May 12, 1780—Nearly 200 engagements were fought in South Carolina throughout the American Revolution, but the most disastrous for the patriots was surely the Siege of Charleston, a nearly six-week battle that ended with the largest loss of troops by the Continental Army through the entire conflict.
The numbers alone tell the appallingly one-sided loss suffered when Major General Benjamin Lincoln at last surrendered to British forces on this afternoon. While royal forces under Commander in Chief Henry Clinton counted 76 killed, 189 wounded and 70 missing or captured, the Americans suffered 92 killed, 148 wounded, and 4,650 missing and captured. At one stroke, virtually alll 5,000 American troops defending the fourth-largest—and most prosperous—American city were taken out of commission.
Unlike other battles then and now, the American defeat was less about a commander’s folly than a state government’s failure to recognize the danger it faced until it was too late. A well-regarded New England veteran of the Saratoga campaign, Lincoln had been appointed by George Washington to head the Continental Army’s Southern Department, now the prey of the major British effort in the war.
To no avail, Lincoln had urged the South Carolina Assembly to permit the enlistment of African-Americans, as well as to use militia to fill out Continental battalions. Nothing doing: Southern slaveowners were so intent on preserving their property that they refused to allow their slaves to build the fortifications necessary for defense of the city, and Governor John Rutledge did little to help either.
Clinton began moving slowly toward Charleston in February, and by the beginning of April was ready to tighten his chokehold on the city. Lincoln, having hoped that the Carolinians would spring to his army’s defense, found himself trapped. His response to a second Clinton demand for surrender—evacuation, if given 10 days to withdraw his troops—met the expected no not just from Clinton but from a city delegation who told him that if he tried this and left them to the tender mercies of the British, they would destroy his boats and open the city gates.
British forces knew well, if the South Carolina Assembly didn’t, how important this victory was. Hessian Captain Johann Hinrichs wrote in his diary: “It was the only fortified harbor of two provinces which, because of the quality of their products, could to some extent hold a balance against the French and Dutch imports….It is, lastly, a harbor which England can defend with a few ships against the strongest French force, since a sandbank which at high tide is seventeen to nineteen and three-quarters feet under water surrounds the entire inlet.”
For the next two years, under British occupation, South Carolinians would know the smell of fear, as a vicious war of vengeance and reprisals took place on both sides. Lincoln and a number of his officers would end up exchanged for British POWs, but others weren’t so lucky. Ann Hart told her husband that because of his patriot activities, she worried that she was “liable to Banishment…for actions not her own.”
What saved South Carolina in the end were the fissures already developing in the British high command. Clinton and second-in-command Lord Cornwallis had come to feel mutual disdain during the Charleston siege. As a result, Cornwallis ignored Clinton’s warnings about venturing into North Carolina. The following year, Clinton’s initial success would abruptly end as Cornwallis was continually harassed by the newly appointed American commander Nathaniel Greene and saw his forces ebbing in strength with each day.
The numbers alone tell the appallingly one-sided loss suffered when Major General Benjamin Lincoln at last surrendered to British forces on this afternoon. While royal forces under Commander in Chief Henry Clinton counted 76 killed, 189 wounded and 70 missing or captured, the Americans suffered 92 killed, 148 wounded, and 4,650 missing and captured. At one stroke, virtually alll 5,000 American troops defending the fourth-largest—and most prosperous—American city were taken out of commission.
Unlike other battles then and now, the American defeat was less about a commander’s folly than a state government’s failure to recognize the danger it faced until it was too late. A well-regarded New England veteran of the Saratoga campaign, Lincoln had been appointed by George Washington to head the Continental Army’s Southern Department, now the prey of the major British effort in the war.
To no avail, Lincoln had urged the South Carolina Assembly to permit the enlistment of African-Americans, as well as to use militia to fill out Continental battalions. Nothing doing: Southern slaveowners were so intent on preserving their property that they refused to allow their slaves to build the fortifications necessary for defense of the city, and Governor John Rutledge did little to help either.
Clinton began moving slowly toward Charleston in February, and by the beginning of April was ready to tighten his chokehold on the city. Lincoln, having hoped that the Carolinians would spring to his army’s defense, found himself trapped. His response to a second Clinton demand for surrender—evacuation, if given 10 days to withdraw his troops—met the expected no not just from Clinton but from a city delegation who told him that if he tried this and left them to the tender mercies of the British, they would destroy his boats and open the city gates.
British forces knew well, if the South Carolina Assembly didn’t, how important this victory was. Hessian Captain Johann Hinrichs wrote in his diary: “It was the only fortified harbor of two provinces which, because of the quality of their products, could to some extent hold a balance against the French and Dutch imports….It is, lastly, a harbor which England can defend with a few ships against the strongest French force, since a sandbank which at high tide is seventeen to nineteen and three-quarters feet under water surrounds the entire inlet.”
For the next two years, under British occupation, South Carolinians would know the smell of fear, as a vicious war of vengeance and reprisals took place on both sides. Lincoln and a number of his officers would end up exchanged for British POWs, but others weren’t so lucky. Ann Hart told her husband that because of his patriot activities, she worried that she was “liable to Banishment…for actions not her own.”
What saved South Carolina in the end were the fissures already developing in the British high command. Clinton and second-in-command Lord Cornwallis had come to feel mutual disdain during the Charleston siege. As a result, Cornwallis ignored Clinton’s warnings about venturing into North Carolina. The following year, Clinton’s initial success would abruptly end as Cornwallis was continually harassed by the newly appointed American commander Nathaniel Greene and saw his forces ebbing in strength with each day.
As for Lincoln, his day of ignominy would turn to triumph only a year and a half later, at Yorktown. During the surrender ceremony, Cornwallis, pleading illness, had attempted to have his second-in-command, General Charles O'Hara, surrender his sword not to George Washington but to the French general Rochambeau. The latter demurred. When O'Hara presented the sword to the American commander, Washington motioned for his second-in-command, General Lincoln, to accept, thereby reversing the disaster the latter had experienced at Charleston.
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