The glorious cause, p.55
The Glorious Cause, page 55
Clinton seems never to have considered a landing on the tip, preferring to come around to strike from the mainland. He needed the navy for this move, and on March 20, Arbuthnot succeeded in getting half a dozen frigates over the bar. A game of seagoing cat-and-mouse preceded this success, with small craft of the Royal Navy marking the shallow spots along the bar with buoys, and Whipple’s boats slipping out afterward to destroy them.
Five days later Paterson and his 1500 who had been detached to Georgia returned, and on the night of March 29, Clinton began sending his reinforced army across the Ashley at Drayton’s Landing, about twelve miles above Charleston. The Ashley was only 200 yards wide at this place, and bent just below so that it shielded from American observers the small boats manned by Arbuthnot’s crews.16
The Americans did not oppose this landing, and by April 1, Clinton’s forces had moved within 1000 yards of the defenses across the Neck. The siege now began in a manner familiar in eighteenth-century warfare. Engineers opened a “parallel” across the Neck about 800 yards from the American lines. The parallel consisted of trenches and redoubts roughly paralleling the works some 800 yards away. Ten days later it was completed, and under the supervision of engineers the troops began digging saps toward the American lines. This procedure followed the usual theory and practice of sieges, which were called “regular approaches,” that is, systematic and well-laid out approaches on the ground ever closer to enemy fortifications.17
A siege might bring the attackers close enough to permit them to make an all-out assault without exposing themselves until the last possible moment. Clinton hoped that an assault would not be necessary, hoped indeed that he could force Lincoln to surrender by cutting Charleston off from any relief. His purposes were as much political as military: to capture Charleston and its population intact and thereby help rally loyalist support to the king’s case. The destruction of the city would not contribute to this purpose, and Clinton remarked during the siege when Captain Elphinstone and “all the navy” rejoiced “at the town’s being on fire”: “Absurd, impolitic, and inhuman to burn a town you mean to occupy.” In any case “the success of a storm [an assault] is uncertain. . . . I think we are sure of the place upon our own terms, and with it I think we conquer the southern provinces and perhaps more.”18
No siege any more than a “storm” could be undertaken lightly. It tested the wills of the defenders watching their enemy dig his way into their guts, and it taxed the energies and resourcefulness of the attackers. The ground was generally flat north of the city; the soil sandy and marshy and full of sand fleas whose bites were “very painful” according to a German officer who experienced them. The ground had few high places to screen off American observers so most of the digging was done at night. The heat was not usually oppressive then, but the days of this April were described as “unbearable.”19
The terrain made artillery fire especially effective—effective, that is, by the standards of the eighteenth century. The first parallel was dug out of the range of most artillery, the accuracy of which was always problematical. Generally, even heavy guns were unreliable at ranges over 1200 yards, and some heavy guns beyond 400 yards. Mortars might throw shells much farther—occasionally as far as two miles—but they too lacked accuracy. As the British pushed closer, however, they increased their chances of being killed not only by artillery but by small arms as well.
Push closer they did throughout April. Major Moncrieff, a skillful engineer, directed most of their operations. He began his work one night by crawling up to the abatis in order to see just what he was up against. He then organized large working parties, sometimes as many as 500 men, and put them to constructing the siege works. At several points along the parallel, redoubts were put up, consisting of heavy wooden frames ten feet high and fourteen feet long sitting on three legs. These frames, called mantelets, had been shipped from New York where they were constructed. Assembled on the scene at Charleston, sixteen were fitted together to form the skeleton of a redoubt. Then sand and earth were piled against them until their walls were at least twelve feet thick. Embrasures were cut through their parapets to permit guns and howitzers to be fired. When the last parallel was completed—the third—in late April, several of the embrasures were usually occupied by infantry with rifles and muskets. Rifle embrasures were also built with sandbags along the trenches outside the redoubts to allow infantry to fire into the embrasures of the American redoubts.20
Building these works and digging trenches would not have been easy in peacetime. Lifting the mantelets was difficult; each required eighteen men, and carrying them in the dark to the right place while under fire was no trifling business. The digging also presented special problems. The sand was fairly loose, but it was wet—at times the men worked in water—and drainage ditches had to be dug. The shelling was often very heavy though usually, perhaps, inaccurate. But the lack of precision added a special kind of horror. No one knew when the next round was coming or where it would land. And the Americans fired terrible stuff, canisters filled with jagged fragments of old projectiles, broken shovels, pickaxes, hatchets, flat irons, pistol barrels, broken locks, and sometimes even shards of glass. The wounds this metal inflicted could be terrible: accounts of the siege mention legs torn off, arms shattered, and men blown apart by heavy explosions. A single solid cannon ball that smashed into seven jaegers one May night tore off one man’s leg, damaged another’s thigh, and crashing into a tree threw splinters into five others.21
The British and Germans fired more conventional rounds, but these too had the capacity to mutilate flesh and bone. As the sappers burrowed closer, artillery was dragged forward and aimed at the embrasures of the citadel and the supporting works. For this nice work, the royal artillerymen favored canisters filled with 100 bullets each. They also fired three-pound case shot and half-pound projectiles, called “bogy shot.” Nor did they neglect heavy balls and explosive bombs. By late April, when the second parallel was complete and the third well under way, each side could see the damage and sometimes the casualties inflicted on the other. A shell struck an American platform behind an embrasure: “It burst as it fell, throwing two artillerymen from the embrasure into the trench and blowing up the enemy’s platform.”22
As the horror increased, men on both sides broke. The terror bred confusion as to which side was winning, and each lost deserters to the other. The worst fears came with darkness. Not that the days were tranquil or free of strain—the shells dropped on both sides, and in late April when the range shortened each kept the other under incessant rifle and musket fire. A deadly game took place: each side waited for the other to open its embrasures and then poured in musket balls and cannisters before they were closed again. The nights were worse because when the sun went down men’s imaginations took over.23
For Lincoln’s troops the darkness brought home the knowledge that the enemy’s sappers were at work. When morning came the Americans looked out to an advance that seemed inexorable. The strain showed in glazed eyes and faces tight and bloated with fatigue. For the British and Germans the terrors were no less genuine. The shelling by their enemy increased as the Americans tried to slow the sappers’ digging. When the Americans learned from a deserter that the relief of troops in the trenches was ordinarily done an hour before daybreak, that operation assumed a terrible danger.
Late in April as work on the third parallel was completed and the sappers burrowed toward the canal, the precariousness of their position was made especially clear to the British and German infantry. Their commander in chief had insisted from the beginning that they rely on their bayonets. Their muskets were to remain unloaded at night when no targets could be seen anyway. Reliance on the bayonet meant discipline to Clinton—discipline and pride and spirit. Clinton visited the trenches often in April—he always had physical courage—and on one of his visits he discovered “GREAT NEGLECT,” as he said in his journal, troops who had not fixed their bayonets.24 The troops had not presumably because they felt easier in the dark when their muskets were loaded. Even so they panicked on the night of April 24, when 200 Americans made a sortie against one end of the third parallel. The jaegers there ran back to the second, but even so the Americans killed or wounded fifty and captured a dozen more of them. For a few dreadful minutes the Americans seemed to have cut a part of the third parallel off from the second. The following night small arms fire and yelling from the American lines produced a further panic as Germans and English abandoned the third parallel in terror. Men in flight often overpower the reason of others, and in this instance when they tumbled into the trenches of the second they set off a wild firing from those who did not actually break and run. A jaeger officer later noted that “Everywhere they saw rebels. They believed the enemy had made a sortie and fired musketry [muskets] for over half an hour, though not a single rebel had passed the ditch.”25
Within this carnage lesser struggles were enacted. One found Clinton growling in his journal about Cornwallis and Arbuthnot, and occasionally to them about their conduct. Clinton had learned ten days before he crossed the Ashley that his resignation had not been accepted. This news may have disappointed him; it more than disappointed Cornwallis, who hoped to replace Clinton—it caused him to withhold his advice for his chief. Clinton helped this sulking along by reproaching Cornwallis for having permitted someone on his staff to say with a “sneer” that if Clinton wished to resign all he had to do was to ask again. Cornwallis denied that anyone had sneered at Clinton, and bitter words passed back and forth, though perhaps none so serious as Clinton’s charge in his journal against Cornwallis for “UNSOLDIERLY BEHAVIOR, NEGLECTING TO GIVE ORDERS IN MY ABSENCE.”26 Although the immediate effects of this conflict defy measurement, one result is clear: Cornwallis possessed fine tactical skills and Clinton did not employ Cornwallis well.
Of more obvious importance was the near break with Arbuthnot. The background of this quarrel is to be found in events that occurred before the siege commenced. Arbuthnot rarely acted decisively, and his disagreement with Clinton left him even more reluctant than usual to exert himself. Clinton wanted him to push his ships up the Cooper River in order to trap Lincoln in the city. Arbuthnot never directly refused, but he failed to make the attempt. He offered a series of reasons—he needed more time, or he feared fireships might destroy his fleet in the confined reaches of the river—and in the process he convinced Clinton that he was an incompetent and a liar. Thus Clinton to Arbuthnot: “I find by [the] Ad[miral’s] letter to Elp[hinstone] he still HARPS UPON DELAYS. He should recollect all the delays occasioned by himself. . . . I will once more enumerate them here.” And: he “will LIE—NAY, I KNOW HE WILL IN A THOUSAND INSTANCES.” And about two weeks later—on April 22—”In appearance we were the best of friends, but I am sure he is FALSE AS HELL.”27
During some of these worst days of bickering, Clinton’s forces struck decisive blows and succeeded in cutting off the city without the navy’s aid. On the night of April 14, Lt. Colonel Banastre Tarleton, commander of the Tory Legion, took Monck’s Corner, a strategic point up the Cooper linking the city to the countryside to the north. And in another week, Tarleton and Lt. Colonel James Webster with two regiments dominated approaches all along the Cooper to within six miles of Charleston.28
With escapes closed off, Lincoln lost hope. Civilians in Charleston refused to allow him to surrender, however. Some evidently thought that Washington would march southward and save them. Lincoln tried to persuade them that defeat was inevitable, and on April 21 he offered to surrender to Clinton on the condition that he and his army would be permitted to leave on their own terms. Clinton turned him down immediately.
By the end of the first week in May the two armies were separated by only a few yards. The sappers had done their work well, digging right up to the American lines and actually draining the main ditch that cut across the Neck. Lincoln squirmed and fretted and tried to persuade Clinton both to let him surrender with full honors of war and to allow the militia to go free. Clinton would have none of this, and on the night of May 9 the two sides shelled one another heavily. This time, firing into wooded houses, the British artillery proved effective. With many houses burning, the citizens of Charleston decided they had had enough. Surrender came on May 12. The militia were paroled and all the American officers were allowed to keep their swords until their shouts of “long live Congress” got on British nerves whereupon they were forced to give them up. Altogether 2571 Continentals were taken and 800 militia were paroled. The dead and wounded were surprisingly few on both sides—76 British killed and 189 wounded, and 89 Americans killed and 138 wounded. The American loss of weapons and supplies was heavy: 343 artillery pieces of various sizes, almost 6000 muskets, 376 barrels of powder, over 30,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, plus large stores of rum, rice, and indigo.29
Three days later a dreadful accident added to the dead and wounded. The captured muskets had been thrown carelessly into a wooden building where gunpowder was also stored. A loaded musket tossed onto the pile may have gone off. An explosion followed setting six houses afire and killing some 200 people, British, Americans, Germans, soldiers and civilians alike. A German officer wrote that “a great many” suffering from terrible powder burns “writhed like worms on the ground.” Pieces of bodies were scattered all about, some so “mutilated that one could not make out a human figure.” Thus an agonizing siege ended in a special sort of horror.30
IV
Even during the worst of the siege, except perhaps for the long nights of terror, there had been some rudimentary sense of order. The lines separating the two sides were clear, and friend could identify foe. The shelling, though often ineffective, had brought fear to troops and civilians alike, but its special sort of dread had been confined to the besiegers and besieged of a city. And fear had become familiar, a part of ordinary existence, with its sources known, an enemy who lived just below ground level like one’s own soldiers. Now, with Lincoln’s surrender, the fear spread throughout the Carolinas, not usually so intense to be sure, but especially dreadful because it was unexpected and because it often issued from neighbors and onetime friends.
The spread took the British by surprise. Clinton did not expect that bringing order to South Carolina would be easy, but he did not think it impossible, and he had ideas on how to proceed. On June 1 he and Arbuthnot issued a proclamation offering full pardons to prisoners and other active rebels who would take an oath of allegiance. This proclamation aroused discontent only among loyalists who expected that rebellion would be punished. And here was Clinton promising rebels who would swear allegiance that they would have the rights they had always possessed under British rule, plus exemption from Parliamentary taxation. Many rebels had already accepted parole, moved by the guarantee that in doing so their property would remain their own and perhaps by the rumors that Congress would cede the Carolinas and Georgia to Britain. Clinton did not trust all those he had captured and though he paroled several hundred, he also sent others, clearly disaffected, to islands off the coast and to prison ships in the harbor. There, in these pestilential tubs, eight hundred were to die in the next year.
Two days after the proclamation of leniency, Clinton without consulting Arbuthnot issued a second—Thomas Jones, the loyalist historian, was to observe sardonically that the British thought that they could subdue rebellion by proclamation—releasing all those on parole as of June 20, but requiring them to take an oath to support British measures. If they refused to give active support they would be treated as rebels. The effect of this requirement was to send men who might have sat out the war back into active opposition. Clinton did not remain to face it, however. He left for New York the next week with 4000 troops, most of the horses and wagons, and a good deal of equipment, having received word that the French might attempt to take New York in his absence. With things well under way in South Carolina he could turn the command over to Cornwallis, who had long wanted autonomy.
Just what Clinton had left Cornwallis became clear over the summer. The command in the Carolinas was independent, though of course Clinton remained at the head of the army in America. He gave Cornwallis instructions to pacify South Carolina, reclaim North Carolina, and to drive into Virginia where operations were projected with contingents drawn from the army in New York.
Cornwallis’s command may have been independent but he faced formidable restraints on its exercise. The proclamations Clinton had hung around his neck could be thrown off and were, with the dispatching to jail of some of the worst rebels. But the proclamations had generated an opposition that grew over the summer, grew with every attempt to put it down. In a sense everything Cornwallis could do to destroy the king’s enemies was futile. His problem in the Carolinas had been Howe’s and Clinton’s in the North: in order to restore the allegiance of America he had to crush the rebellion. And the process of crushing the rebellion simply fed its sources.
That process slipped out of his control almost at once in the brutal struggles that occurred over the summer between loyalists and patriots. One of the earliest of these fights took place on June 20, ten days after Cornwallis assumed command. A Tory colonel, John Moore, who had served with Cornwallis above the Cooper River, returned to his home in Ramsour’s Mill in North Carolina and attempted to enlist his neighbors in the king’s service. Some 1300 responded only to be defeated in a chaotic battle by a rebel force of almost equal size. Those of Moore’s men who did survive disappeared, leaving him with thirty stragglers to take to Cornwallis in Camden.
Three weeks later, on July 12, rebels under Captain James McClure beat up a Tory party under Captain Christian Huck, a regular officer who ordinarily served with Tarleton’s Legion. This battle was fought at Williamson’s Plantation (now Brattonville), a little more than fifty miles north of Camden in the Catawba district. And on August 1, Thomas Sumter, called the “gamecock” by Tarleton, led as many as 600 men against a much smaller Tory force under Lt. Colonel George Turnbull at Rocky Mount. The loyalists held their own in this fray, but Sumter gained too from this additional example of defiance of royal authority. In the next month the loyalists absorbed heavy losses at Hanging Rock. And when they were successful, as, for example, the navy was in raiding rebel property near Georgetown, they also succeeded in calling out opposition. Near Georgetown, in the Williamsburg district, the rebel militia swarmed into organized units when the navy showed itself.
