All-consuming and all-important, the war has come to define Washington, Hamilton, and Lafayette in ways that none of them could have imagined when hostilities broke out five years ago. More and more Americans are growing tired of the fighting and openly long for reconciliation with England, yet these driven three will not relent until the war is won.
The British, meanwhile, gleefully exult in the belief that the American collapse is imminent.
“So very contemptible is the rebel force now in all parts and so vast is our superiority everywhere,” Lord George Germain will write to British commander in chief, Gen. Henry Clinton. “No resistance on their part shall be apprehended that can materially obstruct the progress of the King’s arms in the speedy suppression of the rebellion.”
That suppression is no longer focused on the battlefields of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. Other than minor skirmishes, there has been no fighting between the armies of George Washington and Henry Clinton since Monmouth, almost twenty months ago.
Capturing New York City and taking control of the North has always been General Washington’s objective, but now he spends his time in a defensive position rather than attacking. The hub of the rebel strategy has moved to the fort at West Point, fifty miles up the Hudson River from New York City.2
While Washington waits in New Jersey, General Clinton and his troops are heading south, leaving behind a skeleton defensive force of British regulars, Loyalists, and Hessian mercenaries to fend off Washington’s troops, should they decide to move. With the vital southern port of Savannah now in British hands, General Clinton sets his sights on the crown jewel of Charleston, the most important seaport south of Annapolis.
Only when Charleston is captured will Clinton return to the comfort of New York City, there to serve out the war.
LEGEND HERE
The British plan is simple: regain possession of the colonies one at a time by taking advantage of the large number of Loyalists in the South. Soon, the British Army in the South will reunite with their army in the North, in a great pincer-like movement, crushing Washington and his forces once and for all.
To the west the Americans are hemmed in by the Indian nations allied to the British who, throughout the war, have conducted raids along the frontier forests of New York and Pennsylvania and the settlements in the new territory of Kentucky.
While the French were once considered America’s saviors, thus far they have been no help at all. Their navy sails for home at the first sign of a storm rather than fight, and without a naval presence, there is no way Washington can stop Clinton and his redcoats from sailing up and down the coastline or making landfall to attack wherever they like.
This is now Britain’s war to win—and George Washington knows it.
Their first step is to capture Charleston.
* * *
By April 14, the British Army and Navy have almost surrounded the century-old port. The loss of Charleston would be catastrophic, the largest American defeat thus far in the war. Thousands of American soldiers would be taken prisoner should Charleston fall. Hundreds of precious cannon and muskets would be lost. The Americans are outnumbered almost three to one, and George Washington has been able to send only a few thousand troops to aid the Southern Army under the command of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln.
In truth, the British and Americans both believe that the looming battle is already lost. There is little chance for a rebel victory.
The lone glimmer of American hope is that Charleston is not completely surrounded. American wagons use a single narrow dirt road to ferry food, ammunition, weapons, and outside communications into the embattled port. The precious artery meanders from Charleston out into the South Carolina backcountry, crossing the broad and languid Cooper River via the Biggin Bridge, just past Moncks Corner. Should this road remain open, the Americans can hold out or, at the very least, flee the city before it falls.
But if the British gain control of the road, American troops inside Charleston will be trapped.
* * *
Now, just before 3:00 a.m. on April 14, at a location thirty miles northwest of Charlestown, Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton and his British Legion march forth to seize the vital road.
Yesterday, a captured slave revealed the precise location of the American troops. Tarleton knows that the rebel cavalry controls the Biggin Bridge. But reconnaissance says American infantry units are sleeping in a meetinghouse overlooking the Cooper River waterfront, with others scattered up and down the river’s banks.
In exchange for a small bribe, the slave leads Tarleton’s men toward the bridge via seldom-used local trails that shield their presence. Thick forests and blackwater rivers, home to venomous copperheads and cottonmouths, hem in the path on both sides, making this corridor very dangerous indeed.
The night air is damp but not cold. As the British draw closer, Tarleton listens for the telltale signs of an ambush—the click of a musket being cocked, the inadvertent whine of a cannon wheel in need of grease, cracking branches betraying soldiers taking up positions in a thicket.
But he hears nothing. To his surprise, there is no evidence of a cavalry patrol guarding the road.
Though raised the son of a slave-trading politician in industrial Liverpool, Tarleton is used to the sounds of war. An officer in a regiment that remained in Great Britain, he volunteered to serve in this war and has been a part of the British fighting machine in America since almost the beginning of hostilities. As a twenty-one-year-old cornet he participated in the capture of American general Charles Lee in December 1776. His good conduct on this raid advanced Tarleton’s career immeasurably. Promoted to brigade major, and now lieutenant colonel in command of his own newly formed regiment, Tarleton has fought in almost every theater of the war.
Thus far in those many days of fighting, Banastre Tarleton has not shown a proclivity for evil. His weaknesses are gambling and women, vices common to many soldiers. Neither presents a problem on the battlefield. Indeed, these shortcomings were easily overlooked one year ago, when Gen. Henry Clinton gave Tarleton command of the Royal Brigade.
But on this night, something changes in Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton. He will no longer feel the need to behave like an officer and a gentleman.
“At three o’clock in the morning, the advanced guard of dragoons and mounted infantry … approached the American post,” as Tarleton will describe the raid. “A watch word was immediately communicated to the officers and soldiers, which was immediately followed by an order to charge the enemy’s grand guard on the main road.… The order was executed with the greatest promptitude and success. The Americans were completely surprised.”
The flustered cavalry commanders, George Washington’s distant cousin William among them, are so astonished that they flee into the swamp, running rather than taking their chances fighting the British.
By Tarleton’s estimation, well over a hundred prime Carolina horses are captured, allowing him to personally select the mount that best suits his needs. The British force also seizes food, weapons, and clothing while routing the Americans.
Tarleton’s troops charge into the meetinghouse with bayonets fixed, oblivious to the sounds of rebel soldiers wishing to surrender. The slaughter is horrifying. The soldiers stab to death Americans who put up no resistance. One French officer, the major chevalier Pierre-François Vernier, is slashed behind the ear by a saber and then repeatedly cut—“mangled in the most shocking manner,” in the words of one Loyalist eyewitness. The abuse continues right up to the moment of Vernier’s death. In all, fifteen Americans enlisted men and five officers are killed. Hundreds more flee into the night, leaving the British in complete control of Biggin Bridge.
Adding to the carnage, Tarleton allows his soldiers to abuse the female camp followers, who are now undefended. In the wake of the fighting, two dragoons on a foraging mission travel from Moncks Corner to Fair-Lawn, a local plantation. The owner is Lady Jane Colleton, a widow and prominent Loyalist whose husband died three years ag
o. Despite her Loyalist stance, Tarleton’s soldiers attempt to rape her, but she fights them off, only to be slashed by a sword. Another woman is not so lucky. Thirty-six-year-old Ann Fayssoux begs Tarleton’s men to “take her life and not to violate her person.”
Mrs. Fayssoux’s pleas are ignored. She is attacked with a sword, strangled, and finally raped. She survives, but is never the same.
* * *
For the next four weeks, Banastre Tarleton and his Loyalists lay siege to the surrounding countryside, sealing the road out of Charleston in the process. The fierce band roams the South Carolina countryside, seeking out and destroying any remaining rebel resistance. On May 6, Tarleton obliterates the remnants of the American cavalry at Lenud’s Ferry, a crossing point on the Santee River. Men on horseback are crucial in the South, where villages are farther apart than in the North, making the loss of enormous consequence to the rebels. Now that he is in control, Tarleton’s scorched-earth policy quickly becomes the talk of the South. General Clinton will write to Tarleton, “I wish you would get three legions and divide yourself into three parts. We can do no good without you.”
It has now become a hopeless situation for the Americans trapped inside Charleston. George Washington had ordered Gen. Benjamin Lincoln to retreat once the city became indefensible. Lincoln instead took pity on the city’s civilian population, whose leadership pleaded that Continental troops remain there to protect them. Now more than 5,000 American soldiers and sailors are surrounded by a British army and navy numbering 13,500. Making matters even worse, some ungrateful citizens of Charleston have pledged to burn any American boats that might be used to evacuate Lincoln’s troops by sea.
On May 12, after forty days and nights under siege, Charleston falls. The defeat is a stunning blow, giving the British complete control of Georgia and South Carolina.
More than five thousand officers and enlisted men are taken prisoner, the most Continental soldiers to surrender so far in the war.3
Three signers of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Heyward, Edward Rutledge, and Arthur Middleton, are arrested and held in a dungeon at the city’s Exchange. Fearing that they would somehow maintain contact with rebel elements still roaming the Carolina backcountry, all three will soon be transferred to a prison in faraway Saint Augustine, Florida.
More than a thousand of the captured American soldiers will spend the next year in Charleston Harbor, suffering in aging ships that have been stripped of all nautical accoutrement and transformed into floating prisons. Conditions will be horrid inside these hellholes, which reek of filth and teem with vermin. In time, many of these men will become walking skeletons, for there is little food. Disease will rampage through the confined air of the packed holds, and men will die from tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, and smallpox.
One American prisoner will describe life aboard a British prison ship: “At sundown we were ordered down between the decks to the number of nearly three hundred of us. The best lodging I could procure this night was on a chest, almost suffocated with the heat and stench. I expected to die before morning, but human nature can bear more than one would at first suppose. The want of bedding and the loss of all my clothes rendered me wretched indeed.”
An estimated five hundred prisoners will break under the cruelty and accept a British offer to join their ranks. These men will be sent to serve on the tropical island of Jamaica, to prevent their once again joining the rebel cause.
Yet, even in the midst of this suffering, there is compassion. A woman named Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson makes it a point to visit the incarcerated Americans, nursing those suffering from cholera. She is just forty-three but so haggard from years of struggle and the loss of a husband and two sons that a friend describes her as “a fair haired, very conservative old Irish lady.”4
Jackson well knows the name “Banastre Tarleton,” for the British Legion rode into her town shortly after the fall of Charleston and surprised the local militia, massacring more than one hundred rebel soldiers, many of whom were trying to surrender. A new term was coined that day, Tarleton’s quarter, which means no quarter at all.
On that terrible day, Jackson tended the dying in a local Presbyterian church and also watched as her thirteen-year-old son became so enraged by the slaughter that he begged to join the fight. Eventually, the Continental Army took him on as a scout and messenger.
Shortly thereafter, the boy was taken captive by Tarleton’s men. A British lieutenant slashed him across the face with a saber for refusing to clean mud from his boots and then sent him to a backcountry prison camp. It was Elizabeth who personally brokered her son’s release, but not before he almost died of starvation and smallpox.
Now, attempting to alleviate the suffering of those incarcerated in Charleston Harbor is a Herculean task for Jackson, one made all the more difficult by the British insistence on viewing the captives as terrorists and adding to their misery with daily doses of mental and physical torture.
Inevitably, Jackson, an immigrant from Carrickfergus, Ireland, succumbs to cholera. At a time when so many are dying, her passing is a footnote and her place of burial forever lost to history.
But while Elizabeth Hutchinson Jackson can no longer help the cause of freedom, the rescue of her son from a British prison will have an enduring legacy.
For, his name is Andrew Jackson.
And one day, during the War of 1812, he will get his revenge on the British, at the Battle of New Orleans, after which he will become the seventh president of the United States.
24
PORT FERRY, SOUTH CAROLINA
SEPTEMBER 4, 1780
5:00 A.M.
The Swamp Fox is being hunted.
It is a little before dawn when Col. Francis Marion orders his fifty-two-man fighting force to break camp. Word reached him just yesterday that a column of Loyalist militia is approaching. Colonel Marion normally prefers the surprise of an ambush, but this morning he feels the need to press the attack. Thus, his soldiers ride through the black gum trees and scrub oaks of this sand hill region along the Pee Dee River. They are farmers, Huguenots, teenagers—all mostly dressed in rags. To distinguish them from the enemy, Marion has ordered that each man wear a white feather in his cap. Marion himself wears a scarlet vest and a form-fitting leather cap inscribed with the words “Liberty or Death.”
But now liberty seems a lost cause. The war in South Carolina is going badly. The land between the main cities has become a dangerous place of marauding mercenaries and militias. August has been particularly sticky and hot, and also a time of acute embarrassment for the Continental Army as the British continue to tighten their stranglehold on the region. Two weeks ago, the rebels suffered another stunning setback in the South when a force commanded by Gen. Horatio Gates, the self-styled hero of Saratoga, was routed by British soldiers under Lt. Gen. Charles Cornwallis.
Gates fled the battlefield at Camden, leaving behind nine hundred killed and wounded. Another thousand men were taken prisoner. None other than Col. Banastre Tarleton and his British Legion led the final, crucial cavalry charge. By nightfall, General Gates had run so fast that he was sixty miles north in Charlotte. His reputation would never recover from this act of cowardice.1
Most rebels didn’t have the option of taking flight. As an example to any American who would defy the Crown, Lieutenant General Cornwallis made a public show of hanging a dozen prisoners. This vengeful behavior has now become the norm in the increasingly lawless Carolinas, where the British and their Loyalist allies routinely burn farms and homes, kill a man rather than let him surrender, and encourage religious feuds among Baptists, Presbyterians, French Protestant Huguenots, and Anglicans.
The British success is based largely upon an aggressive campaign. Tarleton’s dragoons, the main strike force, most recently defeated a band of eight hundred Continental soldiers led by South Carolina’s own Col. Thomas Sumter. Like Gates, “the Carolina Gamecock” Sumter was forced to run for his life—and is currently still in hiding
.
In the whole American South, there is now just one senior Continental Army officer left to press the fight against the British.
That man is Col. Francis Marion. Born in 1732, the same year as George Washington, the South Carolinian is a roughneck, and an independent man who owns a plantation and does not want to live under British rule.
The Swamp Fox, Col. Francis Marion
At five foot two and weighing only 110 pounds, Marion is a thin, knock-kneed forty-eight-year-old with a hooked nose, a receding hairline that rides well past his forehead, and a prominent limp, thanks to an ankle broken after jumping out of a second-story window during a drinking party. Unmarried and childless, he speaks in the fractured syntax of the Carolina Lowcountry and is known for being hard on his twenty slaves. The British are now targeting Marion’s plantation, and are soon to seize his home and human chattel.
Marion draws on an array of skills for revenge. He possesses a thorough knowledge of the local swamps, knows how to live off the land, and demonstrates superior horsemanship. He is also an expert at guerrilla military tactics, due to his experience repelling frontier raids by bands of Cherokee.
Marion and his men attack by night and retreat deep into the swamps to sleep by day. They change camps on a daily basis, and post patrols at all times, to warn allies of the approaching enemy. News of Marion’s success has already spread through America, published in newspapers and celebrated in Congress. “Colonel Marien,” reads one report spelling his name wrong, “has surprised a party of enemy near Santee River, escorting one hundred and fifty prisoners of the Maryland Division. He took the party and released the prisoners.”2
Killing England Page 21