Clinton held forth at his dinner table in New York, Frederick Mackenzie, Major of the 23rd as well as a senior staff officer at headquarters, noting, ‘I find the Commander-in-chief has been a good deal displeased of late by the conduct of Lieut Colonel Balfour.’ More dangerously for that officer, Clinton wrote to Lord Germain in London about the matter and to Earl Cornwallis in Wilmington.
Cornwallis, no doubt, understood the personal animus that lay behind the commander-in-chief’s sudden assault. He wrote back, swiftly and vigorously backing his man. Cornwallis suggested to Clinton that he must have been misinformed by crooks anxious to make money keeping rotten vessels in government service; Balfour had only sent back those ships that were unfit for further operations. In words that go some way to explaining why Cornwallis inspired such loyalty among his subordinates, the earl told Clinton, ‘Whatever was done … was with my approbation at the time, appearing evidently for the good of the service, I therefore think it my duty to exculpate Lt Col Balfour, whom I have found on all occasions, a most zealous, intelligent, and deserving officer.’
Clinton would not let the matter lie, for he knew how his enemies combined against him. He instituted an inquiry, taking statements from officers of various branches insisting that the ships were seaworthy and very much needed at New York. Cornwallis’s loyal defence of Balfour produced a sheaf of papers in return, in which Clinton told his lieutenant general, ‘I can be the only proper judge’ of whether that officer had erred. ‘I therefore cannot but disapprove of Lt Col Balfour.’ But Clinton seemed to sense that he did not have the absolute power to break Balfour, for authority had been migrating steadily towards Cornwallis. Lord Germain, it was clear from their official correspondence, had approved of Cornwallis’s vigorous operations in the Carolinas and was fed up with Clinton’s inaction. The spat over the transports was therefore symbolic of who was really in charge and who was going to determine the future shape of operations.
Clinton harboured ideas of conquering a peninsula formed by two of America’s great rivers, the Chesapeake and Delaware. This land, comprising the state of Delaware and much of Maryland, would provide a substantial agricultural resource, give plentiful anchorages for the navy and would keep Britain’s field armies – under Cornwallis, Phillips and Clinton himself in New York – close enough to support one another.
Cornwallis, a lesser strategist it is clear, had persuaded himself that it was pointless to campaign in the Carolinas as the unhealthiest season of the year came on, and that those provinces would never be tranquil for as long as men and supplies could be sent down from Virginia. It was that state’s resources, after all, that had allowed Greene, after he crossed the Dan, to turn the tables. Lord Germain, hotfoot from Court, told both Clinton and Cornwallis, ‘It is the King’s
firm purpose to recover these [southern] provinces in preference to all others, and to push the war from south to north, securing what is conquered as we go on.’ Official guidance coincided with gut instinct as far as Cornwallis was concerned, for he was interested in fighting with distinction, believing that would be better done in Virginia, with Major General Phillips’s division added to his own depleted army.
On 25 April, Cornwallis marched around 1,500 men (including a little over 200 of the 23rd) out of Wilmington and began his journey north. Only the fit ones had gone, hundreds more were left at the port for shipment back to Charleston where they might convalesce. The general covered himself against a sudden recall to Charleston or New York by keeping a squadron of transports in Wilmington. On 12 May dispatches reached him that Rawdon had beaten Greene at Hobkirk’s Hill, and Cornwallis marched on into Virginia. By this step he unilaterally determined that Britain’s campaign for the summer of 1781 would take place in that province.
‘How great was my disappointment and astonishment when’, wrote Clinton some years later, ‘I found he had come to the fatal resolution of abandoning both Carolinas to their fate and flying into Virginia.’ The commander-in-chief, though, might still be able to bring about a change, and determined to write to Cornwallis as soon as he emerged from the interior and united with Phillips.
Given that Balfour had spared his patron no detail about the desperation of affairs in South Carolina, it can be imagined that, sitting in Charleston, he too might have felt ‘disappointment and astonishment’. However, Balfour had always harboured doubts about pacifying the province, and these had intensified as he had observed the ruthlessness of the Whigs and relative timidity of the King’s friends. The compact between Balfour and Cornwallis moreover had become so strong, that the Scottish colonel tended to blame Clinton for everything, from pardoning too many rebels back in May 1780 to failing to give proper support to operations in the Carolinas.
As Cornwallis ploughed on northward, affairs stabilised somewhat in South Carolina. After giving Greene a costly check at Ninety Six, that last major backcountry settlement was abandoned and British forces set about trying to consolidate their hold on the coastal hinterland. Balfour decided to resettle some of the piedmont loyalist refugees on sequestered properties in this new, smaller, province, a step that had military logic but simply exacerbated the sectarian unpleasantness between Tory
and Whig. Greene, for all his grasp of strategy, was, during the summer of 1781, drawn into an attempt to reclaim South Carolina that claimed much of his army and was only partially successful, while Cornwallis led his host into Virginia.
The marches up into Virginia passed virtually without incident. Great rivers were crossed with practised ease, while the redcoats received little more than hostile glares from the townships they passed through. Battle, disease and desertion had honed Cornwallis’s troops into a very lean body of men. There was little straggling or trouble on the march up, and on 15 May, they linked up with a party of scouts from under Colonel Simcoe from the Queen’s Rangers, a loyalist corps similar to the British Legion. Cornwallis pushed on at great speed, sixteen miles on the 16th, eighteen the next day, then twenty miles and so on until they reached Petersburg on 20 May.
The column acquired a steady routine during those stages, with the men marching from midnight until the early morning. They would eat when they bivouacked; the hot middle hours of the day were spent resting or foraging, with a meal being cooked around dusk. A few hours’ sleep would be followed by reveille at 11 p.m., everything being in readiness for marching at midnight. It was a strange itinerary, but it worked well enough to spare Cornwallis’s precious remaining men from the fatigues of the sun. While still a couple of days from Petersburg, the Earl had received sad news, that Major General Phillips had died of typhoid. Phillips was an officer of the Royal Artillery who had been allowed to command a brigade of the line; ardent, highly professional, he was a veteran of Minden and had masterminded Burgoyne’s capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1777. With his death, command of the detachment in Virginia went to Brigadier Benedict Arnold, that firebrand from Connecticut who had deserted the Patriot cause the previous year.
Arnold’s operations in Virginia had caused many of the British officers to ask themselves uncomfortable questions. As an enemy, they had respected his vigour and military skill, for Arnold had proven a singular figure both in the ill-fated American march on Quebec and the defeat of Burgoyne at Saratoga. Had Henry Clinton succeeded in his aim of capturing the Hudson forts by Arnold’s defection, it would have proven a grievous blow to the American cause, but the conspiracy had miscarried, gaining the British only the general’s person, at the cost of
Major John Andre, the redcoat who was captured after being sent to meet him.
Andre’s trial and execution left a bitter taste, for he was a young man much admired in the army. There were a few in the 23rd who could even remember him, as he had served briefly in the regiment before the American wars. He embodied principle and stoicism in the face of fate. In return for him, the British got Arnold with his turned coat, emblematic of selfish opportunism. The defector got a purse of gold, provincial brigadier’s rank, and his career in the King’s service was soon provoking further unease. Arnold hit Virginia like a tempest, attacking warehouses and plantations, causing enormous economic damage. In truth, he embarrassed many at headquarters because he showed up the mediocrity and lassitude of those few British officers of rank still on the continent. Phillips’s death left without a proper commander a large British force of more than 4,000 troops, including the army’s two light infantry battalions and two Scottish regiments. On 20 May, Arnold’s few days as acting commander of the British on the Virginia coast ended, for Cornwallis’s army marched into his camp.
The arrival of the grizzled warriors of Camden and Guilford provoked a strong reaction from the Virginian detachment. Cornwallis’s men had, after all, fought repeatedly against intimidating odds, marched 1,500 miles and had weaned themselves from many comforts that other redcoats took for granted. As the 23rd, 33rd and Guards trooped into camp, they cut quite a figure.
‘Words can ill describe the admiration in which this band of heroes was held by the two Scotch regiments, and even by the battalions of light infantry,’ wrote Captain Samuel Graham of the 76th. ‘The gallant earl and his brave officers who had shared with him in his long and arduous marches, as well as in his laurels, were almost idolised.’
Captain Ewald, he of the single hard eye, was in camp too, leading his company of jaegers. He was struck by something different when he saw Cornwallis’s column arrive. For in the wake of Cornwallis’s 1,500 marching troops came a larger crowd of runaway slaves and servants:
I can testify that every soldier had his negro, who carried his provisions and bundles. This multitude always hunted at a gallop, and behind all the baggage there followed well over four thousand negroes of both sexes and all ages. Any place this horde approached was eaten clean, like an acre invaded by a swarm of locusts … I wondered as much about the indulgent character of Lord Cornwallis as I admired him for his military abilities.
Ewald, taking command of the jaegers that had marched up from Wilmington, turned loose their small portion of this crowd. The presence of so many followers – even allowing for some exaggeration of the numbers – undoubtedly complicated operations in the following months, since this ravenous mob excited the fears of the slave-owning Virginia gentry while complicating Cornwallis’s movements. The army grew even larger as Cornwallis arrived, with the docking of transports carrying a further brigade of 1,200 men from New York. This reinforcement, which included the 17th and 43rd (the only two regiments with a similarly extensive record of American service to the 23rd) and two German battalions, had swollen the overall force under the Earl’s command to 7,200.
While Cornwallis soon set about launching further raids into the plantations and trying to thwart the operations of a picked division of Continental infantry under the Marquis de Lafayette, the vexed question of what so large an armament was doing in Virginia could not be deferred any longer. During a few weeks in June and July, Cornwallis received a flurry of contradictory orders from Clinton. Initially the emphasis was on halting operations in Virginia and sending as many troops as possible back to New York, which the commander-in-chief was convinced would soon come under a substantial assault from a Franco-American force led by General Washington and Count Rochambeau. Later, Clinton directed Cornwallis to find a base at the mouth of the Chesapeake, as part of his long meditated scheme to take the Delaware peninsula.
These instructions, insofar as any clear meaning could be divined from them, marked the end of Cornwallis’s independent ‘marching about’ the southern states in search of adventure. Clinton’s scheme, wrote the earl, was for ‘ltory expeditions’ only. ‘As the General’s plan is only defensive in this quarter, then I can be of little use,’ Cornwallis told Balfour in mid-July. ‘I have offered to return to South Carolina.’ The general thus expected for a short time to be reunited with his Scottish factor to the south, a turn of events that would have made quite a difference to Cornwallis’s later reputation, but Clinton would not have it, ordering instead Major General Leslie southwards. General Cornwallis was to remain in Virginia while a base was chosen and fortified on the Chesapeake. Cornwallis could divine in these instructions unmistakable signs of Clinton’s taste for recrimination, telling Lord Rawdon that the commander-in-chief was ‘determined to
throw all blame on me and to disapprove of all I have done and that nothing but the consciousness that my going home in apparent disgust would essentially hurt our affairs in this country, could possibly induce me to remain’.
Cornwallis and his army, including the 23rd, found themselves therefore marching down another peninsula, that formed by the James and York rivers, towards Chesapeake Bay with the enemy to their rear. The joint command of Washington and Rochambeau were, meanwhile, setting their sights on the same place.
The Fusiliers were, by June, a little less dispersed than they had been during Cornwallis’s march through Virginia, but it was still a case of young men being in command. The regiment had Captain Thomas Peter at its head, for Balfour and Mackenzie were still serving in Charleston and New York respectively. The light company men, who were reunited at Petersburg with their brother Fusiliers for the first time in a year, were soon sent off again, not as part of the 1st Light Battalion, as they had been during the hectic campaign of 1777, but, together with the 82nd’s Light Bobs, as mounted infantry serving with Tarleton on his raids. Forbes Champagne was put in charge of this detachment, Captain Lionel Smythe having sailed back to England with his wife some weeks earlier. The 23rd’s Grenadiers, meanwhile, continued to serve with the 1st Grenadier Battalion in New York. Another party numbering a few dozen men was in Charleston, where the evacuees from Camden and Wilmington were gathered. When recruiting parties and twenty-seven prisoners taken by the Americans during late campaigns were counted in with these scattered detachments, the number of Fusiliers shrank from over 400 on paper to fewer than 200 tramping along behind Captain Peter and forty-six under Champagne.