British Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, acting under Lord Charles Cornwallis, conducted a raid across Southside Virginia in July 1781 to destroy ammunition, clothing, and other stores intended for Continental military use. His principal objectives were the armaments and supply depots at Prince Edward Court House, now Worsham, and New London in Bedford County, while also gathering intelligence on Nathanael Greene, intercepting returning southern troops, freeing any British prisoners of war with them, and seizing important civil or military figures before they were paroled. Supplied with three light wagons, a puncheon of rum, good horses, 180 dragoons, and 80 mounted infantry, he left Cobham on July 9, 1781, and ended the raid at Portsmouth on July 24, 1781. In Amelia County, his raiders burned a granary at Mannboro and 700 bushels of public wheat, then struck Amelia Court House, where the jail stored arms for the local militia. Militia Captain Daniel Verser and five local men went there to obtain weapons and resist, but Tarleton's dragoons charged them before they could dismount; Verser was captured but escaped under a hail of bullets. Militia man John Field Jones was captured and forced to guide the raiders, and Colonel William Arter was also taken and later died of smallpox while a prisoner. Tarleton then proceeded through Jenning's Ordinary to Miller's, now Burke's, Tavern, encamped overnight, and traveled to Prince Edward Court House the next day. Jones later recalled that when Tarleton learned of the dragoon killed in Francisco's Fight, he said, "I am not sorry for him, he was out plundering." After the surrender at Yorktown, a lieutenant of Tarleton's Dragoons likewise told Captain Verser and Captain Benjamin Ward that the dead soldier "was a plunderer, and no loss to his Majesty."