USA > South Carolina > The history of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1780-1783 > Part 57
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In reviewing the events of the few months which had elapsed since the evacuation of Charlestown, one would almost imagine, says Johnson, that we had proposed to trace the origin and progress of anti-federalism, to develop the causes that led to the adoption of the Federal Consti- tution, or the distribution of parties into Federal and Republican.
1 Johnson's Life of Greene, vol. II, 398-400 ; Marshall's Life of Wash- ington, vol. IV, 615.
CONCLUSION
WE have now accomplished the purpose announced in the introductory chapter to this history of South Carolina. We have traced the development of the State, socially and politically, from the inception of the colony to the end of the American Revolution. The thirteen colonies, after seven years' struggle, we have now seen recognized as in- dependent of Great Britain, and South Carolina a sovereign State.
A brief review of the salient points of the story will be a fitting conclusion to our work.
The isolated position of the colony of South Carolina from its inception to its ultimate development as a State has been pointed out. The colony had been planted in a far-away position -an outpost - as an assertion of Britannic right to disputed territory ; so planted, it had been left to struggle for its existence against Spaniards, French, and Indians, with but such little assistance as her twin sister, North Carolina, could occasionally afford. She was a British colony planted for imperial purposes of the mother country, and yet, with one exception, that of Oglethorpe's regiment, which passed through Charlestown on its way to Florida in 1738, no British troops set foot upon her soil until 1760, when Montgomery's regiment was sent to meet the Chero- kees, who had been set on to the British frontier by the French, with whom England was at war. For nearly seventy years, that is, from 1670 to 1738, the colony had struggled alone, without the aid of a British soldier, against Indians, Spaniards, and French, the enemies of Great Brit-
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ain, and against pirates, the enemies of mankind. Then. had been planted the feeble colony of Georgia, between the Spaniards in Florida and the colony in South Carolina. To disasters of all kinds the Carolina colony had opposed a stubborn resistance, and with slow growth had gradually developed into a small but wealthy community.
There were essential differences, as we have seen, between South Carolina and the other colonies, in the source of her institution, and in the manner of their devel- opment. These had not originated, so to speak, on her own soil, but had been transferred with her first settlers, in an advanced condition of development, from the British West Indies, principally from Barbadoes, the settlers bringing with them institutions of a planters' colony, social, civil, and military, all based upon that of African slavery.
Isolated from the other colonies, left to struggle for existence as best they might, the people of South Carolina early learned the lesson of self-reliance, and with indepen- dence of the Proprietors for defence, they grew restless of their authority, and were the first colonists successfully to rebel against the government provided for them in England. The revolution "of the people," as it was termed in 1719, it is true, was connived at, if not even to some extent at least instigated, by those at home, who wished to recover for the king the authority recklessly granted to the Pro- prietors. But it was a dangerous appeal, that of the king to the people; and so the prediction of the time that if that "revolt is not crop't in the bud, they [the people] will set up for themselves against his Majesty," was ultimately fulfilled. The revolt of 1719 was not cropped in the bud, and the people, tasting of the power to put down one and set up another, had now overthrown the Proprietors for the king. The time was to come when they would overthrow the king for themselves.
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. But circumstances conspired for half a century to prevent any such desire. South Carolina became the favored colony of Great Britain, and under the first two Georges, though but few troops were sent to her assistance against the Span- iards, the French, and Indians, she was, on the other hand, left with but little interference, to prosper and accumulate wealth. Indeed, her treatment by the mother country was not only merely passively favorable ; she was the recipient of beneficial measures in her development. Two great staple crops were found adapted to her soil and climate, and susceptible of profitable cultivation by negro labor, and for the accommodation of this her trade, the navigation laws of England - that upon which it was believed that the greatness of the kingdom depended - were modified, and bounties were generously given to induce the cultivation of other products for the market at home. True, she was still in a great measure restricted to commerce with the mother country ; but as the mother country took all her commodities at remunerative prices, she felt no burdens in restriction of her trade. And herein lay a great difference between herself and most of the others, especially the Northern colonies. The navigation laws of Cromwell, enforced after the Restoration with even greater strictness and severity than in the days of the Commonwealth, did not materially affect her interests while they crushed and ruined the interests of others.
Her commerce was not only undisturbed by those laws so ruinous to others, but led to closer relations with the mother country. The intercourse between London and Charlestown became as close as that which had been so long maintained between Bridgetown, Barbadoes, and the great city; an intercourse so intimate that the West Indian was said to be more familiar with the streets of London than the British squire who lived within a few
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miles of the city. The Carolina Coffee House was a
London institution. Scarcely a week passed that some vessel did not sail for England from Charlestown, and few of these did not carry passengers. The regular packets were filled with travellers to and fro across the ocean. There were few people in Charlestown who had not crossed and recrossed the Atlantic. In this, as has appeared, the people of Carolina were different from those of the Northern States, in which we are told that a man who had been to Europe was pointed out as a curiosity. And so it was that, out of a list of 114 Americans admitted as members of the Inns of Court in London in the twenty-seven years from 1759 to 1786, 46 were South Carolinians, and of the 30 Americans in London in 1774 who petitioned Parliament against the Boston Port Bill, 15 were from South Carolina.
The sons of the opulent of South Carolina were sent to England for their education, and after passing through Oxford or Cambridge, not infrequently remained to eat commons at the Temple, and to return, not only with their academic degrees, but as English barristers as well. The taste for British politics, thus inspired, became a part of the lives of the people. It was upon this that was founded the Charlestown Library Society in 1748, when a few young men were associated, and contributed among themselves for the purpose of raising a fund to collect new pamphlets and papers published in Great Britain - thus to keep abreast of the times "at home," and to follow the struggle between the great orators and pamphleteers as they fought for Whigs or Tories. Thus it was, that, regardless of Wilkes's personal char- acter, the leaders in South Carolina warmly espoused his cause as that of liberty, and associated it with the strug- gle over the Stamp Act. The conduct of the people in
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the Wilkes case was similar to that pursued by them in regard to the Stamp Act and to the tax on tea. In neither case had they any material interest at stake. In the matter of the Stamp Act and in that of the tax on tea, they entered into the contest as a matter of principle, and a sympathy with the people of the Northern States, who were so grievously oppressed by the navigation laws. But in all this agitation, it was English politics which the young men were discussing. The people, young and old, abhorred the idea of a severance of their ties to the mother country which New England began to agitate. The revolutionists in South Carolina were Chathamites. But step by step, almost unconsciously, they were drawn into the struggle, and then from resistance to revolution, from revolution to independence.
It can hardly be doubted that the people of South Caro- lina as a whole had been at first by a vast majority opposed to separation. The extreme Revolutionary party was confined to the coast, and even in that region there were many, very many, who, though for resistance to the uncon- stitutional proceedings of Parliament, as they conceived, regarded with horror the very idea of being no longer a part of the great British Empire; while in the Up-Coun- try the Scotch-Irish and the newly come Virginians in the middle country were too busy with their new settle- ments to be concerning themselves with questions which they regarded as but Low-Country politics. What concern was it to them whether stamps were required on legal papers or not, when there were no courts in their section in which to use them, and when for their protection against horse thieves and other criminals they were forced to the necessity of organizing courts of regulators, which became as dangerous almost as the evils from which they were established to protect them? Why ask them to
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fight against taxation without representation in Parlia- ment in England, when they had no representation in the General Assembly which met in Charlestown? It was most unfortunate that the Revolution found the people of the province, by and large, in an inchoate condition. The normal order of settlement of the country had been, as we have seen, suddenly changed. Prior to 1750 immigration had come by way of the sea, and from Charlestown had pushed up the rivers, carrying with it the civil and social organization of the coast; but in the eighty years since the beginning of the colony, the settlement of the province had extended but little beyond the falls of the rivers. Then, after Braddock's defeat, had come the immense tide of population from Pennsylvania and Virginia by way of the foot of the mountains, filling up that region with Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and some Germans, and the mid- dle country with English Virginians, until it was estimated that those sections contained two-thirds of the population of the State. This immigration had come, not as individ- uals and families, but as communities, bringing with them their own religious and social systems. It is remarkable, too, that it had come so quietly that the old colonists on the coast, sitting in their Assembly, elected from parishes organized under the Church of England, were scarcely aware of the presence of such a people until they found themselves outnumbered in the province. Measures for the extension of the parish system and the establishment of schools for the children and courts for the people had been contemplated, and it will be recollected to some ex- tent inaugurated, by the General Assembly ; but had been effectually stifled in London by the sine cure holders of patent offices living in England, whose interests would thereby be affected, and who through court influence re- quired to be bought off before such measures should be
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allowed to pass. This had been done, and courts pro- vided had actually been opened; but the parishes had not yet been extended, nor had provision yet been made for giving the people in the back country representation in the Assembly when the Revolution began. For this con- dition of things the newcomers held the people on the coast responsible, and ridiculed the idea of being called upon to join in rebellion against the mother country be- cause Parliament in England taxed the American colonies without giving them representation, when they on the coast did the same in regard to themselves.
It was an unfortunate condition of affairs for which the Low-Country people were not altogether, if indeed at all, to blame; but so it happened that the Revolution found the people of South Carolina radically divided in a man- ner in no wise connected with the questions between Great Britain and the colonies. The Scotch-Irish Presby- terians, above the falls of the rivers, enjoying religious freedom to a greater extent than ever before, and however zealous for political freedom as well, more concerned then with settling their new homes than with the theoretical questions agitated on the coast, turned a deaf ear to the commissioners sent to appeal to them to join in the strug- gle against the king. With but few exceptions they re- frained from taking any part in the struggle until rudely awakened by Tarleton's slaughter of Buford's men in the Waxhaws, and the burning and desecration of their churches upon the assumption that, as the dissenters in New England were the leaders in the Revolution, the dissenters in South Carolina must necessarily be rebels as well.
But it so happened that, divided as South Carolina was upon the subject of the Revolution, not only upon its general merits, but also as to the extent to which it should
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be carried, the first decisive victory for the American cause was that of Fort Moultrie in Charlestown harbor.
It was, indeed, a striking incident, to which we have be- fore called attention, that when, on the 28th of June, 1776, Jefferson at Philadelphia was laying on the table of Con- gress the draft of the Declaration of Independence, and the delegates from South Carolina were hesitating as to their course, his doing so was, all unconsciously, saluted in Charlestown harbor by the roar of artillery as the guns of the British fleet were pouring their broadsides into the little log fort on Sullivan's Island. We have seen the de- cisive consequences of that great victory, one of the most brilliant of the whole Revolution -a victory in which, on the American side, none but South Carolinian blood was shed.
The victory of Fort Moultrie secured three years of comparative quiet to the South, while the war of the Revolution was waged at the North, though in that time her Continental troops had been greatly reduced by the ill-advised expedition against the British in Florida, an expedition in which an army was wasted without a battle having been fought. Then the war was transferred to the South, and South Carolina became its theatre-its bloody ground -its bloodiest ground in all the country.
Upon the evacuation of Boston in March, 1776, the first British movement, as we have seen, had been the expedi- tion of Sir Peter Parker and Sir Henry Clinton against in the Southern States, which had culminated in the attack upon Charlestown harbor, and the disastrous defeat of the bel British fleet and army. Then for three years the conflict had been confined almost entirely to the Northern States, ma in which the first object had been, by a joint movement n is from Canada down the lakes under Burgoyne, and up the ould Hudson from New York by Sir William Howe, to cut off
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and isolate the New England States, which it was assumed in England would end the war. That movement had like- wise ended disastrously, the whole of Burgoyne's army having been captured. Then " Mr. Lee's plan " of carry- ing the war into the middle States and capturing the city of Philadelphia, the seat of government of the rebel States, had most extraordinarily been followed by the two Howes at the instance of the traitor Charles Lee, while a prisoner in their hands, to the abandonment of the plan of campaign before agreed upon by the two brothers, Lord Howe and Sir William, in conference with the War Office in London. Philadelphia had been taken, but the campaign had proved abortive. The Howes had been recalled, Sir Henry Clin- ton appointed commander-in-chief, and a new programme arranged by the British ministry, based upon two principal ideas : (1) the carrying the war "from South to North," and (2) "the conquering of America by Americans."
This plan, it will be observed, was but a recurrence to that of 1776, which had been based upon the belief, not without foundation, that the Revolutionary movement in the South was confined almost entirely to the coast of the two Carolinas, that the people of the interior of these provinces were hostile to the governments in the Low- Country, and ready to rise against them, that especially was this the case in North Carolina. It was believed that, if the British could but penetrate to the region in which the Scotch refugees from Culloden, who now, strange to say, were of all people in America the most loyal to the house of Hanover, to wit, the neighborhood of Cross Creek, in which the town of Fayetteville now stands, that they might establish a Royal government there, in the rear of the seats of the State governments on the coast; and that, having done so, the people would flock to the Royal standard; that a full regiment of Highlanders would be
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formed to join the British when they reached that point, and that the strength of their army would be greatly in- creased as they marched through the country, gathering recruits at every point; that with this growing army they would march triumphantly through Virginia to the Chesa- peake and thence on northwardly. These were the basic ideas of the campaign to be conducted upon the transfer- ence of the war to the South.
The movement began, it will be recollected, upon the rejection by Congress of the terms of peace brought by the peace commissioners from England in 1778. The British garrisons in Florida were strengthened, and General Prévost directed to move from that quarter, while a considerable force under Colonel Campbell was despatched from New York to form a junction with him. Savannah was promptly taken by Colonel Campbell, who followed up his success by an advance into the interior of Georgia and the defeat of the American force under General Ashe at Brier Creek. Then in 1779 had followed Moultrie's affair at Beaufort and Prévost's expedition into South Carolina, in which he had nearly succeeded in taking the city of Charlestown ; then had been fought the battle of Stono, the year 1779 closing with the disastrous siege of Savannah by the com- bined French and American forces. These had been but the beginning of the long and terrible warfare to be waged in South Carolina.
Prévost's march had been begun, not with any expec- tation of reaching Charlestown, but more as a feint, or threat, to recall General Lincoln, the Continental officer who had superseded Howe in command of the American forces in the South, from a movement of his towards Augusta to counteract the effect of Ashe's defeat at Brier Creek in Georgia ; failing to accomplish that object, Lincoln understanding its original purpose, and not believing that
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Prévost would have the temerity to press on to the city, Prévost had nearly succeeded in taking it. He had failed to do so, but his march had not been without results of the greatest importance. He had marked the road to the city and demonstrated that its true approach was not from the sea, but through the various inlets in its rear. His raid had also shown the immense wealth of the region through which it had been made, and had given a substantial ear- nest of the spoils to be obtained ; and more, it had shown the divisions of the people, the unreliability of the militia of the country, and the military weakness because of the negro slaves. The losses in the battle of Stono, at Beaufort, and in the siege of Savannah, Sir Henry Clinton well knew, were irreparable to the Americans. The time had arrived, therefore, for the more decisive inauguration of the grand ministerial plan of carrying the war from South to North. His scheme for the fulfilment of this plan of campaign was by calling in his forces around New York, to leave a part of them under Lieutenant-General Knyphausen to con- front Washington on the Hudson during the winter, while, with the bulk of his army, he proceeded by sea to Savan- nah, under the convoy of Admiral Arbuthnot, who had just arrived with a reenforcement from England, and land- ing there and on the islands near Charlestown, to advance upon the city, which, knowing the great weakness of the Continental army, and the impossibility of any adequate reinforcements by Washington overland from New York, it was assumed would speedily be taken; this accom- plished, Sir Henry, leaving a sufficient part of the army under Lord Cornwallis to make a triumphal march through the Carolinas and Virginia, he would return with the rest of the army to New York ; all this was to be done in mid- winter, while the ice and snow would prevent operations at the North. As we have before shown, this plan was the
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prototype of Sherman's march to the sea, and from the sea to the rear of Lee's army in 1865, even tu the detail, which had been arranged, that Sir Henry Clinton, after his return to New York, should send an expedition to land at Ports- mouth, Virginia, which, moving across that State, should meet Cornwallis on his arrival there, who, with the joint forces, was to proceed to Baltimore and thence northward as circumstances would allow. This part of the scheme, it will be observed, was that followed in 1865, when General Terry's expedition was landed at Wilmington and joined Sherman in North Carolina. This was the grand plan which Sir Henry Clinton had undertaken to carry out.
We have seen the result - Charlestown would not at once fall. Her walls would not come down as Jericho's did, not even in six days, though the men of war compassed her about, and the trumpets were blown! Time pressed Sir Henry, but the city would not surrender. Time, indeed, was now very precious to the British. The season for active operations at the North was approaching, and it behooved Sir Henry to get back to New York as soon as possible, lest Washington, taking advantage of his absence, might, with a recruited army, fall upon Knyphausen's depleted force. At last, on the 12th of May, the city capitulated, and Sir Henry at once addressed himself to the securing of the fruits of his victory. He had captured the great bulk of the Continental army in the Southern States, which he held as prisoners. In order to get in the militia of the State, he now offered the same terms to all who would come in and surrender as he had allowed the troops in the city. His offer was accepted, and large numbers laid down their arms, gave their paroles, and accepted certificates of pro- tection of their property. But time was passing, and a new cause for anxiety arose. Late in April the Marquis de Lafayette had arrived at Boston on his return from
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his native country, which he had obtained permission to revisit, and where he had been received with every mark of favor and distinction at the Court of Versailles, and from which he had brought information that his Most Christian Majesty had consented to send a considerable land and naval force to assist in the ensuing campaign. The British had learned of this, and it became of the greatest importance that Sir Henry Clinton should bring matters to a close in South Carolina, and be able to return to New York with part of his army before the French expedition should reach America. In this emergency he fell upon the unfortunate device of revoking the paroles he had taken, and issuing a proclamation, on the 3d of June, declaring that all inhabitants of the province who were prisoners on parole and were not in the regular military line, should, from the 20th of that month, be freed and exempted from all such paroles and be restored to all the rights and duties of citizens, and that all such persons who should neglect to return to their allegiance and due submission to his Majesty's government, should be con- sidered as enemies and rebels to the same, and be treated accordingly ; upon this point, as we have seen, the con- tinuance of the Revolution in South Carolina turned. Having issued this proclamation, Sir Henry sailed for New York with four thousand men, and reached that place just in time to escape an encounter with the French fleet and army, which arrived at Newport on the 12th of July.
Upon the fall of Charlestown the British troops had at once been advanced into the interior of the State, and the slaughter of a Virginia regiment which had been sent to reënforce Lincoln's army in the South, had taken place in the Waxhaws under circumstances of great atrocity. British posts were established at Ninety Six, Camden, and Cheraw. And so it was that Sir Henry Clinton, just
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