A cannonball crashed through the roof of the stable that sheltered David George; his wife, Phyllis; and their children, Jesse, David, and Ginny. British troops had taken Savannah, Georgia, in January 1779, and American forces and their French allies were now laying siege to the city. Under the relentless bombardment of their mortars and fifty cannons, David’s temporary place of refuge was turning into yet another site of danger in his turbulent life.¹

Born into slavery in Virginia around 1740, David had as a child and teenager carried water, carded cotton, and worked his master’s tobacco and cornfields. The whip ruled life on the plantation. David remembered seeing his eldest sister flogged till her back seemed “as though it would rot.” When one of his brothers ran away, they hunted him down with hounds and strung him up by his hands. After they had laid on five hundred lashes, they rubbed salt water into his wounds and sent him straight back to the fields. David, too, had been whipped, “many a time on my naked skin, and sometimes till the blood has run down over my waistband.” When he heard his mother, the master’s cook, beg for mercy as she was flogged, and when he then witnessed her dying from the constant abuse, he couldn’t take it any longer. In his twentieth year, David ran away, pursued by his master’s son over hundreds of miles, escaping only to be enslaved again, first by Creek Indians, and then by the Natchez, who in 1770 sold him on as a servant to an Indian agent at Silver Bluff, Georgia.

There, David married a half-black, half-Indian woman named Phyllis, and the couple had the first of what would eventually be ten children. When he was exposed to Baptist teaching, David found his calling: he learned to read, and on the eve of the Revolution became a charismatic preacher to a flock of eight, soon to number thirty. He had, in effect, founded the first exclusively black Baptist church in America. As the British approached the area in 1779, David’s “Antiloyalist” master fled. David led his family and fifty or more of his fellow slaves towards Savannah.

David George and his family were among thousands of slaves from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia who responded to a proclamation that the British commander in chief General Sir Henry Clinton had issued in June 1779. Clinton decreed that slaves owned by rebels who fled to British lines must not be claimed as property or sold. He also promised any blacks deserting the rebel standard that they would be free to follow “any Occupation” within British lines. Unlike Dunmore’s proclamation, Clinton’s did not require the former slaves of rebels to fight for the Crown to earn their freedom. But, Clinton warned, “any NEGROES taken in Arms or upon any military Duty, shall be purchased for a stated price” and sold, with the proceeds benefiting the officers and soldiers who had captured them.²

Like Dunmore’s before, Clinton’s emancipation decree was not a moral measure but a strategic one designed to stoke white fear, decimate the rebel South’s labor force, and strengthen the British Army’s support infrastructure. By employing blacks as pioneers—felling trees, clearing roads, building fortifications—as well as smiths, carpenters, and armorers, Clinton could thus release white soldiers for armed duty. In the Georgia capital, David and his family were surrounded by other black men, women, and children, both free and enslaved. Numerous black laborers, nurses, and laundresses worked for the occupiers, and a total of 620 black recruits helped defend the city under siege. General Prevost would later praise their resolve: “They certainly did wonders in the working way and in fighting they really shewed no bad countenance.” One of those armed black men was Scipio Handley. A fishmonger in Charleston, South Carolina, Scipio had escaped execution at the hands of Patriots in 1775 after he had been sentenced to death for carrying messages for the governor. He then served in the Royal Navy before making grapeshot in the Savannah armory. When carrying ammunition to a redoubt, Scipio was shot in the leg; the gangrenous wound nearly cost him a limb, and soon he was evacuated alongside injured British soldiers. Handley and his peers faced other blacks among their assailants. These were men like Shaddrack Battles with the 10th Virginia Regiment, who had previously fought at Brandywine, Monmouth, Germantown, and Stony Point, as well as free blacks from Saint-Domingue who served with America’s French allies.³

After their narrow escape in the stable, David George evacuated his family to nearby Yamacraw, where they all hid under the floor of an empty house. But George had contracted smallpox and he sent his family away for their own protection. Left without medical care or food—a dog had devoured most of the little Indian corn David had left—he managed to recover thanks to some rice donated by passersby. By the time he was reunited with his family in Savannah, the siege had been lifted: black guides had led British reinforcements to the city just in time. The retreating allies counted their eight hundred killed and wounded to Britain’s several dozen. David and his family remained in Savannah, where he kept a butcher’s stall and Phyllis washed laundry for British officers. His military pass affirmed that David was, for now, “a free Negro” and “a good subject to King George.”⁴

Mobilizing greater numbers of blacks, such as for the defense of Savannah, was part of a new British strategy that had been triggered by dramatic changes in the war’s international contexts. After France had entered the fight as an ally of the United States in 1778, Spain—even though it did not yet recognize American independence—declared war on Britain the following year, hoping to recapture former possessions like the Floridas, Jamaica, Gibraltar, and Minorca. What had started as a war in North America had expanded into a worldwide conflict. By 1779, British naval and military forces were confronting the Bourbon powers in Central America and the Caribbean, West Africa and India, as well as in Europe, where the Spanish were blockading Gibraltar and the French were preparing to invade the British Isles. From London’s perspective, the war against the thirteen rebellious American colonies was no longer the most important theater in Britain’s newly global struggle.⁵

In early 1778, the British government had briefly considered ending the war in North America altogether; a sense of duty towards the Loyalists weighed heavily in the decision to carry on. But it was clear that Britain would need to adjust its American strategy to fit its new geostrategic circumstances. The government thus executed a pivot to the Southern colonies that it had been contemplating since the winter of 1777–78. Holding the American South was still seen as vital to supplying Britain’s Caribbean sugar islands, the economic powerhouse of the Empire. But with regular British troops increasingly required to fight the Empire’s wars globally—by 1779, several regiments had already been redeployed from North America to the Caribbean, with others recalled to the British Isles—Britain would now need to rely on homegrown support. And the South held two large reservoirs of manpower to tap: white Loyalists, and blacks. Both of these groups would be key to the process of Americanizing the war. But their mobilization would also significantly alter the dynamics of the conflict.⁶

Much of the South, and especially the backcountry regions of North and South Carolina, had been in the grip of violence for almost two decades. Frontier militia conducted scorched-earth raids against the Cherokees. Western settlers clashed with eastern elites in North Carolina in the Regulator Wars. Rival ethnic and religious groups and families carried their feuds with them as they migrated. Such social and political friction played out against the constant backdrop of slavery—of white oppression and of slave resistance. The British invasion intensified these preexisting tensions in the South, such that it became “a society struggling to contain the savagery of war, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing,” as the historian Wayne E. Lee puts it.⁷

By recruiting Southern blacks for both support and fighting roles, Clinton aimed to use whites’ fear of ferocious slave unrest for tactical advantage. But blacks were not just pawns in the conflict among Anglo-American whites: they were also independent actors in their own right. And for many, Clinton’s proclamation presented an opportunity. Only a minority of the half a million blacks living in Revolutionary America in 1775 actively supported either side, with perhaps 20,000 fighting for or against the British during the war. But, as the historian Douglas Egerton reminds us, “several hundred thousand slaves tried to use the chaos of war to their own advantage.” In myriad acts of resistance, African-Americans took on the struggle to assert their own interests and identity in the turmoil that was the Revolutionary War. Whether they decided to run from their masters—either to join the British or to liberate themselves and slip away into the countryside—or whether they stayed on the plantations, blacks in the South continued to face the violence of racial discrimination and of war, and, in many cases, displacement and disease, too. For them the Revolution brought both unfathomable dangers and new possibilities.⁸

Americanizing the war also entailed a greater role for armed white Loyalists, both in semiregular, so-called provincial regiments in the British Army, which were typically led by British commanders, and in local Loyalist militias. In the South, as elsewhere, Americans chose sides—or tried to remain neutral—based on ideological and pragmatic considerations. There were Loyalist concentrations among Scottish merchants from the Chesapeake south to Georgia, Scottish Highland clansmen in the Cape Fear Valley in North Carolina, and small farmers across the Southern backcountry. In 1778, the United States’ alliance with France boosted the Loyalist camp, as collaborating with an absolutist, Catholic power went one step too far for some previously passive Loyalists and hitherto uncommitted individuals. One British officer argued that—unlike using German auxiliary troops, which alienated the American population—recruiting American Loyalists promised to end the “bloody Rebellion” sooner. For Loyalists were “bound by every tie which can affect the human heart, to extenuate the ravages and depredations of war.” But after years of civil strife, that was probably as optimistic, if not naïve, an assessment as British officers’ evaluation of the strength of Loyalist support generally. In fact, by enabling more Loyalists to act on the powerful motivation of revenge after years of rebel persecution, the British were more likely to fan the flames of civil war.⁹

Indeed, Britain’s new approach particularly encouraged the expansion of irregular warfare—the kind of war, in the words of one historian, between “small flexible units which were local in their concerns and objectives, which were dedicated to partisan activity and to making the countryside uninhabitable to the enemy, and which resorted to fear and intimidation to hold the civilian population in line.” With both regular armies and irregular forces turning the South into the most active theater of war in North America, it was this conflict between militias and other nonregular troops that would dominate the experience of the Southern war for not only many soldiers but civilians, too.¹⁰

Some commanders still worried that unlimited violence might make it difficult to reconcile Americans with one another after the war. But by 1779, attitudes among the officer class as a whole had shifted: a majority of British officers serving in America now advocated a war of depredation and destruction. They felt that temporarily escalating the levels and forms of violence was a necessary and justified means towards the ultimate pacification of the rebellious colonies. To the Revolutionaries, Britain’s new strategy confirmed that the peace commissioners’ manifesto had not just been an empty threat: their former imperial masters seemed indeed to be moving towards ever more unlimited ways of war.¹¹

After the Franco-American siege of Savannah was lifted, General Clinton left New York at the close of 1779 to lead the invasion of South Carolina. Clinton’s 10,000-odd troops landed 30 miles south of Charleston, a city of 12,000 inhabitants, half of them slaves. While David George and his family stayed in Savannah until near the end of the war, other former slaves in the city moved north with British Army units, including a corps of 186 black pioneers and the 170 women and children traveling with them. In May 1780, General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered Charleston along with the single largest contingent of American troops lost in the entire war, at least 4,500 soldiers. As at Savannah, blacks had served on both sides: among Charleston’s defenders had been hundreds of blacks who, in the words of one historian, “risked their lives, sometimes under British fire, to preserve the capital of their masters.”¹²

One of the black men who had joined Clinton’s Southern campaign was Harry Washington, George Washington’s former slave. Born in the Gambia River region of Africa, Harry had worked at Mount Vernon for a decade before running away to Lord Dunmore, with whom he had moved on to New York. It was as a corporal in the Black Pioneers, a corps originally formed in New York from remnants of Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, that Harry entered Charleston alongside the Royal Artillery. In the city, the Black Pioneers swelled to more than two hundred men, receiving decent clothing and the same rations and pay as white soldiers. With the Prince of Wales’s American Regiment came Samuel Burke, who later claimed he was a freeborn black man from Charleston and had worked as a servant to Governor Browne of the Bahamas; he helped Browne recruit men for his Loyalist regiment in New York before returning to his hometown.¹³

And then there was Boston King, whose story exemplifies the wider perils that war held for blacks. A skilled carpenter who had run away from a particularly brutal master to find work in British-occupied Charleston, King became the personal servant of a Loyalist captain. When King almost died in Charleston, it was not of a war injury, although the conflict was at least indirectly to blame. Blacks like King who fled to British lines suffered disproportionately from camp diseases. Typhus, typhoid, dysentery, and smallpox affected both whites and blacks, of course, but overworked and undernourished ex-slaves were hit particularly hard. They were also the last to receive help and were often considered expendable when resources were scarce. In 1780, an especially severe outbreak of smallpox struck Charleston. King was quarantined: “[A]ll the Blacks affected with that disease, were ordered to be carried a mile from the camp,” he remembered later, “lest the soldiers should be infected, and disabled from marching.” Left without any medical care, “[w]e lay sometimes a whole day without any thing to eat or drink.” King probably owed his life to a kind British soldier who brought him supplies. When the British paroled 1,200 to 2,000 Patriot militiamen they had captured in Charleston, those men spread smallpox throughout the South Carolina countryside, as did British forces when establishing a chain of garrisons from Augusta to Rocky Mount and to Georgetown. And still, thousands more slaves kept surging towards the British Army.¹⁴

Historians have estimated that during the war up to 80,000 or even 100,000 out of half a million black slaves living across America may have fled slavery for at least temporary freedom (although the most conservative estimates have the total at just 20,000, including 12,000 from the South). In 1782, between 5,000 and perhaps as many as 10,000 slaves escaped from South Carolina during the British evacuation. To be sure, even after Clinton had issued his proclamation, tens of thousands of slaves did not leave the plantations, deciding instead to remain with their families and not risk the dangers of flight. They knew that if they were caught, they could be severely beaten and whipped or even killed. Those slaves who stayed behind on rebel plantations witnessed British soldiers lay hands on their overseers and masters, previously the untouchable tyrants of their worlds. At Silk Hope in April 1780, “in full view of the plantation slaves, a passing British patrol ‘bound the overseer…& whipped him most unmercifully.’ ” At the same time, the British Army was known to send detachments to Loyalist plantations where the slaves were rebelling, sometimes executing a slave to make an example. The king’s army also claimed thousands of captured slaves as property. It used them as laborers on deserted plantations and in the army’s quartermaster department, with the commissaries, in hospitals, as servants to officers, and as guides, scouts, and spies. Others were sold so that provisions could be bought from the proceeds. There is even evidence that British officers participated in an illicit slave trade.¹⁵

Blacks were also used as a psychological cudgel. The British-Loyalist raiding parties out to plunder estates and seize slaves routinely included black men—a clear affront to the racial order upheld by Southern whites, and a conscious effort to use blacks to terrify white rebels into submission. Eliza Wilkinson, who lived in the South Carolina Sea Islands during the British invasion, recalled one “day of terror” in spring 1780 when British troops with “several armed negroes” stormed into her house with “pistols in their hands” and “making as if they’d hew us to pieces with their swords.” The invaders, demanding to see “these women rebels,” plundered Wilkinson’s chests and clothes, stripped her shoes of their buckles, snatched her sister’s earrings, and, threatening to shoot her, ripped another woman’s wedding ring from her finger. With the black-and-blue imprint of one of the earlier intruders’ hands marking the attacks on Wilkinson’s arm, her household went on to suffer further raids, putting them so on edge that they “could neither eat, drink, nor sleep in peace.”¹⁶

Elsewhere, it was slave refugees trailing the paths of regular British troops who spread fear. Such semi-independent groups of blacks attacked Patriot and Loyalist plantations alike. Even the former royal governor of South Carolina, William Bull, saw his plantation, Ashley Hall, “plundered and greatly damaged by the irregular and great swarm of Negroes that followed” the British Army. The Hessian officer Johann von Ewald marveled at the spectacle of escaped slaves who raided plantations alongside British foraging parties, only to appear from their forays dressed in their former masters’ and mistresses’ clothes: “A completely naked Negro wore a pair of silk breeches, another a finely colored coat, a third a silk vest without sleeves, a fourth an elegant shirt, a fifth a fine churchman’s hat, and a sixth a wig. All the rest of the body was bare!” As one historian has put it, “A stronger image of social revolution could hardly have existed in the South than a band of black foragers swooping down on a small farm and stripping it of foodstuffs and livestock”—and, we should add, the family’s personal items and their slaves.¹⁷

Congress, too, tried to mobilize more black soldiers and laborers by authorizing the formation of black regiments in the South. One delegate from New Hampshire hoped that such regiments would lay the foundation for full-scale emancipation and spread “the Blessings of freedom to all the Human Race in America.” Most colonies had stopped importing slaves in 1774; in 1780, Pennsylvania passed a law gradually phasing out slavery in the state. Over the course of the war, some 9,000 black men did serve with Revolutionary forces—as laborers and servants, spies and soldiers. But when Congress left the final decision on large-scale recruitment of blacks in the South to the state legislatures, the project was doomed. The South Carolina House of Representatives, dominated by slave-owning planters who feared the loss of property, labor, and control, resoundingly rejected the idea. However, this did not stop Revolutionary forces raiding Loyalist plantations in the South from seizing slaves, including some 130 from Lieutenant Governor John Graham’s plantation outside Savannah; there is some evidence that the British Army tried to counter such raids by arming the slaves on deserted Loyalist plantations.¹⁸

Whether they went off to join the fight or remained on their plantations, blacks in America were becoming embroiled in new forms of violence—as both perpetrators and victims. But it was still unclear whether Britain’s strategy would cause white rebels’ resistance to crumble or merely stiffen their resolve.

Beasts of Prey

By June 1780, with Charleston secure, Clinton returned to New York City, which he feared was under threat from a combined attack by the French navy and the Continental Army. Six French ships of the line and 5,500 French troops would arrive in early July, helping boost recruitment to the Continental Army in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and giving momentum to allied planning. Clinton left General Cornwallis in charge in the South and dispatched a supporting force under Major General Alexander Leslie to Virginia to cut off rebel supplies. The corpulent, aristocratic Cornwallis was a career officer who had opposed both the Stamp Act and the Declaratory Act before the war but then volunteered to serve in America. After playing a prominent role in several campaigns in the North, Cornwallis had returned home in 1779, advising the government that the “subjugation of America was ‘impracticable.’ ” But when his king asked him, Cornwallis nonetheless returned to America, now as second-in-command to Clinton, with a dormant commission to replace him if he resigned or died; he joined Clinton at the siege of Charleston in February 1780.¹⁹

At home, the British government had weathered a political storm over the winter of 1779–80, when high taxation, a credit crisis, and concern over the use of public funds fueled demands for political reform that threatened to topple the ministry. The capture of Charleston in May 1780 was a much-needed tonic to an administration under duress. But by then wide swaths of the American lower South presented a scary scene—a virtually permanent little war of raiding and plundering between Patriot and Loyalist militias, prisoner abuse, even outright murder. In addition, armed gangs unaffiliated with any real military units operated in the semi-lawless wasteland between the lines. To put the levels of violence into perspective, it is worth recalling that South Carolina in 1780 and 1781 saw nearly one-fifth of all battlefield deaths of the entire American war, and nearly one-third of all battlefield wounded. Strikingly, the majority of these casualties resulted from American-on-American violence.²⁰

One British officer who operated at the center of this partisan war was Colonel Banastre Tarleton. As commander of the British Legion—a semi-independent, highly mobile force of American Loyalist cavalry and light infantry, typically between four hundred and six hundred strong—Tarleton became one of a set of younger, ruthless British leaders of Loyalist forces in the South who would have a disproportionate impact on the ways the war was fought and perceived. The son of a prominent Liverpool slave trader and sugar merchant with extensive West Indian plantation holdings, Tarleton was educated at University College, Oxford, and the Middle Temple, London, where he spent as much time playing cricket and tennis, boxing, riding, and gambling as he did studying. His early inheritance largely frittered away, Tarleton purchased a commission in the 1st Dragoon Guards in April 1775: he was twenty, and war in America presented an opportunity. Tarleton fought across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. In July 1779, when skirmishing in Westchester County, New York, Tarleton outlined his method for subduing his opponents: “I proposed to the militia terms, that if they would not fire shots from buildings, I would not burn [those buildings]. They interpreted my mild proposal wrong, imputing it to fear. They persisted in firing till the torch stopped their progress, after which no shot was fired.”²¹

Once he had moved south, Tarleton also relied on mixed-race raiding parties to scare white masters and undermine the plantation economy: “Upon the approach of any detachment of the King’s troops, all negroes, men, women, and children,” wrote Tarleton, “thought themselves absolved from all respect to their American masters, and entirely released from servitude. Influenced by this idea, they quitted the plantations and followed the army.” In the words of John Cruden—the British commissioner for sequestered estates who oversaw 5,000 slaves growing supplies for the British Army on four hundred rebel plantations—seizing slaves from rebels was a method that struck “at the root of all property” and promised to “bring the most violent to their senses.” Since, in the South, men were “great in proportion to the number of their Slaves,” Cruden argued, undermining their wealth and status would be the best means of finally pacifying the rebels. African-Americans were soon deeply implicated in whites’ partisan war in the South. One “Gibson, a coloured man and his party of tories,” were known to murder white rebels. Conversely, Moses Knight (or Moses McIntosh), an African man brought up by General Alexander McIntosh in South Carolina, spent his military service from 1779 to 1782 “chiefly in pursuit of Tories.” Where blacks helped whites hunt Loyalists or Revolutionaries, the levels of feared and actual violence were bound to rise.²²

Tarleton, and those among his fellow officers who also led Loyalist units, were favored by the new British commander in the South, General Cornwallis. Once Charleston was secured, Cornwallis ordered Tarleton to conduct a sweep through South Carolina’s interior. With some 270 Loyalist legionnaires, Tarleton rode 105 miles in just over two days to catch up with Colonel Abraham Buford’s Continental force at the northern South Carolina border. Tarleton demanded Buford’s surrender, warning that, should he decline, “the blood be upon your head.” The Continentals held their fire until Tarleton’s cavalry was within just ten yards; the British crashed through the rebel line. As Buford’s troops first sought to surrender, Tarleton’s horse was shot from under him. Both sides quickly recommenced firing. The “rage of the British soldiers,” as one American participant wrote decades later, “excited by the continued fire of the Americans, while a negotiation was offered by flag, impelled them to acts of vengeance that knew no limits.” A rebel doctor added that “for fifteen minutes after every man was prostrate [the British] went over the ground plunging their bayonets into every one that exhibited any signs of life, and in some instances, where several had fallen one over the other, these monsters were seen to throw off on the point of the bayonet the uppermost, to come at those beneath.”²³

This engraving of Tarleton, derived from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s grand oil portrait that was about to be shown at the 1782 annual exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, accompanied a highly laudatory article about the officer in the Westminster Magazine that spring. Credit 47

There is debate about whether Tarleton had explicitly condoned or even ordered the atrocities. What is clear is that a veritable slaughter took place. Out of approximately 420 Continentals, 113 were killed and 150 wounded; the casualty rate among Tarleton’s smaller British force was perhaps one-tenth of that. The disproportionate American losses were largely due to cavalry breaking infantry lines, enhanced by battlefield confusion and a desire on the part of British and Loyalist soldiers to avenge Tarleton. Nonetheless, even Charles Stedman, a British officer and early historian of the war, who commended the British Army for their “activity and ardor on this occasion,” conceded that “the virtue of humanity was totally forgot.” While the encounter was perhaps not the mass atrocity of historical legend, Patriots quickly dubbed it Buford’s Massacre. Their new battle cry, “Tarleton’s quarter,” helped them explain, if not justify, future atrocities as revenge.²⁴

Tarleton became notorious for allowing loose discipline among his troops. A few snapshots suffice to convey the general picture. The British Legion robbed, physically assaulted, and raped several women at a plantation near Moncks Corner, twenty miles outside Charleston. When Tarleton failed to capture or kill Francis Marion, a Patriot guerrilla leader notorious, wrote Cornwallis, for “the terror of his threats and the cruelty of his punishments,” the legion marked its retreating path by the columns of smoke rising over thirty plantations. Tarleton had a woman named Mary Carey Richardson flogged for not revealing Marion’s whereabouts and allegedly exhumed the body of her late husband, the Patriot general Richard Richardson, in front of his widow and children. People said Tarleton’s Loyalist corps “exercised more acts of cruelty than any one in the British Army.” The colonel was building his reputation as “Bloody Tarleton” and “the Butcher”—the latter a moniker he shares in British military history with George III’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who had earned his in the Scottish Highlands in 1746. Here was not just another Charles Grey in charge of British regular troops, horrific though the Baylor Massacre had been. The Southern war had enabled a different type of aggressive, less rule-bound commander to emerge—and, by leading American Loyalists against their own neighbors, to lastingly alienate local populations. Seeing or experiencing these violent excesses reinforced Americans’ understanding of their Revolutionary struggle as a violent confrontation with a degenerate, oppressive empire that must be defeated at almost any cost.²⁵

Just after Buford’s Massacre, and just before he returned to New York in early June 1780, Clinton toughened the British policy towards armed white rebels. All militiamen on parole were now required to swear an oath of allegiance to the king: by forcing them to take an explicit stance, the Crown was essentially nullifying their paroles. If a rebel militiaman was captured and found to have previously served with the British, he was to be executed. There was no doubt in Cornwallis’s mind that “in a civil war there is no admitting of neutral characters, &…those who are not clearly with us” must be disarmed. As rebels fled to North Carolina and Virginia, many took their slaves with them. Others who previously had been inactive or outwardly neutral were driven into the rebels’ arms. After Cornwallis scored a critical victory against General Horatio Gates’s larger force at Camden in August—the Continentals and North Carolina militia suffered some 250 killed; another 800 men were wounded and taken captive—he put these policies into action, ordering the execution of several rebel fighters.²⁶

Some of Cornwallis’s subordinate officers, such as Major James Wemyss of the 63rd Foot, made it their primary mission to destroy plantations across middle and up-country South Carolina. That September, Wemyss’s men burned dozens of houses and plantations in his quest to terrorize the rebels into submission. When one rebel’s wife refused to give away her husband’s whereabouts, Wemyss’s men locked her and her children inside their house and set it on fire. The family eventually escaped, but Wemyss’s men incinerated their pigs and chickens. Stories circulated of another British officer who trusted his men would rather overcome scruples against murder than forfeit alcohol: every soldier who took prisoners would lose his rum ration for two months. Such conduct by the British Army, combined with Clinton forcing Americans to take sides, spurred rebel resistance in South Carolina.²⁷

So did the conduct of Loyalist militia—and the war of American militias in the South was particularly fierce. Militias, whether Patriot or Loyalist, were more prone to committing excessive violence than regular armies. With a background in frontier conflict and Native American warfare, they specialized in nighttime and dawn attacks, hit-and-run raids, and feed fights. Operating with limited central oversight, their officers rotated frequently, and their composite nature eroded their sense of community, leading to less hierarchical control or peer restraint.²⁸

After the British had captured Charleston in May 1780, Cornwallis appointed Captain Patrick Ferguson as British inspector of militia for Georgia and the Carolinas. A path quite different from Tarleton’s had brought Ferguson to the American South. The son of a minor Scots aristocrat, Ferguson had joined the British Army at age fourteen and purchased a commission in the 70th Foot in 1768. While Tarleton was enjoying himself in Oxford and London, Ferguson helped suppress a major rebellion of the Carib population in Tobago, where his brother was the governor. After his right arm was permanently injured at Brandywine in 1777, the rebels began calling Ferguson the “one-armed devil.” As the British officer newly in charge of Southern militias, Ferguson worked over the summer of 1780 to form some 4,000 Loyalists into seven battalions and led them in multiple controversial actions.²⁹

On October 1, Ferguson issued a proclamation meant to rally locals in northern South Carolina to the British cause:

Unless you wish to be eat up by an inundation of barbarians, who have begun by murdering an unarmed son before the aged father, and afterwards lopped off his arms, and who by their shocking cruelties and irregularities, give the best proof of their cowardice and want of discipline; I say, if you wish to be pinioned, robbed, and murdered, and see your wives and daughters, in four days, abused by the dregs of mankind—in short, if you wish or deserve to live and bear the name of men, grasp your arms in a moment and run to camp. The Backwater men have crossed the mountains…If you choose to be degraded [one variant has “pissed upon”] forever and ever by a set of mongrels, say so at once and let your women turn their backs upon you, and look out for real men to protect them.

Patriots had indeed recently attacked some unarmed Loyalists, “butchering two young men” and maiming two elderly men. But Ferguson’s militias had also left a sad trail across the western Carolinas—of burnt homes, slaughtered cattle, and traitors dangling from trees. The proclamation hardly swelled his Loyalist ranks.³⁰

Ferguson and his force of some 1,100 men were now out of contact with the main British army under Cornwallis. On October 7, Ferguson made a stand on Kings Mountain, South Carolina, where his 900 Loyalists (200 men were away foraging) were about to face some 1,700 Patriot riflemen. Both forces had been marching for weeks. The Loyalists had been moving for two days without provisions. Many of the Patriots—hunters, farmers, and artisans from the valleys around the headwaters of the Nolichucky and Watauga Rivers—had endured up to thirty-six hours without sleep, with minimal food. Among the Virginia Patriot militia were at least four free blacks, including the former slave Ishmael Titus, who had been freed for substituting for his master’s son and had later reenlisted, as well as one slave. Ferguson was to be the single British participant in the war’s largest and most consequential all-American battle.

On Kings Mountain, Ferguson chose a nearly bald-topped plateau at the northeastern end as his fighting ground. This forced a European linear formation on the defendants while allowing the attackers to maximize the impact of their Indian-style fighting. The assailing forces divided into four main columns to encircle the mountain. To tell friend from foe, the Patriots wore pieces of paper in their hats and the Loyalists pine sprigs. The seventeen-year-old Patriot James P. Collins participated in the assault: “We were soon in motion, every man throwing four or five balls in his mouth to prevent thirst, also to be in readiness to reload quick. The shot of the enemy soon began to pass over us like hail.” Collins and his fellow soldiers, fighting from tree to tree, “soon attempted to climb the hill, but were fiercely charged upon and forced to fall back to our first position.” Eventually the Patriots forced their enemy into an ever-smaller killing zone in the northeast corner, where Ferguson’s men were constrained by their own wagons, tents, and formations. When Loyalists initially attempted to surrender, Ferguson cut down their white flags. As he charged on a white stallion, several sharpshooters took him down, one large-caliber round hitting his face, others drilling through his limbs and puncturing his torso. For several more minutes, the frightened horse paraded Ferguson’s body, caught in the stirrup.³¹

Abraham De Peyster, next in command, soon sent a flag of truce, “but as the [Patriots] resumed firing, afterwards ours renewed under the supposition that they would not give quarter. And a dreadful havoc took place.” With Loyalists trying to surrender, Patriot officers eventually had to knock down the loaded rifles of their own men with their swords to stop the slaughter. In the melee, most soldiers had barely known their own unit’s role, less still grasped the overall battle situation. Yet an element of vindictive retaliation was also at play. For even after Loyalists surrendered themselves as prisoners, some Patriots, “who had heard that at Buford’s defeat the British had refused quarter to many who had asked it,” continued firing.³²

The night after the battle presented a grim scene: “The groans of the wounded and dying on the mountain were truly affecting—begging pitteously for a little water; but in the hurry, confusion, and exhaustion of the Whigs, these cries, when emenating from the Tories, were little heeded.” One injured Loyalist beseeched his Patriot brother-in-law to help him but was coldly turned away. Attending to perhaps two hundred wounded men, a single doctor worked throughout the night, dressing gunshot wounds with rags and amputating limbs with a field surgeon’s crude tools. The following day the Patriot James Collins witnessed local Loyalist wives and children finding their “husbands, fathers, and brothers, [lying] dead in heaps, while others lay wounded or dying.” The Goforth family had three Loyalist and two Patriot sons; four of them fell on Kings Mountain. The Brandon family, likewise, had six members on the mountain; the Loyalist father would be killed, while four Patriots lived, as did Josiah Brandon, who fought on the Loyalist side that day but would switch to the Patriot militia soon after.³³

The victors inspected Ferguson’s bullet-riddled body for evidence of their marksmanship. They then stripped it for souvenirs and, according to local tradition, urinated on it. Later, though, the Patriots allowed the Loyalists to wrap up the corpse in a cowhide and bury it. Both sides hastily buried their other dead, covering them so thinly with logs, tree bark, and a few rocks that the bodies soon fell prey to scavenging animals. Roaming wolves attracted to the corpses made it too dangerous for locals to venture out at night. Half of the region’s dogs had to be put down when they went “mad.” People even refused to eat their fat hogs, as they had “gathered in to the place, to devour the flesh of men.”³⁴

The following day began the march north. With almost as many prisoners as guards, Patriot leaders became concerned about their captives’ safety. Colonel William Campbell ordered all officers “to restrain the disorderly manner of slaughtering and disturbing the prisoners.” But on October 14, Patriot leaders held what one Loyalist dismissed as a mock trial of men whom their rebel enemies accused of murder, arson, or robbery. Colonel Ambrose Mills was charged with inciting the Cherokees to make war on the South Carolina frontier. Of some thirty-six Loyalists tried and up to thirty condemned to death, the Patriots hastily hanged nine on a tree before reprieving the others and moving on, lest British forces surprise them. Colonel Mills’s wife had said farewell to her husband just before his execution; she and her young child were now seen sitting through the rainy night alongside the colonel’s corpse. Together with an old farmhand, the widow of a Loyalist who had just been killed on the mountain cut down the last bodies and buried them in a shallow trench.³⁵

British officers complained less about the battle itself than about the murders committed afterward. General Cornwallis remonstrated that “the cruelty exercised on the prisoners taken under Major Ferguson is shocking to humanity; and the hanging of poor old Colonel Mills, who was always a fair and open enemy to your cause, was an act of the most savage barbarity” that would not go unanswered. But by then Washington and his subordinate commanders routinely highlighted Britain’s “Violations of the Laws of Nations” and humanitarian outrages across the Southern theater; Cornwallis’s protest over the Kings Mountain murders apparently received no official American response.³⁶

At Kings Mountain, the Loyalists had suffered their worst debacle of the entire war. Within 65 minutes, 157 Loyalists had been killed and 163 wounded too heavily to be moved; more than 600 men were taken prisoner. The Patriots counted only 29 killed and 62 wounded. The battle cost the British one-third of their effective force in that theater. Cornwallis had to reverse his advance into North Carolina, where he had hoped to mobilize the Loyalists, and instead took his army to spend the winter at Winnsboro, South Carolina. The British force under Major General Leslie that had been destroying rebel supplies in Virginia was ordered to join Cornwallis. Among Revolutionaries, meanwhile, morale rallied. Partisan leaders such as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter stepped up their guerrilla fight, while Loyalists felt discouraged from further aiding the British. As one British officer saw it, the brutal defeat “put an end to the disposition of arming for us, renewed the spirits and encreased the number of the rebels.” And yet, despite this setback for Britain’s Americanization strategy, the civil war in the South for now continued virtually unabated.³⁷

Washington’s new man in the South was General Nathanael Greene. In the fall of 1780, after losing two armies at Charleston and then at Camden, the Continental commander in chief had put Greene in charge of a third Southern army. The stocky, handsome Quaker from Rhode Island was a gifted strategist whom Washington had long valued as a potential successor, should something happen to him. Greene used the breathing space provided by the Patriot victory at Kings Mountain to reorganize his forces. He found “nothing but murders and devastations in every quarter” as Patriots and Loyalists “pursue[d] each other with as much relentless fury as beasts of prey.” Both sides seemed bent on mutual annihilation, worried Greene, and unless “those private massacres” ended, “this Country will be depopulated…as neither Whig nor Tory can live.” Writing to his wife, Catherine, from camp at Little River, a frustrated Greene exclaimed: “My dear you can have no Idea of the horrors of the Southern war. Murders are as frequent here as petty disputes are to the Northward.”³⁸

As both Patriots and Loyalists recognized the war in the South as particularly violent, predictably, each side blamed the other. Among the most notorious rebels was Colonel Benjamin “Bull Dog” Cleveland, who terrorized Loyalists in the Yadkin country. When Ferguson’s proclamation just before Kings Mountain mentioned the rebels “murdering an unarmed son before the aged father, and afterwards lopped off his arms,” he was referring to an infamous incident involving the “Bull Dog.” In another instance, Cleveland’s men broke out two Loyalists from a prison, stood one of them “on a log, put the noose around his neck, threw the end of the rope over a tree limb, fastened it, and kicked the log out from under him.” Cleveland then gave the second Loyalist a choice: he, too, would be hanged, unless he cut off his own ears. The man grabbed a knife, sliced off his ears, and was let go.³⁹

Loyalists gave as brutally as they got. One of the Loyalist partisans guilty of excessive violence was Thomas Brown, the South Carolina victim of Patriot torture who lost several toes to his tormentors in 1775. Brown later oversaw the hanging of one, two, or even three dozen rebel captives near Augusta, and the beheading of four more by Native Americans. William “Bloody Bill” Cunningham, another Southern Loyalist partisan leader, became infamous for murdering sick rebels he dragged from their beds. And one historian narrates the horrific moment when a Loyalist band, passing the house of a Patriot, “found his pregnant wife. They stabbed her with bayonets, cut open her breasts, and in her own blood wrote on the wall, ‘thou shalt never give birth to a rebel.’ ”⁴⁰

Such sadistic American-on-American cruelty naturally affected the individuals perpetrating, witnessing, and suffering from it. Some men seemed to become accustomed to the “savage fury” of civil war. In his old age, Moses Hall reflected on how the experience of atrocity had hardened him. In February 1781, Hall, twenty-one years old, served with Henry Lee’s Continental dragoons. A Loyalist group moving through North Carolina under Dr. John Pyle approached the dragoons, mistaking their green uniforms for Tarleton’s Loyalists. When the truth was discovered, a brief but intense fight broke out at extremely close quarters between two long columns of opponents. Some ninety to one hundred Loyalists were killed; the remainder fled. Apparently no Patriots died. The event became known as Pyle’s Massacre.⁴¹

In his recollections, Hall zoomed in on the murders of six Loyalist prisoners in the aftermath of the fighting. Initially, Hall had reacted with shock and criticism to that “scene which made a lasting impression on my mind. I was invited by some of my comrades to go and see some of the prisoners. We went to where six were standing together.” Suddenly someone shouted, “Remember Buford”—Tarleton’s slaughter of Colonel Buford’s troops at the Waxhaws—

and the prisoners were immediately hewed to pieces with broadswords. At first I bore the scene without any emotion, but upon a moment’s reflection, I felt such horror as I never did before nor have since, and, returning to my quarters and throwing myself upon my blanket, I contemplated the cruelties of war until overcome and unmanned by a distressing gloom from which I was not relieved until commencing our march next morning before day by moonlight.

But then Hall made a gruesome discovery near a camp recently abandoned by Tarleton: “Being on the left of the road as we marched along, I discovered lying upon the ground something with appearance of a man. Upon approaching him, he proved to be a youth about sixteen who, having come out to view the British through curiosity, for fear he might give information to our troops, they had run him through with a bayonet and left him for dead. Though able to speak, he was mortally wounded.” Experiencing the teen’s senseless murder, rather than reinforcing Hall’s earlier doubts about Americans killing each other, desensitized him to his own side’s brutality. “The sight of this unoffending boy, butchered rather than be encumbered…on the march,” Hall concluded, “relieved me of my distressful feelings for the slaughter of the Tories, and I desired nothing so much as the opportunity of participating in their destruction.” For Hall—who first had felt “unmanned” by his exposure to atrocity—to deal with war’s brutalities, he had to turn off sensibility (a notion that peculiarly defined manliness in this period) and recover a form of masculinity that saw him inure himself to violence and thrive on vengefulness.⁴²

This hunger for retribution among American partisans eroded Britain’s ability to pacify the Southern states. As Greene’s Continentals and irregular rebel troops swept through the lower South, he largely avoided pitched battles with the British Army in favor of a strategy of attrition. Gradually, Greene was thus able to expel the British from most areas except for a strip between Charleston and Savannah. When the enemies did clash in larger battles, the Revolutionaries acquitted themselves well. In the Battle of Cowpens in early 1781, a combined force of Continentals, state troops, and Patriot militias under Daniel Morgan dealt a heavy blow to British regulars and Loyalists commanded by Tarleton: casualties amounted to one-sixth of Cornwallis’s army. The victorious Morgan proudly reported to General Greene that, despite Tarleton’s “most cruel Warfare, not one man was killed[,] wounded or even insulted after he surrendered.” Alas, after the British had ignored many previous “Lessons of Humanity,” Morgan feared “they are incorrigible.” British Pyrrhic victories like the one they clinched in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in March 1781, where the Crown sustained vastly greater casualties than the defeated Revolutionaries, further depleted the British Southern army. Throughout this period, the rebels’ war of attrition against British supply lines and posts was also continuing to take its toll. British officers were finding it increasingly difficult to persuade local couriers to transmit messages to Cornwallis, as the rebels were said to be murdering any Loyalists they captured. Indeed, “fear or intimidation” drove previously loyal subjects towards the insurgents.⁴³

Harry’s Head

Even though their strategy of Americanizing the war appeared to be backfiring on the British, the Empire’s prospects in America were not entirely bleak. There were signs that not only the American people but their French allies, too, were tiring of the war, while “widespread disaffection” coursed through the half-starved Continental Army “over wage arrears and poor conditions” after the exceptionally harsh winter of 1779–80, when New York City’s waterways were frozen for five weeks, and the Delaware at Philadelphia for nearly eleven. And although control of the South Carolina countryside was gradually slipping away from Cornwallis—he found Loyalist support to be “more passive” than he had anticipated—during the spring and summer of 1781 he launched a concerted attempt to cut off rebel supplies at their source, in Virginia. In the historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s assessment, Cornwallis’s broader aim was “to occupy Virginia sufficiently to overturn the government and establish a loyalist militia to police the population.”⁴⁴

After the destruction at Norfolk at the start of the conflict, the largest and most populous state had avoided the war until Britain pivoted south. At that point, Virginia repeatedly became the target of British-Loyalist assaults. In mid-1779, coastal raiders destroyed huge amounts of tobacco, salted pork, and naval stores, as well as more than one hundred naval and merchant vessels, and seized 1,500 slaves and several thousand horses and head of cattle. In late 1780, General Greene saw his supply lines seriously disrupted when the traitorous former Patriot general Benedict Arnold led a 1,600-strong raiding force into Virginia. Loyalists, white and black, risked severe repercussions if the rebels caught up with them. After Shadrack Furman, a free black man, provided Arnold’s troops with quarters and supplies, rebels burned Furman’s house and crops and tortured him to extract intelligence; his Loyalism left Furman blinded and crippled, his back scarred.⁴⁵

Throughout early 1781, British soldiers and Loyalist privateers were pursuing scorched-earth tactics along Virginia’s rivers and coastline. They burned warehouses, magazines, shipyards, and naval and merchant vessels, as well as private property. As Johann von Ewald commented, “Terrible things happened…churches and holy places were plundered.” Compounding injury and insult, all along the way British troops seized scores of slaves, while thousands more streamed towards the army of their own accord. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson numbered among the many planters whose slaves defected during this time. Nathaniel Lyttleton Savage tabulated damage and very substantial losses totaling £583 that he suffered at the hands of the British Army that spring. Alongside 10,000 fence rails burned, horses and livestock taken, tobacco and grain destroyed, and various goods plundered, including a library of “100 volumes of the best authors,” Savage’s single most expensive item was “one Valuable Y.g Negro Fellow taken by the Army.”⁴⁶

In May, Cornwallis moved his army across the Roanoke, joined up with Arnold at Petersburg, and conducted raids up and down the York and James Rivers, seizing horses in order to rebuild an effective cavalry. Slaves were now defecting all along the Potomac and Rappahannock. By June, Cornwallis was marching from Richmond via Williamsburg and Jamestown to the small tobacco port of Yorktown. Josiah Atkins, a Connecticut soldier with the American forces chasing the British, observed the toll the war continued to take on the British Army’s black followers: “I have marched by 18 or 20 Negroes that lay dead by the way-side, putrifying with the small pox…These poor creatures, having no care taken of them, many crawl’d into the bushes about & died, where they lie infecting the air around with intolerable stench & great danger.”⁴⁷

The Revolutionary authorities were now struggling to recruit war-weary Virginians for army and militia service. Some Patriot men of serving age fielded free and enslaved blacks as substitutes. Yet despite significant incentives in terms of land, cash, and slaves, Virginians widely and often violently evaded the draft, even during the British invasion of their state—or perhaps especially when their local area was affected. As the historian Gary B. Nash explains, plantation owners prioritized securing their human property over fighting for independence. They either moved with their slaves out of the path of the approaching British or swore an oath of loyalty to the king, as long as they could hold on to their chattel; as Nash writes, “The idea of independence had its limits.”⁴⁸

General Clinton, holding out in New York, still expected a Franco-American attack on the city. When he realized that the real threat was instead to Cornwallis’s army in Virginia, Clinton desperately tried to lure Washington back north. He ordered his forces to lash out at the Connecticut coast: New London was burned and Fort Griswold stormed in late September, giving rise to allegations that the garrison was massacred. In response, congressional committees recommended that the U.S. retaliate: reducing English coastal towns “to ashes,” executing British prisoners, and having any soldiers captured in the act of burning an American town “immediately consigned to the flames.” Alas, Washington did not allow himself to be distracted but continued his army’s four-hundred-mile march south.⁴⁹

Cornwallis learned only in early September that the French and American armies were approaching his position at Yorktown; it was not until the twenty-third that he became aware of the size of the French fleet. Still, he felt assured that Clinton’s reinforcements would reach him by October 5. But by then a French fleet had forced the Royal Navy to leave its Chesapeake station. An allied army of 16,000 troops and naval forces now had Cornwallis fully surrounded. It was precisely the scenario that British commanders had feared ever since France had entered the war more than three years earlier: combined French naval and American land forces cutting off a major British army in a coastal outpost. The British had extricated themselves from somewhat similar traps twice before: at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1778, and again at Savannah in 1779. But at Yorktown, Cornwallis’s besieged troops—heavily outnumbered after the steady force depletion over recent months, separated from reinforcements, their supply lines severed—were reduced to slaughtering their artillery and baggage horses, whose bloated carcasses were soon seen floating in the York River.⁵⁰

Smallpox, too, began infesting the British camp. To prevent the further spread of the disease and preserve scarce resources, Cornwallis expelled his black soldiers, laborers, and laundresses. One Patriot officer saw “numbers in that condition starving and helpless, begging us as we passed them for God’s sake to kill them, as they were in great pain and misery.” Other Patriots cried biological warfare, believing that the British were deliberately spreading smallpox among enemy forces and civilians. Such accusations had a ring of plausibility to them. In 1777, the British officer Robert Donkin had suggested in a treatise on military science: “Dip arrows in matter of smallpox, and twang them at the American rebels, in order to inoculate them; This would sooner disband these stubborn, ignorant, enthusiastic savages, than any other compulsive measures. Such is their dread and fear of that disorder.” Donkin’s book was published to raise funds for the widows and children of “valiant soldiers inhumanly and wantonly butchered” when “peaceably marching to and from Concord the 19th April, 1775.” In all but two of the known copies of the treatise, the footnote on page 190 that contains the proposal of germ warfare has since been excised.⁵¹

Donkin’s suggestion was never implemented, but when, in July 1781, Major General Leslie wrote to Cornwallis at Portsmouth, Virginia, that “[a]bove 700 Negroes are come down the River in the Small Pox. I shall distribute them about the Rebell Plantations,” he did as promised. And when Cornwallis expelled infected blacks from Yorktown three months later, many Patriots assumed something similar was afoot.⁵²

It soon became clear that the decision stemmed from desperation as much as strategy. On October 17, 1781, after twenty days of siege, including nine days of constant artillery fire from more than one hundred enemy cannons, with his defenses crumbling, ammunitions running very low, and hundreds of his men killed already, Cornwallis asked for a parley; two days later his forces surrendered. It was four years to the week since the British defeat at Saratoga—and two days before Clinton’s promised reinforcements set sail from New York.

Robert Donkin, Military Collections and Remarks (New York, 1777), with the footnote at page 190 preserved in one copy and neatly cut out in another, retaining the ornament and catchword “BOWS” on the reverse. Credit 48

As had become typical, blacks were among the hardest hit at Yorktown. One local lawyer, St. George Tucker, noted in his diary: “An immense number of Negroes have died in the most miserable manner.” It is estimated that of 4,000 to 5,000 black recruits with Cornwallis at Portsmouth and Yorktown, perhaps 2,000 survived smallpox, typhus, and injuries. Around half of those were reenslaved, some captured by soldiers turned bounty hunters hired by their former masters. Jefferson retrieved five or six of his slaves; Washington recovered two young black women but not a dozen other slaves who had run away from Mount Vernon. They were among the hundreds who managed to slip away and make new lives for themselves as free blacks in the North, building communities where they would continue to pursue their own political interests. But not even patriotic service was enough to guarantee freedom. Among the slaves who had served with the Continentals at Yorktown was James Armistead, a black spy who had carried vital intelligence from the British camp to the Americans. He had not been promised his freedom when he enlisted, nor was he offered it afterward. It was only in 1786 that the Marquis de Lafayette, Armistead’s former commanding officer, persuaded the Virginia legislature to free him.⁵³

The terms of capitulation at Yorktown granted Cornwallis’s dispatches and any officers he selected free passage to New York on HMS Bonetta. Although Washington suspected runaway slaves were hiding on the ship, he honored his word and let it depart unexamined. And, indeed, on board were men like Thomas Johnson, a free black man who had served as a guide to Tarleton from Charleston to Yorktown. Washington’s officers had specifically asked that Johnson be handed over: they saw him as thoroughly tainted by his work with Tarleton. But as the historian Christopher L. Brown notes, while the British “liberated to win a war, not to promote emancipation,” the protection they offered to at least “some black loyalists in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War represented a partial attempt to honor obligations.” Had the British not smuggled Johnson, his wife, Margaret, and their children out on the Bonetta, he would almost certainly have been executed. Instead, he and his family went via Nova Scotia to England, where they are last recorded in London, receiving payments from the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor in 1787.⁵⁴

Some white Loyalists sold their slaves or freed them, sometimes in exchange for payment by the slaves themselves, before going into exile; others brought them along. In total, some 15,000 blacks left America as slaves when the British evacuated their last American footholds at the end of the war, plus some 9,000 as free Loyalists. Peter Anderson, formerly of Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, who had been captured and expected to be executed but managed to flee to the British, and who had subsequently been at Savannah and Charleston, went to England, leaving behind his wife and children. Samuel Burke was already in London, selling paper flowers, after he had been evacuated with an injury in 1780; with him was his wife, a free black woman named Hannah. The George family, Boston King, and Harry Washington were first evacuated, at British cost, to Nova Scotia, where David George founded the first Baptist church; they later helped settle the free black colony of Sierra Leone, where streets were named after Tarleton and Howe.⁵⁵

Tarleton may have been remembered well in Sierra Leone, and he went on to brandish his war injuries when running for the British Parliament, but he had long lost his honor in America. While American and French officers dined other British officers, as was customary among the gentlemanly fraternity of European armies, Tarleton was snubbed. It was Tarleton who, in a ceremony separate from the British surrender to Continental officers, had surrendered British forces to the French army. The French granted him protection against the assassination he feared, but not without Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, snarling, “Colonel Tarleton has no merit as an officer—only that bravery every Grenadier has—but is a butcher and a barbarian.” As officers of the rebellious American colonies joined with their French allies in European-style civility, Tarleton’s brutish conduct had put him beyond the pale.⁵⁶

When some 7,000 British and German soldiers marched into captivity at Yorktown in fall 1781, major combat activities between the British and Continental Armies largely ended. Recognizing the limitations of finance and manpower, its parliamentary majorities eroding, and finally beginning to realize that they had been consistently overestimating the extent of Loyalist support, the British government would not send any new troops to North America. Instead, they adopted a primarily defensive posture to hold their current possessions: New York City with more than 15,000 troops and, in the South, Charleston, Savannah, Penobscot, and St. Augustine with a total of some 10,000 rank-and-file effectives; they also continued to control their positions in Canada and frontier forts on the Great Lakes. Washington pushed for joint U.S.-French attacks on the British strongholds at New York and Charleston, but France—refocusing on her broader geostrategic interests, especially in the Caribbean and also in India—demurred.⁵⁷

Britain’s global war was continuing apace. In 1781, British forces defeated three Mysore armies in India. After declaring war on the Dutch Republic in December 1780, in 1781, Britain seized all Dutch trading posts in India and captured Dutch stations at Padang and on Sumatra. The following year British forces took Dutch trading posts in West Africa and a base in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), but elsewhere suffered setbacks against France and Spain. So when the Royal Navy triumphed over the French in the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782, that victory not only protected Britain’s Caribbean jewel, Jamaica, it gave national morale a much-needed boost.⁵⁸

Even as Parliament voted for peace and a new government under the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham replaced Lord North’s in March 1782, British naval and land forces were thus continuing to defend imperial interests on several continents and oceans. In the American colonies, as Britain still called them, the conflict would sputter on for well over a year after Yorktown. In the South in particular, where animosities between neighbors ran deep, the civil war of irregular troops and privateers continued to simmer. From late 1781, Major General Alexander Leslie, who had recently used smallpox-infected blacks to spread the contagion, established black cavalry units that were called the Black Dragoons. Specializing in foraging, capturing deserters, and protecting confiscated rebel estates, they also fought skirmishes and some battles. Whatever mission they were carrying out, the British counted on the fact that the Black Dragoons would be sowing fear among their white rebel targets—especially since some units were, atypically, led by black officers. As one British official reported to Germain, rebel officers were avowing their “abhorrence of the indiscriminate outrages committed by our Black Dragoons, to which,” he admitted, “their savage nature prompts them much more when furnished with Arms.”⁵⁹

As Leslie’s Black Dragoons struck fear into the hearts of white Southerners, rebel guerrilla leaders like Francis Marion and his band of white and black men continued to terrorize escaped slaves. When a black man known as Harry, previously enslaved to a Charleston Loyalist but now spying for high-ranking British officers, set out one day to gather intelligence on rebel partisans, Marion’s men captured and killed him. The rebels beheaded Harry and mounted his head on a stake near the Greenland swamp—the gruesome way marker a deterrent for escaped slaves daring, still, to support the Crown.⁶⁰

British strategists plotting and executing the Southern pivot proved unable to control to their advantage the effects of the violence they unleashed with their two-pronged Americanization of the war. The brutal excesses of Tarleton’s British Legion, as well as those committed by militias and other irregular forces, alienated a war-weary population while reminding them of the purpose of their continued struggle. Loyalist support proved difficult to maintain beyond areas under the immediate protection of the British Army; anticipating their neighbors’ future wrath dampened Loyalists’ ardor. The war in the South confirmed the very point of having codes of war: “[A] war in which the violence of the means undermines the political ends is counter-productive.” Loyalists’ vindictiveness corroded Britain’s ability to pacify and engineer reconciliation in the South.⁶¹

As for relying on Southern blacks, historians agree that, in the final analysis, Clinton’s emancipation proclamation was counterproductive, too. Even though many rebel slave owners chose to swear a loyalty oath in order to hold on to their chattel, such measures were expedient and largely temporary; on balance, Britain’s strategic emancipation of rebel slaves did not so much demoralize white rebels or scare them into submission as bolster their will to resist. And although the British Army did rattle the Southern labor regime, it ultimately protected the plantation economy and helped it prevent slave uprisings.⁶²

For blacks striving to obtain their individual freedom and resist the system of slavery, the war yielded new possibilities but also new perils. Slaves exposed to the dangers of war on plantations, as well as those current and former slaves fighting on both sides of the conflict, experienced the mutually reinforcing violence of racial oppression and war. For thousands, that combination proved lethal. Britain’s use of more white Loyalists and blacks, then, did not achieve its intended aims, but it did make the partisan and racially charged war in the South particularly vicious. And if peace came too late for former slaves like Harry, parts of the Northern theater, too, experienced the reverberations of war until well after the surrender of a British army at Yorktown.

A New and accurate Map of New Jersey, from the best Authorities [London, 1780]. Credit 49