55. The Emergence of Guerrilla Warfare in South Carolina

Clinton had no qualms about his June departure north. Georgia and South Carolina were pacified and that was that. North Carolina would be no problem either: Cornwallis could make a quick thrust into that state, and the British presence, heightened by the return of North Carolina’s royal governor Josiah Martin, would inspire and activate the Tories. And so that state would be quickly pacified. From there, the British would move up to the Chesapeake, both British armies would unite in Virginia, and then go on to subdue the middle colonies. No qualms were felt about the hostile personal relations between Cornwallis and Clinton, nor about Clinton’s failure the previous May to mount an invasion of Virginia simultaneously with the attack on Charleston—a failure caused by the activities of the French fleet. Instead, Clinton confidently set sail for New York on June 8.

Several factors, however, now began to change the military picture in the lower South. A French fleet again prevented the British seaborne invasion of Virginia off the Chesapeake; a severe shortage of supplies forced Cornwallis to postpone his march into North Carolina; and the southern Indians failed to take their expected part in the southern campaign. For one thing, the death of John Stuart, the esteemed British Indian agent in the South, deprived the British of much influence over the Indians. The Spanish entrance into the war also gave the Indians more tasks to perform, and a smallpox epidemic blighted the fighting spirit of the Cherokee. Most important, however, was the emergence in South Carolina of that form of warfare most suited to the conditions of revolutionary war: guerrilla warfare. In this case, small but compact and highly mobile partisan bands of rebels organized to harass and trouble the British. The three most noted guerrilla leaders were Andrew Pickens, Thomas Sumter, and the aptly named “Swamp Fox,” Francis Marion, all officers of the South Carolina militia.

Several engagements between units of rebel and Tory militia were soon fought in the northern back country of South Carolina. A party of Tories was defeated by rebels at Fishing Creek, and Col. William Bratton defeated a detachment of Tories near Winnsboro on May 29. To crush the pesky rebel bands, Col. George Turnbull, in charge of the substantial British camp at Rocky Mount, sent out Capt. Christian Houk and his Tory militia to plunder and destroy in the back country and to crush the rebel partisans. Camping northwest of Williamson’s plantation, 400 of Houk’s militia were attacked in a withering surprise thrust by 260 rebel militia under Colonel Bratton. Bratton was able to attack Houk on two sides, and to fire at the defenders from behind fences. The result was the killing of Houk and the crushing of his forces, which suffered almost 90 casualties while the rebels lost only one man. This victory had been achieved by a truly democratic people’s army in which every action was decided upon by a vote of all the militia.

Sumter, too rash and too willing to engage in open confrontation to be a first-rate guerrilla fighter, felt emboldened enough by the victory at Williamson’s plantation to launch a direct attack on Rocky Mount itself. Gathering perhaps 600 militia at Mecklenburg, North Carolina, near the South Carolina border, he struck directly at the well-fortified British post on July 30; several assaults failed, however, and he wisely withdrew before losses should become too heavy.

It should be noted that the roundup of Tory support in the Cheraw district was so spotty that Lord Rawdon was forced to evacuate that post, and that a Tory battalion under Col. John Lisle carrying Rawdon’s sick men defected to Sumter en masse, with the sick becoming prisoners of the Americans.

The climactic battle in this series of skirmishes came on August 8 at Hanging Rock. Here Maj. John Carden held a strong position with 500 Tories. Sumter, with 800 South Carolina militia, decided to attack. A comedy of errors brought all of Sumter’s men to attack the British left flank, and to good advantage. When Carden tried to outflank the Americans on his left, the rebel militia swiftly opened up a withering fire from behind trees; the British were completely routed, and the American militia plundered and looted, heedless of the remainder of the enemy. This general carelessness finally forced Sumter to withdraw, but he had achieved a notable victory, inflicting over 200 casualties upon the 500 defending Tories.

All in all, during July and early August, no fewer than twelve battles were fought between Tory and rebel bands in the Carolina back country, and a string of rebel victories made the British position highly precarious in the interior. These American victories took place in frays between modest-sized forces, but they were a portent of a rising threat of rebel militia in the northern back country as well as a slip in the effectiveness of the British occupation.

While the British-led Tories were suffering these reverses, Toryism in the North Carolina back country received a severe setback. Restlessly failing to wait for Cornwallis’ march, Col. John Moore of Ramsour’s Mill, near the South Carolina border, gathered a formidable force of 1,300 Tories to join British forces in Camden. Nearby, Col. Francis Locke assembled 400 patriot militia and launched an attack upon Moore. Although lacking central command, each officer acting on his own as representative of his men, the numerically inferior American force managed to attack the Tories front and rear on June 20. A fierce hand-to-hand combat completely routed and scattered the Tories, even though American losses were proportionately higher. Once again, Toryism was crushed in back-country North Carolina before the British could arrive; and only thirty men reached Camden. This rout of North Carolina Tories was to deprive Cornwallis of a great deal of effective Tory support in that state.

All in all, the British attempt to rely on the raising of Tory troops in South Carolina proved not very successful. It is true that effective Tory militia units were organized in the strong Tory areas of Orangeburg and the Little Pee Dee River in the interior regions closer to the coast. And at Charleston, Cornwallis was able to form eleven Tory companies totalling 400 men for garrison duty. But in the Camden and Cheraw areas, the results were disappointing, and attempts to form two provincial battalions of South Carolina Tories were abject failures. Some of the obstacles to Tory recruitment were simple supply problems; there was a scarcity of both small arms for militiamen and horses for mobile cavalry to check rebel guerrilla raids on back-country Tories. More important in the failure was a shortage of qualified Tory officers; the great bulk of back-country officer material either had become rebels or had fled the state.

Above all these problems, however, stood the alienation of public opinion, generated by the widespread plundering and atrocities committed against the civilian population by the vengeful Tory troops, particularly those under Tarleton. This revolutionary war was, to an extent undreamed of by the British, a people’s war in which public opinion provided the indispensable groundwork for a committed revolutionary effort. This and their careless assumption that the South Carolina back country was staunchly Tory ignored the dynamics of the situation. These people had been largely indifferent to the Revolution, or their support had been lukewarm, and they therefore needed to be wooed by the British. Instead they suffered plundering and the exigencies of martial law. British and Tory actions thereby pushed these men of the back country into ardent support of the Revolution during the critical summer of 1780. As Smith concludes:

British officials no more comprehended the situation that confronted them in the South than they understood the extent of revolutionary sentiment in America. They failed to see that a permanent restoration of law and order in South Carolina rested not on the strength of the Loyalists, as they had originally calculated, but on pacification of the revolutionists.... Peace in the South depended upon reconciling rebels to British authority and upon rapidly organizing Loyalists to quell any minor rebel resurgence. Any major revulsion against British control was not anticipated.*

The successful rise of rebel militia bands in the back country of the Carolinas, and even in Georgia, led Cornwallis to complain on August 6 that all of upper South Carolina was in “an absolute state of rebellion, every friend of Government has been carried off, and his plantation destroyed.” All this only confirmed him in his belief that he must soon invade North Carolina, and with his main force reduce the back country of the Carolinas to British control. This belief was reinforced by the news that a new Continental American Army was moving southward, news that inspired and emboldened the rebels and disheartened the Tories of the back country. Only a successful Cornwallis presence in North Carolina, the checking of the new American army, and the reduction of the Carolinas could save the interior of all the southern states for the British. Cornwallis determined to take his main force to Camden preparatory to moving north, leaving detachments particularly at Charleston, Augusta, and Ninety-Six. On August 10, he left Charleston for Camden.

* Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats, p. 141.