1775 (92 page)

Leaving North Carolina, many British officers expected to take control of Charleston’s great harbor easily, but it turned out to be another inauspicious battleground.

The Mismanaged Battle for Charleston Harbor

Like the contest for Cape Fear, the jockeying for control of Charleston Harbor—its maritime environs, not the town, constituted the actual target—had started back in the autumn of 1775. Six months later, the port of Charleston was among the most heavily fortified in the new world, and its channels were a risky, ever-changing maze for all but knowledgeable local pilots. Here, too, the Royal Navy would underestimate its task.

Very small craft could use a back door, but for a ship of any size, entry was tedious. Depending on a vessel’s draft, it had to choose among six channels, through which it might take seven hours to reach the main docks. The channels, for their part, dictated where major fortifications had been
or soon would be placed. Fort Johnson, dating back to 1708, overlooked the southern passage. The main ship channel, in turn, went near Sullivan’s Island, soon to be fortified. The northern route crossed a large anchorage near Haddrell’s Point, also given a battery of cannon. Preparation for attack between the summer of 1775 and the following spring emphasized both constructing or strengthening forts and blocking channels, usually by sinking old or derelict vessels. In August, Patriots began by removing a beacon on Lighthouse Island and chopping down landmark trees used by pilots crossing the Charleston bar (sandbar).
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Patriot militia had already taken Fort Charlotte on the Savannah River in July, and on the night of September 15, three companies of South Carolina infantry, commanded by Colonel Isaac Motte, under orders from the Council of Safety, boarded a packet boat at Charleston’s Gadsden Wharf to occupy Fort Johnson, the harbor’s main bastion. But the British, hearing of the imminent raid, had dismounted the cannon and then abandoned the installation. The Patriots, in turn, acted after learning of a letter in which Lord Dartmouth mentioned a British attack on Charleston.
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Governor Campbell quickly fled to HMS
Tamar;
the Patriots remounted Fort Johnson’s guns; and war inched closer.

On October 19, after rejecting a more sweeping plan to close the harbor, Patriots decided instead to block two of the northern entryways—the Marsh and Hog island channels. Either might get the Royal Navy close enough to the Cooper River waterfront to bombard the warehouse district with its combustible stores of tar, pitch, and turpentine. Scuttling six old schooners was calculated to provide adequate obstruction, and on November 9, the Provincial Congress assigned escort duty to the South Carolina Provincial Navy schooner
Defence.
Thirty seamen were detailed from the colony’s two regiments, and 35 infantrymen were assigned as marines.
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On November 11, after the expedition set off down Hog Island Creek, the decrepit
Tamar
was perceived to be attacking, and the
Defence
fired back. South Carolina officers were too distracted to sink more than three of the hulks. However, Patriot leader William Drayton got what he really wanted: a definitive confrontation. After pressure from Royal Governor Campbell, both British sloops, the
Tamar
and the
Cherokee,
appeared the next morning and opened fire on the
Defence,
although with practically no effect.
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Historians consider this November 11–12 skirmish as the opening battle of the Revolution in South Carolina—in part because Patriot leaders Drayton and Colonel William Moultrie wanted it to assume that role. With
popular attention now directed to the Hog Island Channel and Sullivan’s Island, this portion of the harbor became the central focus of defense planning. The Provincial Congress had discussed putting a fort there some weeks earlier. In late December, a company of South Carolina Rangers, including a number of Catawba Indians, cleared Sullivan’s of its last few British seamen and runaway slaves. Within days, 200 men from South Carolina’s First Regiment marched into Haddrell’s Point, just to the north, and quickly emplaced a battery of eighteen-pounders.
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For
Tamar
and
Cherokee,
this boded poorly. Bad enough that in December, Patriots had cut off local supplies of provisions, water, and fuel. Now rebel eighteen-pounders controlled much of the harbor. On January 6, the king’s two sloops and their supporting vessels, no longer able to maintain station, sailed for Savannah. No longer would Charleston’s fort builders have to worry about cannonades from the sloops’ six-pounders. The Committee of Safety recommended that work begin on a strong fort and battery on Sullivan’s Island, which it did.

As we will see, the March-June prelude to the eventual battle is a tale of two preparations. South Carolinians, not always certain the British were coming, worked fortification magic with shilling-each palmetto logs. The British fleet and regiments off Cape Fear, not completely assembled until early May, finally set sail for Charleston on May 31 based on several pieces of misinformation that helped to underpin yet another British military disaster. From the Patriot perspective, the confrontation at Sullivan’s Fort is a book in its own right—more than half a dozen have been published. However, this chapter’s narrower emphasis is on the British mistakes and misconceptions that made the inept Charleston campaign a fitting conclusion to the southern expedition.

To begin with, the underlying priority was dubious. General Clinton and Commodore Parker left Cape Fear for South Carolina well aware that their army of 2,500 men was insufficient to capture Charleston itself. The plan, as recalled by Clinton, was this: Commodore “Sir Peter Parker having in the mean time procured Intelligence from whence it appeared the Rebel Work on Sullivans Island (the Key to Rebellion Road and Charles Town) was in so unfinished a state as to be open to a Coup de Main & that it might be afterwards held by a small Force under Cover of a Frigate or two…I thought Sullivans Island, if it could be seized without much loss of time, might prove a very important acquisition and greatly facilitate any Subsequent Move we should be in a Condition to make in Proper Season against that Capital [the city of Charleston].”
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Getting the troops back to New York for the upcoming invasion should have been more compelling, but Clinton needed to return with some battle laurel.

As for the low-built, harbor-facing fort on Sullivan’s west shore, it was indeed unfinished—its walls were low, and only two of its four sides were completed, an open back door for a land attack. Until the Royal Navy’s bombardment was into its second or third hour, many British officers and some on the American side had assumed the new fort could never withstand such massive firepower, but it seemed to be unhurt.
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It was no ordinary fortification. The Committee of Safety had armored the harbor’s most vital defenses—Fort Johnson and Sullivan’s alike—with cheap and readily available palmetto wood, known for a spongy, difficult-to-break quality. Two thousand palmetto logs had been floated across the harbor in October to strengthen Fort Johnson’s walls.
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Thousands more were used on Sullivan’s for a palmetto log fort with sixteen feet of heavy sand and marsh clay packed between its outer and inner walls.
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Palmetto had been chosen as resistant to both shock and splintering; the wood’s unusual texture allowed cannon balls to sink in without fragmentation. Indeed, palmetto forts remained effective as late as the American Civil War. Ironically, the Royal Navy should have been alert, being acquainted with South Carolina’s unusual subtropical woods. In the early 1770s, the Admiralty had experimented with South Carolina live oak because of its ironlike hardness and resistance to rot.

It seems, however, that Commodore Parker entered Charleston Harbor with a dangerous dearth of local expertise: “Through an oversight, the British naval bureaucracy had failed to give Parker a single officer with knowledge of the harbor, though, as one dumbfounded Charlestown loyalist observed afterwards, ‘this was no obscure place but well known, to many Gentlemen of the Navy.’ Even more astonishing was Parker’s failure to enlist the aid of Lieutenant John Fergusson and the crew of the sometime Royal Navy ship
Cherokee,
whose firsthand knowledge of Sullivans Island lay at his command a few hours away in Savannah, Georgia. Ultimately, these omissions left the execution of the commodore’s battle plan dependent on the reliability of a handful of black pilots, who either had been seized from coastal shipping or had been spirited out of Charleston.”
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The spring tides had just changed, increasing the dangers from the harbor’s many sandbars. The black pilots, unhappy, refused to follow British orders. The
Bristol
’s guide would not take the flagship close to the fort, and the pilot
on the 50-gun
Experiment
followed suit. Three smaller frigates, poorly advised by the single pilot they shared, ran aground on the sandbar called the Lower Middle Ground.
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Most histories give no more detail, but it may be significant that as pilots refused orders, Patriot prospects brightened.
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By way of context, no body of men was more important to Patriot committees in the waterscapes including Boston, Philadelphia, coastal Virginia, Cape Fear, and Charleston than harbor pilots and river pilots. Their vocational “treason”—exactly how Patriots felt about willingness to guide British ships—could bring about critical defeats. We have seen in
Chapter 23
how pilots in the Boston area, taken on board British vessels for one hurried expedition in July 1775, simply refused to provide directions. As described by Admiral Graves, “Rewards or Threatenings were alike ineffectual. They continued in a manner petrified.” Indeed, even before Lexington and Concord, Graves had notified the Admiralty that it had become “almost unpardonable for Pilots to take charge of the Kings Ships and Vessels, several have been driven from their homes and threatened with death for assisting his Majesty’s Fleet.”
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On August 21, the Rhode Island Assembly provided criminal penalties for anyone piloting armed vessels save those of the colonies.
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On September 16. the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety resolved that river and bay pilots should stay ashore. Anyone who let himself be taken on board a British armed vessel, the committee said, would be deemed an enemy to American liberty. By contrast, Delaware River pilots with already established loyalties were brought into Patriot confidence respecting the location of river obstructions and played a vital role in the local war effort.
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Patriots took similar precautions in the two regions visited by the king’s southern expedition—the lower Cape Fear and Charleston Harbor. In the former, in January 1776, when the British sloop
Scorpion
required assistance from one local pilot, the Wilmington–New Hanover Committee of Safety took over control and specified what would be expected of each individual pilot.
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In Charleston, where a prominent free black pilot, Thomas Jeremiah, was executed in August 1775 for supposedly encouraging a slave insurrection, most historians identify racial motives. However, on June 8, Henry Laurens of the Committee of Safety had written to his son in London that “we have ordered the pilots not to board or bring in any Man of War on Transport Ship.”
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Many of Charleston’s harbor pilots were black, and Jeremiah’s execution may have also been a maritime warning.

As for the Charleston pilots’ actions in refusing British requests on June 28, we cannot reconstruct their motivation. Scores of blacks served in the
South Carolina Navy during the Revolution, but it is also possible that black pilots compelled to help the British in the great harbor battle were as petrified as the white Boston pilots had been in July 1775.

The final British mistake in deciding to strike at Charleston Harbor returns us to the mind of Henry Clinton. An additional reason—beyond the fort’s presumed vulnerability—for expecting the campaign to be quick and easy lay in an ill-advised belief that his 2,200 men could cross to Sullivan’s from nearby Long Island at Breach Inlet, so called, simply by wading across waters only eighteen to 24 inches deep at low tide. Then, after marching a few miles, they could overrun the fort through its open back door—the uncompleted southwestern and northeastern sides. Instead, the water in question turned out to be seven feet deep, not two. According to one officer involved, Captain Sir James Murray, “so much was the general prepossessed with the idea of this infernal ford, that several days and nights were spent in search of it,” adding that the crossing should have been abandoned “upon the first discovery of our mistake.”
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Instead, Clinton shifted to a plan in which Breach Inlet eventually had to be crossed by Britons in boats, against a Patriot position now well manned by North and South Carolina riflemen with grapeshot-firing artillery. This attack had to be called off after heavy casualties. The bitter remarks about Clinton that began among officers on the scene continued into the pages of hostile British newspapers.