After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  The first wave of transports arrived in Charlestown on September 20, and in mid-October, the first group of refugees sailed to British-held St. Augustine: 1,147 Loyalist troops, 1,383 Loyalist civilians, and their 1,681 black slaves.22

  But the skirmishing continued. West of Charlestown in October, Whig militia broke up a meeting of Tories. Loyalist militia then ambushed the Whigs near Saltketcher Swamp, wounding several. In November, Whigs lured ten black British dragoons out of their positions on the outskirts of Charlestown. Eight were killed or wounded; two were captured.

  The last fighting with regular British troops took place on November 14. Colonel Thaddeus Kosciuszko, 36, had been with the Continentals since 1776. A Polish cavalry officer and engineer, Kosciuszko built the Whig defenses at Saratoga and West Point. He went south after Gates’s defeat at Camden. Despite some tactical blunders during the campaign against Cornwallis, Greene trusted Kosciuszko. After Laurens died, Greene assigned Kosciuszko many of Laurens’s former duties, including intelligence, patrolling near the British, and harassing British foragers.23

  One of Kosciuszko’s officers found that up to one hundred British sailors were landing regularly on James Island, across the harbor from Charlestown, to cut wood. On November 14, Kosciuszko and his men prepared to ambush the sailors. But the British had their own intelligence, and they ambushed the ambushers. Kosciuszko’s force of about seventy Continentals found themselves facing more than three hundred British regulars. Five Whigs died, and another five were wounded. Four bullets pierced Kosciuszko’s coat and another bullet shattered a lance he held, but he and most of his men escaped.

  In October, wrote a Whig captain, “It was now pretty well known that the enemy would soon evacuate the city. Many poor devils had taken protection and followed the British in; provisions scarce in town, and those people sick of their situation. They were anxious to get back to their old places of abode in the country. Some very miserable objects came out—whole families, battered and starving.”24

  Leslie wanted his troops to depart without being molested. Greene wanted to inherit a Charlestown that was neither looted nor torched. He assigned Wayne to negotiate the handover with Leslie. Wayne, who had negotiated the British evacuation of Savannah, was now recovered from a long illness.

  They concluded their agreement on December 13. “The preservation of Charlestown, and the lives and property of its inhabitants being of much greater consequence than striking or capturing a rear guard of a retiring enemy, I agreed to the enclosed propositions from General Leslie,” Wayne reported.25

  As the British pulled back from their positions, Wayne’s advance guard would move in, keeping a buffer of two hundred yards. “During the whole of this, it is to be understood that no hostility is to take place until our troops have got on board their transports,” Leslie said. If Wayne attacked the British, Leslie would order the city destroyed.26

  At daybreak, Saturday, December 14, 1782, the last British troops left their fortifications, and Wayne’s cavalry and light infantry followed them through the city. Occasionally, the British asked Wayne to leave more distance between them. Wayne complied. As he moved into the city, Wayne stationed guards “at proper places.” Small groups of soldiers patrolled the streets.27

  Royal lieutenant governor William Bull recalled that “the rebel cavalry were at hand and came to town that morning, but General Leslie sent to them to forbid their approaching the waterside of the town until his troops were totally gone. A few straggling sailors had remained in town who were kindly treated by the American cavalry and permitted to return quietly to their ships.”28

  A Continental captain “saw the last of the enemy embark in their boats . . . An immense fleet lay in sight all day. Found the city very quiet—houses all shut up.” He saw no residents until the next day, when some shops also opened.29

  It was a “melancholy scene,” a British soldier said, because of what was happening to the “poor, unhappy Loyalists,” who were now “left victims to their merciless enemies, or . . . to suffer every species of indigence and want in a strange land.” Charlestown’s streets, “formerly crowded and cheerful to the view, now presented one mournful scene of the most complicated wretchedness.” As the Loyalists passed by the homes of friends who were staying, “they silently, with grief unutterable, bowed their last farewell. This melancholy salute was returned with feelings that could only be expressed by tears and sobs. A gloomy despair sat on every countenance, and all was wretchedness and woe.”30

  Some blacks, abandoned by the British, grabbed the sides of shuttle boats as sailors rowed them to the transports anchored in the harbor.31

  The Continentals treated the remaining white Charlestown Loyalists “with civility, and permitted them to carry on business as usual,” a Tory paper reported.32

  With favorable tides, the 126 transports, divided into five fleets sailing to different locations, crossed Charlestown bar on December 18. The smaller of the fleets carried two hundred black soldiers to St. Lucia, in the Caribbean; twenty boats headed for Jamaica; another twenty to England; and eight to East Florida. The remaining, larger fleet, with the army, sailed to New York. Bull estimated that the transports evacuated more than nine thousand civilians from South Carolina.33

  General Marion dismissed his men on December 15. He told them that “he will always consider them with the affection of a brother.”34

  Greene gave the president of Congress the “agreeable information of the evacuation of Charlestown.” To Washington, he added a caution. He was “afraid” of complacency—that southern Whigs “will turn their attention too much to private repose for the public safety.”35

  A friend didn’t share Greene’s contemplation. “There are very few persons, my dear friend, to whom Providence has given the power to think justly,” wrote Congressman Gouverneur Morris. “It is not, therefore, a matter of astonishment to me that you were obliged to perform wonders.”36

  The British army was gone, but there remained unfinished business.

  Through at least March 1783, attacks continued on rebel merchant ships off the Carolina coast. Primary sources are inconsistent as to the dates and whether there was one or multiple incidents, but it’s clear that one action involved a rebel ship, the Eliza, carrying a cargo from Havana of sugar, rum, and possibly specie. On March 30 or 31, a British frigate or Loyalist privateer ran the Eliza aground on Bull Island, twenty-five miles northeast of Charlestown. One side or the other burned the ship to keep the enemy from either the cargo or the ship itself. There might have been a skirmish.37

  Into the mid-1790s, local troops and vigilantes fought fugitive Loyalists, bands of escaped slaves, and gangs of bandits who continued to raid civilians. In September 1783, for example, they tracked down one of the renegade Tories, chased him, and, after they shot him in the leg and he fell from his horse, executed him. In May 1786, Catawba Indian, South Carolina, and Georgia troops destroyed a remote, fortified village of three hundred ex-slaves-turned-raiders. Some of the ex-slaves, who called themselves “The King of England’s Soldiers,” escaped and continued their raiding.38

  Despite Greene’s reconciliation efforts, Whig civilians wanted revenge. Gangs tarred and feathered some former Loyalists. Anti-Tory mobs appeared around the state. Their worst riot was in July 1783. The South Carolina legislature ordered ex-Loyalists to leave the state in 1784.39

  Charlestown put symbolic distance between it and Britain. On August 13, 1783, it incorporated as a city and changed its name to something that sounded more American: Charleston.

  For Greene, until a peace treaty was signed, he had to maintain what remained of his Continental army. His men were unpaid and anxious to leave. He dealt with some small mutinies. His men were ill; it had been “one of the sickliest seasons known this 30 years,” Greene said. “I have been unwell with a fever but have got quite over it. . . . We have buried upwards of 200 of our fine fellows.” And Greene’s troops were hungry. “If the year continues as it has begun,” he wrote
on New Year’s Day 1783, “we shall end badly as we have nothing to eat for man or beast.”40

  On June 21, 1783, Greene told his men they could go home. Speaking in the third person, he said, “The General joined this army when it was in affliction, when its spirits were low, and its prospects gloomy. . . . We have trod the paths of adversity together, and have felt the sunshine of better fortune. . . . It has been the General’s good fortune to point the way, but you had the honor to accomplish the work. . . . The General cannot take leave of this subject without adding his strongest assurances to the army that he is fully persuaded their country will do them justice, if not consider their merit with liberality.”41

  After the war, Greene was hounded by creditors, his debts largely incurred by his guarantees related to the purchase of clothing for his troops. In 1785, he, Caty, their five children, and a tutor, moved to a rice plantation outside of Savannah. Confiscated from a former Loyalist official, it was a gift from the Georgia government. Greene was now a slaveholder and farmer. One of his neighbors was Anthony Wayne, also a gift recipient.

  Greene died in 1786, at forty-three, possibly from a heat stroke. His neighbor, Wayne, wrote a friend: “Pardon this scrawl. My feelings are but too much affected, because I have seen a great and good man die.” Washington also was moved: “He was a good man, indeed.” The general proposed to Caty that he raise her namesake son, George Washington Greene, as his own.42

  Some time after her husband died, four men began flirting with Caty. Three were married, and one was Wayne, estranged from his wife. Once, when Caty went north for a visit, Wayne wrote of his difficulty to “restrain every tender emotion” as she sailed away. “I experienced a sensation more forcibly felt than I had power to describe.”43

  But Caty married her children’s tutor, Phineas Miller, who now managed the plantation. When a new tutor, Eli Whitney, invented a cotton gin to separate fibers from their seeds, the Millers financed the invention, and Caty suggested an enhancement. But they lost money on that investment, and lost even more on a land speculation. In 1800, they auctioned off the plantation to pay debts, and moved to a property Nathanael had bought on a Georgia coastal island. The new plantation succeeded. Caty and Phineas are buried there, and the cemetery and the ruins of their house are now part of Cumberland Island National Seashore.44

  Nathanael was buried in a Savannah cemetery, but in the ensuing years, his grave became lost to memory. Nonetheless, Savannah erected a monument to him in Johnson Square, surrounded today by office buildings and businesses. In 1901, Savannah found his body and reinterred him in Johnson Square. Rhode Island chose Greene to be one of its two state heroes with statues in the U.S. Capitol. Seventeen states named counties after Greene; nearly two dozen cities honor him in their name.

  Wayne’s plantation was a financial disaster. His political life was more successful. In 1791, he defeated the incumbent congressman—his former subordinate, James Jackson. After Indians routed two American armies in Ohio, President Washington, in 1792, brought Wayne out of retirement. He defeated the Indians in 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Two years later, he died near Erie, Pennsylvania. Despite a precarious personal life, the public honored Wayne. Towns, cities, and counties in seventeen states are named after him, including Fort Wayne, Indiana. Books ranging from The Catcher in the Rye to Tender is the Night allude to him. And he is the ancestor of fictional Bruce Wayne, the alter ego of comic book hero Batman.45

  Moultrie, who commanded John Laurens and Francis Marion earlier in the war, was, in his day, more prominent than either Greene or Wayne. When his military career ended, his political career began, and he served as governor. In 1802, he published his memoirs, an important record. He was buried on his plantation, seventeen miles northwest of Charleston. It is now a subdivision. His gravesite was forgotten until 1977, when archaeologists found it. He was reburied near the visitors’ center at Fort Moultrie, now part of Fort Sumter National Monument.

  Leslie returned to Scotland, where he was second-in-command of the army forces stationed there. In 1794, soldiers mutinied in Glasgow, and Leslie ordered five arrested ringleaders to be transported to Edinburgh. When the transfer began, other soldiers freed the prisoners without resistance from the guards. Later, a mob attacked two officers of that guard: an adjutant and a Major Leslie. Whether the major was related to the general is unknown. But starting with an account published in 1842, historians distorted or poorly summarized what really happened. One 2013 scholarly history incorrectly said General Leslie died “attempting to suppress a riot outside of Edinburgh.” In fact, even the Major Leslie who was attacked “received no material injury except a slight cut over the temple,” reported a contemporary newspaper.46

  General Leslie did die ten days after the riot, on December 27, at his home near Edinburgh “after a few days illness.” His obituary said Leslie caught the illness “at Glasgow in the service of quelling the late riots there,” but from the perspective of modern medicine, we’ll never know where or how he caught his illness.47

  PART THREE

  The Frontier

  16. Indians

  FROM THE START, INDIANS AND WHITES INTERACTED IN THE SAME kinds of complex, changing ways that the English did among themselves, with the Scottish and Irish, and with allies and enemies on the European continent: Alliances shifted, factions disagreed, wars started and ended, trade ebbed and flowed, rebels were suppressed or supported.

  Fifteen days after their 1620 landfall in Massachusetts, Pilgrims looted Indian homes, food storage pits, and graves. Nine days later, Indians attacked a Pilgrim landing party. The same Pilgrims soon formed a military alliance with a different Indian group.1

  By the Revolution, Indians and whites were co-dependent. Indians needed modern weapons and agricultural tools; Anglos sought military manpower (for many years, used against the French and their Indian allies) and profitable furs and skins. They lived in each other’s communities and sometimes intermarried. In winter 1772–1773, for example, about twenty whites lived in the Shawnee town of Chillicothe on the Ohio River. In the South, three hundred lived with the Creeks. Mohawks in upstate New York not only lived as neighbors to Sir William Johnson, the British Indian superintendent, but Johnson had a common-law marriage and nine children with Molly Brant (Gonwatsijayenni), a prominent Mohawk woman who later received a British pension. Indians were a familiar presence in most colonial towns and cities.

  The frontier was porous, fuzzy, dynamic, a “cultural cacophony, a country of mixed and mixing peoples.”2

  Here, Scotch-Irish immigrants fought—sometimes violently—with landed English aristocracy; small-time land speculators competed against big-time speculators like Washington; Christian Indians aligned themselves with whites, but refused to cut ties with their tribes, which themselves were divided between neutrality or alignment with the French (before the Revolution) or the British or the Whigs; Loyalist whites fought rebel whites, and both pressured neutral whites; the Spanish lurked along the Mississippi, suspicious of both the British and their land-hungry rebels; traders from old French Canada balanced relationships between Indians and warring whites; misfits and drunks of all races triggered tipping points large and small; Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Moravians undermined each other; rebel leaders, in hopes of an alliance, warned Bostonians to temper their virulent anti-Catholicism; and the governments and agents of Pennsylvania and Virginia—more sovereign nations than united colonies—fought over frontier lands.

  Clashes and disputes between whites and Indians were as frequent as unions and accommodations, but ever-increasing numbers of settlers moving into Indian territory led to ever-increasing tension, cultural misunderstanding, and racism.

  In 1773, Johnson updated New York’s governor on the situation. The Indians closest to him, the Mohawks, “having at different times been prevailed on to dispose of their lands and suffered many indispositions . . . have very little property remaining.” Fighting for Britain during the Seven Years�
�� War, “they suffered great losses,” and all that was left of them was about four hundred people. Among all the six Iroquois nations, ten thousand people remained, of whom two thousand were able to fight. Johnson estimated that all the native nations in the northern colonies east of the Mississippi had 130,000 people, of whom about one in five could bear arms. But many of them lived far from white settlements.3

  A Kentucky settler estimated in 1784 that the twenty-eight major tribes east of the Mississippi, from the Iroquois in the North to the Creeks in the South, were composed of about twenty thousand people, with four- to five-thousand fighting men.4

  The pressures on their land were immense. Reading, Pennsylvania, for example, in 1750, had one white home. Two years later, there were 130. By 1775, an estimated fifty thousand whites lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. That year, about two thousand whites and 8,500 Cherokees lived in the southern Appalachians, while three hundred whites and two thousand Shawnees lived in what’s now West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Fifteen years later, more than twenty-six thousand whites lived in Cherokee country, and sixty-seven thousand lived in Shawnee country. The total Indian population: fewer than ten thousand. In Kentucky alone, twenty thousand whites moved onto Shawnee lands in 1779 and 1780.5

  Frederick Jackson Turner, who wrote in the early twentieth century about the impact of the frontier on the American character, described the white invasion:

  In the course of the seventeenth century, the frontier was advanced up the Atlantic courses, just beyond the “fall line,” and the tidewater region became the settled area. . . . The end of the first quarter of the [eighteenth] century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans up the Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. The Germans in New York pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats. In Pennsylvania, the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement. Settlements soon began on the New River, or the Great Kanawha, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad. The King attempted to arrest the advance by . . . forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic; but in vain. In the period of the Revolution the frontier crossed the Alleghenies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled.6