Short, disciplined to the life of a soldier, yet plain and gentle in manner, Francis Marion (the figure at left) was equally brilliant as an officer of regulars and a partisan leader of militia. To the British he was as elusive as a fox, marching his brigade at night, rarely sleeping twice in the same camp, and vanishing into the swamps when opposed by a larger force.
A few days later, these men met Thomas Sumter, a former colonel in the South Carolina Continentals. He had fled to western South Carolina after the British burned his plantation. The holdouts asked him his opinion of the situation. “Our interests are the same. With me it is liberty or death,” he said. They elected him their general and went to war.
Elsewhere in South Carolina, other men coalesced around another former Continental officer, Francis Marion. Still others followed Elijah Clarke, who operated along the border between South Carolina and Georgia. These partisans, seldom numbering more than 500 men and often as few as 50, struck at British outposts and supply routes and attacked groups of loyalists whom the British were arming and trying to organize into militia regiments. The British and loyalists grew exasperated. After the battle of Camden, Lord Cornwallis declared that anyone who signed a British parole and then switched sides would be hanged without a trial if captured. If a man refused to serve in the loyalist militia, he would be imprisoned and his property confiscated. At a convention of loyalist militia regiments on August 23, 1780, the members resolved that these orders should be ruthlessly applied. They added one other recommendation. Anyone who refused to serve in the king’s militia should be drafted into the British regulars, where he would be forced to fight whether he liked it or not.
For the rest of 1780, a savage seesaw war raged along the Carolina frontier. Between engagements both sides exacted retaliation on prisoners and noncombatants. Elijah Clarke besieged Augusta with a mixed band of South Carolinians and Georgians. Forced to retreat by British reinforcements, he left about two dozen badly wounded men behind. The loyalist commander of Augusta, Thomas Browne, wounded in the siege, hanged 13 of them in the stairwell of his house, where he could watch them die from his bed. A rebel named Reed was visiting a neighbor’s house when the landlady saw two loyalists approaching. She advised Reed to flee. Reed replied that they were old friends; he had known them all his life. He went outside to shake hands. The loyalists shot him dead. Reed’s aged mother rode to a rebel camp in North Carolina and displayed her son’s bloody pocketbook. The commander of the camp asked for volunteers. Twenty-five men mounted their horses, found the murderers, and executed them.
In this sanguinary warfare, the rebels knew the side roads and forest tracks. They were expert, like Marion’s men, at retreating into swamps. But the British also had some advantages. The rebels could do little to prevent retaliation against their homes and property. If a man went into hiding when the British or loyalists summoned him to fight in their militia, all his corn and livestock were liable to seizure, and his house might even be burned, leaving his wife and children destitute. This bitter and discouraging truth became more and more apparent as the year 1780 waned. Without a Continental army to back them up, Sumter and the other partisan leaders found it difficult to persuade men to fight.
Not even the greatest militia victory of the war, the destruction of a loyalist army of over a thousand men at Kings Mountain in October 1780, significantly altered the situation. Although loyalist support declined, the British army was untouched by this triumph. Moreover, many of the militiamen in the rebel army had come from remote valleys deep in the Appalachians, and they went home immediately, as militiamen were inclined to do. The men of western South Carolina were left with the British regulars still dominating four-fifths of the State, still ready to exact harsh retaliation against those who persisted in the rebellion.
Elijah Clarke, a colonel of Georgia militia, fought at a number of important actions in the civil war along the Southern frontier in 1780-81.
George Washington understood the problem. In an earlier campaign in the north, when the New Jersey militia failed to turn out, he had said that the people needed “an Army to look the Enemy in the Face.” To replace the disgraced Horatio Gates, he appointed Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island as the commander of the Southern army. A 38-year-old Quaker who walked with a slight limp, Greene had become Washington’s right-hand man in five years of war in the north. On December 2 he arrived in Charlotte, N.C., where Horatio Gates was trying to reorganize the remnants of the army shattered at Camden. Neither the numbers nor the appearance of the men were encouraging. There were 2,046 soldiers present and fit for duty. Of these, only 1,173 were Continentals. The rest were militia. Worse, as Greene told his friend the Marquis de Lafayette, if he counted as fit for duty only those soldiers who were properly clothed and equipped, he had fewer than 800 men and provisions for only three days in camp. There was scarcely a horse or a wagon in the army and not a dollar of hard money in the military chest.
Among Greene’s few encouraging discoveries in the army’s camp at Charlotte was the news that Daniel Morgan had returned to the war and at that very moment was within 16 miles of the British base at Camden with a battalion of light infantry and what was left of the American cavalry under Lt. Col. William Washington. Angered by Congress’s failure to promote him, Morgan had resigned his colonel’s commission in 1779. The disaster at Camden and the threat of England’s new southern strategy had persuaded him to forget his personal grievance. Congress had responded by making him a brigadier general.