Washington returned with most of his army to the New York area to keep Clinton in check. For Greene’s southern army, the best Washington could do was to send “a respectable reinforcement.”39
PART TWO
The South
4. Rice and the Low Country
THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP, INTO WHICH LAND SPECULATOR George Washington had sunk money in the 1760s, starts about fifty miles south of Yorktown and spills over the North Carolina border. Soon after that, the coastline turns sharply to the southwest. The next five hundred miles, and for about fifty miles inland, is low country—a coastal plain. “It may be said of this place,” a 1671 traveler reported, “as we read of the Land of Canaan . . . it is a land flowing with milk and honey.”1
Scores of rivers—the Ashley, Stono, Combahee, Edisto, Pee Dee, Cape Fear, Neuse, Santee, Cooper, Ashepoo, Chehaw, Black, Coosawhatchie, and Savannah, among others—along with countless creeks flood and feed swamps and marshes, leaving rich soil and habitat. In estuaries, fresh waters mix with seawater, even thirty miles inland, raising and lowering the river levels. Between the rivers is dry ground, used as early as 1688 by white settlers for cattle and pigs, cowpens and pigpens. There are pine forests, live oak, palmettos, cypress trees. Indians grew corn, beans, squash, and ate seaweed and wild plants. Whites and Indians alike hunted quail, wild turkeys, deer, and ducks. They fished and picked oysters, shrimp, and clams.2
But the low country wasn’t Canaan. It was a hot, humid land that got forty to fifty inches of rain a year. It bred thousands of insect species, many of them parasites, no-see-ums, greenhead and deer flies, and mosquitoes. Yellow fever and malaria devastated settlers. There were bobcats, foxes, rattlesnakes, water moccasins, alligators. Norway rats immigrated from ships. The earliest whites were “in fear of the wolves, which are too plenty.”3
Descriptions from diaries of Whig soldiers from the North—the reinforcements Washington sent after Yorktown—complete the picture:
Lieutenant William Feltman: “We were obliged to cross a number of very disagreeable swamps. . . . We were obliged to wade through them knee-deep. . . . Camped in the wilderness among a fine parcel of pines and surrounded by swamps . . . The water here is very bad, no springs or rivulets, all ponds and swamps, which are full of little insects.” Later, a servant “killed a very large rattlesnake. It was above six feet long, and of a prodigious thickness.” Day after day of bad weather came in April, and Feltman’s typical entry was “A very rainy and very disagreeable day. We were obliged to keep in our tents.”4
Lieutenant John Bell Tilden: “The roads horrid bad the greater part of the way, with mud and water to the knees.” The mosquito bites are “intolerable.”5
Lieutenant William McDowell: “The roads exceedingly good and straight. See a number of elegant houses, a small distance from the road and fine avenues leading to them, and a large rice plantation.”6
Major Ebenezer Denny: “Rice farms around this neighborhood—the fields almost all under water; immense quantities of ducks; excellent sport at times. . . . Was on picket the night before we reached Ashley [River]; got exceedingly wet—it rained all night. Marched next morning in wet clothes 12 miles . . . laid up with fever—carried to hospital. . . . Ashley River low; full of alligators.”7
It had taken nearly a generation for settlers to understand the low country—dangerous and lush, impressive and harsh—tame it, and monetize it. Tenants and agents of the original seventeenth-century British landowners experimented with crops, trying to find the optimum commercial product that could survive the floods, weather, heat and humidity, and occasional frosts and droughts. They planted olives, almonds, dates, indigo, cocoa, tobacco, pepper, ginger, cotton, sugar, grapes, corn, capers, currants, oranges, mulberry, and fruit.8
By the mid-1720s, there was a clear winner: rice. It wasn’t an obvious choice. The planters began by growing rice in dry, upland soil, relying on rainfall. With the help of West African-born slaves (some historians argue) who had grown rice in their native lands, planters eventually shifted to coastal swamps that could be irrigated using man-made—that is, slave-made—paddies, dikes, gates, and tidal flows. Once the planters and their slaves figured out how to grow and mill it efficiently, the rice economy grew exponentially. South Carolina exported ten thousand pounds of rice in 1698. By 1726, the colony exported ten million pounds.9
As rice production grew, so did African slave importation: Rice farming required labor-intensive work. A South Carolina doctor, unsympathetic with slavery, wrote that the “tilling, planting, hoeing, reaping, threshing, pounding have all been done merely by the poor slaves here.” A white merchant believed in the logic of slavery: “I am positive that the commodity can’t be produced by white people because the work is too laborious, the heat very intense, and the whites can’t work in the wet at that season as Negroes do to weed rice.” By 1765, about ninety thousand black slaves lived in South Carolina—nearly seventy percent of the population.10
This was the low country when the Revolution began: Wealthy white planters owned the land. They imported, bought, and bred black slaves, who grew the rice. They traded with merchants and shippers in Charlestown, Savannah, and Wilmington, who shipped and sold the rice to Europe.
5. General Leslie Comes to Charlestown
WHILE CORNWALLIS AND O’HARA FOUGHT AND RAIDED IN Virginia during late summer and early fall 1781, Clinton, the British commander-in-chief, grew concerned about Charlestown and the rest of the South. The ranking officer who replaced Cornwallis was a colonel who had arrived with reinforcements only in June. This colonel, Clinton said, was “altogether deficient in local knowledge.” Moreover, Clinton anticipated a “powerful” French-and-rebel offensive sometime in 1782.1
He ordered Lieutenant General Alexander Leslie, 51, to sail from New York and assume command in the Southern District. Unlike O’Hara, whose career lurched between lows and highs on three continents, Leslie’s rise to command was linear and North American. The son of a Scottish peer, Leslie was named after an ancestor—a successful general who led armies in the seventeenth century. When he was twenty-nine, the then-Major Leslie married. His wife, Mary Tullidiph, died a year later after giving birth to a daughter.2
He received regular promotions in the army. He was a regimental commander and lieutenant colonel when he arrived in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1768. For the next fifteen years, he would live and fight in the American colonies.
He was, a fellow officer said, “a genteel little man, lives well, and drinks good claret.” Leslie’s gentility also impressed the sister of a Boston customs collector, who found him “an amiable and good man, the father of his choir and the soldiers who all look up to him with respect and affection. He’s of a noble Scottish family, but distinguished more by his humanity and affability.” These weren’t idle words. The woman described Leslie’s predecessor as “devoted to self and self-gratification . . . and universally despised.” Even the rebels conceded his grace. A Boston newspaper publisher who certainly knew of Leslie, by reputation if not personally, said he was “brave, sensible, polite” and conducted himself “with a dispatch and propriety worthy of his character.”3
At one point, Leslie was posted to Halifax, but by the summer of 1772, with anti-Crown agitators creating civil unrest, he returned to Boston. In late 1774, anti-British rebels secured some old cannon, smuggled in new artillery from Europe, and were converting old ships’ cannon into field pieces. The British knew this because of their superb intelligence. If the rebels were a majority of the population, that majority wasn’t yet overwhelming; many residents saw it as their duty to keep the government informed.4
So the British knew precisely where the cannon were: in a blacksmith’s shop, separated by a single-span drawbridge on the North River immediately across from Salem, a wealthy port of five thousand people, twenty-five miles north of Boston. (In 1790, it was Massachusetts’s second-largest city, and the nation’s seventh largest.)
Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, the royal govern
or and commander, ordered Leslie and a 246-man detachment to make a surprise raid and seize the cannon. To achieve surprise, they sailed from Boston a little after midnight on February 25, 1775. They arrived off Marblehead, five miles from Salem, and timed their landing for when most residents would be at afternoon church services. The plan didn’t work. By the time Leslie arrived at the North River, rebels had spread the alarm, raised the drawbridge, and dispersed the cannon.
Abusive Salem residents and rebel militia from as far as forty miles away soon outnumbered the British. According to one rebel account, when Leslie saw the raised bridge, “he stamped and swore, ordering the bridge to be immediately lowered.” A rebel taunted him back: “You had better be damned than fire! You have no right to fire without further orders! If you do fire, you will all be dead men.” A Quaker tried to calm Leslie by asking if he understood the seriousness of the situation. The mob shouted, “Soldiers, red jackets, lobster coats, cowards, damnation to your government!” Leslie threatened to take over homes to quarter his troops unless the mob lowered the bridge. One rebel prevented Leslie’s troops from seizing a boat—the last on the Salem side of the river—by staving its bottom. Then, he bared his chest and invited a soldier to bayonet him. The soldier pricked him and drew a little blood.5
By now it was 5 P.M. The sun was going down. A Loyalist clergyman arrived and offered to mediate the standoff. Soon the parties reached a compromise: The rebels would lower the drawbridge—a useless symbol, since the cannon had been removed much earlier—and Leslie would uphold royal honor by marching across the bridge and back.
The start of the war would wait—for fifty-two days. Then, on April 19, during another mission to seize rebel arms (in which Leslie didn’t participate), forty-nine rebels and seventy-three British soldiers would die along the road from Boston through Lexington, Concord, and back.
Leslie’s career became a map of the war. He helped plan the defense of Boston, and in February 1776 led a raid, capturing six rebels. But the British finally evacuated the city, and after playing a key role, Leslie was promoted to brigadier general.
The war shifted to New York and New Jersey, where the British overwhelmed the rebels. Leslie led light infantry at the Battle of Long Island and the landing at Kip’s Bay in Manhattan. He commanded troops on Harlem Heights, where, on September 16, his men were surprised by the rebels’ flanking movement and forced to fall back until reinforcements arrived. The next month, in White Plains, Leslie’s troops assaulted a strong rebel position, but were thrown back in heavy fighting. But the British won the field, and the rebels retreated to New Jersey. Leslie commanded troops in January 1777 at Maidenhead, New Jersey, where his men failed to detect Washington and his army passing nearby on the way to a successful attack on Princeton. (A Leslie nephew was killed there.)6
The next year, Leslie was in New York commanding the strategically important Staten Island. He was rewarded in April 1779 with another promotion, this time to major general. For the rest of the war, Leslie’s assignments took him southward. He participated in the capture of Savannah and Charlestown in late 1779 and spring 1780, and briefly commanded Charlestown before returning to New York. Later in 1780, he commanded troops raiding rebel supply lines in Virginia, and he established a base in Portsmouth.
In the wake of a British debacle and defeat at King’s Mountain on the inland border between North and South Carolina, Clinton ordered Leslie to the Carolinas. He arrived in Charlestown before Christmas, and joined Cornwallis’s main army in mid-January 1781. He was with Cornwallis at Cowan’s Ford on February 1. There, like O’Hara, Leslie nearly drowned. At the Guilford Courthouse in March, he commanded the British right wing. Although he didn’t figure as prominently as O’Hara, Cornwallis praised him nonetheless: “I have been particularly indebted to Major General Leslie for his gallantry and exertion in the action, as well as his assistance in every other part of the service.”7
As Cornwallis prepared to move north into Virginia, Leslie’s health deteriorated, and he received permission to return to New York to recuperate. Once recovered, Clinton ordered him to assume command in Georgia and the Carolinas. He was experienced—and experienced in the South. On November 8, 1781, Leslie arrived by frigate in Charlestown to take command.8
With the defeat at Yorktown, the British occupied peripheries and enclaves.
In the north, their positions in Canada were secure; the last serious rebel incursion, in 1775–1776, ended in a debacle. On Penobscot Bay in Maine (then part of Massachusetts), the British manned a small fort. On the frontier—from Lake Ontario and upstate New York to Georgia—most Indians allied themselves with the British, who pledged to prevent incursions by land-greedy rebels. The British also controlled frontier forts on the Great Lakes. South of Georgia was the small colony of East Florida, centered in St. Augustine. Clinton’s headquarters was in strongly fortified New York—although he maintained an ongoing fear of a coordinated operation by the rebels and the French navy.
By fall 1780, the British had largely pacified the South: not just the low country, but all of Georgia and the Carolinas. A battle-filled year later, when Leslie took command, the British maintained positions only within radii of Wilmington, North Carolina, Charlestown, and Savannah. Charlestown was the key. With more than twelve thousand residents in 1775, it was British North America’s fourth-largest city, and the South’s economic center.
Leslie found a dire situation. In North Carolina, the rebels threatened Wilmington. In Georgia, an aggressive enemy general, Anthony Wayne, was reported to be on his way. Wayne’s superior, Nathanael Greene, had forced Cornwallis to leave the Carolinas, and now he threatened Charlestown itself. In East Florida, the governor told Leslie he anticipated an attack by Spain, the French ally that controlled the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Another report said the Spanish would recruit Creek Indians as allies.9
The rebel armies were strong and growing—at least 2,500 Continental army regulars, according to British intelligence, plus experienced state militia. What the British didn’t know was the whereabouts of key rebel generals and how many reinforcements they were getting post-Yorktown. If the French navy coordinated an assault with the rebels on any of the cities, the British positions would be untenable.10
Leslie found 3,500 regulars in South Carolina fit for duty. Savannah, Wilmington, and St. Augustine had roughly seven hundred, five hundred, and 450 regulars, respectively, plus small bands of Loyalist militia. The towns were indefensible at those troop levels. Wilmington’s situation was urgent, as rebel troops were on the march. Throughout the low country, 2,300 British regulars in total were sick or recovering from wounds. Desertion caused more erosion. Hessian mercenaries, especially, deserted daily, and the British refused to trust them as advance guards. Loyalist militia disappeared.11
Refugees crowded into the four towns. Rebels plundered Loyalist plantations and seized Loyalist property—that is, the slaves who made the plantations profitable—for use as bounty: three slaves offered for every new rebel recruit. Food became scarce. The rebel forces pressured land the British used for forage. Rebel privateers squeezed supply ships.12
South Carolina’s royal lieutenant governor said that while Leslie’s arrival gave residents “fresh spirits,” the rebels threatened a blockade and subjected Loyalists in the countryside to “violence and plunder.” Spies abounded, and the purchases of food and wood “drains the town of ready money.” Leslie reported the same to Clinton: “The numbers of loyal inhabitants and of helpless refugees, with their women and children, is very great. They are burdens that will soon become very serious . . . Provisions is an object of so great importance that unless the inhabitants get some supply, they must all leave the town[Charlestown].”13
A month later, Leslie went into greater detail: “The whole of the country is against us but some helpless [Loyalist] militia with a number of officers, women, children, Negroes, etc. Add to this the refugees from North Carolina and many from Virginia on parole to feed, clothe and supp
ort, many of them formerly in affluent circumstances and now are destitute. . . . I must get my heart steeled. It is a most unpleasant situation.” Disease decimated Leslie’s troops. He ran down the roll call of his senior officers: “Colonel Balfour expects to go away . . . General Gould has been confined to his room ever since my arrival . . . General Knoblock is also ill . . . General Bose (a most respectable man) manages his Hessians, and that is all. From wounds and sickness, a great many officers of the last-arrived regiments are going home.”14
Three days into 1782, Leslie summarized his situation to London: “It is with much concern that I am obliged to inform your Lordship of the almost total revolt of this Province.”15
6. The Deputy Savior
THE REBEL GENERAL, NATHANAEL GREENE, 40, HAD HIS OWN problems. He was Washington’s most trusted general, but not because of military success. Greene was “neither the most wise, the most brave, nor the most patriotic of counselors,” said one rival. Asthmatic, often ill, and with a bad leg that made him walk with a limp, he didn’t look like a soldier. To some, he disrespected civilian authority. He left an impression of “belittling and sneering . . . not only undignified and petulant, but unwise and most unfortunate. . . . He assumed a grand air of importance, superiority, and patronage, and in a manner somewhat at least as that of a dictator.”1
Southern Whigs sarcastically called him “the Deputy Savior.” These complaints reached Congress. “Have you heard,” asked one congressman of another, “a report which has been whispered here, and the truth of which I cannot assent to, concerning the unpopularity of General Greene with his army?”2
Greene fought every year of the war and never won a battle. At a crucial time on Long Island in August 1776, he had been a no-show, suffering from a life-threatening fever. The Whigs were routed. While he argued that preservation of the army was more important than saving New York, he caused the surrender of its last stronghold there. “I cannot conceive the garrison to be in any great danger,” he advised Washington. Six days later, its three-thousand men surrendered to the British.3
After Yorktown Page 4