Liberty Is Sweet by Woody Holton

Author:Woody Holton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Even before driving Greene off, Rawdon had received instructions to leave Camden and march his army east to Monck’s Corner, just thirty miles north of Charles Town. During the battle, Greene captured several men who had fought on the American side and then deserted to the British. He hanged five of them, and when news of the executions reached the American deserters still with Rawdon, they refused to go out on patrols. The mutinous spirit spread through the Camden garrison, sealing Rawdon’s decision to evacuate. Heading east on May 10, the troops were accompanied by numerous Loyalists and as many as five hundred African Americans. Some had escaped from Whigs, while others remained the property of Loyalists—living reminders that Britain’s enlistment of rebels’ slaves was an alliance of convenience.57

The day after Rawdon abandoned Camden, Thomas Sumter captured the eighty-man British garrison at Orangeburg, whereupon other nearby posts “fell in quick succession.” Months earlier, British soldiers had driven Rebecca Brewton Motte from her mansion near the confluence of the Congaree and Wateree Rivers, turning it into “the principal depot of the convoys from Charleston to Cambden.” Lee and Marion laid siege to “fort Motte” on May 8 and set slaves to work digging approach trenches. On the fourth day of the siege, Motte “presented the besiegers with a quiver of African arrows” that they set ablaze and shot onto her roof, igniting it and forcing the nearly two hundred Loyalists inside to capitulate. (More than two hundred years later, a University of South Carolina archaeologist would dig up one of those arrows.)58

By the end of May 1781, the British had lost or left all of their posts in the Carolina backcountry except Ninety Six. London slave trader Richard Oswald was not surprised. When his friend and longtime trading partner Henry Laurens was captured at sea and imprisoned in the Tower of London, Oswald paid him a visit, and the two agreed that “these remote Inland Situations,” far beyond the reach of supply ships, placed British regulars and American militia on an “unequal footing.” As Laurens explained to Oswald, the militiamen could travel light by subsisting on parched corn boiled into “a Sort of Saloop or Jelly.” In other words, an essential ingredient in the Whig victory was that classic First Nations contribution to southern cuisine, grits.59

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