In Charlestown, Leslie’s strategies changed with his orders. Clinton had originally ordered Leslie to save Charlestown at all costs. To do this, Leslie pulled in his troops from far-flung, indefensible positions almost as soon as he arrived in November. He strengthened a defensive line at Quarter House, a narrow part of the Charlestown Peninsula six miles north of the city proper, and it became “one of the best-fortified field positions imaginable.” And he abandoned outposts such as Monck’s Corner, thirty-five miles north of the city. The day Leslie arrived, he ordered Wilmington to be abandoned. The troops there hadn’t even heard about Cornwallis’s surrender. And Leslie warned Clinton that he wouldn’t be able to help Savannah or St. Augustine if they were attacked without jeopardizing Charlestown.16
Islands in the immediate Charlestown area, however, were important. Leslie established new posts on them and pledged “to keep the islands as long as I can, as our only hope of supplies to this town depends upon them.”17
Anticipating that the contraction would cause an outcry among Loyalists, Leslie publicly pledged that the British were there to stay. He promised Loyalists they could rely on “speedy and effectual support” by the British army. “In every event and situation,” he said, Loyalist “interests and security shall be considered as inseparably connected with those of his Majesty’s troops.” As for anyone who previously promised to support the Crown, but later became rebels, “the severest punishment shall be inflicted.”18
To give his words credibility, he ordered “frequent excursions of cavalry, sustained by infantry, to irritate the enemy and harass their detached posts.” He conceded these raids resulted in “no decided consequences,” but they nonetheless “were distressing to the rebels, gave confidence to the King’s troops, and served to animate a defensive situation.”19
Leslie also had a personal strategy: After 14 years in America, ten of them consecutive, seven of them at war, he wanted out. He begged Clinton to relieve him of command. His health was “much impaired from having served the whole war. . . . From sickness and accidents, by falls, dislocations, etc., my health is unfit to stand the summer.” The “perplexity” of problems related to Loyalist civilians was “so much beyond my abilities to arrange that I declare myself unequal to the task.” The stress was fierce: “From morning to night I have memorials and petitions full of distress.” His mother, 82, was “going into her grave, and only wishing to see me.” His only daughter “now depends on my return to Europe” because she refused to get married until her father returns. “My country has got her full share out of me,” Leslie said.20
Clinton was unsympathetic. Leslie stayed.
Leslie’s orders to defend and maintain Charlestown suddenly changed in May 1782. Clinton had resigned, and the pro-war government was gone, both victims of Yorktown. The new commander, Lieutenant General Guy Carleton, arrived in New York with new orders: Abandon Charlestown, Savannah, and New York. Consolidate the British North American army in Halifax.21
For Leslie, evacuation posed complex questions. Will there be enough ships? When will they arrive? How do you break the news to Loyalists? What can they take with them? How do you handle slaves who escaped for British promises of freedom? Do you include the Loyalists’ slaves? Slaves that British officers had stolen from rebel plantations? With Greene making it dangerous to forage, how do you feed and house the growing numbers of refugees? Are prisoner exchanges possible? Will Greene attack the troops as they leave Savannah and Charlestown? Will the evacuation be another massacre like the road from Concord to Boston in 1775?
At first, Leslie acted secretly and refused to confirm the evacuation rumors. “The people in town don’t much believe it,” he reported to Carleton in June. “When it happens it will be severely felt by many. I’ve taken no steps toward it yet, knowing the jealousy of the people.”22
Meanwhile, refugees arrived daily, adding to the thousands already there. By the end of April, Leslie was trying to feed nearly eleven thousand men, both soldiers and civilians, along with 2,100 women, 1,600 children, and another 1,100 free or enslaved blacks. “Their misery and helpless situation justifies our attention to them.” Shortages of fresh meat and vegetables caused prices to spike. Rebels made it difficult to seize food from the countryside.23
But it wouldn’t be until August that Leslie would publicly announce the evacuation.
8. North Carolina: Two Combustible Commanders
TWO DAYS BEFORE LESLIE’S NOVEMBER 8 ARRIVAL IN Charlestown, the British commander in Wilmington, North Carolina, 170 miles to the northeast, requested reinforcements and supplies. A 1,500-man rebel army was threatening; the 450 British troops in Wilmington were on two-thirds rations; and the commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Henry Craig, 33, reported he had grain for only twenty-five days.1
But the next week, Craig learned about Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown. With Leslie’s support, instead of organizing reinforcements, he began to organize an evacuation. Leslie hoped Craig wouldn’t lose many troops in the process.2
Wilmington was the last British stand in North Carolina, a state they thought they had pacified the year before. It was a port town of two hundred houses and one thousand residents along the Cape Fear River, “confined to very narrow limits, the buildings concentrated in the hollow west of the sand hills, and resting on the river.” The British had occupied Wilmington since late January 1781, when Cornwallis ordered Craig to secure a supply route from the coast to the interior.3
Craig, like Leslie and O’Hara, was a career army man. His Scottish father was a judge in Gibraltar, where John Henry was born. He joined the army at fifteen. By 1774, he commanded an infantry company in the Boston area. He fought in the war’s first major battle, Bunker Hill; in Canada in 1776, helping to thwart a rebel invasion; in three battles that were part of the British northern invasion of New York in 1777; the successful 1779 Penobscot River campaign in Maine; another campaign in the Chesapeake Bay area the next year; and, finally, Clinton’s invasion of the Carolinas in late 1780. He was wounded three times.
Unlike the “genteel” Leslie, Craig was an acquired taste—authoritarian, stubborn, manipulative, and easily offended, although friend and foe acknowledged his competence. A subordinate described him as “very short, broad, and muscular, a pocket Hercules, but with sharp, neat features as if chiseled in ivory. Not popular, for he was hot, peremptory, and pompous, yet extremely beloved by those whom he allowed to live in intimacy with him; clever, generous to a fault, and a warm unflinching friend to those he liked.”4
After Craig overwhelmed Wilmington’s two hundred defending rebel militia in January 1781, he turned the town into a support base and haven for Loyalists and Loyalist militia. He disarmed residents of questionable loyalty and built up Wilmington’s defenses. He captured prominent rebels and put them in a notorious prison yard nicknamed “Major Craig’s Bull Pen.” One captured rebel congressman was brought to Wilmington “thrown across a horse like a sack of meal.” Both he and a rebel militia brigadier general died during imprisonment—as a result of mistreatment, the Whigs said.5
Craig refused to negotiate prisoner exchanges. He lured slaves to leave their rebel masters and work for the British. Most important, he took the war to the rebels, supplying Loyalist militia, sometimes supporting them with regular troops, always encouraging them to raid the traitors and treat them harshly.
One Whig militiaman described a typical Craig-inspired raid: “Horses, cattle and sheep, and every kind of stock were driven off from every plantation; corn and forage taken for the supply of the army and no compensation given; houses plundered and robbed; chests, trunks, etc., broke; women and children’s clothes, etc., as well as men’s wearing apparel and every kind of household furniture taken away. The outrages were committed mostly by a train of loyal refugees.”6
Wilmington was “the theatre of proscription, murder, and torture, in rapid succession and often under circumstance of atrocity utterly incompatible with the honor of a great and civilized societ
y. . . . Every active and spirited Whig, within the range of their operations, was ‘hunted like a partridge on the mountains,’ and, if caught, was instantly put to death. Fathers, husbands, and brothers were murdered in cold blood, and their mothers, wives, and children were left without a home, without protection, and without even the means of subsistence,” said an early nineteenth-century historian who interviewed veterans and other survivors.7
But the Whigs didn’t passively give in. A militia major described their reaction: “A system of plunder and cruelty was practiced by the Tories . . . which soon produced a spirit of retaliation on the part of the Whigs, and devastation marked the track of both parties as they passed the dwellings of their adversaries.”8
Craig himself said North Carolina had become “a glorious situation for cutting one another’s throats.” By summer 1781, the British and Loyalist militia controlled much of the colony. Craig’s success gave Greene “pain and mortification to find the Tories so successful in their excursions. Wilmington is the root of the evil.”9
In less than two months, everything would change. It began with a Whig militia general, Griffith Rutherford, as hated by the Tories as Craig was hated by the rebels. “A perfect savage,” said a Loyalist colonel.10
“This villainous ruffian . . . butchered [Loyalists] in cold blood,” and ordered his men to “wound with their swords every Loyalist they met,” reported a Tory newspaper. The resulting scars were called “General Rutherford’s mark.” Even a fellow Whig, a Wilmington-area legislator, said Rutherford was a “bloodthirsty old scoundrel.”11
Greene, knowing Rutherford’s reputation, gently warned the militia general about the reports that Rutherford was treating Tories “with great severity, driving them indiscriminately from their dwellings without regard to age or sex, and laying waste [to] their possessions, destroying the produce and burning their houses. . . . But in national concerns as well as private life, passion is a bad counselor, and resentment an unsafe guide. . . . If we pursue the Tories indiscriminately and drive them to a state [of] desperation, we shall make them from a weak and feeble foe [to] a sure and determined enemy.”12
Rutherford was neither a North Carolina native nor even American-born. Historians fill the first thirty years of his life with modifiers: “approximate,” “around,” “about,” “apparently,” “perhaps.” He was born in Northern Ireland—about 1731. His mother had moved there from Wales, his father from Scotland. Around age eight, in 1739, he and his parents sailed to America, but his parents died aboard the ship, or perhaps soon after arriving. While he had family in Virginia, he appears to have been raised by an elderly German couple, possibly in Delaware. He might have been related to them. Around 1745—or 1750 or 1751—he lived in Virginia near or with his relatives. By 1753, he had moved to North Carolina, about two hundred miles upcountry from Wilmington. There, another set of relatives helped him get a job as a surveyor. He was about twenty-two.13
The next year, or possibly two years later, he married a local woman, with whom he had ten children. Both his relatives and his wife’s family were apparently well connected, which helps explain why an orphan could later have the political and social success he did. Like Washington, Rutherford turned his surveying skills into profitable land speculation. While his wealth never rivaled that of low-country plantation owners, he was able to buy thousands of cheap acres, much of which he turned into productive farmland.14
In 1758, Rutherford began his military career as a militia member, and fought the French and Indians in the Seven Years’ War. A different kind of fighting broke out in 1765. The “regulators,” poorer, backcountry farmers, often indebted, protested the political and economic power of low-country planters, royal officials, lawyers, and land speculators. Their protests ranged from intimidation, refusal to pay taxes, disruption of court proceedings, to seizing repossessed property. The movement caught Rutherford in the middle. The royal governor had appointed him county sheriff, responsible for enforcing the law, and he earned a fee from collecting taxes. Rutherford balanced royal politics with local politics by supporting reform in the assembly, resigning as sheriff after a year, and endorsing a local agreement with the regulators—while participating in militia action against them.15
When the dispute between colonists and the British reached the tipping point, Rutherford chose rebellion. His neighbors elected him to the Whig legislature, and he was named colonel of his county militia. By the end of 1775, he helped relieve a Whig army besieged by Tories in South Carolina. In 1776, the legislature named him a state brigadier general.16
His first action as general was against the Cherokees, “that treacherous, barbarous nation of savages, with their white abettors [the British], who, lost to all sense of humanity, honor, and principle, mean to extinguish every spark of freedom in these United States.” The Indians had escalated the defense of their land against encroaching white settlers. Rutherford’s army of 2,400 men destroyed thirty-six Cherokee towns. When some of his men scalped a Cherokee woman and murdered a prisoner, Rutherford arrested the ringleader, but was forced by troops to release him. (The next year, the legislature began offering a bounty for Indian scalps.) Unable to resist the white army, the Indians sued for peace, and ceded large swaths of territory.17
During these years, Rutherford’s neighbors continued to elect him to the assembly, and in 1777 to the state senate, where he remained a senator for eleven years. He advocated a strong legislative branch, a weak executive, religious freedom—no established church—and harsh policies toward Tories.
In 1780, the British captured Charlestown, forcing rebel general Lincoln into a humiliating surrender. Rutherford joined the new rebel general, Horatio Gates, in backcountry South Carolina in August. That month, in Camden—forty-five miles from the North Carolina border—Cornwallis routed the rebel army. Rutherford, who had multiple wounds, was taken prisoner. Cornwallis called out his capture: “The taking [of] that violent and cruel incendiary, Gen. Rutherford, has been a lucky circumstance.”18
As an officer, Rutherford was treated well in his St. Augustine imprisonment, allowed to grow a garden, and to walk within certain limits of the town. He was exchanged after ten months, and arrived back in North Carolina in early September 1781. He immediately recruited an army. By October, he led 1,400 or 1,500 men.19
Now, he marched toward Wilmington. With little artillery, he didn’t intend any frontal assaults on entrenched British regulars—a direct attack on Wilmington would have been suicidal—but he would do everything else: cut off supplies, try to starve Craig’s garrison, intimidate Tory civilians, and fight Tory militia.
The first battle was on October 15, about ninety miles from Wilmington. Part of Rutherford’s army surprised three hundred to six hundred Tory militia, routing them “entirely with sabre,” and forcing them to flee into swamps and marshes. By the 20th, Rutherford successfully confined British troops to the Wilmington area. Craig wrote his commander that Rutherford’s only goal was to “subdue the Tories—and distress them they will.” He hoped the Tories would elude the Whig army.20
On the 22nd, Rutherford moved to besiege Wilmington. He split his army, sending one force down the west side of the Cape Fear River, and the other approaching Wilmington on the north. By mid-November, Rutherford was on Wilmington’s outskirts. At More’s Plantation on the 14th, his troops surprised one hundred Loyalist militia, killing or wounding forty-two of them. The next day, the Whigs skirmished with British regulars at the heavily fortified Brick House, just outside the main Wilmington defenses. A militia captain demanded the British surrender. “I disregard your orders,” the British officer replied. “I don’t surrender.” With no artillery to make good on their demand, the Whigs retreated.21
Tory militia attacked ninety Whigs on the 16th. The Whigs counterattacked, and the Tories retreated. The next day, Rutherford’s main army was four miles from Wilmington, and learned about Cornwallis in Yorktown. But Craig had learned about Yorktown several days earlier and was
already making plans to evacuate.
At sunrise on November 18, British troops marched to their transport boats, taking with them about one thousand Loyalist militia and families. “Boats lined the wharves, baggage upon baggage; dragged down and conveyed to the ships, riding at anchor in the stream,” an eyewitness recalled. “The fife and drum were heard, and company after company, headed by their respective officers, marched in solid columns through the streets, leaving their horses behind.”22
Suddenly, while the troops were still embarking, a small group of rebel cavalry rode into town “at full speed.” One of the rebels recognized a Tory on the road. He rushed up to him, “and with one blow by a vertical cut laid his head open, the divided parts falling on each other.” The dead man, the rebel said, had hanged his father with a grapevine. British regulars fired back, but the cavalry retreated quickly, receiving only slight wounds.23
Rutherford’s army arrived after the British had sailed. Immediately, they began looting Whig and Tory property. A civilian representative begged Rutherford for protection. The general agreed, and placed a guard by all civilian houses. Over the next two weeks, the army broke up and went home.
Rutherford also returned home and was named commissioner of confiscated property. He showed little spirit of reconciliation. When a former Tory asked for help in reuniting his family, Rutherford told him he was an “open enemy” and suggested the man move to Canada. After voting against ratification of the Constitution in 1788, he lost his seat in the state senate. He retained large land holdings in North Carolina and Tennessee, and added more. In 1792, Rutherford moved to Tennessee, where he led the territorial legislature. Two counties, in Tennessee and North Carolina, are named in his honor.24
Craig continued his upward career track in the British army, serving in Holland, Cape Town, India, and Italy. His most well-known role was as governor and commander of Lower Canada, in 1807. It was a controversial tenure, and Craig worsened the tensions between French and British Canadians. Nor did Craig hesitate to interfere in American affairs, supporting Indian efforts on the frontier to counter American expansionism. He also hired a spy, which caused a Congressional stir. His health failing, he left Canada for England in 1811 and died the next year.
After Yorktown Page 6