In late 1778, under the new ruling from London which marked out the South as the main theater of war, British sails began to break the horizon off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. Down from New York came warships and transports, unloading British, Hessian, and Tory units under Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell at Tybee Island at the mouth of the Savannah River, some fifteen miles below the little Georgia metropolis of the same name.
Up the coast from British Florida labored another contingent commanded by General Augustine Prevost. A weak American force of less than 1,000, under General Robert Howe of North Carolina, maneuvered to get between the two bodies and their obvious objective, Savannah. Howe was brushed aside, his command badly scattered, and as 1779 came in, Sunbury and Augusta fell as well as Savannah, and all of Georgia was under British control.
Through spring and summer Prevost made no important moves into the Carolinas, contenting himself with consolidating his position, gathering supplies, strengthening the ruinous fortifications of Savannah, and striving to win Georgian allegiance to the Crown. In this last he was so successful, at least on the surface, that the state legislature actually met under the authority of the British government.
That same spring a small British expedition under Sir Henry Clinton sailed along the coast of the southern colonies in the hope of arousing the Loyalists against the newly established American governments in the Carolinas and Georgia. Reaching the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, Clinton learned that a Loyalist uprising had been smashed by the patriots at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge near Wilmington (Feb. 27, 1776). Then, continuing southward, Clinton's fleet bombarded the harbor fortifications at Charleston, S.C., perhaps seeking to establish a coastal base for local Loyalists. In any case, the expedition was beaten off (June 28, 1776), terminating important British activity in the South for over two years.
In the South, a region long neglected by Britain, the war reached its conclusion. Because of the British inability to prevail in the North, London's strategists gradually shifted their attention to the South, beginning in late 1778. They felt that section contained a higher percentage of Loyalists than any other part of America. Then, too, if choices had to be made after France's entry into the war had stretched British resources tissue thin, England preferred to save the South above all other areas. Its raw materials were the most valuable of all American commodities in the mother country's mercantile scheme.
Britain, as usual, opened a new theater of campaigning with a string of triumphs. In December 1778 small British expeditions from New York and Florida subdued Georgia. Fighting in 1779 was inconclusive along the Georgia-South Carolina border, and a combined Franco-American assault on British-held Savannah was beaten off. In February 1780 Britain greatly expanded its southern beachhead when Sir Henry Clinton arrived in South Carolina from New York with 8,700 additional troops. He soon laid siege to Charleston, where on May 12 American Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln surrendered the city and its more than 5,000 defenders. A second, hastily assembled American Southern army under Horatio Gates was crushed at Camden in upper South Carolina (Aug. 16, 1780) by Lord Cornwallis, whom Clinton had left in command when he returned to New York.
These English victories did not extinguish the flames of rebellion. Britain found pacification of the back country difficult. Rebel small-unit operations continued under such local, legendary guerrilla leaders as Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. And a body of patriot frontiersmen, mainly from the Watauga settlements in present-day eastern Tennessee, wiped out a 1,000-man contingent of Loyalist troops at King's Mountain on the border of the Carolinas (Oct. 7, 1780).
As the guerrillas tied down Cornwallis, still a third American army formed in the South under Major General Nathanael Greene, who then launched the most effective military campaign of the war. Greene's basic plan was to keep his numerically superior antagonist, Cornwallis, off balance by a series of rapid movements and by cooperating with the South Carolina guerrilla leaders. Greene audaciously divided his small army, sending Brigadier General Daniel Morgan into western South Carolina, where he destroyed Lt.Col.Banastre Tarleton's Tory Legion at Cowpens (Jan. 17, 1781). When Cornwallis pursued Morgan, Greene united his army, led Cornwallis on an exhausting chase into North Carolina, and finally fought him to a draw at Guilford Courthouse (Mar. 15, 1781). While the British general limped eastward and then northward to the Virginia coast, the resourceful Greene returned to South Carolina, and between April and July picked off, one by one, every British post save Charleston and Savannah, where the enemy remained isolated and impotent until peace came.
Cornwallis, meanwhile, was sealing his own fate in Virginia, where he united with a raiding expedition under Benedict Arnold (now in British service), already in that state, and erected a base at the port of Yorktown. Both his superior, Clinton, in New York and General Washington recognized that Cornwallis was vulnerable to a land-and-sea blockade on a Virginia peninsula. But Cornwallis refused to leave, arguing the doubtful proposition that Britain would have to capture Virginia in order to have lasting success in the lower South.
At this point, Franco-American army and naval operations, hitherto disappointing in their results, now determined the fate of Cornwallis. Adding to his forces the French troops of the Comte de Rochambeau in Rhode Island, Washington raced southward and opened siege operations before Yorktown on October 6, while a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse sealed off a sea escape. Clinton hastened a naval squadron from New York to the Chesapeake, but it was repulsed by de Grasse. After suffering through an intensive artillery bombardment, Cornwallis, on Oct. 19, 1781, surrendered his nearly 8,000 troops to the 17,000-man allied force.
The British failed in the South for several reasons, including an exaggerated estimate of Loyalist support, an inadequate program of pacification, and a failure to recognize the significance of sea power.
©Author: Don Higginbotham - Permission given by the author.
Picture Credit: Private collection.
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