After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  Laurens’s connections began with his father, Henry, a successful Charlestown import-export merchant whose early wealth came from the slave trade. Henry might have been responsible for one-third of all the slaves imported into and sold in Charlestown from 1751 to 1761—more than 7,400 people. With cash from his business, Henry bought land, about twenty thousand acres in six Georgia and South Carolina rice plantations, farmed by five hundred slaves.6

  In ordering such “merchandise” for resale, Laurens was particular. “Our people like tall slaves best for our business and strong,” he wrote a business associate. Yet he was a moralist, and conflicted by the trade. “I abhor slavery,” he said. “I am devising means for manumitting many of them and for cutting off the entail of slavery.”7

  Henry was a Whig activist. In 1777, he was elected to the Continental Congress, and that November, succeeded John Hancock as president. Congress then named him a foreign minister with the intent of helping Adams and Franklin in Europe. But on his way there in 1780, the British captured him and made an example of him. They jailed him in the Tower of London. There, his health deteriorated until a conditional release in late 1781. By then, he was “much emaciated, and so heavily afflicted with the gout as to be obliged to make use of crutches,” a London newspaper reported.8

  Henry’s son, John, was a different kind of man. In 1771, he turned eighteen, and his father took him to Switzerland to study. John wanted to become a naturalist or doctor. His father wanted him to study law. John studied law in London. While in London, he lived with one of Henry’s friends—and got the friend’s daughter pregnant. They married in October 1776. “Pity has obliged me to marry,” John wrote Henry.9

  As tensions grew between America and Britain, John grew antsy. “I cannot read with indifference the valiant acts of those whose prudent conduct and admirable bravery have rescued the liberties of their countrymen.” He left London and his pregnant wife a couple of months after they married. He would never see his wife again, nor his daughter.10

  Laurens wanted to fight, and in August 1777, Washington welcomed the son of a congressman to his staff as an aide and lieutenant colonel. One month later, Laurens got his wish at the Battle of Brandywine. “It was not his fault that he was not killed or wounded,” said Lafayette, using a double negative. “He did everything that was necessary to procure one or the other.”11

  In October, at Germantown, Laurens did get wounded, nicked in the shoulder and side. At Monmouth, in 1778, during hand-to-hand combat, his horse was shot from beneath him. Laurens and fellow Washington aide Alexander Hamilton “seemed to court death,” a companion reported.12

  Reports of John’s recklessness had long since reached his father. John admitted as much. “You have asked me, my dear father, what bounds I have set to my desire of serving my country in the military line. I answer: glorious death or the triumph of the cause in which we are engaged.” Henry pleaded with his son to be prudent. “You have had many escapes, but I submit it to your wisdom and philosophy whether it be necessary to tempt the fates or to brave them.”13

  But John couldn’t be restrained. Two days before Christmas, he fought a duel with General Charles Lee, who, Laurens said, “publicly abused General Washington in the grossest terms.” Laurens, a member of Washington’s military family, said he had a right to defend his surrogate father’s honor. Laurens grazed Lee, but wasn’t hit himself, and the seconds—Hamilton was Laurens’s—insisted the duel stop.14

  Laurens and Hamilton had become more than friends. They used over-the-top, sentimental language in their letters to each other, but historians are divided about whether the words they used were just fashionable among young male friends or were suppressed homoeroticism. When, in 1779, Laurens left Washington’s staff to fight in the South, Hamilton’s farewell letter was typical of their correspondence: “Cold in my professions, warm in friendships, I wish, my dear Laurens, it might be in my power by action rather than words [to] convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that till you bade us adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you.” Laurens returned the sentiment, telling Hamilton of “many violent struggles I have had between duty and inclination—how much my heart was with you, while I appeared to be most actively employed here.”15

  Laurens’s southern assignment was a disaster. The Whigs, under the overall command of General Benjamin Lincoln (who later received O’Hara’s sword at Yorktown), attempted to take British-held Savannah. In one engagement, Laurens was ordered to lead a two-hundred-fifty-man militia guard into a rear position. Instead, he attacked. The results were two men killed and seven wounded, including Laurens. His immediate commander, General William Moultrie, was furious because it resulted in militia desertions, and Moultrie was forced to retreat. Laurens acted “very imprudently,” Moultrie said. He had “unnecessarily” exposed his men to British fire. “Col. Laurens was a young man of great merit, and a brave soldier, but an imprudent officer; he was too rash and impetuous.”16

  Laurens was conspicuous in the joint Whig-French siege and assault on Savannah, but the British prevailed. Lincoln and the Whigs retreated to Charlestown where, on May 12, 1780, they surrendered to the British. Laurens was a prisoner of war, soon paroled, but bound by his word not to fight until he was exchanged for a captured British officer of the same rank. He begged Washington to expedite a prisoner exchange: “It is the greatest and most humiliating misfortune of my life to be reduced to a state of inactivity at so important a juncture as the present. . . . An exchange would restore me to life.”17

  Laurens got his exchange about five months later, but Congress had other plans for him than fighting. It needed to send a military man to France to update the ally and to immediately secure more money from them. Laurens, with his European education, fluency in French, closeness to Washington, and experience working with a military ally, was a logical choice. Lafayette tried to set up a friendly welcome for Laurens, telling his wife that “General Washington loves him very much, and of all the Americans you have had the opportunity to see, he is (beyond all comparison) the one I would like to see you receive in the most friendly manner.”18

  But Lafayette and other friends warned him to temper his personality when acting as a diplomat. If the French didn’t agree to give the money, Lafayette said, “it will, I believe, be because they won’t think themselves able to do better—so . . . don’t get angry, and be [assured] that their intentions are good.”19

  Hamilton was blunter. “In the frankness of friendship, allow me to suggest to you one apprehension. It is the honest warmth of your temper. A politician, my dear friend, must be at all times supple—he must often dissemble . . . I suspect the French Ministry will try your temper; but you must not suffer them to provoke it.”20

  Laurens arrived in France on March 9, 1781. He immediately broke protocol, offended sensitivities, demanded money, threatened, stormed, and pestered. “Notwithstanding the great efforts we are making for the United States, Mr. Laurens is not satisfied,” Vergennes, the French foreign minister, complained to Lafayette. Moreover, Laurens “is little familiar with the usages and consideration which are due the ministers of a great power. He has made his demands not only with unfit importunity, but even employing threats.”21

  Franklin was equally critical. “He was indefatigable while he stayed and took true pains, but he brusqued the ministers too much, and I found after he was gone that he had thereby given more offense than I could have imagined . . . It produced me some mortifications.”22

  The only diplomat who enjoyed Laurens was the equally undiplomatic John Adams, with whom Vergennes refused to talk, and about whom Franklin had conceded honesty, patriotism, and wisdom, “but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.” Adams said Laurens “succeeded to a marvel, though Dr. Franklin says he have great offense. I long since learned that a man may give offense and yet succeed.”23

  And Laurens did succeed. He returned to America on August 25, 1781, with 2.5 millio
n livres in cash ($10.6 million today), two cargoes of military supplies, a Dutch loan in the works, and a promise of French naval reinforcements. Although Franklin had already arranged for loans and gifts of ten million livres in late 1780, Laurens’s presence probably expedited the payments.24

  Diplomacy concluded, Laurens rejoined the army, which was closing in on the British at Yorktown. He served under Hamilton and helped lead the attack on a crucial fortification. Hamilton reported to his commander, Lafayette, that Laurens “distinguished himself by . . . entering the enemy’s work with his corps among the foremost, and making prisoner the commanding officer of the redoubt.”25

  Laurens represented the Whigs in the surrender negotiations. Within a month of the British surrender, he headed home to South Carolina to report to General Greene. Laurens had an ulterior motivation for returning to the South.

  As a student in Europe, he had come to oppose slavery. “How can we . . . reconcile to our spirited assertions of the rights of mankind the galling abject slavery of our Negroes?” he said. In 1778, he had proposed a fight-for-freedom plan in which he would recruit three thousand slaves to fight for the Whigs, and pay their owners $1,000 each. After the war, the slaves would be emancipated and given $150 each. Laurens pleaded with his father to give him “a number of your able-bodied men slaves instead of leaving me a fortune.”26

  Henry was skeptical, but Congress endorsed the plan. Southern legislatures despised it. In South Carolina, the legislators “received it with horror,” sure that “terrible consequences” would result. “Terrible consequences” had resulted in 1739, when a slave revolt began a dozen miles from Charlestown. At least twenty-one whites were killed and nearly all of the eighty rebellious blacks were killed or executed. This is what would happen if blacks were armed.27

  Arming free blacks, let alone slaves, was problematic for many in the Whig military as well. When Washington took command of the army in 1775, he refused to allow any blacks, whether free or slave, to remain. Several New England officers with integrated units protested. “We have some Negroes, but I look upon them in general equally serviceable with other men . . . Many of them have proved themselves brave,” said Massachusetts general John Thomas. With advice from Congress, Washington compromised and grandfathered into the army freemen. Over time, starved for manpower, he relented on slaves. Over the course of the war, about five thousand blacks fought as rebels—including, at any given time, about six to twelve percent of Washington’s army. In 1782, he went further and endorsed Laurens’s concept.28

  Laurens also enlisted Greene’s support, then was elected to the South Carolina legislature, and began pushing his fight-for-freedom plan. “That they would make good soldiers, I have not the least doubt,” Greene wrote the governor in April 1782.29

  But, as in 1778, the legislature was appalled. One legislator, a Yorktown veteran, was sure the Laurens plan was part of a northern conspiracy for general emancipation and worse. He told a friend of a mutual acquaintance in Philadelphia who “once mentioned seriously to me that our country would be a fine one if our whites and blacks intermarried. The breed would be a hardy excellent race, he said, fit to bear our climate.”30

  Edward Rutledge, the governor’s brother and a Declaration of Independence signer, reported the voting results: “We have had another hard battle on the subject of arming blacks. About 12 or 15 were for it, and about 100 against it. I now hope it will rest forever and a day. But I do assure you I was very much alarmed on the occasion.”31

  The proposal, said a Greene aide, was “annihilated” by “the fears of the people.” Greene himself was frustrated. “I was in hopes the southern states, by enlisting blacks, might have enabled me to act offensively,” he said.32

  Laurens took the defeat hard, telling Washington: “The single voice of reason was drowned by the howlings of a triple-headed monster in which prejudice, avarice, and pusillanimity were united.” Washington consoled Laurens, telling him that “every selfish passion has taken its place.” Americans, he said, can’t “boast an exception” to self-interest versus the national interest.33

  Arming slaves would not happen with South Carolina rebels, but using them in other ways was appropriate. Like the British, the Whigs used them as laborers, even boat pilots. Black women could become mistresses or rape victims; sometimes, white men freed their mistresses and children. About one-third of freed slaves were mixed-race children, and black women comprised three-quarters of free adults. Finally, slaves were a unit of currency. South Carolina authorized the governor to use slaves confiscated from Tories to meet back-pay obligations to its troops. The Whig government and military offered confiscated slaves as a signing bonus to new recruits—one grown black for a private, three grown blacks and one small one for a colonel.34

  12. The Swamp Fox Meets His Match

  SO GREENE AND LESLIE FOUGHT A WAR OF SKIRMISH, OF PROBE and thrust, parry and counter-parry, forage, raid, terror, counter-terror, retaliation; Greene unwilling to concentrate his skinny forces, Leslie unwilling to dilute his Charlestown base; British regular against Continental regular, Tory militiaman against rebel militiaman, the four in various combinations, and, sometimes, plunderers with no conviction.

  Historians have documented nearly two hundred encounters in South Carolina in the fifteen months after Yorktown. There are scores more, piddling incidents, footnotes:

  “This day,” wrote a Continental officer on April 14, 1782, “a small party of the enemy’s cavalry came to Dorchester and took Lieut. Carrington prisoner . . . This night, the soldiers slept with their clothes on and lay on their arms.”1

  An officer sent men to guard ammunition wagons, “lest the Tories, who are very numerous, should take them. The Tories fired on part of the guard who were left with one of the wagons.”2

  Assured that he would be treated as a POW, a Loyalist captain surrendered, but as “he had been so notorious a villain . . . he was immediately put to death before[in front of] his wife and children.”3

  On a foraging expedition, British regulars and Loyalists encountered rebels near Monck’s Corner. The rebels holed up in a defensive position, and “a heavy fire from these houses” killed two and wounded five or six others. The British “collected a number of cattle.”4

  Near Ninety-Six, Whigs used dogs to track Tories who had “burnt some houses and committed other irregularities.” This tactic, a rebel report noted, “succeeded beyond our most raised expectations.”5

  On the Ashley River, a boat manned by soldiers “in the garb and color of negroes” hauling goods to market, captured the Alligator, a British galley. A few British were killed, a few escaped, but Whigs captured the captain and twenty-eight sailors before torching the ship. A month later, in Beaufort, three British privateers flying the rebel flag lured half a dozen rebel boats into a trap, captured the crews, burned supplies, and seized slaves.6

  Most of these skirmishes were ad-hoc affairs. Greene was more methodical, and in December 1781, what might have been described as a skirmish turned into strategic victory.

  Dorchester was a small, prosperous trading community on the Ashley River, twenty miles northwest of Charlestown. It was settled in 1697 by Puritan colonists from its namesake town in Massachusetts. Soon, Anglicans joined the Puritans, and Creeks and Cherokees traded with them both. The town prospered from its pine forests, which provided lumber and pitch; from low-lying areas turned into rice paddies; from its location at the head of river navigation for large ships. Dorchester had a large dock and a shipyard. During the Seven Years’ War, the settlers built a fort made from tabby, a mixture of oyster shells, lime, sand, and water, which, when dry, had concrete-type strength. The fort, eight feet tall and two feet thick, commanded the river.7

  When the revolution began, Whigs turned the town into a military depot. Sometime over the next five years, both the military and civilians abandoned Dorchester; in 1780, a British foraging party reported about forty deserted homes. The British seem to have occupied it shortly thereaf
ter, but they, too, abandoned it. Continental colonel Henry Lee raided the town in July 1781, but found no British. But the British soon returned. By November, four hundred infantry, one hundred fifty cavalry, and an unknown number of Tory militia occupied Dorchester.

  An enemy post of that size got Greene’s attention. In mid-November, he left his main camp north of Charlestown headed for Dorchester, leading two hundred cavalry and two hundred infantry. “We appeared before Dorchester the first [December 1] after a most fatiguing, wet, and disagreeable march,” Greene said. His advance guard spotted a Tory patrol and immediately charged, killing about ten, wounding up to twenty, and taking several prisoners. British cavalry counterattacked, but were driven back “with such fury as left them no doubt but that our whole force was at hand.”8

  The British concluded they had no choice but to abandon Dorchester. That night, they destroyed supplies, sunk their cannon in the river, and burned as many buildings as they could. Greene entered what was left of the town the next day.

  Residents eventually returned and repaired the church and their homes, but the town was dying. The school closed in 1818; the church, in 1820. After an 1886 earthquake, the last residents abandoned Dorchester. Archaeological efforts in the mid-twentieth century brought it back to the public’s attention. In 1969, a timber company donated the property to the state. Today, the town site is part of the Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site. The fort walls, made of tabby, and the brick bell tower of the church survive.

  General Horatio Gates, who led the Whigs to victory at Saratoga in 1777—their greatest until Yorktown—preceded Greene as southern commander. His leadership was a debacle, resulting in defeat at Camden, South Carolina, in 1780.

  Where Greene welcomed local partisans and state militias to supplement his army, Gates had little use for them, including Francis Marion, a middle-aged plantation owner and state brigadier general. After Gates’s defeat, it was largely Marion who kept the pressure on the British with incessant hit-and-run guerilla tactics.