02:56 PM EDT on Monday, July 17, 2006

BY GERALD M. CARBONE
Journal Staff Writer

The British troops were hungry, so in the early morning hours of Sept. 8, 1781, their commander sent a few hundred of them out from camp at Eutaw Springs, S.C., to forage in the fields for sweet potatoes.

Eutaw Springs was a nice, rural place. An underground river burst forth here in two clear springs.

Where the springs bubbled forth there stood a three-story brick mansion with a big, walled garden. Outside the garden walls were eight acres cleared for crops and beyond that, the lush, jungle-like woods of South Carolina. White tents now blossomed in neat rows in the clearing, home to between 1,800 and 2,000 veteran British troops.

While the foraging party was rooting for sweet potatoes, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene's American Army was marching slowly down the River Road toward them. Greene had pitched camp at a plantation just 7 miles from Eutaw Springs; that morning of Sept. 8, 1781 he'd woken his troops early, putting them on the march at 4 a.m.

The troops moved in fits and starts, covering about 3 miles in three hours. At around 7 a.m. Greene halted so his men could swig a fortifying belt of rum:

"We . . . moved in order of battle about three miles, when we halted, and took a little of that Liquid which is not unnecessary to exhilarate the Chimiral Spirits upon such occasions," recalled Greene's friend and tent-mate, Col. Otho Williams. "Again we advanced, and soon afterwards our light troops met the van of the enemy, who were marching out to meet us.

"Very serious, very important reflections began to obtrude."

Gunfire boomed through the park-like forest of oak and cypress, but not much of it. The American light troops had not, as Williams believed, met the van, or forward part, of the main British army; they had surprised the sweet potato party, many of whom were captured unarmed.

Around 9 a.m. of a clear, hot day the Americans did come up against the British advance parties about 3 miles from Eutaw Springs:

The Enemies advanced parties were soon driven in, Greene reported, and a most tremendous firing began. . . .

The woods around Eutaw Springs literally shook from the blasts of cannonballs. Greene, who had fought in the sleet of Trenton, the fog of Germantown and the oven heat of Monmouth later called the battle unfolding at Eutaw Springs the most bloody and obstinate I ever saw.

As he had at Guilford Courthouse, Greene built his first line of his rawest militia; unlike at Guilford Courthouse, they fought like battle-tested troops, firing 17 rounds per man before the British drove them back into the woods.

Greene's second line, comprising North Carolina veterans under Col. Jethro Sumner, drove the British back to the edge of their camp. Greene had kept his best men, the Maryland and Virginia veterans of Guilford Courthouse, in reserve. Now they came on with level bayonets. In his memoirs, Henry Lee wrote that men died on the field with their enemies' bayonets in their guts and their bayonets sunk into their dead enemies.

The veteran Continental troops drove the British through their neat rows of white canvas tents; after the disappointments of Hobkirk's Hill, Guilford Courthouse and Ninety-Six, Nathanael Greene stood on the verge of victory.

As they pressed through the British camp the hungry, threadbare, thirsty Americans began plundering the tents.

Colonel Williams recalled:

"The retreat of the British army lay directly through their encampment, where the tents were all standing, and presented many objects to tempt a thirsty, naked and fatigued soldiery." Tents also made good cover from the deadly fire bursting from the brick mansion by the Eutaw Springs.

The British general, Alexander Stewart, had ordered a major to occupy that mansion "to check the enemy, should they attempt to pass it."

As the Maryland and Virginia troops drove toward the mansion, a mad race ensued to get inside that building first. The British troops won, pushing the door closed against a tide of Americans trying to shoulder it open.

And then they opened fire from the mansion's windows, blasting their own campground with deadly fire.

Williams wrote:

"Everything now combined to blast the prospects of the American commander [Greene]. The fire from the house showered down destruction upon the American officers; and the men . . . perhaps thinking the victory secure and bent on the immediate fruition of its advantages, dispersing among the tents, fastened upon the liquors and refreshments they afforded, and became utterly unmanageable."

Much of Greene's cavalry had gotten tangled up in the brush of "black jack" bushes on the river side of the mansion, and British troops raked them over. Col. William Washington's horse fell dead, rolling over him. Advancing British troops pierced Washington with bayonets and captured him.

With much of his cavalry ruined and his men staggering beneath the fire from the mansion, Greene had seen enough. After nearly four hours of fighting he pulled his men back, leaving an advance picquet, or outguards, to keep an eye on the battlefield. The rest of his troops, wet with sweat and grimy with gunpowder, walked the 7 miles to the nearest well at Burdell's Plantation where they had camped the night before.

A British messenger under a flag of truce rode into Greene's camp with a letter from Colonel Washington, now a prisoner of war. Washington, like his famous cousin, was a big man, 6 feet and solid; he wrote that he'd been wounded "with a Bayonet in my Breast, which together with the Contusion from the fall off my Horse which was kill'd makes me extremely sore." He asked Greene to send his clothes.

In terse orders that evening an exhausted Greene wrote: The Troops will Encamp as they lay last Night & refresh themselves. The Wounded are to be carefully Collected & dressed, & the Prisoners of War sent off.

An obstinate action

The next morning, Sept. 9, 1781, Greene had more to write about the Battle of Eutaw Springs. And in his writings to South Carolina Gov. John Rutledge, he claimed victory: We have had a most Obstinate and Bloody action. Victory was ours.

Greene made the same claim the next day in a letter to the president of the Continental Congress, Thomas McKean:

We collected our Wounded, except such as were under command of the fire of the House, and retired to the ground from which we marched in the morning, there being no Water nearer, and the Troops ready to faint with the heat. I left on the field of action a strong Picquett, and early in the Morning detached General Marion and Lt Colonel Lee with the Legion Horse between Eutaw and Charles Town, to prevent any reinforcements from coming to the relief of the Enemy. . . ."

When British Gen. Alexander Stewart read Greene's claim of leaving advanced guards on the battlefield, he was livid. Stewart wrote to Lord Cornwallis: "in short his Letter is full of lies." Stewart, too claimed victory at Eutaw Springs. But he did not stick around to savor it.

As a chill rain fell on the day after the battle, Stewart ordered his men to break 1,000 muskets that they would no longer need; the British threw those muskets into Eutaw Springs. They also broke into 20 to 30 barrels of rum and poured it on the ground, to lighten the load for their hasty retreat toward Charlestown.

Stewart left Eutaw Springs with at least 40 percent fewer men than he'd had at the start of battle. He had lost at least 866 men out of less than 2,000: 85 dead on the field; 781 wounded or missing. According to The Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, at Eutaw Springs: "The British suffered the highest percentage of losses sustained by any force during the war."

Greene lost a quarter of his force: 139 killed; 375 wounded; at least 8 missing. Man for man, the now little-known Battle of Eutaw Springs was the bloodiest battle of the American Revolution. As for who won, arguably the "honors" of that day belonged to Stewart as his troops camped on the field; but as in all of Nathanael Greene's so-called defeats, he won by losing.

As soon as Stewart marched from Eutaw Springs on Sept. 9 -- leaving 70 wounded men in addition to his broken muskets and emptied rum casks -- Greene pursued. He chased the British troops to Fergusons Swamp, about 30 miles from Charlestown, where the British linked up with reinforcements from the city. Greene broke off the chase writing: we shall halt a Day or two to refresh; and then take our old position in the High Hills of the Santee.

On the march back to the High Hills, the American Army stepped along the River Road, swinging through Eutaw Springs at 8 a.m. Greene gave his men a chance to pause on the battlefield and reflect.

The Army will halt here half an hour, Greene wrote in his orders book at Eutaw Springs, to refresh and then resume the long march for the High Hills of the Santee.

Catching the bird

Soon after he reached the High Hills of the Santee on Sept. 16, 1781, Greene responded to a weeks-old letter from the Marquis de Lafayette. In his letter, Lafayette reported happy news: a French fleet had sailed into the Chesapeake Bay, giving the allied forces control of Virginia's coastline.

And in a postscript, Lafayette dropped this bombshell: Lord Rawdon, who had chased Greene off Hobkirk's Hill and away from Ninety-Six, had been captured while sailing home to England and was a prisoner aboard the French fleet.

Lafayette gloated: "Lord Rawdon is certainly on Board a Ship in the James River and I shall Have the pleasure of Seeing Him in a few hours."

As a captive aboard a French warship, Rawdon had a ringside seat on the most important naval battle of the war, the Battle of the Virginia Capes.

Just as they had when the French took control of Narragansett Bay in 1778, the British sent a fleet toward the Chesapeake in hopes of drawing the larger French fleet out to sea for a battle. Just as they had in 1778, the French bit, slipping their cables to give chase on Sept. 5, 1781.

This time, no tempest blew through to scuttle the battle. The two fleets funneled toward each other, and thundered away. Both captains -- the French Adm. de Grasse and the British Adm. Samuel Graves -- fought a conservative battle. For five days the fleets maneuvered within sight of each other without firing another shot. Finally de Grasse sailed back into Chesapeake Bay, where he found that a smaller French fleet had arrived from Newport with 600 marines and heavy siege cannon to assault Cornwallis's post in the deepwater port of Yorktown.

Nathanael Greene kept abreast of these developments from his camp in the High Hills of the Santee. As a good strategist, Greene knew exactly what was unfolding: Cornwallis was trapped. He had posted his troops in Yorktown at the tip of a peninsula. Lafayette had camped his 5,000 troops at the neck of the peninsula, sealing Cornwallis out on the tip. Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau were hustling their way from the Hudson River with 11,000 French and American reinforcements. The French fleet controlled the waters off the peninsula, and for Cornwallis there was no way out. As Greene wrote to Gen. Anthony Wayne: the old fox has got into the trap at last.

Washington and Rochambeau rode to the outskirts of Yorktown on Sept. 14, 1781; there they began a siege similar to the one Greene had tried to take the garrison of Ninety-Six, only on a much larger scale.

On Sept. 29, Greene wrote to his friend, Henry Knox, comparing himself to a bird-dog beating the woods to flush the prey, Cornwallis, for Washington to bag: We have been beating the bush and the General has come to catch the bird.

Never was there a more inviting object to glory, Greene continued in his letter to Knox. The General is a most fortunate Man, and may success and laurels attend him. We have fought frequently, and bled freely, and little glory comes to our share. . . .

With things looking so promising both in Virginia and in his own corner of the South, Greene allowed himself to dream of war's end. He wrote to Knox:

I long to see you and spend an evenings conversation together. How is my old friend Col [Henry] Jackson [of Massachusetts] is he as fat as ever, and can he still eat down a plate of fish that he cant see over? God bless his fat face with good health and good spirits to the end of the war, that we may all have a happy Meeting in the North.'

Ragged as wolves

In early October 1781, Nathanael Greene left his army on the High Hills of the Santee and turned his horse toward Charlotte, N.C., a 90-mile ride. He wanted to tour the hospitals between his camp and Charlotte, and he wanted to recruit militia from Charlotte to completely drive the Loyalists out of the South Carolina low country and into Charleston.

Greene arrived in Charlotte after a long day in the saddle. He felt unwell and very tired. His hospitals were as Col. Otho Williams described them: "deplorable."

"The wounded from Eutaw Springs," Williams reported, "were wholly without necessaryes, some of them scarcely attended, and others wholly neglected; many had their wounds animated with fly blows [maggots]. . . . Their moans indicating pain, want and dispair impressed the Spirits of every humane Spectator. . . ."

In a letter to Congress, Greene concurred: [O]ur sick and wounded [are] in a most deplorable situation and numbers of brave fellows, who have bled in the Cause of their Country, have been eat up with maggots. . . . To afford the sick & wounded all the relief in my power, I visited the hospitals from Camp to Charlotte.

Greene returned to his camp in the High Hills in mid-October, where he found many men sick with fever, probably malaria. His soldiers had received no pay in two years; more than a third, Greene observed, were entirely naked with nothing about them but a breech cloth. They shared one tent for every 10 men. Yet on Oct. 28, 1781, this camp of sickly, near-naked men ragged as wolves broke out in cheers and fired all their cannon in a celebratory feu de joy: Lord Cornwallis had surrendered his army of 7,000 men, their ships, cannon, flags and supplies at Yorktown.

Greene wrote to Washington:

Nothing can equal the joy that it gives to this Country.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources consulted for today's installment:

Boatner III, Mark M. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. Stackpole Books: Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1994.

Clipson, William J. and Symonds, Craig L. A Battlefield Atlas of the American Revolution. The Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America, Inc.: Mount Pleasant, S.C., 1986.

Coffin, Charles Carleton. The Boys of '76. Harper & Brothers, 1876.

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

Diary of Frederick Mackenzie, Vol. 2. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1930.

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.