Life and Times of Washington, Volume 2 / Revised, Enlarged, and Enriched

by John Frederick Schroeder; Benson John Lossing

This proclamation was unjust and impolitic. Proceeding on the supposition that the people of those provinces were subdued rebels, restored by an act of clemency to the privileges and duties of citizens, and forgetting that for upward of four years they had been exercising an independent authority, and that the issue of the war only could stamp on them the character of patriots or rebels. It might easily have been foreseen that the proclamation was to awaken the resentment and alienate the affections of those to whom it was addressed. Many of the Colonists had submitted in the fond hope of being released, under the shelter of the British government, from that harassing service to which they had lately been exposed, and of being allowed to attend to their own affairs in a state of peaceful tranquility; but the proclamation dissipated this delusion and opened their eyes to their real situation. Neutrality and peace were what they desired, but neutrality and peace were denied them. If they did not range themselves under the standards of Congress, they must, as British subjects, appear as militia in the royal service. The people sighed for peace, but, on finding that they must fight on one side or the other, they preferred the banners of their country and thought they had as good a right to violate the allegiance and parole which Clinton had imposed on them as he had to change their state from that of prisoners to that of British subjects without their consent. They imagined that the proclamation released them from all antecedent obligations. Not a few, without any pretense of reasoning on the subject, deliberately resolved to act a deceitful part and to make professions of submission and allegiance to the British government so long as they found it convenient, but with the resolution of joining the standards of their country on the first opportunity. Such duplicity and falsehood ought always to be reprobated, but the unsparing rapacity with which the inhabitants were plundered made many of them imagine that no means of deception and vengeance were unjustifiable.

Hitherto the French fleets and troops had not afforded much direct assistance to the Americans, but they had impeded and embarrassed the operations of the British Commander-in-Chief. He had intended to sail against Charleston so early as the month of September, 1779, but the unexpected appearance of Count D'Estaing on the southern coast had detained him at New York till the latter part of December. It was his intention, after the reduction of Charleston, vigorously to employ the whole of his force in the subjugation of the adjacent provinces, but information, received about the time of the surrender of the town, that Monsieur de Ternay, with a fleet and troops from France, was expected on the American coast, deranged his plan and induced him to return to New York with the greater part of his army, leaving Cornwallis at the head of 4,000 men to prosecute the southern conquests. Clinton sailed from Charleston on the 5th of June.

After the reduction of Charleston and the entire defeat of all the American detachments in those parts, an unusual calm ensued for six weeks. Imagining that South Carolina and Georgia were reannexed to the British empire in sentiment as well as in appearance, Cornwallis now meditated an attack on North Carolina. Impatient, however, as he was of repose, he could not carry his purpose into immediate execution. The great heat, the want of magazines, and the impossibility of subsisting his army in the field before harvest, compelled him to pause. But the interval was not lost. He distributed his troops in such a manner in South Carolina and the upper parts of Georgia as seemed most favorable to the enlistment of young men who could be prevailed on to join the royal standard; he ordered companies of royal militia to be formed; and he maintained a correspondence with such of the inhabitants of North Carolina as were friendly to the British cause. He informed them of the necessity he was under of postponing the expedition into their country, and advised them to attend to their harvest and to remain quiet till the royal army advanced to support them. Eager, however, to manifest their zeal and entertaining sanguine hopes of success, certain Tories disregarded his salutary advice and broke out into premature insurrections, which were vigorously resisted and generally suppressed by the patriots, who were the more numerous and determined party. But one band of Tories, amounting to 800 men, under a Colonel Bryan, marched down the Yadkin to a British post at the Cheraws and afterward reached Camden.

The people of North Carolina were likely to prove much more intractable than those of South Carolina and Georgia. They were chiefly descendants of Scotch-Irish settlers—stern Presbyterians and ardent lovers of liberty. When Tryon was their governor, they had resisted his tyranny under the name of Regulators, and at Mecklenburg had published a declaration of independence more than a year before Congress took the same attitude of defiance. Such were the North Carolinians; and their State was destined to be the scene of many battles in which the power of Britain was bravely resisted.

Having made the necessary dispositions Cornwallis entrusted the command on the frontier to Lord Rawdon and returned to Charleston in order to organize the civil government of the province and to establish such regulations as circumstances required. But Cornwallis showed himself more a soldier than a politician, and more a tyrant than either. Instead of endeavoring to regain, by kindness and conciliation, the good will of a people whose affections were alienated from the cause in which he was engaged, Cornwallis attempted to drive them into allegiance by harshness and severity. Indeed, many of the British officers viewed the Americans merely in the light of rebels and traitors, whose lives it was indulgence to spare; treated them not only with injustice, but with insolence and insult more intolerable than injustice itself; and exercised a rigor which greatly increases the miseries without promoting the legitimate purposes of war.

By the capitulation of Charleston, the citizens were prisoners on parole, but successive proclamations were published, each abridging the privileges of prisoners more than that which had gone before. A board of police was established for the administration of justice, and before that board British subjects were allowed to sue for debts, but prisoners were denied that privilege; they were liable to prosecution for debts, but had no security for what was owing them, except the honor of their debtors, and that, in many instances, was found a feeble guarantee. If they complained they were threatened with close confinement; numbers were imprisoned in the town and others consigned to dungeons at a distance from their families. In short, every method, except that of kindness and conciliation, was resorted to in order to compel the people to become British subjects. A few, who had always been well affected to the royal cause, cheerfully returned to their allegiance, and many followed the same course from convenience. To abandon their families and estates and encounter all the privations of fugitives required a degree of patriotism and fortitude which few possessed.

In that melancholy posture of American affairs, many of the ladies of Charleston displayed a remarkable degree of zeal and intrepidity in the cause of their country. They gloried in the appellation of rebel ladies, and declined invitations to public entertainments given by the British officers, but crowded to prison ships and other places of confinement to solace their suffering countrymen. While they kept back from the concerts and assemblies of the victors they were forward in showing sympathy and kindness toward American officers whenever they met them. They exhorted their brothers, husbands, and sons to an unshrinking endurance in behalf of their country, and cheerfully became the inmates of their prison and the companions of their exile—voluntarily renouncing affluence and ease and encountering labor, penury, and privation.

For some time the rigorous measures of the British officers in South Carolina seemed successful and a deathlike stillness prevailed in the province. The clangor of arms ceased and no enemy to British authority appeared. The people of the lower parts of South Carolina were generally attached to the revolution, but many of their most active leaders were prisoners. The fall of Charleston and the subsequent events had sunk many into despondency, and all were overawed. This gloomy stillness continued about six weeks when the symptoms of a gathering storm began to show themselves. The oppression and insults to which the people were exposed highly exasperated them; they repented the apathy with which they had seen the siege of Charleston carried on, and felt that the fall of their capital, instead of introducing safety and rural tranquility, as they had fondly anticipated, was only the forerunner of insolent exactions and oppressive services. Peaceful and undisturbed neutrality was what they desired and what they had expected; but when they found themselves compelled to fight, they chose to join the Provincial banners, and the most daring only waited an opportunity to show their hostility to their new masters.

Such an opportunity soon presented itself. In the end of March (1780) Washington dispatched the troops of Maryland and Delaware, with a regiment of artillery, under the Baron de Kalb, to reinforce the southern army. That detachment met with many obstructions in its progress southward. Such was the deranged state of the American finances that it could not be put in motion when the order was given. After setting out it marched through Jersey and Pennsylvania, embarked at the head of Elk river, was conveyed by water to Petersburgh in Virginia, and proceeded thence towards the place of its destination. But as no magazines had been provided, and as provisions could with difficulty be obtained, the march of the detachment through North Carolina was greatly retarded. Instead of advancing rapidly, the troops were obliged to spread themselves over the country in small parties, in order to collect corn and to get it ground for their daily subsistence. In this way they proceeded slowly through the upper and more fertile parts of North Carolina to Hillsborough, and were preparing to march by Cross creek to Salisbury, where they expected to be joined by the militia of North Carolina.

The approach of this detachment, together with information that great exertions were making to raise troops in Virginia, encouraged the irritation which the rigorous measures of the British officers had occasioned in South Carolina; and numbers of the inhabitants of that State, who had fled from their homes and taken refuge in North Carolina and Virginia, informed of the growing discontents in their native State, and relying on the support of regular troops, assembled on the frontier of North Carolina.