On August 16, 1780, the celebrated hero of Saratoga, General Horatio Gates, fled the battlefield at Camden, South Carolina, riding 60 miles by evening while his army was destroyed. This episode dissects one of the most humiliating American defeats of the Revolutionary War and how it unexpectedly set the stage for ultimate victory.

We follow the British Southern Strategy after the fall of Charleston, Gates’s march through the barren Pine Barrens, a meal of meat, cornmeal and molasses that sickened his troops, and a blind night collision with Cornwallis’s army. Then we break down the fatal deployment that placed untrained militia opposite British regulars, and the heroic stand of Baron de Kalb’s Maryland and Delaware Continentals.

• Why the 18th-century “place of honor” tradition doomed the American left flank
• How a British bayonet charge sent the Virginia and North Carolina militia fleeing
• Baron de Kalb’s 11 wounds and General William Smallwood’s disappearance
• How Nathanael Greene and Daniel Morgan rethought tactics after the defeat
• How Cornwallis learned the wrong lesson on the road to Yorktown, and the Camden 14