At Charleston the American General Lincoln was in command with about six thousand men.The place, named after King Charles II, had been a center of British influence before the war.That critical traveler, Lord Adam Gordon, thought its people clever in business, courteous, and hospitable.Most of them, he says, made a visit to England at some time during life and it was the fashion to send there the children to be educated.Obviously Charleston was fitted to be a British rallying center in the South; yet it had remained in American hands since the opening of the war.In 1776 Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander, had woefully failed in his assault on Charleston.Now in December, 1779, he sailed from New York to make a renewed effort.With him were three of his best officer--Cornwallis, Simcoe, and Tarleton, the last two skillful leaders of irregulars, recruited in America and used chiefly for raids.The wintry voyage was rough; one of the vessels laden with cannon foundered and sank, and all the horses died.But Clinton reached Charleston and was able to surround it on the landward side with an army at least ten thousand strong.Tarleton's irregulars rode through the country.
It is on record that he marched sixty-four miles in twenty-three hours and a hundred and five miles in fifty-four hours.Such mobility was irresistible.On the 12th of April, after a ride of thirty miles, Tarleton surprised, in the night, three regiments of American cavalry regulars at a place called Biggin's Bridge, routed them completely and, according to his own account, with the loss of three men wounded, carried off a hundred prisoners, four hundred horses, and also stores and ammunition.There is no doubt that Tarleton's dragoons behaved with great brutality and it would perhaps have taught a needed lesson if, as was indeed threatened by a British officer, Major Ferguson, a few of them had been shot on the spot for these outrages.Tarleton's dashing attacks isolated Charleston and there was nothing for Lincoln to do but to surrender.This he did on the 12th of May.Burgoyne seemed to have been avenged.The most important city in the South had fallen."We look on America as at our feet," wrote Horace Walpole.The British advanced boldly into the interior.On the 29th of May Tarleton attacked an American force under Colonel Buford, killed over a hundred men, carried off two hundred prisoners, and had only twenty-one casualties.It is such scenes that reveal the true character of the war in the South.Above all it was a war of hard riding, often in the night, of sudden attack, and terrible bloodshed.
After the fall of Charleston only a few American irregulars were to be found in South Carolina.It and Georgia seemed safe in British control.With British successes came the problem of governing the South.On the royalist theory, the recovered land had been in a state of rebellion and was now restored to its true allegiance.Every one who had taken up arms against the King was guilty of treason with death as the penalty.Clinton had no intention of applying this hard theory, but he was returning to New York and he had to establish a government on some legal basis.During the first years of the war, Loyalists who would not accept the new order had been punished with great severity.Their day had now come.Clinton said that "every good man" must be ready to join in arms the King's troops in order "to reestablish peace and good government." "Wicked and desperate men" who still opposed the King should be punished with rigor and have their property confiscated.He offered pardon for past offenses, except to those who had taken part in killing Loyalists "under the mock forms of justice." No one was henceforth to be exempted from the active duty of supporting the King's authority.
Clinton's proclamation was very disturbing to the large element in South Carolina which did not desire to fight on either side.
Every one must now be for or against the King, and many were in their secret hearts resolved to be against him.There followed an orgy of bloodshed which discredits human nature.The patriots fled to the mountains rather than yield and, in their turn, waylaid and murdered straggling Loyalists.Under pressure some republicans would give outward compliance to royal government, but they could not be coerced into a real loyalty.It required only a reverse to the King's forces to make them again actively hostile.To meet the difficult situation Congress now made a disastrous blunder.On June 13, 1780, General Gates, the belauded victor at Saratoga, was given the command in the South.
Camden, on the Wateree River, lies inland from Charleston about a hundred and twenty-five miles as the crow flies.The British had occupied it soon after the fall of Charleston, and it was now held by a small force under Lord Rawdon, one of the ablest of the British commanders.Gates had superior numbers and could probably have taken Camden by a rapid movement; but the man had no real stomach for fighting.He delayed until, on the 14th of August, Cornwallis arrived at Camden with reinforcements and with the fixed resolve to attack Gates before Gates attacked him.On the early morning of the 16th of August, Cornwallis with two thousand men marching northward between swamps on both flanks, met Gates with three thousand marching southward, each of them intending to surprise the other.A fierce struggle followed.Gates was completely routed with a thousand casualties, a thousand prisoners, and the loss of nearly the whole of his guns and transport.The fleeing army was pursued for twenty miles by the relentless Tarleton.General Kalb, who had done much to organize the American army, was killed.The enemies of Gates jeered at his riding away with the fugitives and hardly drawing rein until after four days he was at Hillsborough, two hundred miles away.
