field, but the price was devastating: 93 killed, 413 wounded, and 25 missing. Greene's losses were lighter in killed and wounded, though many North Carolina militiamen simply went home after the fighting.

The aftermath reshaped the war. Cornwallis, his force reduced to fewer than 2,000 effective soldiers, could not pursue Greene into the backcountry. He marched instead to Wilmington on the coast to rest and refit, then made the fateful decision to move into Virginia rather than remain in the Carolinas. His superior, General Henry Clinton, was furious, writing that the move was "dangerous to our interests in the Southern Colonies." But Cornwallis pressed on, eventually concentrating his forces at a small tobacco port called Yorktown. Meanwhile, Greene -- the general who lost the battle -- exploited the opening brilliantly. He marched south toward Camden and Charleston, methodically dismantling British control of the Deep South. As Greene himself put it with characteristic understatement: "We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." By year's end, he had recovered the southern states. At Yorktown, Cornwallis surrendered to Washington and Rochambeau in October 1781, effectively ending the war.

The battlefield is preserved today as Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, established in 1917 near Greensboro, North Carolina. Every year around March 15, reenactors in period uniforms demonstrate Revolutionary War fighting techniques on or near the original ground. Recent research has revealed that the battlefield extended further east than previously known, into what is now Greensboro Country Park. The American Battlefield Trust has preserved land at the site of the British attack on the first American line. In 2016, a Crown Forces Monument was dedicated at the park, honoring the officers and men of Cornwallis's army -- soldiers who marched 600 miles through uncharted wilderness, forded rivers that would "be reckoned large...in any other country in the world," and fought with what Cornwallis called "persevering intrepidity" even as their cause was crumbling beneath them. Three Army National Guard units active today trace their lineage to American units that fought at Guilford Court House, among only thirty units nationwide with roots reaching back to the colonial era.