Fusiliers by Mark Urban

Author:Mark Urban [Urban, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, American War of Independance
ISBN: 9780571246908
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 2008-09-03T23:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

The Battle of Camden

In Which the 23rd Cover Themselves With Glory

The scene around the American bivouacs at Rugeley’s Mill on 13 August 1780 was one of nervous anticipation. Thousands of troops had marched into that South Carolinian township earlier in the day, scattering the Tory militia, who had kept up some outposts there. Serjeant Major William Seymour, of the Delaware Regiment, summed up the mood of Horatio Gates’s army as it anticipated its march on Camden: ‘Confident … that we should drive the enemy, we being far superior to them in numbers.’

At the core of Gates’s army was a division of 1,400 Continental troops, seven regiments from Maryland and one from Delaware. Their campaign had begun four months before at Morristown in Pennsylvania with orders to make haste for Charleston, in order to repel the British. They were seasoned regiments, quite the best division for such a task at General Washington’s disposal. It was the Marylanders and Delaware men who had faced the 23rd at Long Island in 1776, or been part of Sullivan’s division thrown back at Brandywine in 1777. Hard fighting and hard living had tempered them into something quite impressive. One British officer, a prisoner of the Americans in Pennsylvania, watched one of the Maryland brigades marching by shortly after it set off and recorded, ‘They were 450 strong, had good clothing, were well armed, and showed more of the military in their appearance than I had ever conceived American troops had yet obtained.’

Some of the journey down south had been done by ship, but most of it by foot-slogging through baking Virginia and North Carolina’s backcountry. Serjeant Major Seymour meticulously noted the marches in his journal: 843 miles to Rugeley’s Mill. Towards the end, problems started.

As the Continental troops joined with Virginia men and thousands of militia from the Carolinas, food had run out. Gates blamed the local militia for ‘devouring’ the little fat of the land and admonished their commander, telling him, ‘This is a mode of conducting war I am a stranger to — the whole should support and sustain the whole, or the parts will soon go to decay.’ Gates sent off to Virginia, pleading for supplies, setting his sights also on the British magazines at Camden.

Cast in the role of pillagers of meagre Carolinian farms, the American soldiers returned hostile stares from the locals and convinced themselves there were loyalists everywhere. During the first two weeks of August the official ration had amounted to just half a pound of beef per man, ‘and that so miserable poor’, wrote the Delaware serjeant major, ‘that scarce any mortal could make use of it. Living chiefly on green apples and peaches which rendered our situation truly miserable, being in a weak and sickly condition and surrounded on all sides by our enemies the Tories.’

This bad atmosphere helped starve Gates of information as well as rations. Even early in August, his picture of British dispositions was hopelessly wrong, believing that Cornwallis had left the state and forces at Camden were being run down.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.