Sir Major General Banastre Tarleton GCB 1st Baronet MP
(1754-1833)

Died aged c. 79

Sir Banastre Tarleton, 1st Baronet, GCB (21 August 1754 – 15 January 1833) was a British soldier and politician. Tarleton was eventually ranked as a general years after his service in the colonies during the American Revolutionary War, and afterwards did not lead troops into battle. Banastre Tarleton was known for his British military service in the American War of Independece, which started when Tarleton was twenty-one. As a military commander he was the subject of a rebel American campaign which claimed that Tarleton's British Legion had massacred surrendering Continental Army troops at the Battle of Waxhaws, South Carolina, in 1780. In the 19th century those killings became known in American history as the Waxhaws Massacre. In the biography The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson (1957), by Robert D. Bass, Tarleton is identified as the 'Bloody Ban', the 'Butcher', and 'The Green Dragoon'. In American popular culture those nicknames were the result of Col. Tarleton's reputation for brutality during the War of Independence, whilst the colonial Loyalists and the British hailed and praised Tarleton as an outstanding leader of light cavalry, and as an officer of great tactical prowess and soldierly resolve, especially against superior numbers of enemy. Tarleton's cavalrymen were called 'Tarleton's Raiders'. His green uniform was the standard uniform of the British Legion, a provincial unit organised in New York, in 1778. After returning to Great Britain in 1781 at the age of 27, Tarleton was elected a Member of Parliament for Liverpool and returned to office in the early 19th century. As such, Tarleton became a prominent Whig politician despite his young man's reputation as a roué. Given the importance of the slave trade to the British shipping industry in Liverpool, Tarleton strongly supported slavery as an economic means.

DbPedia

Wikidata Wikipedia