At 3:00 in the morning a sentinel’s shot pierced the still spring air. The blare of a bugle followed. Troubled sentries hurried to report the muffled sound of an army approaching. The Legion grabbed their arms and prepared to fight. But no enemy appeared. Their leader wondered if, at such an hour, his troops were imagining the sounds.
But then another shot, from another guard, stationed in another part of camp, dispelled that thought. The men reoriented themselves to face the latest warning. Then still another warning shot rang out from elsewhere. One more erupted from the Legion’s rear. Now, a horrified Henry Lee, his men camped in an expansive field near a tributary of the Little Pee Dee River, realized that his Legion was facing a likely hopeless fight with the entire British army.
The main American army was at least three days’ march away. The Legion was seemingly surrounded. So running was not an option, and help, in the form of South Carolina’s militias, was nowhere near. Lee quietly arranged his men into lines of cavalry and infantry and steeled them for battle as the sun rose. But when daylight emerged and the Americans began to move, preparing to encounter British fire at any moment, the enemy was nowhere to be seen. What did come into view were the tracks of wolves. Provisions that had been gathered for the army and left nearby had rotted, attracting the animals, who circled Lee and his Legion.1
For a rare moment Lee was prey rather than predator.
It was April of 1781; a month had passed since the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. In the days following that hot and bloody conflict, with the British army triumphant but staggering, Nathanael Greene hoped to stage a rematch forthwith. On March 18, three days after the battle, Lord Cornwallis finally began to move his tattered army away towards Wilmington. They crawled to Ramsey’s Mill, a spot on the Deep River, named for its owner, a member of the state’s legislature. After two days there, replenishing themselves as best they could, the British constructed a bridge of rocks from the mill’s dam to cross the river and move east.2 But Lee and his Legion were lurking in their shadow, preparing to fight “on the shortest notice.”3
While the British departed and the bulk of the American army, thirteen miles east of Guilford Courthouse at the Iron Works upon Troublesome Creek, composed itself—tending to the injured, finding provisions—Greene sent Lee to keep track of Cornwallis’s progress in anticipation of an American attack. Lee was ordered to destroy the British-built bridge spanning the Deep River, trapping Cornwallis to its west while the rebel army arrived to reengage. But the Americans, in need of provisions and magazines, moved too slowly. By the time Greene arrived at Ramsey’s Mill, on March 28, the British had crossed the river and moved on towards Wilmington.4
The Americans camped at Ramsey’s Mill near the border between the Carolinas, where Greene faced a great strategic dilemma. Earlier in the year, Benedict Arnold, leading his legion composed mostly of American loyalists, had cruised up the James River, landed in the Virginia town of Westover, and marched uncontested into the capital city of Richmond. Governor Thomas Jefferson, hurriedly removing military stores, had fled to Charlottesville, and Arnold had looted and torched the Virginia capital. George Washington, in response, had ordered the Marquis de Lafayette south along with twelve hundred soldiers to pin down Arnold with the aid of a French fleet. A naval battle between the French and British at Cape Henry in the Chesapeake Bay had proven inconclusive, allowing Arnold to be reinforced by two thousand men and continue to terrorize Virginia.
As Greene deliberated on where he would next take his army, one possibility suggested by his officers was to protect the vital state of Virginia, not only as a source of reinforcements, but also as a link between the American armies, North and South. Others, though, proposed that he chase after Cornwallis and provoke the battle Greene had hoped for in the days immediately after Guilford Courthouse.
The American general chose neither.
Rather than attempting to save Virginia or pursuing Cornwallis, Greene decided to return to and liberate South Carolina. The main American army would target the major British strongholds in that state, while Lee, teaming with Francis Marion, would tear into the state’s interior and knock out the string of British posts stretching west from the Atlantic Coast and essential to communications and recruitment. If Cornwallis followed him, Greene reasoned, the British general would be abandoning North Carolina; if he did not follow, the British posts would be at the mercy of Lee and Marion. The decision was not reached easily; Greene conferred with his officers, some of whom objected to the plan.5 By the end of March, his mind was made up, and Greene wrote to Washington to describe the strategy. “The Manoeuvre will be critical and dangerous; and the troops exposed to every hardship,” he cautioned.6
Of Greene’s subordinates, Lee was enthusiastic about the endeavor. “I am decidedly of opinion with you that nothing is left for you,” he wrote Greene, “but to imitate the example of Scipio Africanus.”7 The reference was to the Roman general who had diverted his army away from the Italian peninsula and towards Carthage, the backyard of his antagonist Hannibal. As a boy at Leesylvania, and then a student at Princeton, Lee had obsessed over pivotal military strategies from the past and their executors; now he was helping conceive and perform them himself.
The plan was put into action on April 6, Greene marching the American army south, his sights set on Camden, while Lee’s Legion, joined by a company of Maryland Continentals, headed across the Pee Dee River in search of Marion, then camped in the swamps of the Black River, a winding waterway in eastern South Carolina. When Lee, having sent two officers to locate his partner, arrived in Marion’s camp after a march of eight days, the reaction among the Swamp Fox and his soldiers was euphoric.
The situation in South Carolina was grim.8 Just the month before, Lord Francis Rawdon, the clever, pug-faced officer commanding the British garrison in Camden, had launched a two-pronged attack led by Major John Doyle and Colonel John Watson to finally exterminate the Swamp Fox. While Marion was busy fighting Watson, three miles away at Britton’s Ferry Doyle, led there by a loyalist, raided and ransacked a virtually unprotected Snow’s Island, tossing Marion’s accumulation of stores and ammunition in a nearby creek.9 Marion had lost over one hundred men, and many others had been wounded, or their homes burnt to the ground by the British. His force now stood at seventy downhearted and hungry warriors.
As Marion’s men ate cold rice out of pots, one whispered to another about the sighting of a large number of Continental troops. The news was transmitted to Marion, and soon the entire camp gathered around, their eyes welling with tears at the arrival of desperately needed aid. The sound of drums was soon heard, and Major John Conyers and Captain Edmond Irby appeared, sent by Greene along with a number of Lee’s dragoons to notify Marion of the army’s new design and his new assignment with Lee. Later the same day, April 14, the remainder of the Legion arrived. Lee and Marion, happily reunited, now waged their war of posts.10
Their first target was Fort Watson.
Named for and built on orders from the British colonel pursing Marion, the outpost sat atop a thirty-foot-high Santee Indian burial mound with a view over both the river named for that tribe and the central road stretching from Charleston to Camden. Along this artery the British funneled vital stores and reinforcements. Wasting no time, Lee and Marion emerged from the woods surrounding Fort Watson on the afternoon of April 15 intending to block this path.
Inside, Lieutenant James McKay was commanding in place of Watson, with a combined force of forty men from the loyalist Kings American Regiment and eighty British regulars. A brief skirmish was followed by demands from Lee and Marion that McKay surrender the post. When this offer was rebuffed, the rebels plotted to make the enemy capitulate. Fort Watson’s water supply was derived from Scott Lake, an outlet of the Santee River. Lee and Marion placed riflemen between the lake and the fort to block British access. McKay’s men responded by digging a well.
With the siege dragging on, Lee wrote to Greene on the eighteenth, requesting that the general send a cannon so he could “finish the business. . . in five minutes.” Greene declined, citing the risk of expending men to guard the field piece, given that the garrison at Camden, which the American army was approaching, was stronger than he had thought. Frustrated, Lee wrote Greene twice on April 20, restating the request for the cannon and asking for a hundred riflemen and a company of regulars to help conclude the operation. Again on the twenty-third, Lee wrote to Greene, describing himself as “miserable to find. . . that no field piece is on the way.”11
While Lee waited, one of Marion’s militiamen, Major Hezekiah Maham, suggested a solution: the Americans, putting down their muskets and picking up axes, would fell and chop trees from the surrounding woods and construct a long tower capped with a floor of logs. For two days the rebels worked on the tower, while McKay, lacking any artillery, could do little to stop its construction. On April 23 the Maham Tower, standing forty feet tall and higher than the fort’s rampart, was finished and the Americans, led by Captain McCottrey, were atop the structure shooting down into the fort. While McKay’s men scrambled to avoid the fire, the Americans dashed around the fort removing the abatis protecting it. The path was now cleared for an assault, and out came the white flag. Fort Watson had fallen.12
Meanwhile, to the south, Greene had arrived on the outskirts of Camden. Finally settling his army of some fifteen hundred men on an incline a mile north of the town, he prepared to provoke a fight with the British army, nine hundred men strong and mostly comprising loyalists. When a deserter from Maryland divulged Greene’s order of battle and the fact that reinforcements were likely arriving soon in the form of Thomas Sumter and his militia, the British commander Francis Rawdon, his supply lines under assault by Lee and Marion, surmised that an advantageous time for the battle was at hand. In the late morning of April 25, the armies clashed. After initially repelling the British advance, the American army’s fortunes fell when a break in its line forced Greene to order a retreat. Looking on from a hole he had carved with a razor blade in a wooden fence was a twelve-year-old boy named Andrew Jackson, then a British prisoner of war.
In the days that followed, Rawdon was reinforced by the arrival of Watson, who tried, with no success, to reengage Greene, now situated several miles to the north. With his stores dwindling and the team of Lee and Marion causing havoc on his supply line, Rawdon withdrew from Camden, leaving it in flames as he moved south.
Unable to block Watson from making his way to Camden, Lee and Marion reunited. But for a spell the future of the collaboration was in jeopardy. Lee had warned Greene that Marion’s spirits were low and suggested the general send him a word of encouragement.13 Months later, matters were worse after Greene had accused Marion of refusing to send horses to the regular army and allowing his men to pillage the property of loyalists. In response, Marion threatened to resign his commission. It was only when Greene, finally following Lee’s advice, wrote Marion an eloquent note reminding him of the stakes in South Carolina and the important role he played in the fight there that this issue was diffused.
Now Lee and Marion moved on to their next target.
Rebecca Brewton Motte was, it seemed, haunted by the British army. The child of a wealthy Charleston family, she and her late husband Jacob had been supporters of American liberty from the beginning of the war. When her brother, Miles Brewton, a financial backer of the Revolution, was lost in the Atlantic in 1780, Rebecca inherited his Palladian home on Charleston’s King Street and a plantation further inland.
When the British claimed Charleston months later, Sir Henry Clinton used Motte’s home as his headquarters, and so did Rawdon once the city was under his supervision. Motte was forced to live in a small space with her three daughters while feeding and entertaining the British officers. When Rawdon permitted the Mottes to leave the city, they relocated to the family plantation, set on the spot where the Rivers Congaree and Wateree merge to form the Santee, in the heart of South Carolina. But the British, seeing the area’s strategic importance as a depot for moving supplies westward from Charleston, followed her. Once again her house, a newly built three-story brick mansion situated on a high hill, was seized by the British. And the Redcoats, led by Lieutenant Colonel Donald McPherson, built an installation surrounded by a deep ditch, fortified by over 180 soldiers. The outpost was named Fort Motte; the Mottes, meanwhile, were exiled to an old farmhouse on an adjacent hill.14
On the morning of May 6, Lee and Marion arrived to liberate the Mottes’ land. The former posted near the homestead; the latter, on the slope leading away from the fort, from which he trained a six-pound cannon, a gift from Greene, on the enemy installation. While Lee’s men, with the assistance of local slaves they had impressed, excavated a trench in front of the fort, the Americans demanded that McPherson surrender. The demand was denied, as McPherson falsely believed that Rawdon, who had recently abandoned Camden, would come to his aid.
Lee and Marion grew tired of waiting. When the American ditch was within a few feet of the Motte Mansion, the rebels concluded that if cannons would not bring McPherson out, perhaps flames would. The troops were told to make bows and arrows. But Lee fretted about destroying Motte’s home. During their siege, she had sheltered Lee and his officers, fed them well, and even opened her cellar—full of fine wines—to them. On the morning of May 12, Lee met with Motte and, with regret, informed her of his intention to burn the mansion. To his surprise, she was delighted. If sacrificing her home furthered the cause of American liberty, she would happily agree to it. And, as it happened, improbably, in her possession was a stash of arrows brought from the East Indies by a ship captain and presented to Motte’s brother.
While the tips of these arrows were then being covered with a combustible wrap, Lee’s courier, Dr. Mathew Irvine, went to the fort a final time to seek surrender from McPherson, who politely refused. Then the first arrow was set ablaze and launched from a rifle. When it failed to ignite, another was loaded and launched, with the same result. Then, finally, a third flaming arrow was hurled at the house, piercing and igniting its dry shingles. When McPherson ordered his men to climb to the roof to douse the fire, they were greeted with artillery shots. Out again went the white flag; now Fort Motte had fallen. Another vital link in the chain keeping the British army alive in South Carolina was gone.15
Before the Americans moved on to their next objective, Motte hosted the officers of both sides—the American victors and their British prisoners—at a grand dinner. But the conviviality was superficial. When the Americans departed on the thirteenth, they left behind gruesome mementos: the bodies of two loyalists, Lieutenant Fuller and John Jackson dangling from Motte’s gatepost. Several American soldiers had been placing a noose around the neck of another loyalist, Levi Smith, when a furious Marion intervened. Who had ordered them to hang this or any man, he demanded to know. Colonel Lee, they replied.16
The British were evicted from Forts Motte and Watson. Rawdon, making his way east to Charleston, was reeling. And Greene refused to relent. On May 13 he ordered Lee to demand the surrender of Fort Granby at Friday’s Ferry. “I depend upon you pushing matters vigorously.” Built in and named—like the town it called home—for a British duke favorable to colonial independence, Fort Granby was a two-story trading post that had been commandeered by the British in 1780. Because of its strategic location on the Congaree River, the fort was another vital link in the British supply line. Behind its trenches were three hundred men, commanded by Andrew Maxwell, a loyalist from Maryland.17
Lee would take a new tack at Fort Granby. Hastily constructed towers or flaming arrows would be unnecessary. Maxwell had a notorious appetite for plunder. After Lee’s Legion hailed musket fire on the fort, Maxwell was ready to capitulate—with a condition. He must be allowed to leave with his precious booty: horses, two carriages, and two pieces of artillery. Lee blanched at the idea of permitting Maxwell to flee with ill-gotten gains taken from local patriots. But when news arrived that Rawdon was approaching the fort, necessitating a quick end to the parley with Maxwell, Lee relented, and off Maxwell merrily went to meet with Rawdon, his looted treasure in tow. The terms of the surrender so infuriated local militia commander Thomas Sumter, already annoyed by Lee’s presence—“the Gamecock” believed that he could have taken Fort Granby, and done so without regulars, and was entitled to the swag behind its walls—that he resigned his commission.18
While Sumter was stewing, Lee was blazing across the South Carolina–Georgia border heading for Augusta, site of one of the few remaining British forts in the South, on Greene’s orders. (The general, meanwhile was approaching Ninety-Six, the enemy’s last outpost in South Carolina other than Charleston.) The ride from Fort Granby to Augusta was seventy-five miles. It took Lee and his Legion three days, riding at breakneck pace. “Your early arrival at Augusta astonishes me,” Greene wrote Lee upon hearing the news. “For rapid marches you exceed Lord Cornwallis and everybody else.”19 Once into Georgia, Lee collaborated with Colonel Elijah Clarke, the lynchpin of the Georgia patriot militia. Also on his way to Augusta was Andrew Pickens.
Augusta, situated on the Savannah River, was taken by American loyalists led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brown in 1780. At its heart was Fort Cornwallis, a garrison named after the British general. Two smaller outposts, Forts Galphin and Grierson, sat on the outskirts of the town. These would have to be subdued first. On the morning of May 21, Lee moved on the former, twelve miles south of the city. The Georgia air was dangerously humid, and his men, tired from their long march, had not a drop to drink. Arriving at the fort, which was little more than the two-and-a-half story brick home of an Indian trader named George Galphin, Lee placed the broiling members of his Legion in the pines surrounding it.
Inside the brick walls, a Tory named Samuel Rowarth commanded a force of two hundred of his fellow loyalists. In order to draw them out, Lee ordered members of Pickens’s militia to attack and retreat. When they did, Rowarth and the bulk of his men charged out of the house after them. When the gates to the fortress swung open, Lee raced in, forcing the remaining loyalists inside to surrender. Rowarth was cut off from his lair and forced to surrender. Fort Galphin, along with its stores of blankets, ammunition, medicine, and tools, belonged to the rebels.
The following day Lee scaled a hill outside of Augusta and joined with Pickens and Clarke at its summit, gazing down below at Fort Cornwallis, the ultimate objective of this campaign. It was considerably better built and a harder prize to claim; its warden, the loyalist Thomas Brown, was a cagey and stubborn foe who would not easily be persuaded to surrender. Lee had tried just that, sending Joseph Eggelston under a flag of truce to Fort Cornwallis. General Greene’s army was approaching, he had informed Brown—untruthfully—and now was the time to lay down his arms. Brown ignored the demand.
With a peaceful resolution foreclosed, Lee, Pickens, and Clarke were determined to isolate Brown by taking Fort Grierson. Constructed around the home of and commanded by loyalist Colonel James Grierson, the fort was connected to Fort Cornwallis, a mile to its north, by a gully. On May 22, the rebels, equipped with axes, swarmed into this ditch, scrambled towards the fort, and hacked away at its stockade. Grierson and his fellow loyalist bounded over the side of the fort and sprinted towards the safety of Fort Cornwallis. To secure their safe arrival, Brown provided a cover of cannon fire. Lee returned the favor, killing several loyalists with his artillery.
Other occupants of Fort Grierson who managed to escape the cannon blasts but did not make it to safety were taken prisoner. Several were in need of medical treatment. Lee sent a loyalist to Fort Cornwallis in order to collect the necessary medicine, reestablishing communication with Brown. (The loyalist commander had refused to surrender when the messenger was Eggelston, partly because he believed him to be a member of Clarke’s militia. There was searing hatred between the amateur soldiers in the South, rebel and loyalist.)
This courtesy was short lived. Soon Lee and Pickens prepared to lay siege to the fort. Trenches were dug to its east and west. And, recalling the fit of ingenuity at Fort Watson, a new Maham Tower was built, this one thirty feet tall and stuffed with stones, bricks, mud, and rubbish; and with a six-pounder gun on its top platform, peaking over the fort’s ramparts. Underneath, rebel riflemen took aim at the enemy in gaps between the turret’s notched logs. Late-night raids launched by the loyalists had led to ferocious fighting in the trenches but did not thwart the construction of the tower.
As the militiamen continued to press towards the fort, some of them rolled up cowhides and draped them on the embankment, forming portholes to shoot through. Tarleton Brown, a captain in the South Carolina militia, looked on in horror as a young soldier named Stafford taking aim through one of the cowhides was blown away by a shot from the fort.20 Lee and Pickens had again demanded Brown’s surrender on May 31, and again he had declined. As the Americans erected their tower he even paraded his prisoners, including elderly men, along the parapets.
But by June 2, the loyalists, trapped by cannonade and rifle fire, were forced to retreat to small pockets of the fort, including caves in the walls, to find safety from the rebel fire. The two artillery pieces in the fort were destroyed. In a last bit of desperation, Brown slipped a Scottish sergeant—posing as a deserter who offered to help the Americans locate and blast Brown’s powder magazine—out of the fort to set the tower ablaze. Lee, after initially entertaining the man’s proposal, grew apprehensive and placed him under guard.
In one last effort to resist the attackers, Brown set fire to two houses near the fort, left two standing, dug a tunnel under them, and filled it with explosives, hoping that Lee and Pickens’s men would take cover there during the attack. If they did, Brown would blow them to smithereens. But Pickens’s men inspected the homes in the hours leading up to the attack and the buildings exploded shortly after they left.
On June 3, Lee and Pickens asked for surrender yet again, but Brown would not relent. So the final attack was set for the following day, which happened to be the birthday of King George III. Brown, now with no hope of escape, but desiring not to wave the white flag on the monarch’s birthday, finally agreed to surrender—on the fifth. The negotiations may have been aided by a comely young lady21 whom Brown sent to parley with Lee. Generous terms were agreed upon: Brown and his men marched out of Fort Cornwallis with their arms at their shoulders, drums beating, before heading to Charleston.
Lee’s opinion of much of the militia, particularly Clarke’s men, was low. “They excel the goths and the vandals in their schemes of plunder, murder and iniquity,” he lamented to Greene. He must have known that many of the Georgians and Carolinians wanted nothing more than to extract bloody revenge on their Tory neighbors. To prevent this, at the surrender of Fort Cornwallis, Lee tasked Captain Joseph Armstrong with protecting Brown from would-be assassins.22
James Grierson was not so fortunate. James Alexander, one of Pickens’s men, stormed into Grierson’s home, where he had been sent after the surrender, and shot and killed him in front of his family. His clothes were divided amongst the militiamen, and his body was thrown in a nearby ditch. Lee condemned the murder, but had done nothing to prevent it. Alexander was never punished.23
On the morning of June 6, the Legion rode north once again. Lee had loosened the British grip on Georgia, and Greene was in the process of doing the same in South Carolina. Thanks to Lee’s successful war of posts, only two British fortifications of any strength remained in the Palmetto State: the occupied port of Charleston, on the Atlantic coast, and to the northwest, the village of Ninety-Six.
The origin of the name of the spot, which Lee mistakenly believed signified its distance from the closest Cherokee settlement, was mysterious. The fort built there by the British in 1780 was stout, star shaped, and manned by 550 loyalists from South Carolina, New, Jersey, and New York. It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Cruger, a New Yorker.
Greene had arrived on the outskirts of Ninety-Six on May 22 and at once set about preparing for a siege. Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a meticulous Polish military engineer whose fortifications had helped beat the British at Saratoga, oversaw the digging of trenches leading to the fort. Another Maham Tower was fashioned as well. But Cruger, upon learning that Greene and the American army were approaching, had strengthened the fort, building a formidable parapet surrounded by a ditch. Nearby were a star-shaped earthen redoubt and a secondary and smaller stockade known as Holmes Fort, enclosing three barns and protecting the loyalists’ water supply—both connected to the main fort by covered walks—and several hastily built block houses.24
On June 7 Rawdon, who had relocated to Charleston, set out west again—to save Ninety-Six. With the British defenses in the South crumbling, he had gathered three regiments freshly arrived from Ireland. The following day Lee’s Legion rode into the American camp, naturally with spectacle. On his approach to Ninety-Six, one of Lee’s officers had skirted the town with prisoners collected at Augusta on display. Cruger saw this, believed it a purposeful insult, and opened fire on the Legion, harming none but startling all.25
Under Kosciuszko’s watchful eye, the Americans were focused on storming the star-shaped redoubt. With the Legion once again at his disposal, Greene assigned Lee to begin approaches to the left of that fortification, where Holmes Fort protected the rested by the side of a spring. Lee’s men began digging, built a battery, and positioned a six-pounder—fighting off night-time raids by Cruger’s men.
In letters from Sumter, Greene saw evidence—but not yet proof—that the reinforced Rawdon was marching in his direction. While the slow work on the siege works went on, Lee grew frustrated. Focusing on the star fort, Kosciuszko had neglected Holmes Fort. Take this structure, cut the enemy off from his water, Lee argued to Greene, and Cruger will be forced to abandon Ninety-Six. Greene agreed, allowing Lee to send a sergeant and nine privates crawling on their bellies to blow up the stockade. The operation was foiled by Cruger’s men, who spotted the small party and killed six of their number.
As the Americans continued to build their entrenchments, a countryman was seen galloping into Ninety-Six holding a letter high above his head. The gates to the enemy garrison swung open, and he disappeared within. The news he carried was good for Cruger, grave for Greene. Rawdon was at Orangeburg, a hundred miles to the east. Greene ordered Sumter to block or slow the British march. But the Gamecock, misreading Rawdon’s route, failed to do so. Greene’s window for opportunity was inching to a close as Rawdon moved west.
It was time to fight or withdraw. Greene chose to fight. The order was given on June 17. Continentals from Maryland and Virginia targeted the star fort; Lee and his Legion took on the stockade that the smaller party had failed to destroy earlier. The following day, at noon, a tremendous blast from the American battery gave the signal; the rebels sprinted forward, swinging their axes at the abatis protecting the fort and hurling hooks at the sandbags lining its walls.
Lee took Holmes Fort with little contest, the last loyalist inside having fled. But before he could move forward towards the village, Greene ordered Lee to halt. The American right was being greeted with fire and steel from the parapets by Cruger, who sent two contingents of thirty men outside the fort to surround the rebels. Greene watched as his men, bayonetted in the ditches and fired upon from above, quickly sustained heavy casualties. Worried about depleting his army, the general ended the attack and retreated the Americans east across the Saluda River, leaving 147 dead rebels behind.26
In his orders issued after the fight, Greene offered the now familiar approbation of Lee. “The General takes great pleasure in acknowledging the high opinion he has of the gallantry of the troops engaged in the attack of the enemy’s redoubts,” wrote Greene. “The judicious and alert behavior of the light infantry of the legion. . . and those directed by Lieutenant Colonel Lee, met with deserved success, etc, etc.”
On June 21 Rawdon arrived at Ninety-Six and promptly pursued the American army heading east and now across Bush River. The hunt ended when Rawdon realized there were simply too many miles between the two armies; his own, newly arrived from abroad, suffering in the summer South Carolina heat, away from their stores, with foraging a formidable task with Lee prowling nearby, was moving slowly. So he returned to and then abandoned Ninety-Six—its distance from the Atlantic Ocean rendering it too far to be maintained. The British outposts that had once laced through South Carolina and dipped down into Georgia were no longer. The Tories, whose numbers the British had hoped would multiply across the region, were now dwindling and left twisting in the wind. Seeking safety, many attached themselves to the rear of the British army as it marched east.
Before thinking twice Greene, hoping for a rematch, turned around and pursued the enemy army—which though smaller than his, was better equipped and advantageously posted near Orangeburg. Greene’s rebels were exhausted, punished by the southern heat, their clothes tattered, many among them wounded or sick. So the general called for a pause in hopes of restoring his fighting force while summer passed in the High Hills of Santee—a twenty-five-mile-long but only five-mile-wide network of sand hills, the tallest standing three hundred feet above the Wateree River, the swampy valley of which lies to their west. The altitude there, among the pines and oak, had for over a century been thought a cure for sickness and fever by South Carolinians. Greene hoped it would have the same restorative power on his army.27
Cornwallis, after tarrying in Wilmington, moved north to Virginia to meet up with Arnold’s force, the leadership of which had deferred to General William Phillips. But Phillips became ill before the meeting was to take place in the town of Petersburg, which the Marquis de Lafayette was shelling as the general lay dying. Cornwallis was now in control of all the British forces in Virginia, numbering over seven thousand. He raked the state’s countryside and sparred with Lafayette’s smaller army.28
In New York, Henry Clinton, who had never approved of the invasion of Virginia and was now threatened by possible invasion by a Franco-American army led by Washington and the French general Rochambeau, sent a series of contradictory messages to Cornwallis. He ultimately ordered the general to find a secure spot on the Virginia peninsula where British ships could dock in the Chesapeake Bay, presumably to carry away men to open up other fronts. In August the British soldiers began to fortify Cornwallis’s chosen port, Yorktown.29
The general was sealing his own fate—and Britain’s. While Cornwallis occupied Yorktown, Washington and Rochambeau received word that a formidable French fleet led by Comte de Grasse was sailing north from the West Indies. Its twenty-seven ships and thirty-two hundred soldiers were at their disposal. The attack on New York was abandoned, but a small force was left behind so Clinton would think otherwise. The French and American armies began their march south to rendezvous with de Grasse in Virginia.30
Whispers from farther north were enough to give even the worried Greene cause for optimism. “The people in that quarter are in high spirits and a defeat and capture of the Earl [Cornwallis] is strongly talked of,” he wrote Lee. “But you know this will require hard blows. Some of the southern army is much wished for, I mean the Legi[on] and the gallant Col. Lee.”31
But Lee was unavailable. Initially he had not joined the army for its sojourn in the hills. Instead Greene had sent him to South Carolina’s low country, along the Atlantic coast. There he joined Sumter and Marion in an ultimately futile pursuit of the British 19th Regiment led by Lieutenant Colonel James Coates, before finally heading north in late July to convalesce with the rest of the army in the High Hills.32
There the Legion, which had been on the march constantly since arriving in the South, enjoyed clean water, the cool air afforded by high elevation, comfortable quarters, and time to heal its wounded and remedy its sick. In a shock for all but Lee, it was reunited with an old comrade. When Cornwallis had taken command of Arnold’s legion, John Champe had deserted, slipped out of Virginia, and drifted southward, eventually finding the American army in South Carolina. Lee greeted Champe warmly while the legionaries looked on in shock—until the entire scheme to capture Arnold was at last revealed. Champe was subsequently sent north to Washington and discharged.33
While his Legion rested, Lee was restless. He offered spontaneous strategic advice to Greene. Could he not, with his cavalry, advance on Haddrell’s Point, near Charleston, to liberate American prisoners of war held there? Greene was uninterested in the proposal, but allowed Lee to resume his intelligence-gathering activities on August 5, when he rode out of the American camp with the Legion infantry to stalk the British army, whose leadership had changed hands by late summer. Rawdon, exhausted and fighting malaria, had boarded a ship in July bound for Britain. (His arrival was delayed when privateers apprehended the vessel and handed it over to the French fleet.) In his stead, Colonel Alexander Stewart took the reins of the mixed loyalist-British force still camped at Orangeburg. He did not remain there long, though, moving north in late July in search of supplies.
Keeping tabs on the enemy army, Lee pleaded with Greene to venture out of the High Hills and confront Stewart, whose force was smaller and, according to deserters, in terrible spirits. Now was the time for the Americans to thrust “a fatal stab to the British tyrant”34 Lee pleaded. In a particularly brash idea, he even declared his intention to ride with the Legion cavalry all the way to the gates of Charleston. Greene naturally dismissed such a wild plan. But he did warm to Lee’s suggestion of fighting Stewart. Lee, ever optimistic, assured Greene that with the right number of reinforcements the Americans could make easy work of their foes.
Greene dispatched Lee’s infantry to join their leader. Then he began to call in all the fragmented parts of the American fighting force, which, after a delay in organizing the junction of the expanded force, began to march south. As Greene moved, his army multiplied: the militias of Pickens and Marion appeared. North Carolina militia commanded by the Marquis de Malmedy, a Frenchman serving the American cause, joined in. South Carolina state troops, non-Continental soldiers signed up to longer terms of service than militia under Lieutenant Colonel William Henderson, were added to the fold. By the time Greene reached Burdell’s Tavern on September 7, his army numbered nearly three thousand. Ten miles away was Eutaw Springs, a stream hooking off of the Santee River. There the British army sat, unaware of the Americans nearby.35
An initial skirmish between Lee and British cavalry commander John Coffin, who had been sent to confirm rumors of the American presence, began with Greene’s order for attack at 4:00 a.m. on the eighth. The rebels rode forward as the sun rose. The day ahead was bloody and boiling. Once Coffin returned to camp to inform Stewart that Greene had arrived, the British army was thrown into one line. On its far right, Major John Majoribanks stood behind a thicket just in front of Eutaw Springs. Cruger commanded the center, made up of both loyalist and British soldiers. To the left, regiments of British infantry were supported by Coffin’s cavalry.36
The American army deployed in three lines. The first, from left to right, was made up of Pickens, Malmedy, and Marion. Lee’s Legion was positioned on the right flank. In the second line were Continental soldiers from Maryland and Virginia. William Washington and the Delaware Continentals were held in reserve. When the first volleys exploded, the American militia, to Greene’s great satisfaction, held their ground and returned fire. But only for a time. Soon Malmedy’s men crumpled, and the North and South Carolina militia began to flee. But Greene thrust his experienced second line forward with bayonets fixed. The current of the battle changed swiftly. Lee and the Legion infantry plowed through the British left flank, while Cruger’s loyalists dueled, sword to sword, with the American Continentals in the center before falling back. A British rout seemed to be unfolding.
But it quickly folded. As the Americans stormed into the British encampment, the tired, thirsty soldiers began to pillage, unaware of a large and stout brick mansion, owned by Patrick Roche, just beyond the camp. Major Henry Sheridan, commanding a regiment of Tory sharpshooters from New York, following Stewart’s orders rushed into the house, barred the doors, opened its windows and began to pick off rebels. Meanwhile, on the British right, behind an impenetrable screen of brush stood Majoribanks, also raking the Americans with fire. Greene’s attempt to destroy the house proved futile; the riflemen behind its walls mowed down his artilleryman.
Now the British army began to regroup. Greene dispatched his reserves—William Washington’s cavalry and the Delaware regulars—to take Majoribanks. This too failed, as Washington’s horse was shot out under him and he was taken prisoner, while many of his men were killed. Greene dispatched his second in command, Nathaniel Pendleton, with orders for Lee to gather his cavalry and make a last effort to charge the British left and Coffin’s cavalry. But when Pendleton reached Lee’s cavalry, he could not find their leader. Lee was elsewhere, moving across the battlefield, commanding his infantry. The order then went to his deputy, Eggleston, and the charge was made—unsuccessfully. Coffin sent the Lee-less Legion retreating and then attacked the American infantry. With the numbers of dead and wounded growing, the sun scorching, the Roche house unbreakable, and Stewart and Cruger rallying, Greene called for a retreat.37
The battle, which lasted four hours, was one of the costliest of the entire Revolution. Over one hundred of Greene’s men were killed. Nearly four hundred were wounded. Eighty-five of Stewart’s men died; 297 were injured. Lee’s Legion lost every fourth man. The American army retuned to Burdell’s Tavern. Rain fell the next day, negating any chance for the armies to meet again and soaking the corpses littering the battlefield.38
After remaining at Eutaw Springs for two days, Stewart removed to Charleston. For the British, Eutaw Springs was another Pyrrhic victory. Greene, despite his heavy casualties, had been beaten but not dispatched. And the British losses had also been great. The American South, other than the few far-flung towns the British still controlled, was liberated. There was not, nor would there be, a great loyalist uprising.
From the day he had arrived in the South, Lee had done so much to bring this about. He had deflected Cornwallis during the race to the Dan, allowing the American army to escape into Virginia intact. He had fought gallantly at Guilford Courthouse and been commended for it. And he and his Legion had been the burning fuse that had detonated the forts so vital to the maintenance of the British war effort. And yet cruelly, during the climactic final major confrontation in that theater, at the moment of greatest need, he had been absent.
His place in the Battle of Eutaw Springs would torment Lee and haunt his legacy. Fellow officers grumbled that he had cost the Americans a total victory by freelancing on the battlefield and not attending to his cavalry. Lee was a vain man—and especially sensitive after the court martial-stained triumph at Paulus Hook. Naturally he was distraught over the missed opportunity to hand-deliver “the fatal stab” to the British. This despite the fact that his “great address, gallantry and good conduct” were singled out on Greene’s summary of the battle to the latest president of the Continental Congress, Thomas McKean.39
Nearly a month after the battle, Lee wrote an unaddressed letter to a friend. To the recipient, whose identity is lost to time, he narrated the events of the recently ended battle. “You will feel for our mortifying disappointment,” Lee wrote, “after carrying victory for two miles by an intrepidity never before exhibited so generally, during the war.” The long letter concluded with an admission: “I have been exceedingly ill of a fever which took me while below.”40 After five years of constant fighting, disappointment and fatigue were overtaking Lee.
But he did not have much more war left to wage. Days before the battle at Eutaw Springs, de Grasse’s French fleet had defeated and dispatched a British naval force in the Chesapeake Bay, eliminating any means of escape or reinforcement for Cornwallis. Weeks later, Washington and Rochambeau arrived in Yorktown and began their siege.
With Cornwallis trapped, Lee remained in the High Hills of the Santee, sending Michael Rudulph to Virginia in a vain search for men and supplies to fortify the Legion. In October, Greene presented Lee with a new mission. Washington wanted a full appraisal of the state of affairs in the South. Greene hoped to convince the commander in chief to supply the South with the necessary manpower to finally clear the British from the region once Cornwallis capitulated. To ensure better and more comprehensive communication, Greene sent Lee north to Yorktown to liaise with Washington. The choice was natural given the bond between the two Virginians. Carrying a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette on his person explaining the assignment, Lee departed his Legion and headed to his home state, arriving in Yorktown by mid-October.41
In the American camp, old friends and acquaintances abounded. Alexander Hamilton, after a brief absence from the army, was no longer an aide-de-camp but now commanded a battalion of light infantry. On the night of October 15, in the twin pursuits of victory and glory, he personally led the American attack on one of the two last redoubts blocking the advancing American trenches, leaping over the parapet, calling for his men to follow. John Laurens, another of Washington’s protégés, was there blocking the retreating British. Lafayette and his fellow Frenchmen took the other redoubt. Anthony Wayne was there too, commanding his Pennsylvanians in unrelenting bombardment of the British.
His fortifications pummeled, his army surrounded on all sides, escape impossible, Cornwallis sent out an officer waving a white handkerchief on October 17. Two days later, after terms of surrender were negotiated, the siege ended.
On the morning of the nineteenth, the French and American soldiers spread out on opposite sides of a road, stretching in line for over a mile. Washington and Rochambeau were mounted and at their respective heads. The Frenchmen were resplendent, their uniforms crisp, their bands playing tunefully. The Americans, though less elegant, their musicians less grand, were to a man beaming. Beyond the armies, hundreds of civilians had congregated nearby to watch. When representatives of the vanquished army appeared, Cornwallis, claiming sickness, was not with them. Instead the sword of surrender was presented by his second, General Charles O’Hara, who mistakenly addressed Rochambeau before being directed to Washington. The sword was then handed to General Benjamin Lincoln, Washington’s second. The British soldiers tramped onto an open field and abandoned their arms. American independence, while not formalized, was won.42
Henry Lee was looking on. As a spectator.