By the Hand of Providence by Rod Gragg

Author:Rod Gragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

After the capture of Charleston, General Clinton returned to New York, leaving operations in South Carolina in the hands of his capable, aggressive forty-two-year-old second in command—General Charles Cornwallis. Under his command, British forces systematically occupied the state, establishing outposts at key locations and recruiting a significant number of Loyalist troops. Almost immediately, however, Patriot support began to swell in South Carolina due to the brutality of British tactics. In late May of 1780, for instance, a force of seven hundred British dragoons and infantry overtook four hundred retreating Virginia troops at a place called Waxhaws on the South Carolina–North Carolina border. The Virginians tried to surrender, but they were massacred by the British, who were commanded by a ruthless officer—Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton. “For fifteen minutes after every man was prostrate,” an eyewitness would recall, “they went over the ground plunging their bayonets into everyone that exhibited any signs of life.…” The Waxhaw Massacre and other acts of British brutality fueled Patriot support in the Carolinas. 10

Congress, meanwhile, named General Horatio Gates as commander of the Department of the South. Acclaimed as the victor of Saratoga, Gates hurried to the Carolinas to mount an offensive against the invading British army. On August 16, 1780, near Camden, South Carolina, he led an army of about four thousand regulars and militia against Cornwallis’s army of 2,400, which consisted mainly of well-trained British regulars. Although Gates’s army was larger, about half its numbers were inexperienced militia, and many of the troops were ill and weakened from a diet of green peaches, green corn, and local molasses. 11

Gates ineptly executed a clumsy battlefield strategy, which opened the American front-line troops to a devastating British artillery barrage, while Banastre Tarleton’s British dragoons struck the American rear with a shock-force attack. The militia troops panicked, threw down their weapons, and ran. A small force of Continental troops from Maryland and Delaware made a courageous defense but were overwhelmed, and their commander—the volunteer French general Baron de Kalb—was mortally wounded. The American army was almost annihilated. General Gates abandoned his army and fled, racing away from the battlefield, and not stopping until he was far away in North Carolina. The dramatic, one-sided triumph at Camden strengthened the British hold on South Carolina and Georgia, and General Cornwallis now began preparations for invading North Carolina. 12

In London, Lord George Germain, the British Secretary of State for North America, learned of Cornwallis’s one-sided victory at Camden and led the ambitious general to believe that he now exercised an independent command in the Carolinas. Germain meddled in British military operations reportedly because he favored Cornwallis’s aggressive tactics over Clinton’s. Cornwallis initiated a harsh campaign designed to suppress all resistance in South Carolina. British policy there dictated that anyone who supported the American cause, he ordered, “should be punished with the greatest rigour,” and men who refused to join the Loyalist militia should “be imprisoned and their whole property taken from them or destroyed.” In rural Patriot strongholds, countless homes were routinely torched.

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