From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Palmetto, sir,” sighed Colonel Moultrie for perhaps the fourth time, staring cold-eyed across the table at the slovenly General Lee, who, now that he had liberally spotted his waistcoat with pork grease, was feeding scraps to his “honest quadruped friends,” as he called the dogs that were always around his feet. “As I’ve opined already,” Colonel Moultrie said, “palmetto may prove better than oak, under fire. I’ve seen men ruined by oak splinters, but I sure don’t reckon palmetto will splinter.”

  Jonathan wiped his face with a napkin. He was sweating to soak his clothes.

  There was no more denying it: malaria had caught up with him.

  But Jonathan wouldn’t go on sick call with it. He was determined not to be sick abed on his first day of war, which, he was sure, would be any day now.

  The city of Charles Town was as ready for siege as it could make itself. Men had sent their families into the country for safety, then had turned to, alongside soldiers and slaves, to build barricades in all the principal streets, and to tear down waterfront warehouses that might have obscured the defenders’ view of the harbor. Citizens had even contributed their lead window-sash weights to be melted down for bullets.

  Most of General Lee’s army had been deployed to defend the city itself and the approaches to it. A large body of regular troops under General Armstrong stood by on the mainland, at Haddrell’s Point, as the northern defense for the city. On the northeast end of Sullivan’s Island were concealed 700 South Carolina sharpshooters, directly across Breach Inlet from the Redcoats encamped on Long Island. Thus the sharpshooters were outnumbered four to one, but that was of little concern; Moultrie knew the swift and tricky currents of Breach Inlet would keep Redcoats from fording it as well as bullets could. Apparently without knowing it, General Clinton had stranded his Redcoat army on a shadeless, mosquito-plagued sandbar where they could hardly bother anybody. And thus it was that Moultrie firmly believed that the defense of Charles Town ultimately would turn out to be a cannon duel: his fort against Admiral Sir Peter Parker’s fleet. That was why he kept demanding more powder.

  Lee, a British officer who had resigned his commission to fight on the rebel side, scorned militia, and thought Moultrie was too democratic with his men. There was talk that Lee wanted to replace him with a more authoritarian, less popular, officer. Just now Lee was scoffing.

  “Your little fort’s but half made! Only two walls. It’s a slaughter pen, I say, and there’s no retreat from it.”

  “I don’t intend to retreat,” Moultrie said.

  “The fleet will knock your little fort down about your ears in half an hour.”

  “Then we’ll fight from behind the ruins of ‘my little fort.’”

  “And after they’ve knocked it down they’ll shoot right up your rump through that unfinished side, then turn round and bombard the town. Ha! Huh!”

  “I say give me some powder, General, sir, and they’ll never get past our muzzles.”

  Jonathan looked at the mild, persistent Carolinian with a rush of admiration. Then an onslaught of feverishness came over him, making sweat prickle on his face and causing his senses to extend and contract like a telescope.

  “I think Moultrie’s right,” said Ensign Croghan’s soft, deep voice. Jonathan mopped his brow and nodded to his friend across the table. William Croghan, dark-haired, with deep-set blue eyes and a jutting chin, was English-born. He had turned down an offer of high rank in the British army because he believed in the American cause. He had joined the 8th Virginia in April and had become Jonathan’s closest friend. He pronounced his name “Crawn.” Everybody was fond of Bill Croghan, for his candid irreverence and unfailing cheerfulness. Though his skin was fair and smooth as a child’s, he was hard-muscled and manly. He was a grand raconteur. Being a great-nephew of George Croghan, Britain’s deputy Indian agent under Sir William Johnson, Bill Croghan was full of wondrous Indian anecdotes—many of them about Sir William’s legendary procreative powers that had increased the North American Indian population by an estimated thousand halfbreeds.

  Now a stirring in another part of the pavilion signaled General Lee’s brusque departure. Everybody was rising to attention. The general stalked out of the tent, wiping his chin with his coat sleeve, followed by his pack of canines and his staff officers, in that order. “I believe they like their master so well because he always reeks o’ meat,” an officer remarked.

  “Who does,” Croghan asked, “his dogs or his staff?”

  Jonathan laughed despite his misery.

  The atmosphere relaxed after Lee’s departure, and there was familiar, easy talk, that casual after-breakfast hubbub that was one of the most pleasant parts of an officer’s life, in Jonathan’s estimation; it was so much like mornings at the Clark home. While most of the officers jabbered about the eternal politics of soldiering, Jonathan and Bill talked nostalgically about homes and families. If Jonathan was malaria-sick, he was twice as homesick. Bill Croghan had heard about every member of the Clark family, and had heard probably a hundred of Ann Rogers Clark’s “Maxims to Live Decent By,” as Jonathan liked to call them.

  “Up! Up, gents!” someone was shouting. “Look! The fleet’s on the move!” There was a lively turning of heads, scooting of benches, press of bodies. Jonathan rose, heart pounding, and looked out toward the Atlantic.

  Offshore to the southeast, beyond low, scrubby Sullivan’s Island with its squat fort, above the sun-silvered horizon, stood the topsails of the British men-o’-war. The vessels were under full sail, their tall canvas looking creamy and translucent against the backlight of the morning sun. Colonel Moultrie had risen, pausing to button his waist-length artillery jacket and don the glossy black-leather Romanesque helmet of his Corps. He squinted at the fleet, then limped rapidly toward the exit on his gouty foot.

  “Wishing you a good shoot, sir,” Bill Croghan called as he passed. Officers were pouring out of the pavilion, mounting their horses outside.

  “Thank y’ kindly,” Moultrie answered without looking back. “That’s what we aim to have.”

  THEY STOOD ON THE SWAMPY GROUND OF THE MAINLAND north of Sullivan’s Island and watched with pounding hearts as the awful moment approached. Still full of breakfast, the Continentals stood like spectators in some enormous coliseum, voices murmuring with awe and dread.

  The towering fleet glided ominously toward the channel, the ships’ massive bows munching the blue water. There was a terrible sense of unstoppability in the moment now, no way to call it off, no way to prevent the impending destruction. In the fort on the beach of the island, off to the east, Moultrie’s black-jacketed cannoneers were swarming like black ants over their huge iron guns. Their shouts came up as voice-wisps on the wind. Each cannon, longer than a man’s body, squatted on its massive oaken carriage on four small wooden wheels, pyramids of the eighteen-pound black iron balls stacked behind it, and the tools of the trade were in the cannoneers’ hands: the sponge-staffs, ramrods, shovels, sledgehammers, waterpails, powder barrels. The muzzles faced through apertures in the thick ramparts, faced that narrow channel of blue water through which the slow-moving ships would have to pass within a few moments. The ramparts were crudely made, but massive: ten feet thick, walls of shaggy-looking palmetto trunks laid horizontally, the spaces between the walls filled with tons of sand. The ramparts looked like flood dikes rather than walls. The fort seemed impregnable.

  But then there were the ships, nine of them in a file, and each one of them was a fortress bigger than the one on the beach. Jonathan and Bill Croghan looked at each other, then looked back to the ships.

  The ships, seen in the terrible clarity of fatal moment, were both monstrous and sublime. Their hulls were as big and heavy as courthouses; the canvas and intricate rigging that pulled them on looked fragile as spiderwebs and moth wings. Their sails were taut-full of the onshore wind, and the Union Jacks, blood-red with blue and white crosses, rippled from mastheads and fantails. Dozens of pennants and many-colored signal flags ran through
the riggings. Flags. Flags in the wind. The flag of South Carolina stood out from its staff above the fort in the stiff, hot wind, a blue-black banner with a white crescent moon in its corner and the word LIBERTY in its center. And a few feet from where Jonathan stood, the little salmon-pink banner of the 8th Virginia Regiment crepitated atop its pole. Flags fluttered as the moment compressed. Jonathan could see men on the ships now, tiny as fleas; he could see cannon ports checkering the hulls; each of the warships carried more guns than Colonel Moultrie had in his whole fort. The size and the relentless, quiet progress of the fleet into the mouth of the gauntlet now for the first time made Jonathan doubt Moultrie’s confidence, made him fear that the ships would drive right past the fort and into the harbor.

  Jonathan drew out the gold watch his father had given him, attached to the fancy fob George had given him, and opened the cover. It was ten o’clock in the morning. He heard snatches of voice from the fort. His mouth was dry; his heart raced. The first ship was almost abreast of the fort now, in the neck of water between Sullivan’s Island and James Island. “That’s a frigate, right?” he asked Bill Croghan.

  “Yes. The Active, I think.” The defenders knew much about the enemy fleet that had lain at anchor so long outside; South Carolina fishermen were daring spies.

  Farther down the line there was the towering canvas of the Bristol, Sir Peter Parker’s fifty-gun flagship.

  “Great God in Heaven,” someone exclaimed in the ranks, “why don’t somebody shoot them boats?”

  And then Jonathan nearly jumped off the ground when the morning burst open with a crash of cannon. Four or five of the fort’s big guns discharged at once, shaking the swampy earth underfoot. Seconds later, a sail of the Active caved in. A yell went up from the fort.

  Now the sides of the Active spewed orange tongues of spark and fire, and blue smoke hid her hull. Jonathan had never heard such a peal of noise in his life, not even the great cracking, rumbling thunderstorms that rolled up the Shenandoah Valley on summer evenings, and his heart quailed.

  “She’s dropped anchor!” Bill shouted. “She’s going to stand there and fight!” It was plain now. The Active was going to sit right in the face of the fort and pour broadsides into it while the other ships passed on her far side. The earth seemed to quake every time the concussion from the ship’s guns rolled ashore. They were belching out their horrendous fire and noise with an amazing rapidity, and geysers of sand leaped up in and around the fort. Between the blasts and through the ringing in his ears Jonathan could hear men’s voices shouting and whooping in the fort. Sandspouts leaped, shrubs and trees behind the fort disappeared, an old fishing hut burst apart in a flash of splinters and spinning boards and roof thatch. Jonathan was surprised that anyone could still be alive in the fort, but apparently there were many, still quite alive. The troops of the 8th Virginia were still dumbstruck, overawed by the tumult and watching like an audience as the fiery panorama unfolded under the blue sky.

  Now the Bristol flagship, the largest vessel ever to have entered this channel, her high oaken side checkered with twenty-five gun ports, drew abreast of the fort and erupted in such a storm of cannon fire that she disappeared in her own smoke. The rampart of the fort shuddered with the impact of at least a dozen simultaneous direct hits. Bright sand sprayed fifty feet into the air, and behind its windblown, drifting veil, Jonathan saw the South Carolina flag go down, its staff snapped off at the base by a cannonball.

  But now came a still greater storm of noise: Colonel Moultrie’s eighteen-pounders were answering with a booming salvo from the right, one gun per second. The Active and the Bristol, and now another fifty-gun giant, the Experiment, were all at anchor directly in the line of fire. Two other ships, the Solebay and the Thunder, a bombship, also were dropping anchor and discharging broadsides at the fort. Now the five gunships were anchored in a line less than 500 yards offshore, and at this close range, the Carolinian gunners could hardly miss. Through the blown smoke now Jonathan watched the warships take their punishment.

  Sails twitched and turned to rags. Rigging snapped. Oak rails and bulkheads disintegrated and spun overboard in chunks and splinters to splash into the channel. Spars and booms shivered and dropped. Shrouds parted and hung flapping like rope ladders, masts crashed down like felled trees, cannon leaped up and fell, fires broke out on the decks, gaping holes appeared in the freeboards, sailors and marines were blown out of the rigging and off the decks like sparrows in a shotgun blast.

  At the sight of this havoc, the gunners in the fort and the troops along the shore raised a resonating hurrah! Bill Croghan’s hand gripped Jonathan’s arm; he was grinning, but there were tears in his eyes; this was, after all, the navy of his native land.

  Colonel Moultrie’s appraisal of his fort was proving true. When a cannonball hit the ramparts, the wall would buck and sand would fly like the dust beaten out of a rug, but the spongy palmetto logs and their fillings of sand were simply swallowing the British lead.

  His artillery was proving as sound as his fortification. His gunners were cool and deliberate, wasting no shot, and the decks and rigging of each ship in turn were being reduced to a shambles of rope, splinters, broken bodies, and blood. And, to the greater thrill of the onlookers, a tiny, dark-clad figure, some madly brave artilleryman, had picked up the fallen Carolina flag, attached to a sponge staff, and now stood as a human flagpole atop the rampart, in the hail of British shot, holding the riddled banner up in the wind while his comrades lashed it to the stump of the flagstaff. Jonathan gritted his teeth and prayed that the brave fool would not be blown apart.

  Still, for all this heartening display, the guns of the fort were not sinking any ships. And now, covered by the fire of the anchored gunships, three more white-sailed frigates came plowing up the channel, going around the far side of the gunships, headed for the harbor. Apparently these fast vessels were going to avoid the fort’s barrage almost entirely. Jonathan realized this suddenly, amid the thrilling spectacle of the gunnery, and his heart sank.

  The first of the three frigates now emerged beyond the anchored ships. Unscathed, she had got north of the fort, past the line of its fire, and was coming about, as if to turn at the end of the island, lie offshore, and pour fire into the fort through its unfinished and unprotected side, thus making it the “slaughter pen” that General Lee had warned it would be.

  “That one’s the Actaeon,” cried Bill Croghan, who was now watching the frigate through a spyglass. “God, I’m afraid she’s going to enfilade the fort!”

  “Damnation!” Jonathan yelled, “I wish they’d give us something to do! I didn’t walk all the way to Charles Town to lay idle and watch!” The little rosy-silk regimental banner fluttered against the sky, now like a symbol of uselessness.

  “Hey! What’s this now?” Croghan yelled. There was an outburst of cheering from the fort; some of the officers of the infantry along the shore were capering and throwing their hats in the air. At first Jonathan could not determine what they were celebrating. They were pointing toward the Actaeon. There was something odd in the way she was standing.

  Jonathan was a stranger to ships, but even to his eye, the frigate looked somehow crippled. She was listing slightly; her sails were empty and flapping uselessly in the wind … and she was not moving. “She’s aground!” Croghan whooped. “She’s fast stuck in the shallows o’ that love-ly channel!”

  “Yaaaaahaaaaa!” someone yodeled, and a ripple of derisive laughter went through the ranks. “Some sailors, them Royal swabs!” a voice yelled between the slamming, booming explosions from the fort.

  Well, that was a small piece of good luck, Jonathan thought. But now going feverish again and feeling somehow vulnerable and doomed, he wondered what all this was coming to in the big scheme of things. There were still ships coming up the channel; the five gunships were still pouring cannonballs into the fort’s ramparts; there were no orders for the Virginia troops; there was no intelligence from General Lee about whether the 3,000 Redcoat
s down on Long Island were on the march yet.

  Suddenly Bill Croghan grabbed Jonathan’s arm and pointed up toward the town.

  Yes! The two other frigates seemed to be in trouble now. They had veered to pass the stranded Actaeon, and now they, too, seemed to be aground, sitting in the channel in awkward attitudes.

  And now most of Sir Parker’s fleet, which had looked so irresistible, was at a standstill, locked in a thunderous duel with the fort or blocked in the channel by its own grounded frigates. This juggernaut of a fleet, which had been plowing so resolutely up the channel an hour ago in a straight battle line, now was sprawled all over the narrow channel, running up signal flags, slowly disintegrating under Moultrie’s methodical cannonade. It was a merry piece of mayhem.

  Now there was nothing more pressing for the 8th Virginia to do than stand in the hammering midday sun with marsh water in their shoes and enjoy a great spectacle of the enemy’s desperation, played out against the choppy blue waters of the channel, the shimmering beaches of James Island across the way, under a crystalline sky in a scouring hot wind.

  IT WENT ON THROUGH THE AFTERNOON. WORD CAME THAT Moultrie had sent to Lee demanding more powder, and it seemed unlikely that Lee could refuse now. Moultrie’s gunnery officers had been sparing of powder, sighting each big gun as if it were a hunting rifle, scarcely wasting a shot. They were aiming at the ships’ waterlines now. Maybe they would sink some ships. It was certain the British were not going to sink the fort. The bombship Thunder was lofting bombshells one after another into the compound from her mortars. These would have killed everyone in the fort, but that the ground within the works was so soft and wet—a sandy morass—that they were swallowed and smothered on impact, and few exploded.

  Jonathan’s troops, waiting in the sun, were near collapsing with heat, and he wondered how those artillerymen in the stifling, smoke-filled confines of the fort could still be moving. He could see them through his spyglass, stripped to their drawers, rags tied around their heads, shining with sweat and black with powder, laboring like ants in the superheated gunpits to keep the big cannons swabbed, loaded, and aimed. But they were happy in their work, especially when the firebuckets full of grog would be passed to them.