Washington's General

by Terry Golway

  The British filed out of Camden and marched behind the trees on the American left. The movement was not detected until Greene’s forward pickets came under attack at ten o’clock, only three hundred yards from the main American position. Rawdon had achieved complete surprise, but thanks to the pickets’ quick work, the main American force had time to form a defensive line before the British and loyalists were upon them.

  Greene, with a good view of the field, saw that Rawdon’s assault line was narrow and therefore susceptible to a counterattack on its flanks. In other battles, Greene had been reluctant to gamble with bold moves and counterattacks, but this time, he was determined to be more aggressive. It was he, after all, who sought out this battle. Greene ordered the 2nd Maryland Regiment to counterattack the British right flank, while the 1st Virginia Regiment counterattacked Rawdon on his left. The remainder of his army, the 1st Maryland under Colonel John Gunby, which had fought so well at Guilford Court House, and the 2nd Virginia, moved down the hill toward the enemy’s center. To complement the counterattack, Greene brought up newly arrived artillery and fired a short-range volley of grapeshot at the center of the British line. He sent William Washington and his cavalry flying down the American left to attack the British rear and cut off their lines of retreat. However, thanks to the damnable shortage of horses, about thirty of Washington’s eighty-seven men did not have mounts.

  Rather than fight his usual defensive battle, Greene aggressively sought to trap Rawdon with a classic double envelopment, that is, attacking him on both flanks. Timing and ferocity were vital: he wanted a simultaneous attack, and with fixed bayonets.

  Rawdon countered Greene’s movement by bringing up troops from his rear and lengthening his line, making it harder to turn his flanks. Fighting was fierce, and Greene was in the middle of it, shouting orders, trying to make sense of the sound of musket fire, peering through the smoke, and waiting on reports from his officers. One of Greene’s aides, Colonel William Davie, said, “General Greene exposed himself greatly in this action ... so much so, that one of the officers observed to me that his conduct during the action resembled more that of a captain of grenadiers, than that of a major general.” The battle seemed to be going his way when the 1st Maryland, perhaps Greene’s best unit, began to fall apart on the American left after at least one of its officers was killed. The shortage of officers in the Maryland line, which Greene had complained about months earlier, may have contributed to the sudden breakdown in discipline: there was nobody to step forward to replace the man (or men) cut down. Gunby, the regiment’s commander, was momentarily confused and ordered his troops to halt their advance. The British seized the chance and pushed forward with fixed bayonets of their own, threatening the entire American position.

  At any moment, Colonel Washington and his cavalry were expected to swoop down on the British rear and turn the tide of battle. But the depleted Washington had taken a circuitous route to get behind the British–so circuitous, in fact, that most of his men were too far behind the line to be of any use.

  Just minutes after victory seemed within his grasp, Greene suddenly was on the defensive, fighting desperately to hold off the British onslaught. With much of his army falling back, he had little choice but to order a general retreat to save his army from destruction. As he left the field, Greene spotted a group of artillerymen struggling to pull their cannons out of the brush and away from the British. He got off his horse and helped pull the pieces to safety.

  The Americans fell back six miles. As at Guilford Court House, the British victory was dearly bought: the British suffered about two hundred and fifty casualties, about a quarter of Rawdon’s force. American casualties were about the same.

  This time, however, Greene took no comfort in the carnage he had inflicted. This time, he believed victory could have and should have been his. Where had Sumter been? And what about Gunby, whose men had been so heroic at Guilford Court House? Bitterly, Greene lashed out at the commander of the 1st Maryland, telling his friend Joseph Reed, the president of the Pennsylvania legislature, “We should have had Lord [Rawdon] and his whole command ... in three Minutes, if Col. Gunby had not ordered his regiment to retire.” This was Greene at his worst: petulent, filled with self-pity, and desperately trying to protect his reputation from those confounded critics who were ever so willing to find fault with him. He chose Gunby as a scapegoat when, in fact, his own decisions to counterattack on Rawdon’s flanks and send Washington’s cavalry into the fray may have tipped the battle in Rawdon’s favor.

  This defeat could not be promoted as a strategic victory, and Greene knew it. He confessed to Reed that the battle’s outcome left him “almost [frantic] with vexation. Fortune has not much been our friend.” Two days after the battle, Greene’s troops came upon some two dozen American deserters. They were brought before a court-martial, which found them guilty of desertion. Greene did not hesitate. He ordered five of them hanged.

  His mood was testy and bleak, as evidenced in his reply to a letter from his friend Henry Lee, who had asked for reinforcements: “You write as if you thought I had an army of fifty Thousand Men. Surely you cannot be unacquainted with our [actual] situation.” To Washington, Greene confessed, “I am much afraid these States must fall, never to rise again.”

  Tensions were high and emotions raw throughout the American ranks. When Greene criticized Francis Marion over complaints that his men were taking horses from local Tories–a common-enough practice but one that Greene believed to be both unjust and impolitic–the offended Swamp Fox fired back with a threat to resign his command. A clearly exasperated Greene replied, with more than a little self-pity:

  It is true your task has been disagreeable; but not more so than others. It is now [going] on seven years since the commencement of this war. I have never had leave of [absence] an hour nor paid the least attention to my own private affairs. Your state is invaded, your all is at stake. ... I left a family in distress and every thing dear and valuable to come & afford you all the assistance in my power, and if you leave us in the midst of our difficulties ... it must throw a damp upon the spirits of the Army.

  Greene, of course, had spent more than a little attention to his private business affairs. But now was not the time. He surely was astonished that he had to remind Marion–not Sumter, but Marion–of his duty.

  Years later, Colonel Davie remembered a depressing conversation with Greene at about this time. In Davie’s recollection, Greene told him:

  Congress [seems] to have lost sight of the Southern States, and to have abandoned them to their fate, so much so that we are even as much distressed for ammunition as men. . . . [We] will dispute every inch of ground in the best manner we can–but Rawdon will push me back to the mountains, Lord Cornwallis will establish a chain of posts along the James River and the Southern States, thus cut off, will die like the Tail of a Snake.

  Greene’s bitterness and despair led him to toy with the idea of leaving the Carolinas–not with the army but by himself–to take over American forces in Virginia. He already had ordered Baron von Steuben to leave Virginia and join the main southern army in South Carolina (Steuben never made it); perhaps he and the baron should simply switch places. Feeling very sorry for himself, Greene told Lee that the baron would certainly “arrange matters very well,” and that he had little doubt the army would be better off without him.

  Before he had a chance to act on this unlikely plan, astonishing news arrived in camp. On May 10, Lord Rawdon evacuated Camden, marching his beaten-up army toward the seaport of Charleston. For the moment anyway, Rawdon was conceding the interior of South Carolina to Greene in order to ensure the safety of Charleston and its access to supplies. Marching alongside Rawdon’s men were dozens of South Carolina Tories and their families, fearful of the fate that might await them in the countryside with the main British army gone.

  Word of Rawdon’s retreat banished Greene’s darkest thoughts and mooted any ridiculous idea that he would leave the army in Steuben�
��s charge. Greene’s aide Colonel Dudley was summoned to the general’s tent for breakfast on May 11, the day after Rawdon began his march to the coast. The general greeted Dudley with a “pleasing” expression and a handshake, asking him if he had heard the good news. “No sir,” Dudley replied. “What news?” “Rawdon evacuated Camden yesterday afternoon.” It truly was a breathtaking turn of events. His spirits lifted, Greene returned to the simple strategy he had outlined in a letter to a French ally, the chevalier de La Luzerne: “We fight, get beat, rise and fight again.”

  Greene now turned his attention to a string of British forts in South Carolina built roughly along the line of the Santee, Congaree, and Saluda rivers, from Fort Watson in the east to Ninety Six in the west. Fort Watson, some sixty miles northwest of Charleston, already had fallen to the Americans. Greene believed the others could be picked off one at a time. Even before Rawdon abandoned Camden, Greene had sent Light-horse Harry Lee and Francis Marion to assault Fort Motte, a supply depot and home to more than one hundred and fifty troops on the Congaree River. In the meantime, Sumter assailed a garrison of loyalist militia in Orangeburg, west of Charleston and south of Greene’s position at An-crum’s Plantation on the Congaree. The forts, isolated once Rawdon retreated, fell quickly; Sumter took Orangeburg on May 11, while Lee and Marion captured Fort Motte on May 12. With exquisite timing, Greene arrived at Fort Motte right after the British surrendered–just in time to celebrate the victory by dining with Marion, whom he had never met before, Lee, and the British officers who were now Greene’s prisoners.

  Making full use of his mobility, Greene then sent Lee on a dash for Fort Granby, near present-day Columbia, South Carolina. “I depend upon your pushing matters [vigorously],” Greene told Lee. Lee did exactly that, forcing the fort’s surrender on May 15.

  The “war of the posts,” as this phase of the campaign was called, involved small numbers of troops and low-intensity operations heavily dependent on partisan militia. There was none of the drama of the large-scale battles of the North, like Monmouth or Long Island. The stakes were not as high as they were at Guilford Court House. The American victories, however, were vital all the same, and they caught the attention of Washington and other military and political leaders in the North. “The brilliant repeated successes which reflect so much glory on the Southern Army will be attended with the most important Consequences,” wrote Washington. The fall of each fort represented another blow to British control of the Deep South, and with each blow, the spirits of the region’s Tories fell. By contrast, patriots in South Carolina sensed that the tide of battle was turning. Greene believed it was time to restore the state’s patriot government, which had collapsed after Gates’s defeat at Camden. He told John Rutledge, the governor of South Carolina, that “Civil Government” ought “to be set up immediately” because the public should be ruled by “Civil rather than Military authority.” He would soon offer the same advice to patriot leaders in Georgia, urging them to form a legislative council to reestablish order.

  Greene had a very pragmatic reason for urging patriot leaders to reassert their political authority in the South. As the war dragged on through another summer, there was talk of a new peace initiative from Europe. Greene feared that Britain might claim undisputed civil authority over the southern states and so could be entitled to continued rule over the region as part of a peace compromise. If, however, a patriot government were functioning in the South, Britain’s claims would be hard to justify.

  There was, too, another, more idealistic side to Greene’s emphasis on civil authority. Like other American commanders during the Revolution, Greene understood that America’s liberty depended upon civilian government, not military control. Though he certainly had the power to impose himself on civilian leaders in the South, he had no intention of playing the role of governor-general in the Carolinas or in Georgia. His place was on the battlefield, not in the statehouse.

  There was no question that civil authority was desperately needed. In the backwoods of the Carolinas and Georgia, Americans were committing atrocities on other Americans: patriots casually slaughtered Tories, and vice versa. Grievances between the two groups often predated the war or were justified by citing the other group’s atrocities. Greene soon learned that an American militia officer, LeRoy Hammond, was rampaging through Tory territory near the Saluda River in central South Carolina. He was horrified, as he made clear in a letter to one of the militia leaders he had grown to trust, General Andrew Pickens. He asked Pickens for help in putting an end to American outrages and explained why tit-for-tat reprisals were not only inhuman but bad public relations: “The Idea of exterminating the Tories is not less barbarous than impolitick; and if persisted in, will keep this Country in the greatest confusion and distress. The eyes of the people are much upon you, the disaffected cry for Mercy, and I hope you will exert your self to bring over the Tories to our interest.”

  This generous attitude was in sharp contrast with patriot demands for vengeance in the South. But Greene was determined to offer the Tories a chance to reconsider their loyalties. In an open letter addressed to “the Inhabitants Upon the Saluda,” he assured the Tory population of his “abhorence and detestation” with regard to Hammond’s crimes. He said he would welcome them to the American cause if they offered “a [sincere] repentence for what is past.”

  After victories at Orangeburg and Forts Watson and Motte, Greene decided the time had come to commit the main army to battle. He marched his one thousand-plus Continentals sixty miles to the west, to the British post known as Ninety Six, manned by about five hundred Tory militia. While Greene was on the march, he sent Lee and Pickens to assail another British post, this one in Augusta, Georgia. Marion was dispatched to do likewise in Georgetown, South Carolina.

  Ninety Six, a village surrounded by an impressive stockade, owed its name to its location, believed to be ninety-six miles from the British frontier posts to the west. By Greene’s reckoning, Tories outnumbered patriots by five to one in the area, and they considered the fort a visible sign of Britain’s commitment to their defense.

  The fortress was designed to impress: ditches, bunkers, and a fearsome set of sharpened tree trunks–called an abatis–protected the stockade from sudden assault. Greene arrived outside Ninety Six on May 22 with thoughts of assaulting the fort. One look at the defenses convinced him and his chief engineer, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, otherwise. Instead of attacking, he decided to lay siege to Ninety Six, despite the absence of proper siege equipment. He was not optimistic. “[The] fortifications are so strong and the garrison so large and so well furnished that our success is very doubtful,” Greene told Lafayette.

  Greene’s pessimism was well-founded. From the beginning of the siege, the fortress and its defenders proved too strong and too wily for the American attackers. After more than a month of digging approaches to the stockade’s main fort, and paying a price for each inch in blood and exhaustion, Greene learned that his nemesis, Lord Rawdon, had been reinforced with two thousand troops in Charleston and was marching to relieve Ninety Six.

  Greene decided to attack the fort in hopes he could bring the siege to a quick end before Rawdon arrived. On Monday, June 18, Greene’s men opened fire on the post from two sides. But the Tory defenders shrewdly counterattacked with fixed bayonets, fighting Greene’s men hand to hand in the ditches outside the fort, with the Continentals getting the worst of it. Greene saw that the assault was hopeless, and ordered a retreat. The following day, Greene and his men called a halt to their siege and marched away from Ninety Six, ever watchful for the approach of Rawdon and his reinforcements.

  Once again, Nathanael Greene was retreating in the face of the enemy, deprived yet again of that victory he so desperately desired. He vented his frustrations in a letter to Congress: “It is mortifying to be obliged to leave a Garrison so near reduced, and I have nothing to console me but a consciousness that nothing was left unattempted that could facilitate its reduction.” Still, he was able to tell C
ongress his effort was not in vain: “Had we not moved this way this Country would have been inevitably lost, and all further exertions would have failed.” In fact, while Greene was overseeing the failed siege of Ninety Six, Marion captured the British post at Georgetown on May 29, and Lee and Pickens forced the surrender of Augusta on June 5. And, in a pattern that was becoming all too familiar to the British in the South, even Greene’s setback at Ninety Six advanced the American cause. Rawdon’s men suffered terribly in the South Carolina heat and humidity during their two-hundred-mile march from Charleston. And when they arrived, finally, at Ninety Six, they did not stay long. Rawdon decided the post could not be held, and so it was evacuated and burned. The Tory defenders along with their families and friends were ordered to march back to Charleston with the main British army.

  July was no time to be marching through South Carolina. The summer weather was cruel and sickening, exempting nobody. The young and promising Rawdon became so ill he was forced to retire when he reached Charleston. Greene briefly considered attacking Rawdon’s numerically superior force but wisely chose to let circumstances be his best ally. While the British and Tories suffered on their way back to Charleston, Greene marched to the shade and repose of a region south of Camden called the High Hills of the Santee, near the confluence of the Santee, Congaree, and Wateree rivers. The name alone suggests the comforts Greene’s men enjoyed while their enemies battled heat, humidity, and deprivation. The American camp was on high, cooler ground above the rivers, away from the mosquito-infested swamps in the Carolina lowlands–just the place for a camp that would, for six weeks, serve as a summer equivalent of winter quarters.

  The respite offered Greene an opportunity not only to rest his exhausted troops but to reflect on the astonishing turn of events in the South since the Battle of Guilford Court House just four months earlier. Since then, the seemingly unbeatable British had been more than simply stopped; they had been forced, in a series of small-scale actions, to retreat from the interior, holding only a small band of territory extending from Charleston, South Carolina, to Savannah, Georgia. Their posts in the backcountry were gone. Their allies, the Tories, were demoralized and in disarray. The Continentals and the militia had captured three thousand enemy troops since March. Cornwallis had been forced to move his operations to Virginia, while his successor, Rawdon, was broken in health and spirit, destined to be captured at sea while en route to England.