USA > South Carolina > The history of South Carolina in the Revolution, 1780-1783 > Part 58
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before his departure for New York, with great assurance, could write to Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for War in England, that he could venture to assert that there were few men in South Carolina who were not either prisoners or with the British. But Lord Cornwallis, his successor, was soon to realize how fallacious were such appearances. The Continental army under Gates, sent by Washington to bar his path on his march to the north- ward, he had met at Camden, promptly defeated and routed, and the road, at least as far as Cross Creek, the former trysting place, where the British and Tories were to meet and set up the government in the interior, seemed clear and open. But there was a lion in his path!
Misunderstanding the condition of affairs in South Caro- lina, and assuming, as we have observed, that because the dissenters in New England had been the moving spirits in the Revolution, that the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in North and South Carolina were likewise rebels, Tarleton and Huck had dashed in among them, slaughtered Bu- ford's men, and cut and slashed among these people, who had really as yet taken but little part in the struggle. The British had, indeed, stirred up a hornet's nest. Scotch- Irish blood was never slow at taking fire ! If as rebels they were to be treated, rebels they indeed would be ! A man, too, was found to lead them. Sumter, without a commission from either the State or Congress, gathering a little party at Clem's Creek, in the Waxhaws, just below the line between North and South Carolina, was joined there by Hill, Neel, and Lacey, and Henry and Richard Hampton, and the Taylors and Bratton, and McLure and Winn, and Williams and Brandon, and by the Virginians recently come into the province, and refugees from the Low-Country, and these all, with Davie's little band of North Carolinians as a nucleus, formed and organized themselves as partisan
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bands to stem the tide of British progress. Assisted only by a few similar small bands from North Carolina and upper Georgia, Sumter first raised the fallen standard of American independence in a country which was overrun by British troops, and claimed by the British commander to be conquered.
Marion, who had fortunately escaped capture upon the fall of Charlestown, had hastened to join the Continental army advancing through North Carolina, and, still more fortunately despised by Gates, had been sent on by that officer to gather up boats on the Pee Dee, -in truth, to get him and his ragged associates away from his regular army. Marion had done more than gather boats on the Pee Dee. There he too raised the standard of indepen- dence, and gathered not only boats, but men, and organized a partisan corps like Sumter's. With him were the two Horrys, Peter and Hugh, the Jameses, McCottry, Baxter, and Vanderhorst. These partisan bands in a month, from the 12th of July to the 12th of August, in twelve engage- ments, had inflicted a loss upon the enemy of five hundred men, at a loss to themselves of but half that number. The field had thus been thoroughly prepared for Gates's ad- vance, but that vainglorious officer had been met by Lord Cornwallis at Camden, and utterly defeated.
The Continental army routed and dispersed, the cause of American independence was now abandoned to the defence of the partisan bands in South Carolina. The French fleet and army, which had arrived at Newport on the 12th of July, having gone into that harbor and disembarked, and the British recovering the command of the water by the arrival of a reënforcement to its navy, had been caught and locked up there, where they remained for a year, "bottled up," to use a later famous expression. Time was now again of the utmost consequence to the British plan
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of campaign. If Cornwallis could now have pressed on, reached Cross Creek, and found there the assistance he had been told to expect, had received the expected addi- tion to his army, and had then pushed on to Virginia, it is not improbable he might have carried out the grand plan of campaign while the French lay cooped up at Newport. It behooved him, therefore, to move, and he did so. But he could not throw off the partisans of Sumter, Marion, Davie, Clarke, Shelby, and Sevier. They hung upon his flanks, opposed his march, and broke up his communica- tions, and finally, at King's Mountain, defeated and killed Ferguson and captured his command. Notwithstanding the brilliancy of Tarleton's movements, now after Marion, and then after Sumter, Cornwallis, who had reached Char- lotte, in spite of Davie's small corps, which had held him at bay for some time, and had advanced some distance be- yond, found himself obliged to abandon his march, so nec- essary to the accomplishment of the British campaign, and not only himself to return with his army to South Carolina and take position at Winnsboro, but to send to Leslie, whom Sir Henry Clinton had despatched to Virginia to meet him there, orders to abandon the attempt to form a junction with him in Virginia, and to come by sea to Charlestown, and thence to join him at Winnsboro. Thus had these volunteer bands, without assistance from Congress, broken up the plans of the enemy, and detained the army of invasion in the backwoods of South Carolina. In these affairs the partisan bands of North and South Carolina and Georgia had killed, wounded, and taken prisoners of the enemy three times as many men as they had themselves lost.
It is difficult to overestimate the results of the work of these volunteers in South Carolina at this juncture. It is not the language of extravagance to say that they had
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rendered the most essential and vital service to the whole country in an hour of its greatest extremity. True, they did not know of the grand ministerial plan which Lord Cornwallis had been charged to carry out, and upon which he was then embarked, and with which they were so ma- terially interfering. They probably did not know that the French fleet, from the assistance of which so much had been expected, was cooped up at Newport, nor how im- portant it was to delay and prevent the consummation of the British plans until it could be released -in short, they did not know what great consequences would flow from their exertions to harass and retard the British on their march through the State; but they acted upon each occasion, as it presented itself, of striking a blow in behalf of liberty ; content with performing small things as the opportunity allowed, they accomplished great results in the cause of the common country. Huck's defeat, Flat Rock, Rocky Mount, Hanging Rock, Musgrove's Mills, Nel- son's Ferry, Fishdam, and Blackstock, and even King's Mountain, were small affairs as great wars go, but they counted up to great proportions in the end. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that at a most critical moment they saved the cause of liberty and independence in America.
But now came General Nathanael Greene-the " Deputy Saviour," as he has been almost blasphemously styled - to reap the fruits and the honors not only of what had been already done by the partisan bands, but of what they should thereafter do. General Greene brought with him his staff, and Lee's Legion followed him. We have seen the false position he first took, and the unfortunate letter he wrote to Sumter upon assuming command of the de- partment. It will be remembered how complacently he had regarded his position at Cheraw. It made, he thought,
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the most of his inferior force. It compelled his adversary to divide his, and held him in doubt as to his own line of conduct. The enemy could not leave Morgan, whom he had sent to threaten Ninety Six, to come against him, or his post at Ninety Six would be exposed. He could not go after Morgan or prosecute his views upon Virginia while he was there with the whole country before him. He was as near Charlestown as was Cornwallis. But al- though, he added, there was nothing to obstruct his march to Charlestown, he was far from having such a design in contemplation, in the present relative positions and strength of the two armies. In all this the result showed that General Greene was utterly at fault. He had divided his army, sending Morgan with his best regiment, and all his cavalry except that of Lee's Legion, to the west of the Broad to threaten Ninety Six. Lee's Legion he had sent to Georgetown while he rested upon the eastern bank of the Pee Dee. Morgan defeated Tarleton at Cowpens, but, notwithstanding this, Cornwallis, who had drawn Leslie over the Catawba, and united his command with his own, without hesitation or regard for Greene's position on his flank, moved forward between the Catawba and the Broad on his march to North Carolina. The two great rivers, the Catawba and the Pee Dee, protected his flank, while Lord Rawdon was left at Camden with a force sufficient to for- bid any advance by Greene upon Charlestown had the latter contemplated such a movement.
Finding himself mistaken as to the supposed advantages of his position, General Greene appears to have lost his judgment. Turning over the command of what army he had to General Huger, he adopted the most extraordinary course of going himself to hunt Morgan in the woods of North Carolina. With only a guide, one aide, and a ser- geant's guard of cavalry, he struck out upon a mad ride VOL. IV. -. 3 A
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of 125 miles across the county, and across the line of his adversary's advance. Owing to the delay of his lordship at Ramsour's Mill for two days, Greene happily succeeded in finding Morgan, on the 30th of January, at Sherard's Ford. But what was the purpose, or where the necessity, of the exposure of the commander of the department to the betrayal of Tories who infested the country, and other great dangers of such a journey ? Was not Morgan quite as able to take care of the small party he had, as was Huger to the safe conduct of the rest of the army? His object, doubtless, was to effect a junction of the two divisions of his army at some point in front of the British advance, and for this purpose to communicate with Morgan. But this would have been effected quite as well by couriers or scouts as by the commander of the department himself in person. Indeed, as soon as he found Morgan, he had to communicate again with Huger, but as he could not, like Oglethorpe in his Florida campaign, be riding back and forth, he had now to content himself with but a letter to Huger.
There was nothing in this first essay of the new com- mander to inspire confidence in his military judgment. He had manifestly been mistaken in the disposition of his forces, and had been out-manœuvred by his opponent, not- withstanding Morgan's brilliant victory. So evident was this, that, in the popular mind, his utter ruin at the time, says his devoted biographer, was saved only by a miracu- lous rise of the Yadkin, which prevented the British advance. What really did save him was the delay of Cornwallis at Ramsour's Mill to destroy his baggage. Then had followed the campaign in North Carolina, culminating in the battle of Guilford Court-house, in which Greene was defeated, but Cornwallis, crippled by his losses, unable to take advantage of his victory, and falling back to the
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coast for supplies, became the pursued instead of the pursuer.
In the meanwhile, though the State had again been abandoned by the Continental army, the war had not therefore ceased in her limits. Sumter and Marion had not retired from the field, though the former was suffering badly from the wound received at Blackstock in Novem- ber. In the three months of Greene's absence, in 1781, the partisan bands had now added twenty-six more engagements to the same number they had fought in 1780. Sumter with his rough riders had raided around Lord Rawdon's position at Camden, had attacked Fort Granby and the post at Thomson's plantation, and taken a large convoy and train on its way thither, and had taken Orangeburgh. He had thus penetrated between Camden and Ninety Six, had broken in upon Lord Rawdon's communications, and com- pleting the circle, had ended his campaign in an affair at the Waxhaws from which point he had started. In the same time Marion had been particularly busy, and had done some of his most brilliant work. He successfully baffled the concerted movements of Watson, Doyle, and McLeroth directed by Lord Rawdon to crush him. He had fought with more or less success the affairs of Wiboo Swamp, Mount Hope, Black River, Sampit Bridge, Snow Island, and Witherspoon's Ferry. He had sent Harden with a part of his command across the country to the lower part of the State, where Harden with brilliant success had carried the war into the rice fields, and taken post after post where the British looked not for an enemy. The partisan bands had thus again prepared the way for the return of the Continental army.
General Greene having followed Lord Cornwallis to Ramsay's Mill, where his lordship changed the direction of his retreat, and from the road to South Carolina to that
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to Wilmington, Greene now made the movement upon which his reputation as a military leader has in great measure been built. But it has clearly appeared, as we think, that not only did General Greene not originate the plan, but that he never cordially approved it. He com- plained to Colonel Lee that he had been misled by him in adopting it. Preparatory to his movement into South Carolina, he writes to Sumter to join him when he reached the State. He calls upon Sumter for reinforcements, as if Sumter had a regularly organized body of militia at his command, which he could bring out at any time if he chose. He misreads Sumter's plain reply, and lays up against him a lasting complaint that he had failed at this time to meet him with one thousand men independently of Marion's followers. He marches to attack Lord Rawdon, who, taking the initiative, moves out from Camden, meets, attacks, and defeats him at Hobkirk's Hill. Upon this defeat he determines again to abandon the State, and is only deterred from doing so by learning that Lord Rawdon, notwithstanding his victory, had evacuated Camden and was on his retreat towards Charlestown.
It was Sumter's, Marion's, and Harden's work during Greene's absence from the State that had compelled Rawdon to fall back. At Nelson's Ferry his lordship was met by Colonel Balfour, the commander at Charlestown, with the report that the whole country was once more in rebellion, and the provincial troops in the city in mutiny. In the meanwhile Sumter, Marion, and Lee had been busy again in Lord Rawdon's rear. Orangeburgh, Fort Motte, and Granby had been taken, and Sumter had ridden with his men to within fifty miles of Charlestown; he had scoured the country, capturing horses and securing all the means of transportation in the way. Now was the time, he urged upon Greene, to strike a decisive blow. He urged
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him to call in all his forces, and, uniting them in one, to fall upon Rawdon's retreating army. True Lord Rawdon had not many days before defeated him at Hobkirk's Hill, but the prestige of that success had been entirely lost by his lordship's retreat, and by Balfour's discouraging reports of the rising of the people of the Low-Country. But Greene preferred to follow the old rule, never to leave a fortress in the rear, and turned aside to take the fort at Ninety Six, instead of pressing on after Rawdon. There he was not only detained for three whole weeks of the most precious time, but was repulsed, and obliged to raise the siege. While he lay before the post at Ninety Six, accident brought in British reinforcements, Rawdon was saved, and the country which the partisan bands had rescued from British control was again in their posses- sion.
Pickens and Lee had, however, in the meanwhile, taken Augusta, and Rawdon, finding himself unable to hold Ninety Six, abandoned it as it would have been abandoned before had not Greene's investure prevented the receipt by Colonel Cruger, the commandant, of Rawdon's order for the purpose. Then, too late, Greene had given Sumter leave with Lee and all the partisan bands to make a dash towards Charlestown, to drive into its immediate vicinity the British outlying forces. The expedition was well planned, and its result brilliant in many of its details, but not as fully successful as it might have been had it not been for the jealousies of its leaders. Wade Hampton and Lee had indeed reached the very gates of the town, and killed, wounded, and captured the guards at the post but four miles from the city. The battle of Quinby Bridge had been fought, and fought not altogether unsuccessfully, but its complete success had not been attained because of the want of a cordial cooperation of the various bands
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composing Sumter's command, especially by the want of Lee's usual zeal and activity.
In the meanwhile, a general exchange of prisoners had taken place, under which the exiles at St. Augustine, the original leaders in the Revolution, had been released, but forbidden to return to the State, and their families banished from Charlestown. Contemporaneously therewith had occurred the capture and tragic death of Colonel Isaac Hayne.
Upon the advance of Lord Cornwallis in January, and the abandonment of the State by General Greene, Governor Rutledge, it will be remembered, had gone to Philadelphia, where he remained for some months, endeavoring to obtain assistance from Congress. As most of the State had now been recovered, he had returned, bringing with him some few necessaries, medical stores, etc., but nothing more. Establishing himself at Camden, he began, under the great powers with which he was invested, to arrange for the restoration of some form of civil government and the reor- ganization of the militia in the recovered territory. For this purpose he had issued the proclamation for the election and convening of a General Assembly we have discussed. We have seen the work of the body thus convened - the Jacksonborough Assembly, as it was called -presenting the singular phenomenon of the most unwise and unjust legis- lation enacted by one of the most distinguished bodies that ever sat in this or any other State of the Union. Governor Rutledge's reorganization of the militia resulted in the loss to the service of both Sumter and Harden.
The battle which should have been fought in May, while the British were in consternation at the numerous successes of the partisan bands and the rising of the people, and before the arrival of the fleet with reinforcements from Ireland, was now to take place - the last pitched battle of
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the Revolution in South Carolina, and the last except that of Yorktown in the United States. It was fought, and both sides claimed the victory ; but Greene retired from the field, while Colonel Stuart, who commanded the British force, held it for the night, but was obliged to abandon it the next day and to fall back to Monck's Corner. Much blood was still to be shed in South Carolina, and many dreadful scenes between Whigs and Tories were to be enacted; but none of these in any appreciable degree affected the situation of the contending parties. It is curious that, while the British were generally successful in the affairs and engagements in 1782, the general result was to drive in and circumscribe their forces into narrow and still narrower limits.
It is difficult to understand the persistent hostility of Greene and Lee to Sumter ; it is still more so to understand the unwillingness of Marion to submit to his command, or even to cooperate with him, though appealed to by Governor Rutledge upon the subject ; but most of all we are at a loss to account for the manifest coolness of Gov- ernor Rutledge himself to one who, in the darkest hour of his country, had raised its fallen flag and stemmed the tide of conquest, and whom he, Rutledge himself, had put in command of all the militia. We can understand to some extent the jealousy of Greene and of Lee of the fame which had already begun to attach to Sumter's name ; we can, with regret, understand that Marion may have indulged somewhat the same sentiment, though it was so unlike his character in every respect; but we cannot refrain from asking ourselves where was the occasion of any such mo- tive on the part of John Rutledge ? And yet, when at he instance of Greene he discriminated between Sumter's und Marion's men in favor of the latter, and practically broke up Sumter's command, he must have contemplated
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Sumter's resentment and resignation, and determined upon the course at the risk of losing his services. There is in this strong inference that there must have been in Sumter's conduct something calling for such action, and yet, as we remember, it was but a few weeks before that the governor had assured Sumter that he had heard nothing to his dis- paragement, and that should he do so, in justice to his merits and services, he would most certainly suspend judgment until he could hear from him in the matter. Reading the correspondence between Greene and Sumter alone, no one would imagine that there was the least difference or unkind feeling between them. Greene makes no complaint to Sumter of his conduct, and upon occasions is most flatter- ing to him ; Sumter is most assiduous in his letters to Greene, writing not only almost daily, but at times repeatedly in the same day; nor in all these letters of his can we find a suspicion upon his part of the want of the most entire confidence in him on the part of his commander; and yet we have the contemporaneous correspondence between Greene and Lee, carried on in part in cipher, in which they join in speaking of Sumter in the most disparaging manner, and heaping upon him the responsibility and blame for all the failures of the campaign. Is it any wonder that, in after life, when he came to know the truth, Sumter should enter- tain the deepest resentment against Greene, who, he learned, had to others belittled and misrepresented all he had done, had intrigued for his removal, and finally driven him from the field ?
The Jacksonborough Assembly, however unwise in its enactments and unjust to the Loyalists, was most gen- erous to General Greene. With Sumter and Marion sitting in the Senate, and all the other partisan lead- ers in one or other House of the body, while nothing was said or done for Moultrie, Sumter, Marion, or Pickens,
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honors were heaped upon Greene with material and pecuniary rewards. These he accepted as due him of right. He took the plantation - " Boone's Barony," as it was called -and the negroes and the money, and turned upon the State which bestowed them. The British fleet had scarcely crossed the bar of Charlestown harbor, reliev- ing him of further hostilities, when he turned his guns upon the people of South Carolina, as if he was their conqueror and they his subjects. In a State with a civil government fully established, and the people ready to do what they could to support his army, - the whole burden of which was left upon them without assistance from other States, - an army few of whom had borne any part in the rescue of the State from the British, most of whom had come into South Carolina only when the fighting was over, and there to mutiny! he claimed the right to im- press as if in a hostile territory. He needlessly offended the people by setting up with a parade of knowledge of international law the far-fetched doctrine of postliminy, that his officers might indulge their fancy as horsemen by retaining the high-bred animals recaptured from the enemy, - an exercise of mere arbitrary power certain to give great offence, and for which nothing was to be attained in comparison with the injury it would inflict upon the sentiment of his people. From the needless impressment of such horses in Virginia, Greene and the Continental army were at this time in the greatest un- popularity in that State. Then, in the controversy with Governor Guerard over the flag from Governor Tonyn of Florida, whatever may have been the merits of the question involved, General Greene's conduct was not only undignified and petulant, but unwise and most unfortunate in the impression which it left upon the minds of the people of the State.
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General Greene's whole conduct in South Carolina was, indeed, most unfortunate in its influence upon the future relations of the State to the general government. To the minds of many his purpose seemed to have been scarcely less to put down State pride and State assertion, than to overthrow British rule. It was not then known, it is true, how in his private correspondence, with persons of influence near Congress, he was belittling and sneering at the conduct of her heroes, while to them he was writing most flatter- ing letters ; but his flattery could scarcely conceal his real unfriendliness to them and to their followers, whom he described as serving more for plunder than from the love of liberty. It did not escape observation that, when he made triumphal entry into the city upon its evacuation by the British, no State officer had been called upon to be present, though Marion and all his officers were within reach; nor was Wade Hampton -who the year before had cut his way to the very gates of the town - beyond call. The only officer of South Carolina whom he allowed to accompany him was Moultrie, who was in the Continental line, and who, however brilliant had been his career in the earlier days of the war, had been a prisoner during the occupation of the city by the British, and thus had had nothing to do with the recovery of the State. The grand entry of the recovered town was made by General Wayne and his mutinous troops from Pennsylvania, who had fought no battle in South Carolina. Then, assuming a grand air of importance, superiority, and patronage, and in a manner somewhat at least as that of a dictator, he assumes to address the General Assembly upon matters under their consideration with which he had no concern. In the issue with Governor Guerard, he defies the chief magistrate of the State and contemptuously overrides her statutes.
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