10:42 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 12, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

On the morning of May 11, 1781, an American colonel rode up to an abandoned house near "a large creek of still deep water" in the heart of South Carolina.

The house was serving as headquarters to America's Southern Army, and the colonel had been invited to breakfast there with the Army's commander, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene.

As he swung from his saddle outside the gate, Col. Guilford Dudley spied Greene standing in the front door.

Events of the past two weeks had not been kind to Greene and his Army; 16 days before they'd been driven off Hobkirk's Hill by advancing British troops, a battle that had cost Greene more than a quarter of his force of 950 men. The British force of the same size had lost a similar number -- but their field commander, Lord Francis Rawdon, had received reinforcements of another 500.

Another colonel who had visited Greene two nights previously recalled that the American general was dispirited, almost resigned to defeat. According to later writings by this colonel, William Davie, Greene spread a map on his table and said:

"Rawdon has now a decided superiority of force. He has pushed us to a sufficient distance to leave him free to act on any object within his reach."

Greene explained how Rawdon could beat him, adding: "We must always calculate on the maxim that Your enemy will do, what he ought to do. We will dispute every inch of ground in the best manner we can -- but Rawdon will push me back to the mountains, Lord Cornwallis will establish a chain of posts along the James River [in Virginia] and the Southern States, thus cut off will die like the Tail of a Snake.

But not all of the news coming into Greene's constantly shifting camps had been bad. Right after the Battle of Hobkirk's Hill he'd heard that Francis Marion and Light-Horse Henry Lee had teamed up to capture Fort Watson, a small fort that stood atop an Indian mound with a commanding view of the Santee River. The Santee was the supply route for the fortified outpost of Camden, where Rawdon kept his troops, and the Americans now controlled it.

When Dudley strolled through Greene's gate on that May morning he found the general in a jovial mood. He recalled:

"At first glance I thought I perceived in the general's countenance an expression of something of a pleasing and interesting nature, and so there was. With his accustomed politeness he stepped out of the door, his fine manly face wearing the smile of complacency and benevolence so natural to him, and met me at the yard gate."

Greene usually greeted his officers with a firm handshake, but this morning his grip was perfunctory and quick.

"Have you heard the news?" Greene said.

"No, sir, what news?"

"Rawdon evacuated Camden yesterday afternoon."

With his river supply line cut off and Greene's still formidable presence lurking in the region, Rawdon had abandonded Camden. Yet another British outpost had fallen. As Lee noted in his memoirs: "Thus in less than one month since he had appeared before Camden [at Hobkirk's Hill], he had compelled the British general to evacuate that important post, forced the submission of all the intermediate posts, and was now . . . in the heart of South Carolina, ready to advance" on the last backcountry outpost in that state.

Greene ordered all the militia and negroes in the region to march into Camden in order to destroy the works there. But there wasn't much left to destroy; Rawdon had burned the mill, the jail, the blacksmith's shop -- every building but Joseph Kershaw's mansion.

When Greene had turned south and left Cornwallis in North Carolina, he had predicted that if Cornwallis did not follow, the Americans would roll up the South Carolina outposts. Cornwallis had not followed, choosing instead to link up with the British forces then invading Virginia.

And so far Nathanael Greene's plan was working.

Siege of Ninety-Six

Nathanael Greene marched the main part of his army toward the biggest British outpost in South Carolina, a frontier town called Ninety-Six. The source of its name is a mystery; the best guess is that Charleston traders believed the town was 96 miles from the Cherokee village of Keowee, a trading post in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Three roads crisscrossed at Ninety-Six, sandy roads so heavily traveled that you can see them still, trenches cut into the earth by churning wagon wheels. The Cherokee Path came through here, as did the Charleston Road and the Island Ford Road, which led to canoes and barges on the Saluda River.

Like any prosperous backwoods town Ninety-Six held a courthouse and a jail, a blacksmith, shops and a few houses. The whole was surrounded by a stockade fence built to withstand Cherokee raids. Since the Revolution began the British had significantly strengthened the works. The town now fell under the protection of the "Star Fort," a system of pointed parapets built atop a 25-foot earthen bank covered with abatis -- sharpened tree trunks set into the ground with their points facing outward to repel invaders. Riflemen firing from the 16 points of the Star Fort could create a devastating crossfire.

Two block houses protected the other end of town, creating a formidable fortress.

Nathanael Greene decided he was going to take this fortress.

After a march of 12 days he wrote, on May 22, 1781:

We arrived before this place this morning, and find this place much better fortified and garrison much stronger in regular troops than was expected.

Inside the stockade garrison of Nintey-Six were 550 veteran Loyalist soldiers; the country around Ninety-Six was a Loyalist hotbed that had witnessed much murder and cruelty as neighbors turned on each other in a brutal civil war. In his memoirs Maj. Gen. William Moultrie wrote:

"It was generally said, and believed, that in the district of Ninety-Six alone, fourteen hundred unhappy widows and orphans were left to bemoan the fate of their unfortunate fathers, husbands and brothers, killed and murdered. . . ."

With only 900 men, Greene could not just storm the palisades of the garrison reinforced by 550; he needed to cut his way into the fort through a series of siege trenches.

The only knowledge Greene had of siege warfare he had gleaned from books. For advice he turned to his Polish aide, Thaddeus Kosciuszko (Kosc-e-us-co), who had studied at a French school of artillery and military engineering.

Kosciuszko, quiet and urbane, had borrowed heavily to come to America and fight in the Revolution. And his contributions had been great: he'd picked the ground for the Saratoga battlefield, and he helped build and plan West Point.

But at Ninety-Six, Kosciuszko goofed: he decided to attack the garrison's strongest point, the Star Fort, and he started digging his trenches 80 yards from the fort -- far too close. On the first morning of the siege a party of Loyalists burst out of the fort, bayoneted Greene's trench-diggers or "sappers," and stole their entrenching tools.

Greene then began his works at a more realistic distance of some 300 yards.

The ground there was hard-baked clay; breaking it was like digging "soft stone," Kosciuszko said. Troops and slaves, impressed from the local farmers, dug in late May and into early June, when the Southern sun glared white hot overhead, mosquitoes hummed and bit sweaty skin, and water was hard to come by. Most nights troops in the fort sallied out, and there was bloody hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches.

For four weeks of sweat and blood they dug and dug and dug.

gcarbone@projo.com / (401) 277-7434

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources consulted for today's installment:

Conrad, Dennis M. ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, VIII. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1995.

Draper, Lyman C., ed. King's Mountain and Its Heroes: History of the Battle of King's Mountain, Oct. 7, 1781. The Overmountain Press: Johnson City, Tenn., 1996. Copyright Peter G. Thompson, 1881.

Lee, Gen. Henry, Robert E. Lee ed. The Revolutionary War Memoirs of General Henry Lee. Da Capo Press: New York, 1998.

"Ninety-Six." Pamphlet, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2000.

Scheer, George F., and Rankin, Hugh F. Rebels & Redcoats. Da Capo Press Inc.: United States of America, 1987. Copyright The World Publishing Co., 1957.

A continuing series.