02:29 PM EDT on Friday, July 14, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

The fifth anniversary of American Independence, July 4, 1781, found Nathanael Greene riding away from his main army to join Henry Lee's legion of light horse skirting the edge of danger. To plot his next move, Greene wanted good intelligence of British movements in the South Carolina garrison of Ninety-Six; he figured the best way to get it was to ride closer and see for himself. Once again, he left his main army under the care of Gen. Isaac Huger while he rode with his special forces.

The next day, Greene received good information from a man named Dominique, whom Greene had wanted to hang as a deserter. Dominique wandered into the main army's camp claiming he had not deserted, he'd been captured and taken into the fort at Ninety-Six. He provided good details of what was going on there: men in the garrison subsisted on stingy rations of boiled corn and beef; they had begun breaking cannon swivels and dismantling the works in preparation for abandoning the fort.

On July 10, an American spy actually spoke with the fort's commander, Col. John Cruger, and confirmed it: the British were abandoning the post the next day. Any Loyalist living in the Ninety-Six district had to move with them below the Tory stronghold of Orangeburg, in the low country toward the coastal city of Charleston. Those who refused to resettle would forfeit any protection.

Once again, Nathanael Greene had won by losing; Guilford Courthouse, Camden, and now Ninety-Six had fallen from British control.

When Greene had taken command of the Southern Army on Dec. 2, 1780, the British held North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. They controlled those states from the sea to the mountains through a chain of backcountry outposts arcing from Augusta, Ga., to Georgetown, S.C.

Now scarcely more than seven months later, Greene had run Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis clear out of North Carolina into Virginia and had captured every one of his backcountry outposts. It was a brilliant, unorthodox campaign orchestrated by a 39-year-old man then at the height of his powers.

Greene wanted to attack the long column of Tory civilians and British soldiers marching out from Ninety-Six along the Ridge Road on a hot, brutal and sad, 110-mile trek to Orangeburg and below. Along the route some 50 British soldiers dropped dead from the heat.

For a few hungry days, Greene's troops camped outside Orangeburg, hoping to draw British troops entrenched there into a fight, but they did not take the bait. Here, the American Army ran out of meat and bread. Lowland rice served as a substitute for bread. For meat, Lee wrote, "Frogs abounded in some neighboring ponds, and on them chiefly did the light troops subsist. . . . Even the alligator was used by a few."

There was some skirmishing -- an American advance party captured three wagons from sutlers -- followers of the army who peddled provisions -- selling spirits to the British army, but was disappointed to find only two hogsheads, or barrels, of rum, a small cask of wine and some "shrub," a concoction of rum and fresh citrus.

Now in mid-July, a brutal time of heat, humidity and clouds of malarial mosquitoes, Greene decided to give his army a rest. He pointed them to a place poetically named the High Hills of the Santee. These hills rose like huge sand dunes from the banks of the Santee River. They humped up about 200 feet above the river, enough to lift men and horses above the snakes, alligators and mosquitoes of low country swamps into drier, breezier air. The chain of hills ran 24 miles long and 5 miles across at its widest; cool springs and rivulets drained into the Santee. Much of the High Hills had been cultivated with corn and grain, creating an undulating quilt of greens and tans providing food and forage for men and horses.

On July 16, 1781, Greene's army plunked down in a place called James' Old Field in the High Hills.

From camp he wrote to North Carolina Gov. Thomas Burke: The Army has sufferd incredible hardships; and requires a little relaxation.

A Delaware captain figured that in the 100 days since they'd turned their backs on Cornwallis to plunge into South Carolina, the light troops had marched 771 sweaty miles through the enervating heat of a Southern summer.

The Camp at James' Old Fields, refreshing as it was, was still an army camp, subject to strict codes of discipline. Exactly as in 1775 on the hills of Roxbury outside Boston, Greene insisted on cleanliness. He erected a camp gallows which he employed a few times to hang deserters; on the 19th, he ordered quartermasters to provide "Strong Rakes" for fatigue or work parties, which would burn or bury every offensive matter, within two hundred yards of the line.

While the troops relaxed, Greene did not. In camp, he had more men than muskets, no clothes for his troops, no money to pay them. He wrote to Robert Morris, the country's superintendent of finance, [D]on't imagine when I tell you I am in distress to mean little difficulties but suppose my situation to be like a Ships crew in a Storm where the Vessel is ready to sink and the water gains ground in the hold with every exertion to prevent it. . . . I foresee more difficulties than I readily see how to conquer.

The underlying cause of supply problems, Greene wrote to Morris, was Congress' failure to tax the states and centralize power. If Congressmen continued to surrender so much of their just and necessary prerogative into the hands of the different States then internecine broils and feuds will frequently convulse the empire for want of a sufficient respect and dependence of the States upon Congress. Politicks is a knotty subject and all general principles liable to many exceptions. . . . Perhaps what I conceive now unfavorable may produce national advantages. Time will bring all things to light . . . . Time actually proved Greene right when, 80 years later, Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter "convulsing the empire" in a civil war.

Propositions of peace

From camp in the High Hills of the Santee, Nathanael Greene's thoughts turned home to Rhode Island. He wrote to his wife, Caty: I suppose you are at Westerly. I wish I was there with you, free from the bustle of the World and the miseries of war. My nature recoils at the horrid scenes which this Country affords, and longs for a peaceful retirement where love and softer pleasures are to be found. Here turn which way you will, you hear nothing but the mournful widow, and the plaints of fatherless Child; and behold nothing but houses desolated, and plantations laid waste. Ruin is in every form, misery in every shape.

The heart you sent me is in my Watch, and your picture in my bosom, in a locket.

Almost as soon as Greene pitched his camp, he received a letter penned six weeks before by the Marquis de Lafayette, whom Greene had put in charge of the Southern Army's troops in Virginia.

Propositions of Peace have been made, Lafayette wrote, and A Mediation offered. By now the American Revolution had drawn in most of Europe's major powers. Spain and Denmark had joined France in declaring war on England, which hired soldiers from Germany, the Empress Catharine of Russia had offered to mediate between the warring nations and Great Britain had accepted that offer.

"The Ennemy's plan," guessed Lafayette, "Must Be to Secure the Southern States. They will persuade [argue] that over Running [a state] is possessing" it -- a keen insight by the young Marquis. The proposed truce would be based on the concept of uti possidetis, the principle of combatants retaining the ground they held at war's end.

When Greene took over the Southern Army, the British could have claimed everything south of Virginia; now they had no force in North Carolina, and America had a functioning civil government there. Both sides could still lay a tenuous claim on South Carolina and Georgia -- Greene held most of the ground, but the British held key cities in both states -- Savannah and Charlestown, and no civil government operated in either state.

At this point in his career, Greene's vision was preternaturally clear. Though he would not have favored any agreement short of full independence for all of the 13 states, Greene had anticipated the possibility of a peace based on uti possidetis. Indeed that possibility formed the foundation for his strategy -- reclaiming as much land as quickly as he could, while badgering the former leaders of Georgia and South Carolina to get their governments up and running.

Greene also foresaw the coming British defeat at Yorktown four months before it happened. Throughout the spring and summer of 1781, he tried his best to study developments in the North -- Lafayette's Virginia campaign against Cornwallis and his field general, the traitor, Benedict Arnold; Washington's movements around New York City; and the French army's situation in Newport.

That summer, Washington twice visited Comte de Rochambeau, the commander of the French Army in America, once at Newport -- where cannons of the French forts welcomed him with a thundering salute that shook the ground -- and once in Weathersfield, Conn. The two men agreed that the French Army should march from Rhode Island to join forces with Washington's troops over by West Point on the Hudson River. There they'd monitor the movements of the French fleet and try to link up with it for a joint attack on some port city held by the British. Greene hoped for a joint attack on Charleston, Washington was obsessed with attacking New York, but Rochambeau had other plans.

While retreating toward the High Hills of the Santee in June, Greene wrote to James M. Varnum, his former company commander in the Kentish Guards: I think the greatest stroke [against the British] may be struck in Virginia. If the [French] fleet was to run immediately into Chessapeak Bay and land a force sufficient to cut off Lord Cornwallis's retreat and possess the Shipping and Garrison this would pave the way to victory. This, of course, is exactly what happened nearly four months later at Yorktown.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources consulted for today's installment:

Conrad, Dennis M. ed. The Papers of Nathanael Greene, vol. VIII and IX. The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1995, 1997.

Hattendorf, John B. Newport, the French Navy, and American Independence. The Redwood Press: Newport, 2005.

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

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

A continuing series.