Fusiliers (43 page)
On 17 March, Hill therefore conducted a swift and novel form of triage, deciding who could be moved and who could not. As regards the 23rd, there were fifty-five wounded to be considered. Quite a few, who had been patched up quickly and had their wounds staunched, were already regaining their strength. Others were more seriously afflicted.
Thomas Parks, a private from Birmingham, had been hit in the head by an enemy ball. He was, however, conscious, and, once bandaged, started to recover, so he was selected to march. Robert Butler, shot through the knee, evidently could not walk. Hill in any event wanted more time to observe the case; he would stay, and the surgeon amputated the private’s leg on 24 March. With Jones, Murphy and Yewell, there was a similar problem, leg wounds, so they would stay at New Garden. Some of the men, like Shakle and Deacon, had abdominal wounds, something considered very dangerous. In Deacon’s case, Hill’s examination revealed the passage of a bullet through the ileum. Both stayed put, Shakle dying and Deacon, against the odds, pulling through.
The surgeon selected sixty-four serious cases to be left at New Garden Meeting House. Ten were from the 23rd Fusiliers, but the
Guards, unsurprisingly, predominated with twenty-eight patients.
On 18 March the army set off, moving twelve miles, as it headed south. Cornwallis initially took them to Cross Creek, a journey of nearly two weeks. As the crow flies, it was eighty miles, but it proved difficult, with the army having to build its own bridge to cross one major river. The general had hoped to find friends and supplies at Cross Creek, for the settlement had a largely loyalist population of immigrant Scots who had revolted against Congress earlier in the war. These hopes were dashed, though, with the redcoats finding that some stores left in Cross Creek for them had already been destroyed by their enemies. Most local people did not wish to come out in active support. Cornwallis had also entertained hopes, prior to arriving, that he might supply his army by boats on the Cape Fear River, which wound a hundred miles down to the port of Wilmington, in British hands. However he was told in Cross Creek that the inhabitants along much of that waterway were hostile and would attempt to stop such shipments.
All of these disappointments caused Cornwallis to decide to march to Wilmington itself, a momentous resolution as going to the coast meant abandoning the idea of returning overland towards Camden in South Carolina. Once Greene decided not to follow the British to Wilmington but to head instead into the piedmont, to attack the bases from which Cornwallis had launched his assault on North Carolina, it became clear that all of the British gains there since Camden were being given up.
It was therefore a morose British general who ordered his men to resume their march south, towards the sea, on 1 April, because he knew he had failed in his attempt to protect royal gains in South Carolina by invading the north state. This setback would also give ammunition to his critics, most obviously General Henry Clinton, the commander-in-chief at New York. The gloom deepened on 2 April when Webster, who had been taken along on a wagon, finally died of his Guilford wounds after suffering dreadful agonies.
Cornwallis wrote to Lieutenant Colonel Balfour in Charleston, appealing for supplies and explaining his decision to abandon Cross Creek: ‘the army was barefooted and in the utmost want of necessaries of every kind, and I was embarrassed with about 400 sick and wounded. These considerations made me determine to march down to Wilmington. Now, my dear Balfour, send me with all possible despatch shoes and necessaries of all kinds.’
On 5 April, the army found some boats on the Cape Fear River that had been sent up from Wilmington with barrels of food and drink. It was the first time since 28 January that Cornwallis’s men had been fed by the government, as opposed to their own foraging, living off the land. One week later, they arrived at the port itself.
At Wilmington Cornwallis faced more choices: to go north to Virginia, uniting with an expedition there under Major General Phillips, or to return to South Carolina? And once he resolved that dilemma, another presented itself; to go overland or sail? ‘I am quite tired of marching about the country in search of adventures,’ Cornwallis wrote to Phillips. He knew that Greene would get to Camden and other inland settlements to the south before his own army could be extracted from Wilmington, making its way back up there. Instinctively, the earl knew that his ideas of making war, far inland, would have to yield to those of General Clinton and Lord Germain, both of whom had been pushing for months to concentrate on campaigning in Virginia, but to do so with raids and expeditions aimed at destroying the enemy economy. ‘If our plan is to be defensive, mixed with desultory expeditions,’ a weary but unbowed Cornwallis reflected to Phillips, ‘let us quit the Carolinas … and stick to our salt pork at New York, sending now and then a detachment to steal tobacco etc.’
While Balfour tried to anticipate the army’s needs for a return to South Carolina, sending a supply ship to rendezvous with Cornwallis on the coastal route back, the earl’s mind was already elsewhere. Inwardly, he had ‘quit the Carolinas’. He would go the way he knew best, forward, overland to Phillips. Cornwallis rationalised that heading up to Virginia contained its own risks – ‘the attempt is exceedingly hazardous’ – but when had that sort of thing worried him? The general would leave Lord Rawdon and Nisbet Balfour to manage the unmanageable in South Carolina and he would take his men to Virginia.
Nathaniel Greene wasted little time moving towards Camden. There was another American army in Virginia to deal with British forces there. The campaign in North Carolina had ground down Earl Cornwallis’s army; it entered that state with 2,774 men at the start of February but ended the campaign at Wilmington two and a half months later with 870 fewer soldiers. These men were very hard for the British to replace, so General Clinton would bear a grudge about it. The Fusiliers and other members of that army, by contrast, were
sanguine about the loss, rationalising that their general was at least a fighting man, unlike most of those serving in America, and that they had achieved prodigies under him.
The Americans, though, could suffer one reverse after another, shrugging off their losses of manpower by obtaining new levies or raising militia. Greene had campaigned judiciously, for he was a highly intelligent man, delaying a general action until it absolutely suited him. Admirers penned many a panegyric to Greene’s abilities, but he summed up best what had just happened. ‘Here has been the field for the exercise of genius,’ Greene wrote three days after the battle of Guilford Courthouse, ‘and an opportunity to practise the great and little arts of war. Fortunately we have blundered through without meeting any capital misfortune.’
A strategy of trying to pacify South Carolina in its entirety had produced the 23rd’s marches to Camden, the Dan and Guilford. Cornwallis had refused to wait passively as sickness sapped his army, partisan bands multiplied and the Continental Army marched down to try and recover that province. ‘Consolidation’ of South Carolina would almost certainly have failed too, but Cornwallis’s forward strategy had brought matters to a head more quickly. The appearance of French fleets, and uniting of a large force of Continentals under Washington was about to produce a new crisis for the British. Once more the 23rd were destined to be in the thick of it.
TWENTY
Or How Balfour and his Regiment Endured Adversity
For Nisbet Balfour, sitting at headquarters in King Street, Charleston, in April 1781, each day brought some unwelcome revelation. While maintaining to superiors that his Lordship’s action at Guilford was a signal victory, the 23rd’s commanding officer understood soon enough both that the heavy losses rendered the army unable to continue its campaign in North Carolina and that Greene would soon move into South Carolina. While Cornwallis stopped at Wilmington, he and Balfour were able to exchange some letters.
The commandant of Charleston, facing rebel insurrection in every corner of the province as well as the imminent arrival of Greene’s Continentals, still hoped that Cornwallis would come back to help him. Preparations were set in train to supply the earl on the coastal route from Wilmington to Charleston. Balfour’s sense of complicity with the general was such that he told Cornwallis he had only reported the state of affairs in South Carolina to General Clinton, their mutual bugbear in New York, in ‘a guarded, cautious, manner’.
Even before news of Guilford, Balfour had been feeling powerless in the face of growing revolt and its tactics. The lieutenant colonel told one friend, ‘Universal disaffection must moulder us away, when joined to the millions of advantages those people have over us.’ In particular, he felt there was no answer to the increasingly brutal methods being used by the king’s enemies to extinguish British power in the countryside.
During the first part of April, Captain Haring, for example, had led some rebel parties into Dorchester on a killing spree. This town was
only 40 miles to the north-west of Charleston, but the Tory irregulars there did not prove equal to the enemy challenge, as Balfour explained to Cornwallis: ‘They have adopted the system of murdering every militia officer of ours, as well as every man (although unarmed) who is known to be a loyalist. The terror this mode of conduct has struck, you will easily suppose.’
Colonel Marion, the Swamp Fox, was operating close to Monk’s Corner, a similar distance from Charleston, and he too used gruesome methods, including impaling the severed heads of suspected spies on stakes. It might have been supposed that these excesses were restricted to some wayward characters in out of the way places, but this was not the case, for when Greene began his advance into the province, the main army too began executing many loyalists.
While Cornwallis was gathering strength at faraway Wilmington, Greene had moved on Camden in the middle of April 1781. Lord Rawdon, who commanded a garrison of provincials and regulars there, decided to confront the invasion close to the site of Cornwallis’s victory over Gates the previous August. On 25 April, Rawdon fought and defeated Greene at Hobkirk’s Hill, checking his progress for just long enough to evacuate Camden, removing or destroying the magazines there. Greene pressed on to snuff out several minor posts in May. The farthest-flung loyalist settlement, Ninety Six, continued to hold out against the odds; its refusal to surrender to besieging forces probably owed much to their expectation of what they might receive from their captors.
Serjeant Major Seymour of the Delawares kept writing his journal, recording a vivid impression of the progress of Greene’s army through the backcountry. On 17 May, ‘were executed five of our deserters’; two days later, ‘executed three more of our deserters who were taken in the late Fort’; on 21 May, ‘took and killed about 12 Tories’, and the next day, ‘took and killed about eleven of the Tories within encampment’. The order of events – ‘took’ then ‘killed’ – leaves little doubt these were summary executions.
Balfour was deeply angered by reports of these killings. He felt he had to do something for the sake of maintaining morale among the King’s troops. In May, following reports of brutality towards prisoners by Marion, Balfour ordered more than 130 American militia to be put on board prison ships as ‘hostages’, in case of further abuses. Balfour’s temper sometimes overwhelmed his common sense for this was an
arbitrary step that produced howls of outrage from the officers concerned, seconded by Nathaniel Greene himself.
The confinement of these unfortunate men was not in any case of long duration, for in June 1781 there was a general exchange of prisoners that finally allowed those Continentals who had survived the siege of Charleston and one year aboard the hulks to be released; 740 men marched away that month. Of the others, 530 had already escaped their captivity by enlisting with loyalist regiments, and something like 800 had died of various illnesses while prisoners. An American surgeon sent to care for the men aboard the ships in Charleston harbour had reported that ‘these vessels were in general infected with small pox’, and that this sickness had been complicated by dysentery and putrid fevers, thus carrying off many men. These deaths undoubtedly stained Britain’s reputation, poisoning the opinion of many in Charleston. It mattered little in the war for opinion in the Carolinas that Balfour generally tried to help the doctors to stamp out disease, the prisoners received the same rations as British troops, and the death rate, though shockingly high, was comparable to that of some regiments on Caribbean service.
While Balfour tried to deal with the enemy to his front, he was also to discover, during those difficult months of April to June 1781, the risks of being stabbed in the back. When a convoy of supply ships had arrived in Charleston in April, they had been swiftly unloaded, with some sent on to New York and others straight back to Europe. General Clinton, who faced shortages of transports that hampered his operations elsewhere, was livid. The commander-in-chief had long been hoping to catch out Balfour. Clinton started firing off letters about his grievances against the commanding officer of the 23rd and commandant of Charleston. Not only had the ships been stupidly sent back to Europe when they were needed in American waters, but Balfour had used defeatist language to Lord Rawdon about the state of the rebellion in South Carolina, and had done nothing to repair Charleston’s defences as Greene marched into the province.