09:49 AM EDT on Thursday, July 13, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

On the 15th day of the Siege of Ninety-Six a messenger rode into Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene's camp to tell him that Fort Cornwallis, the last of the Georgia outposts, had fallen. Its commander, Thomas "Burnt Foot" Brown, had been captured along with 300 British and Tory soldiers, and, Greene wrote in his after orders about two hundred Negro's.

The capture of the slaves represented a windfall for American militia; Greene had reluctantly approved a plan that paid militiamen with captured slaves in lieu of cash, a form of licensed plundering.

Bagging Brown was a key capture too; before the war he'd owned 5,000 acres by the Broad and Savannah rivers, which he farmed with indentured servants instead of slaves. From the outset Brown had spoken against the Revolution, which had so angered the local Sons of Liberty that they'd scalped him, tarred his legs and held his feet over a fire, burning off two toes. In so doing they created a smart and determined enemy who had raised a band of Loyalists that committed its own atrocities.

Brown was so hated in Georgia that Greene feared he would be murdered in captivity; he granted Brown parole and let him go to Savannah with an armed escort of his regular troops, whom Greene also paroled on the promise that they would quit the fight.

Retaliatory murders were so rampant in Georgia and around the garrison of Ninety-Six, S.C. that Greene implored Elijah Clarke, a popular militia colonel: use your influence to restrain two very capital evils which rage in this Country and which if not prevented must soon depopulate it. I mean private murders and plundering. . . .

On the day he wrote that letter to Clarke, June 7, 1781, Greene read a letter from Abel Thomas, a Quaker preacher who'd been dogging Greene's steps all the way from Camden:

"[T]he great God of heaven and Earth Commanded mee to Leav my dear wife and Children in Pensylvania" to "Travel thro maney trobles and Dangers in this South Part of America in order to preach the Everlasting Gospel to the Poor."

Thomas had tried to pass through Greene's camp near Camden but had been turned back; he had started north toward home but thought better of it. Now he wanted a permit to "Pass among Thy men. . . . I feel Love in my hart To thee and to all men kind."

Greene, whose father had been a Quaker preacher, replied:

From the good opinion I have of the people of your profession[,] being bread and educated among them, I am perswaded your visit is purely religious and in this perswasion have granted you a pass, and I shall be happy if your Ministry shall contribute to the establishment of morallity and brotherly kindness among the people, than which no Country ever wanted it more.

I am sensible your principles and professions are opposed to war, but I know you are fond of both political and religeous liberty. This is what we are contending for, and by the blessing of god we hope to establish them upon such a broad basis as to put it out of the power of enemies to shake its foundation.

The next day Light-Horse Henry Lee's Legion rode into camp from Augusta, giving Greene much-needed reinforcements.

[O]ur poor Fellows are worne out with fatigue, being constantly on duty, Greene wrote. The position difficult to approach and the Ground extremely hard. The Garrison numerous and formidable when compared to our little force. They have sallied more or less every Night; but have been constantly driven in.

After collecting all of his forces at Ninety-Six, Greene got word that a large fleet from Ireland had arrived at Charlestown, S.C., carrying thousands of British troops. Doubtless the Enemy will attempt to raise the Siege of this place, Greene wrote to the Marquis de Lafayette, and he was right. Lord Francis Rawdon, the field commander of Britain's Southern Army, was already en route to Ninety-Six with a force of 2,000 men.

Greene ordered militia Generals Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion to harass those reinforcements on their march, then join the main army for a head-to-head battle; Sumter and Marion did not get the job done.

On Day 26 of the siege, in the evening, a local came riding into camp, chatting with the soldiers as he passed. No one took much notice; as Henry Lee wrote: "our friends in the country were in the habit of visiting camp, and were permitted to go wherever their curiosity led them."

As the countryman rode down the great road toward the fort he suddenly spurred his horse toward the garrison's closed door. High above his head he held a flapping piece of paper, a letter for the fort's commander, Col. John Cruger. American muskets thundered, the fort's door swung open and the messenger rode through, unhurt.

Minutes later the men on Greene's line heard cheers rising from the garrison, and Greene knew: Lord Rawdon and his 2,000 men were near. Even with Lee's Legion back in camp, Greene did not have enough men to fight the 550 men in the fort plus Rawdon's reinforcements. He faced a decision: run away, try to lure Rawdon somewhere for a fight far from Ninety-Six, or try a bloody, full-scale assault of the fort before the reinforcements arrived.

Henry Lee figured Greene "probably would have decided on the safe course" -- retreating -- "had not his soldiers, with one voice, entreated to be led against the fort."

Storming the fort

June 18, 1781: in the shadowless glare of high noon the cannon roared, signaling Nathanael Greene's army to storm the garrison of Ninety-Six.

Greene's "forlorn hope" -- the men assigned to rushing the high parapets of the Star Fort -- plunged into the trenches carrying muskets with fixed bayonets, axes and pikes. The bayonets were for killing, the axes to chop up the sharpened tree trunks on the fort's sloping walls, the pikes to pull sandbags down from the parapets to make the walls easier to scale.

Cruger could hear Greene's men chopping his abatis and pulling down his sandbags. He sent his own men into the dry moat at the base of his fort; they, too, were pushing bayonets. The two groups met in the ditch. Here in the glare and hellish heat of mid-afternoon men yelled, grunted and gasped as they thrust steel into flesh, killing and dying in a bloody pit.

Lee wrote: "Here ensured a desperate conflict."

After an hour, Greene called off the attack, pulling his forlorn hope's survivors from the trenches.

Lee's Legion had succeeded in taking a part of the garrison, but Tories still held the Star Fort, too firmly entrenched to dislodge.

With 400 yards of trench and a tunnel-like mine dug to the base of the fort, Nathanael Greene had been so close to blowing that fort wide open. It is mortifying, Greene wrote, to be obliged to to leave a Garrison so close near reduced. . . .

Lee's assessment was: "Three days more and Ninety-six must have fallen."

Even with Rawdon's 2,000 troops steadily advancing, Greene did not move that night; he encamped outside the walls of Ninety-Six. Thirty-one of his men lay dead in the ditch and on the sharp abatis of the Star Fort. He sent a man bearing a flag of truce into the fort, asking Cruger for permission to approach and retrieve his dead. Cruger replied the next day: he would send out the American dead for burial.

June 19 was a day of digging dozens of graves in the hard, sun-baked earth of the fields round Ninety-Six. Only then did Greene's men retreat up the cooling waters of the Saluda River.

Rawdon's reinforcements of 2,000 men marched into the garrison on June 21, missing by just 48 hours a chance to capture Greene's Army.

A continuing series.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources consulted for today's installment:

Buchanan, John. The Road to Guilford Courthouse. Buchanan; John Wiley & Sons Inc.: New York, Chichester, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, Toronto, 1997.

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

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

A continuing series.