The Fall of Charleston
The Siege of 1780, Before and After
On May 12, 1780, the Continental garrison of Charleston marched out of its lines, piled its arms in front of the hornwork, and walked back into the town as prisoners of war. It was the largest surrender of American troops in the Revolution. In one stroke the British took a major general and six brigadiers, every Continental regiment in the Carolinas and most of the Virginia line, four frigates, and something over three hundred cannon. For a few weeks it looked as though South Carolina had been conquered. It had not, and the reasons why are bound up in how the siege was fought and in what the conquerors did with their victory.
We have good witnesses on both sides: William Moultrie’s journal and letters from inside the lines; the dispatches of Clinton and Arbuthnot, the letters of Lord Cornwallis, and Banastre Tarleton’s history of the campaign; and the diaries of two Hessian jäger captains, Johann Ewald and Johann Hinrichs, who spent the siege in the forward trenches. Where they disagree, and they often do, we will say so.
The siege of Charleston began, in a sense, in the ditch at Savannah. On October 9, 1779, the French and Americans under the Comte d’Estaing and Major General Benjamin Lincoln assaulted the British lines there and were thrown back, with 637 French and 457 Continentals killed and wounded. D’Estaing sailed away, Lincoln marched back to Charleston, and Moultrie, looking back, put the consequences plainly:
We were then in a much worse situation than before he arrived. … This disappointment depressed our spirits very much, and we began to be apprehensive for the safety of these two southern states.
That November smallpox broke out in Charleston for the first time in nearly twenty years. It was, Moultrie said, “a very good pretence for the militia not coming into town: in fact, they dreaded that disorder more than the enemy.” This would matter a great deal in the spring.
With the French fleet gone, Sir Henry Clinton was free to try the southern expedition he had long planned. He embarked at New York with, as Tarleton described it, “four flank battalions, twelve regiments and corps, British, Hessian, and Provincial,” and some two hundred and fifty cavalry, and sailed on December 26, 1779. Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot commanded the escort. Lord Cornwallis, Clinton’s second in command, came with him.
The voyage was a disaster. “A succession of storms dispersed the fleet,” Tarleton wrote; “few ships arrived at Tybee … before the end of January … one ordnance vessel foundered, most of the artillery, and all the cavalry horses perished.” Captain Hinrichs, writing home from the anchorage at North Edisto on February 10, was more vivid:
We are going to Charleston with 7000 men! to take it. Since December 19 we are aboard ship, much to our discomfort. Six ships have foundered, ten are scattered, and half the remainder have sprung a-leak, are dismasted or are minus their boats. We experienced a storm lasting fifteen days.
Moultrie summed it up in one line: “they had a long and boisterous passage.” Tarleton’s Legion and the 17th Light Dragoons came ashore without horses and would have to find new ones in the low country.
From Tybee the fleet, thirty-five sail by Ewald’s count, put to sea on February 9 and ran up the coast into the North Edisto inlet. On February 11 the troops began going ashore on Simmons Island, now Seabrook Island, about thirty miles south of Charleston. At the same time Clinton ordered some 1,200 men under Brigadier General James Patterson to march up from the Savannah garrison by land.
Then Clinton took his time. The army worked its way across Johns Island and James Island, secured the Stono and the Wappoo Cut, and waited for its artillery. It was nearly seven weeks before it crossed the Ashley. Some of that was caution and some was necessity, since the guns and stores lost at sea had to be made good, and heavy cannon were eventually landed from the ships of the line, including the Raisonnable.Lincoln used the time, but not as well as he might have.
Lincoln, Rutledge, and the Town
Should Lincoln have held Charleston at all? Ramsay, who was in the town through the siege, thought afterward that the war in the South proved “the difference between evacuating and defending towns,” and that “the first was the best plan of defence for America.” But in February 1780 almost no one in Charleston thought that way. The town had beaten off a British fleet in 1776 and Prevost’s army in 1779, and Governor John Rutledge, the council, and the merchants all expected it to be defended. Lincoln was promised Continentals from Virginia and North Carolina and militia from the country. Most of the militia never came. The smallpox gave them their excuse. “Are not the North-Carolinians here, who have not had the small-pox?” Lincoln wrote to Moultrie at the end of February, “surprised to find the militia so unreasonable as to wish to avoid this town.”
The defenses ran across the Neck, from the Ashley to the Cooper, with a canal and wet ditch in front, abatis, and a double-picketed ditch. In the middle stood the hornwork, a work of masonry that Tarleton called “a kind of citadel.” He counted “eighty cannon and mortars” on the land front; Ewald saw fifty-seven embrasures. Batteries lined the waterfront on both rivers. Across the harbor, Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island guarded the channel as it had in 1776.
There was also a small navy. Commodore Abraham Whipple had the Continental frigates Providence and Boston and the sloop Ranger, theQueen of France, the South Carolina frigate Bricole, and two French vessels, L’Aventure and the Truite, besides galleys. The plan was to post them inside the bar to stop the British from crossing, but on March 20 seven British warships came over the bar into Five Fathom Hole and Whipple would not fight there. Two days later Moultrie wrote to Lincoln that the plan had changed:
All our ships and gallies are ordered up to town, and their guns taken out and placed in the batteries, and manned by the sailors, by which means we have a reinforcement on shore, of 1,200 men. … We are to sink some ships, to stop the channel from the exchange over to the marsh, on the other side.
Moultrie thought Whipple should at least have taken a station under the guns of Fort Moultrie. As it was, he wrote, after the fleet passed the fort the navy “was no longer of use to us, but rather a dead weight.”
Outside the town Lincoln kept a light force to watch the enemy and hold the roads. Early in the campaign Lieutenant Colonel Francis Marion was at Bacon’s Bridge on the Ashley with part of it; a return from that post shows 606 men. The cavalry, under Brigadier General Isaac Huger, consisted of the remains of three Continental regiments, Lieutenant Colonel William Washington’s, Bland’s, and Pulaski’s Legion, with some militia horse. They skirmished with the British advance at Rantowle’s Bridge and carried off Lieutenant Colonel John Hamilton of the Royal North Carolina Regiment.
It was during these weeks that the most famous accident of Marion’s life took place. Tradition says that at a dinner in town the host locked the door so that no one could leave before the toasts were drunk, and that Marion left by a window and came down hard. William Dobein James, writing from what Peter Horry told him, said only that Marion “by accident, in attempting to escape from a drinking party, dislocated his ankle.” Moultrie, who was there, wrote that he “by some accident sprained his ancle, which rendered him unfit for service.”
Lincoln had ordered that “all supernumerary officers, and all officers who were unfit for duty, must quit the garrison, and retire into the country.” Marion went out to his home district of St. John’s, Berkeley, and, James wrote, “was afterwards obliged to move about, from house to house, as favoured by friends, and often to hide in the woods, until he got better.” We do not know exactly when he left, but the man who would do more than anyone to undo the British conquest of South Carolina was out of Charleston before the last road closed.
On March 29 the British army crossed the Ashley. Ewald put the crossing at Fuller’s plantation, about fourteen miles from the town; Tarleton said “twelve miles above Charles town.” The next day the light infantry and jägers pushed down the Neck and skirmished with the American light troops; Lord Caithness, one of Clinton’s aides, was wounded. On the night of April 1 the British broke ground for the first parallel, “within eight hundred yards” of the American works, by Tarleton’s figure. Ewald thought the chief engineer, Major James Moncrieff, was “taking the siege too lightly.”
On April 6, according to Moultrie’s journal, Brigadier General William Woodford came into the town with the Virginia Continentals, “about seven-hundred,” by way of Addison’s Ferry over the Cooper, along with some North Carolina militia under Colonel Henry William Harrington. They were the last large reinforcement the garrison would receive.
On the afternoon of April 8 Arbuthnot took his squadron past Fort Moultrie. Ewald, watching from the lines on the Neck, enjoyed it:
Toward four o’clock we witnessed an entertaining spectacle. Under the command of Admiral Arbuthnot the fleet passed through the channel under the fire of Fort Moultrie. … Within two hours the fleet safely passed the fort.
The ships were the Roebuck, to which Arbuthnot had shifted his flag, theRichmond, Romulus, Blonde, Virginia, Raleigh, the armed ship Sandwich, and the Renown in the rear. Arbuthnot reported twenty-seven seamen killed and wounded, and the storeship Aeolus, aground under the fort, was burned. The British squadron was now inside the harbor, and the town was open to fire from the water as well as the land. Our witnesses do not agree on the date; we have followed Clinton, Lincoln, Ewald, and Hinrichs, who all give the 8th.
Two days later, on April 10, Clinton and Arbuthnot summoned the town. Lincoln’s reply is one of the best things he ever wrote:
Sixty days have passed since it has been known that your intentions against this town were hostile, in which time has been offered to abandon it; but duty and inclination point to the propriety of supporting it to the last extremity.
On the morning of April 13, between nine and ten o’clock, the British batteries opened. That same week, at Lincoln’s urging, Governor Rutledge and three members of his council left the town to keep the civil government alive in the country. Lieutenant Governor Christopher Gadsden and the rest of the council stayed. “It was very fortunate for the province,” Moultrie wrote, “that the governor was not made a prisoner in town.”
Charleston was now closed on the south and west. Its only connection with the country ran east and north, across the Cooper River and up the roads to the Santee. Huger held the head of the Cooper at Monck’s Corner, on the road to Biggin’s Bridge, with the cavalry and some militia, perhaps five hundred men in all. Clinton sent Lieutenant Colonel James Webster with 1,400 men, the 33rd and 64th Regiments with Tarleton’s Legion and Major Patrick Ferguson’s American Volunteers, to break it open.
On the night of April 13 Tarleton’s advance guard caught a Black man carrying a letter from Huger’s camp. The letter, and what the man told them, gave away the whole American position. At three o’clock in the morning on April 14 the Legion charged into Huger’s camp. Major Pierre-François Vernier of Pulaski’s Legion was cut down; Huger, Washington, and Major John Jameson got away into the swamps. Tarleton reported taking about one hundred officers and men, four hundred horses, and fifty wagons, at a cost of one officer and two men wounded.Moultrie, who heard the news in the lines four days later, called it in a footnote “a shameful surprise.”
On April 18 a reinforcement of about 2,600 men arrived from New York: the 42nd Highlanders, the Hessian regiment von Dittfurth, the Queen’s Rangers, the Volunteers of Ireland under Lord Rawdon, and the Prince of Wales American Regiment, which Ewald called Brown’s Corps. Clinton now had the men to close the ring. He gave Lord Cornwallis command of the troops east of the Cooper, and on the night of April 23 Cornwallis crossed the river with the Volunteers of Ireland and the North and South Carolina Loyalists. The editor of Cornwallis’s correspondence put his force at about 1,900 men; Moultrie heard 2,500.
It was not the command Cornwallis wanted. He would rather have been in the trenches. On May 7, from his camp at Manigault’s plantation, he wrote to Clinton:
If you find that the enemy are obstinately bent on trying the fate of a storm, I shall take it as a favour if you will let me be of the party. … I should be happy to attend my old friends, the grenadiers and light infantry, and perhaps you may think that on an occasion of that sort you cannot have too many officers.
East of the Cooper the Americans still held a fort at Lempriere’s Point and works on Hobcaw Neck, which covered the last ferry route into the town. Lieutenant Colonel Francis Malmedy beat off an attempt to land on Hobcaw Neck on April 16. But with Cornwallis between them and the country, these posts could not be held. Lempriere’s was abandoned on April 27, and on the 29th a party of five hundred seamen and marines under Captains Hudson, Orde, and Gambier took possession of Mount Pleasant.
Inside the town the mood was darkening. At daylight on April 24 Lieutenant Colonel William Henderson led three hundred Virginians and South Carolinians in a sortie against the British approaches. They caught the guard by surprise and, by Moultrie’s account, killed fifteen or twenty with the bayonet and brought off twelve prisoners, at a cost of Captain Moultrie, the general’s brother, killed and two men wounded. Later that morning Colonel Richard Parker of the Virginia line was killed looking over the parapet. Two days later Brigadier General Louis Duportail, the Continental Army’s chief engineer, arrived from Philadelphia and looked at the works. He “declared they were not tenable,” Moultrie wrote, and wished to leave at once, but Lincoln would not let him go. A council of war considered withdrawing the Continentals across the Cooper while there was still a way out. The townspeople heard of it, and some of them came into the council and told Lincoln “that if he attempted to withdraw the troops, and leave the citizens; that they would cut up his boats, and open the gates to the enemy.” That, Moultrie wrote, “put a stop to all thoughts of an evacuation.”
Lenud’s Ferry and Fort Moultrie
After Monck’s Corner, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Walton White of the 1st Continental Light Dragoons gathered what was left of the cavalry north of the Santee. On May 5 he crossed the river and took an officer and seventeen dragoons of a British foraging party. The next day, at Lenud’s Ferry on the Santee, Tarleton came down on them with 150 dragoons. Tarleton counted five officers and thirty-six men killed and wounded and seven officers and sixty dragoons taken, at a cost of two men and four horses. White, Washington, and Jameson escaped by swimming the Santee. There was no longer any American cavalry worth the name in South Carolina.
The same day, May 6, Moultrie wrote in his journal: “From all appearance, Fort Moultrie is in the hands of the enemy; a British flag was seen flying on the flag-staff.” He added a bitter footnote: “Fort Moultrie was given up without firing a gun.” Colonel Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had come into the town with most of the 1st South Carolina on April 24, and the fort was left to Lieutenant Colonel William Scott with about two hundred men. On the night of May 4 British seamen and marines landed on Sullivan’s Island, and Captain Charles Hudson of theRichmond summoned the fort. The articles, dated May 7, gave the garrison the honors of war. Hudson’s return counted 118 Continentals of all ranks and 100 militia, with forty-one iron guns.
On April 21, with the ring nearly closed, Lincoln had offered to give up the town if the garrison could withdraw to Lempriere’s with the honors of war, its arms, and its field artillery, and then have ten days to march wherever he chose east of the Cooper. A council of war had already concluded that the troops could not get across the Santee before the whole British army overtook them. Clinton rejected the terms. By early May the British had drained part of the canal and dug their third parallel up to the edge of the ditch. On May 4 the garrison’s meat ration was cut to six ounces.
On May 8 Clinton and Arbuthnot summoned the town again, and this time the language was harder. They marked this, they wrote, “as the term of your hopes of succor … and as an hour beyond which, resistance is temerity,” and they threw on Lincoln “whatever vindictive severity exasperated soldiers may inflict on the unhappy people, whom you devote by persevering in a fruitless defence.” A truce followed while terms went back and forth. The British offered what Lincoln could not accept: the militia and citizens to be prisoners on parole, and the Continentals to march out without the honors of war. The seventh article, as Clinton drew it, read: “The drums are not to beat a British march, or colors be uncased.”
Lincoln held out for better terms, and on the evening of May 9 the truce ended. What came next was the heaviest fire of the siege. Moultrie described it:
At length, we fired the first gun, and immediately followed a tremendous cannonade, and the mortars from both sides threw out an immense number of shells; it was a glorious sight, to see them like meteors crossing each other, and bursting in the air; it appeared as if the stars were tumbling down. … it was a dreadful night! it was our last great effort, but it availed us nothing; after this, our military ardor was much abated; we began to cool, and we cooled gradually.
On May 11 the British fired hot shot into the town. That day Lincoln wrote to Clinton that he would accept the terms after all, because of “a recent application” from the militia and citizens, the very people who had kept him from evacuating his Continentals, “wherein they express an unwillingness to comply” with his own. In the afternoon a white flag went up over the hornwork. The capitulation was signed that day.
On the morning of May 12 Lincoln and his Continentals marched out. Hinrichs watched:
They were permitted to march off with drums beating and trumpets sounding, but their colors had to be cased. Since they were not allowed to play an English march, they played the Turk’s march. First came a battalion of artillery, then the 1st and 2nd South Carolina Continentals, the 1st and 2nd North Carolinians, the 1st and 2nd Virginians, and, lastly, a battalion of French and Spanish volunteers.
Moultrie made the same point about the music in a single footnote: “We marched out with the Turk’s march.” His account of the day is the best we have:
About eleven o’clock, A.M. on the twelfth of May, we marched out between 1300 and 1600 continental troops, (leaving five or six hundred sick and wounded in the hospitals) without the horn-work, on the left, and piled our arms; the officers marched the men back to the barracks, where a British guard was placed over them; the British then asked where our second division was? they were told these were all the continentals we had, except the sick and wounded; they were astonished, and said we had made a gallant defence.
The next day the militia were paraded near Lynch’s pasture and ordered to bring in all their arms. Out came, Moultrie wrote, “the aged, the timid, the disaffected, and the infirm, many of them who had never appeared during the whole siege, which swelled the number of militia prisoners to, at least, three times the number of men we ever had upon duty.” Ewald added that the Continental officers were allowed to keep their swords until the evening of the 13th, when they began shouting “Long live Congress” and the swords were taken from them.
On May 15 the captured muskets were being thrown carelessly into a storehouse where the Americans had kept their fixed ammunition. One went off. The explosion, Moultrie wrote, “blew up the whole guard of fifty men, and many others that were standing by; their carcasses, legs, and arms were seen in the air, and scattered over several parts of the town.” A fire spread toward the main magazine, which held ten thousand pounds of powder, and British and Americans alike ran for their lives. When a British officer told Moultrie it would “blow your town to hell!” Moultrie answered that he “expected it would give a hell of a blast!”Ewald, who had seen a great deal of war, wrote that he had “never such a horrible one as this,” and put the dead at over two hundred. Among them were Captain Robert Collins of the Royal Artillery and a party of the 42nd on guard.
The garrison. Lincoln commanded the Southern Department of the Continental Army. Under him were Brigadier General William Moultrie, commanding the South Carolina Continentals; Brigadier General James Hogun with the North Carolina Continental brigade; Brigadier General William Woodford with the Virginia Continentals; Brigadier General Charles Scott, also of Virginia, who came into the town with the light infantry on April 18; Brigadier General Alexander McIntosh of the South Carolina militia; and Duportail, the engineer. The Continental regiments were these:
How many men did Lincoln have? Tarleton put the garrison at “near six thousand men, exclusive of the sailors,” and Clinton reported “about six thousand men in arms.” The British return of prisoners, signed by Major John André, totals 5,618, “exclusive of near a thousand seamen.” Ramsay, who saw the inside of the garrison, said that the British swelled their count with every man of military age in the town. He put the real number of Continental privates at 1,977, “and of these five hundred were in the hospitals.” The garrison’s own return, sent to Congress, gives the same 1,977 rank and file, with 209 non-commissioned officers and 140 drummers and fifers. Moultrie, as we saw, said that 1,300 to 1,600 Continentals marched out. We think the honest answer is that the Continentals fit for duty numbered well under two thousand, and that much of André’s total was sick men and townsmen who had never stood on the lines.
The besiegers. Clinton commanded in person, with Cornwallis as his second. Hinrichs copied the embarkation list at New York, which is the best record we have of the original army:
To these were added Patterson’s column from Savannah, which included more of the 71st, and the 2,600 men who came from New York on April 18. Uhlendorf, who edited the Hessian diaries, figured the original embarkation at about 7,975 men and reckoned some 4,000 reinforcements more, besides 450 seamen and marines serving ashore. Arbuthnot’s squadron comprised the 64-gun Europe and Raisonnable, the 50-gunRenown, the 44-gun Roebuck and Romulus, and a number of frigates, with something like ninety transports.
The losses. Clinton’s return, from the landing on February 11 to the surrender, gave the army’s loss as 76 killed and 189 wounded; the Hessian jägers alone lost seven killed and fourteen wounded. The navy lost 23 killed and 28 wounded. On the American side, the garrison’s return counted 89 Continentals killed and 138 wounded, among them Colonel Parker and Captain Peyton of the Virginia line, Moultrie’s aide Philip Neyle, and Captains Mitchell and Templeton. Ramsay added three killed and eight wounded in the Charleston militia artillery, about twenty townspeople killed by shot falling in the streets, and upwards of thirty houses burned. Hinrichs had the grace to admit, “Their artillery was better than ours.”
The material losses were worse than the men. The British took 311 cannon in the town, by the ordnance return, and eighty or ninety more at Fort Moultrie, Lempriere’s, Mount Pleasant, and on the ships; more than five thousand muskets; fifteen regimental colors; and four frigates and other vessels, with the rest sunk in the channel.
The Officers at Haddrell’s Point
Under the articles, the Continental officers went on parole to the barracks at Haddrell’s Point, across the Cooper. The enlisted men were held in the town and later in prison ships, where a great many of them died. Moultrie counted 274 officers at Haddrell’s Point and the houses nearby. The provisions were bad; by late May Moultrie was writing that “crabs and fish, have supported us hitherto.”
Moultrie also left us one of the few close-up pictures of Cornwallis in these weeks. When Justice Henry Pendleton broke his parole and escaped from the town, Cornwallis sent for Moultrie and received him “very politely” in the upstairs drawing room of Mr. Motte’s house. Cornwallis complained of the broken parole; Moultrie answered that “every one was accountable but for his own parole,” and Cornwallis let it rest. It is a small scene, but it shows the courteous, careful man who now had South Carolina on his hands.
The surrender left one body of Continentals in South Carolina: Colonel Abraham Buford with fewer than four hundred Virginians, the 11th Virginia and detachments of other regiments, who had been marching to relieve Charleston and turned back when they heard of the fall. Clinton sent Cornwallis up the Santee after him with about 2,500 men. From Nelson’s Ferry Cornwallis detached Tarleton with forty men of the 17th Dragoons, 130 Legion cavalry, and 100 Legion infantry mounted on horses, with a three-pounder.
Tarleton caught Buford in the Waxhaws, near the North Carolina line, on May 29, after riding, he said, 105 miles in 54 hours. He sent a summons that offered terms “nearly the same as were accepted by Charles town,” and that warned, “If you are rash enough to reject them, the blood be upon your head.” Buford’s answer was a single sentence: “I reject your proposals, and shall defend myself to the last extremity.”
Buford formed in a wood and ordered his men to hold their fire until the cavalry were ten yards off. The volley came too late to stop the charge. Tarleton’s horse was killed under him, and in his own words, “a report amongst the cavalry, that they had lost their commanding officer … stimulated the soldiers to a vindictive asperity not easily restrained.”Tarleton’s return counted 113 Americans killed, 150 wounded too badly to travel and left on parole, and 53 taken, against five British killed and twelve wounded. Ramsay, writing five years later, said the Americans were “chopped in pieces” while praying for quarter, and that afterward “Tarleton’s quarters became proverbial, and in the subsequent battles a spirit of revenge gave a keener edge to military resentments.”Cornwallis’s report to Clinton recommended Tarleton for “some distinguished mark of his Majesty’s favour.”
For a few weeks the British had South Carolina. Ramsay wrote that the surrender and the Waxhaws “suspended, for about six weeks, all military opposition to the progress of the British army.” The militia south of Charleston, at Camden, and at Ninety Six came in and made terms, believing they would be left at home on parole. Clinton sent three columns inland, to Ninety Six, to Augusta, and with Cornwallis to Camden.
Then Clinton changed the rules. On June 1 he and Arbuthnot, as peace commissioners, offered pardon to all who returned to their allegiance, except those “polluted with the blood of their fellow citizens.” On June 3 Clinton issued a second proclamation. It declared that all inhabitants on parole, except those taken at Fort Moultrie and Charleston or in confinement, would be released from their paroles on June 20 and restored “to all the rights and duties belonging to citizens and inhabitants,” and that those who failed to return to their allegiance “will be considered as enemies and rebels to the same, and treated accordingly.” A paroled man could no longer sit out the war at home. Ramsay put it simply: “With this proclamation, and the enrolment of the militia, commenced the declension of British authority.”
Clinton sailed for New York on June 5, leaving Cornwallis in command, with about four thousand regulars and some Provincials to hold the province. Cornwallis saw at once what the proclamations had done. On June 29 he wrote to Arbuthnot:
I hope you will not be offended when I assure you that the Proclamation of the Commissioners, of the 1st, and that of the General, of the 3rd, did not at all contribute to the success of my operations. Nothing can in my opinion be so prejudicial to the affairs of Great Britain as a want of discrimination. You will certainly lose your friends by it, and as certainly not gain over your enemies.
He was right, and he would spend the rest of his time in the Carolinas living with the consequences.
The men who would lead the resistance came out of the wreck by different roads.
Thomas Sumter had left the Continental service in 1778 and was at home when Charleston fell. When he left his home to avoid the British, a detachment turned his wife and family out of doors and burned the house and everything in it. The exiles who had fled into North Carolina chose him as their leader, and he led them back into South Carolina, ending the six weeks in which, as Ramsay put it, all military opposition had been suspended. His men forged weapons out of farm tools and melted down household pewter for bullets.
Andrew Pickens took British protection after the surrender, as so many men at Ninety Six did, and was paroled to his home. He kept his word until a band of Loyalists plundered his plantation, and then he renounced the protection and went back into the field.
Marion was still lame. When he was able to ride he collected a few friends and joined the Continental army coming south under De Kalb and then Gates. By late summer he was back in South Carolina, and by December Cornwallis was writing to Clinton that “Colonel Marion had so wrought on the minds of the people, partly by the terror of his threats and cruelty of his punishments, and partly by the promise of plunder, that there was scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and Pedee that was not in arms against us.”
We think that sentence is the real verdict on the siege of Charleston. Clinton took the town, the army, and the guns, at a cost to the army and navy together of about three hundred killed and wounded. It was as complete a victory as the British won in the war. But Lincoln’s stand had pinned down the British army for three months, and the conquerors’ own policy, the quarter refused at the Waxhaws, and above all the proclamation of June 3, turned a beaten province into a hostile one. Charleston gave the British South Carolina for six weeks. It took the partisans, and Greene, more than two years to take it back.
Moultrie, William. Memoirs of the American Revolution, So Far as It Related to the States of North and South Carolina, and Georgia. 2 vols. New York: David Longworth, 1802.
Ross, Charles, ed. Correspondence of Charles, First Marquis Cornwallis. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1859.
Tarleton, Banastre. A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781, in the Southern Provinces of North America. London: T. Cadell, 1787. Includes the dispatches of Clinton and Arbuthnot and the British returns.
Uhlendorf, Bernhard A., trans. and ed. The Siege of Charleston, with an Account of the Province of South Carolina: Diaries and Letters of Hessian Officers from the von Jungkenn Papers in the William L. Clements Library. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1938. Contains the diaries of Captain Johann Ewald and Captain Johann Hinrichs.
Hinrichs, Johann. “Extracts from the Letter-Book of Captain Johann Heinrichs of the Hessian Jäger Corps, 1778–1780.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 22 (1898): 137–70.
Ramsay, David. The History of the Revolution of South-Carolina, from a British Province to an Independent State. 2 vols. Trenton: Isaac Collins, 1785.
James, William Dobein. A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion. Charleston: Gould and Riley, 1821.
Clark, Walter, ed. The State Records of North Carolina. Vol. 14. Winston, NC, 1896. Documented on Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina.
Neilan, David, ed. in chief, with G. Richard Wise and Benjamin H. Rubin, eds. The Francis Marion Papers. Vol. 1. Columbia: South Carolina American Revolution Sestercentennial Commission, 2025. Cited as FMP.
Lewis, J. D. “The Siege of Charlestown.” The American Revolution in South Carolina. carolana.com.
South Carolina Encyclopedia. Entries for Andrew Pickens and Thomas Sumter. scencyclopedia.org.
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