None of this pleased Greene, because it meant his most accomplished general couldn’t return to South Carolina. “My motive for withdrawing the troops from Georgia was to have our force collected and avoid, if possible, being defeated in detachments,” he wrote Wayne in early August. “Destroy the trunk, and the branches will soon perish. . . . Our line is daily diminishing by deaths and discharges, and is far less than you can imagine. . . . Leslie may have it in his power to give us a more certain and fatal defeat.”48
About the time Wayne received Greene’s letter, he had become confident that state militia could handle any crisis. In fact, the next month, the militia forced the Indians to surrender virtually all of Georgia.49
Wayne rejoined Greene’s army on August 15. He wasn’t modest about his accomplishments. “The duty we have done in Georgia was much more difficult than that of the children of Israel,” he said. “They had only to make bricks without straw, but we had provision, forage, and almost every other article of war to provide without money . . . and what is yet more difficult than all, to make Whigs of Tories . . . all of which we have effected, and wrested this state out of the hands of the enemy.”50
After the war, Wayne and Jackson had a bitter falling out. Jackson was elected to the first U.S. Congress, and became a Jefferson ally, opposing Washington’s federalist policies. Wayne defeated his reelection bid. “Jackson’s a damned liar,” Wayne said. “Let him do his worst, God damn him. I don’t care a damn for him.” Jackson later resurrected his political career with election as a U.S. senator and governor. His greatest political accomplishment was cleaning up the aftermath of a land-fraud scandal.51
10. Leslie’s Work
CLINTON LIBERATED CHARLESTOWN FROM THE REBELS IN MAY 1780. For a headquarters, he expropriated “one of the handsomest houses in America.” Charlestown’s leading slave trader, Miles Brewton II, built the mansion and compound over four years. One guest described the mansion as having “the grandest hall I ever beheld—azure blue satin window curtains, rich blue paper with gilt . . . most elegant pictures, excessive grand and costly looking glasses.” The “fine brick house on King Street, with . . . generous doorway and double flight of marble steps” cost Brewton £8,000—about $1.4 million today. The British seized it because Brewton was “an ardent Revolutionist.”1
But Brewton was already dead. In 1775, he and his family sailed for Philadelphia, and their ship was lost at sea. Brewton’s sister, Rebecca Motte, inherited the home, and the British allowed her, her three daughters, and ailing husband to live in part of the house until the husband died in 1781. (The Mottes made their daughters live and eat in the attic to avoid contact with soldiers.) Then the Mottes moved to their plantation.2
In late 1781, Leslie commanded Charlestown and worked to address complex problems. The occupation was expensive. His troops were barracked in all or parts of one hundred commercial buildings and private homes, for which the British paid residents more than £5,500 (about $835,000 today). He gave allowances and rations to Loyalist refugees, and bought supplies and services from residents—some of them rebels who smuggled goods for sale across the lines. Money, however, was a minor logistical problem compared to meeting the refugees’ other needs. Many lived in hovels. The diseases endemic to the low country and overcrowded conditions felled both refugees and soldiers.3
Illness struck Leslie himself, and periodically, he continued to plead in vain with his superiors to be allowed to return to England: “I have been severely attacked with an inflammation in my eyes, which has confined me to a dark room . . . As I have your Excellency’s orders to remain here, nothing but the immediate apprehension of my health being in danger can induce me to remove myself to New York, although my physicians have pressed me to it.”4
When Craig arrived in Charlestown after withdrawing from Wilmington, Leslie assigned the unit to Johns Island, thereby improving the defense of crucial pastureland needed for Charlestown’s food supply. Concerned about attacks on Charlestown proper and raids on poorly defended outposts, Leslie began pulling his troops in closer to the city.5
When Clinton ordered him to send two thousand men to Jamaica, Leslie protested that removing the troops from Charlestown would jeopardize the city and, ultimately, the South. He eventually sent 1,300 troops to Jamaica under the command of O’Hara, who, by then, had been exchanged. With his army reduced, Leslie contracted his defense perimeters further.
While he had little success conducting an immediate prisoner exchange with the rebels, Leslie was able to exchange prisoners with France’s ally, Spain.6
Care for refugees. Feed the troops. Defend the city. Protect Loyalists even while reducing areas of control. Maintain troop levels despite disease and desertion. Negotiate prisoner exchanges. Deal with superiors in New York and London. These were the first challenges Leslie faced.
Soon, he would face two more: decisions about slaves, and orders to evacuate.
British law, tradition, and belief supported slavery. British courts had ruled that slavery on British soil was inconsistent with the law, but it wouldn’t ban the slave trade for another generation, and wouldn’t emancipate slaves in the empire until 1833.
“A horse, a cow, or a sheep is much better protected with us by the law than a poor slave,” said an Anglican minister. Most English—and Americans—didn’t consider blacks as equal human beings. The minister had to argue that differences between whites and blacks were “accidental or circumstantial,” and felt compelled to deny “any essential difference between the European and African mental powers.” In fact, “had nature intended Negroes for slavery, she would have endowed them with many qualities which they now want [lack]. Their food would have needed no preparation, their bodies no covering, they would have been born without any sentiment for liberty.” Blacks, he concluded, “are capable of learning anything.”7
Leslie respected that Loyalists needed protection for their property—that is, slaves. Prime field slaves cost about £60 each ($10,000 today) and could be rented for up to £8 a year ($1,400). The owner or renter would incur additional costs for food, shelter, and clothing. The Loyalists couldn’t run their plantations without slaves. No plantations, no food, more Charlestown refugees. It also worked the other way: Rebel property—slaves—“flies to us and famine follows,” said a British spy.8
Leslie’s own officers, and sometimes units, owned slaves. The artillery unit owned forty-four black women and children. The horse unit owned six women and children.9
But in 1775, Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, offered freedom to all male slaves owned by rebels if they could escape to British lines and fight for the Crown. Four years later, Clinton expanded Dunmore’s offer, promising freedom to escapees from the rebels and “full security to follow . . . any occupation which he shall think proper.” African American men and women streamed into British lines. Half-a-million blacks lived in the thirteen colonies—about twenty percent of the population. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 slaves escaped during the war, despite Whig efforts to stop them. In South Carolina in 1775, slaves comprised sixty percent of the 146,000 residents; up to 59,000 of them escaped during the war from their Loyalist and rebel masters. Many went into the frontier or Spanish territory; many more defected to the British. Some, the British would abandon, as O’Hara did in his retreat to Yorktown.10
In Charlestown, Leslie and his predecessors used thousands of African Americans. Often impressed or seized from rebel plantations, sometimes paid or not, sometimes free, sometimes still slaves, they built fortifications; served in the navy; acted as messengers; spied; hauled supplies; emptied latrines; foraged; and plundered. They were carpenters. They were wheelers and smiths, sawyers, and collar-makers. They repaired wagons, boats, bridges, roads, equipment, and arms. The built artillery platforms, barracks, and fascines. Some were prostitutes. Some were raped. And some, the British armed to fight the war as psychological weapons against rebels fearful of slave rebellions.11
Dunmore�
�s Ethiopian Regiment, at its peak, had about eight hundred soldiers, fought in Virginia, but was soon devastated by disease, and the survivors were dispersed into other British units, many of them serving in the elite Black Brigade. The Black Pioneers, a company of escaped South Carolina slaves, served in New York, Providence, Philadelphia, and Charlestown. In the Caribbean, a unit of free blacks became the Jamaica Rangers.
In 1782, Leslie created the Black Dragoons regiment, a small unit of about two dozen cavalry, captained by an ex-slave. It would see action against rebel general Francis Marion in late August. More important, from Leslie’s perspective, the regiment made almost nightly raids, supplying cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses to Charlestown.12
That escaped slaves now carried weapons was, said a Whig general, “sufficient to rouse and fix the resentment and detestation of every American who possesses common feelings.” A colleague concurred. “The black dragoons . . . are daily committing the most horrible depredations and murder.” In January 1782, for example, a farmer reported that “a party of armed Negroes . . . surrounded the house and endeavored to get me out,” leaving after telling the man “that had I not been an invalid they would have fired the house and cut me in pieces.” Even a British official reported that the Black Dragoons had committed “indiscriminate outrages” against civilians, thereby tipping white civilians to the rebel side.13
Some of the raids failed. On April 21, 1782, about two dozen Whig cavalry skirmished with forty British cavalry, three or four of whom were black. One of them was “cut . . . to pieces” after making “a most gallant defense.” At another skirmish, a Whig officer reported, “A party of our men . . . fell in with a party of the British Negro horse [cavalry], consisting of 10 men, of which they killed and wounded all but two men.” He described another of the Black Dragoons’ assignments: “The British deserters come in now every day, and may be averaged at 30 per week . . . More would come off, but are prevented by the Negro horse, as they are kept constantly patrolling for that purpose.”14
Although the number of actual Black Dragoons was small, their raids grew into a myth. “The enemy are arming with great industry a large body of Negroes,” Greene told Washington. “Not less than 700 are said to be armed and in uniform.”15
Whether the blacks were armed or worked as laborers, Leslie said, “There are many Negroes who have been very useful . . . and from their loyalty have been promised freedom.”16
The greatest friction between Leslie and Greene wasn’t the arming of slaves, but the stealing of them. When the South Carolina legislature ordered the confiscation of Loyalist property—including slaves—Leslie protested. “I was in hopes [that] humanity, as well as policy,” would have prevented the confiscations, he wrote a rebel general. Since that didn’t happen, he could “no longer remain the quiet spectator of their [Loyalist] distresses.”17
He proposed to Greene a suspension of confiscations and creation of a commission “to lessen the devastations of war, and secure, inviolate, the property of individuals.” Greene passed on Leslie’s proposal to the governor, who refused the proposal because “every species of property, Negroes, plate, household furniture, horses, carriages, cattle, etc., etc., have been indiscriminately torn from their owners by persons under your immediate command . . .”18
With the rebels hard-lining, Leslie vowed to continue seizing slaves from rebel plantations so that restitution could be made to Loyalists suffering from the legislature’s “oppressive and ruinous” confiscation law. His orders for one of many raids were explicit: “The principal business to prosecute is the collecting of the slaves who belong to those in arms against the British government.” He ordered that the slaves be assured the British were “never to return them to their masters, but to take care of them and their families.”19
In his May 1782 order—to evacuate the South—Carleton told Leslie to “expect a fleet of transports” to carry Loyalists and troops from Savannah and Florida. (Carleton rescinded the Florida orders the next month, so that the colony could be used for refugees.) Evacuation of Charlestown would come later, but “with the utmost dispatch.” He warned Leslie to make the evacuation as friendly as possible. “No destruction nor waste to be suffered,” he said. “Even the fortifications shall remain uninjured; no plundering nor insults nor incivility shall be offered to those who remain behind. Severe and instant punishment must check the first attempt.” His reasoning: “The evacuation is not a matter of choice, but of deplorable necessity in consequence of an unsuccessful war.” Although he was mindful of Loyalists’ distress in the South, New York’s safety came first.20
To avoid panic among the refugees, and to keep the rebels from using the information to their advantage, the British kept a lid on the orders; they wouldn’t publicly announce them until August. One member of the small circle that knew was New Jersey’s royal governor, William Franklin, Benjamin’s estranged son. William reflected Loyalist sentiment when he complained that the British army was impotent in the face of a weaker enemy. “In Charlestown, I find 5,000 or 6,000 regulars, besides militia, closely pent up by about 1,200 ragamuffins and suffering every inconvenience for want of fresh provisions and other necessaries, as if actually besieged by a greatly superior force.”21
Without disclosing the evacuation plans, Leslie wrote to Greene, explaining Parliament’s resolution to end offensive operations and noting the peace talks underway in Paris. He then proposed a ceasefire on behalf of “the rights of humanity, the welfare of this country, and the sentiments of the legislature of my own.”22
Greene refused. He said couldn’t act unilaterally without Congressional authorization and the consent of his French ally. Moreover, he was convinced that the reasons for Leslie’s ceasefire proposal were to “detach us from our alliance . . . relax our exertions,” and unite Britain in “pushing the American war.”23
Washington agreed. Three months later, even as it became apparent that the British would indeed evacuate Charlestown, he said he still questioned whether the British were engaging in a deception until “they could put their marine and other matters in a more prosperous train for prosecuting the war.”24
The fighting in South Carolina continued.
11. “Howlings of a Triple-Headed Monster”
TOO WEAK TO ATTACK CHARLESTOWN, GREENE DISPERSED HIS Continental army and state militia forces around the state. Most units were led by state-appointed generals: John Barnwell in the south; Andrew Pickens, guarding against Indians in the west; Thomas Sumter, and later, William Henderson, in central South Carolina; and the most reliable state general, Francis Marion, northeast of Charlestown. Greene and the Continentals defended the country immediately west and south of Charlestown. His most active general was Marylander Nathaniel Gist. (Wayne rejoined Greene in July 1782, but soon fell seriously ill.)1
Greene had several goals: Protect civilians from Tory attacks without themselves resorting to reprisals and terrorism. Isolate and destroy British outposts. Thwart Leslie’s ability to forage and feed his army and Tory refugees. Force Leslie to evacuate Charlestown, just as Wayne and Rutherford had done in Savannah and Wilmington. Like Leslie, Greene had to feed his army, keep enough of his men free from illness to be effective, and prevent his army from disappearing as enlistments ended or through desertion. Unlike Leslie, Greene also had to arbitrate additional personality conflicts among his officers.
It was a patchwork of problems. One colonel described the fighting as a campaign of “inconsiderable skirmishes.” Wayne wrote a friend about “our little army moldering away to a handful by the baneful effects of short enlistments and the fatal fevers natural to this inhospitable climate.” Marion ordered his men to stop the “scandalous and infamous practice” of stealing food from civilians. Desertion was rampant—a “shameful practice . . . prevailing among the troops,” Greene said. For emphasis, he executed the ringleader of an attempted mutiny.2
Days later, he told Marion: “The enemy threatens us with an attack. We have had no small une
asiness in our camp for want of pay, clothing, and spirits. [Knowledge of] the discontent has reached the enemy, and it is confidently asserted that they are coming out to take advantage of it.”3
William Seymour, a sergeant major, described the routine as mostly marching in anticipation of what the British and Tories might or might not do. From September 8, 1781, until mid-1782, Seymour’s regiment maneuvers were a gazetteer of plantations, villages, and landmarks, two miles march one day, sixteen miles another, five miles, twenty-two miles, twenty miles, five miles, twenty-three miles: Eutaw Spring, Gooden’s Mill (where “our men were taken sick with the fever and ague”), Stono Ferry, Stono Church, Parker’s Ferry, Drayton’s Cowpens, Warren’s plantation, McQuin’s, Goose Creek, Bacon Bridge, Izard’s Plantation, Dorchester, Hatley’s Point, Strawberry Ferry, near Quarter House, Gough’s plantation, Farre’s plantation, Thomas Warren’s plantation, all along the Ashley River, and back again.4
Then, there were the colonels. Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who commanded the elite and successful cavalry company, Lee’s Legion, retired suddenly in January 1782 because he felt he wasn’t appreciated—writing “the indifference with which my efforts to advance the cause of my country is considered by my friends.” Two of Marion’s colonels, Peter Horry and Hezekiah Maham, feuded over seniority, and even over Marion’s command of them. Horry quit when Marion gave Maham command of a cavalry legion.5
Then there was Colonel John Laurens, whose influence, accomplishments, and connections gave him gravitas, but whose intensity grated on his superiors.
After Yorktown Page 9