The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (98 page)

As the horror increased, men on both sides broke. The terror bred confusion as to which side was winning, and each lost deserters to the other. The worst fears came with darkness. Not that the days were tranquil or free of strain -- the shells dropped on both sides, and in late April when the range shortened each kept the other under incessant rifle and musket fire. A deadly game took place: each side waited for the other to open its embrasures and then poured in musket balls and cannisters before they were closed again. The nights were worse because when the sun went down men's imaginations took over.
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For Lincoln's troops the darkness brought home the knowledge that the enemy's sappers were at work. When morning came the Americans looked out to an advance that seemed inexorable. The strain showed in glazed eyes and faces tight and bloated with fatigue. For the British and Germans the terrors were no less genuine. The shelling by their enemy increased as the Americans tried to slow the sappers' digging. When the Americans learned from a deserter that the relief of troops in the trenches was ordinarily done an hour before daybreak, that operation assumed a terrible danger.

Late in April as work on the third parallel was completed and the sappers burrowed toward the canal, the precariousness of their position was made especially clear to the British and German infantry. Their commander in chief had insisted from the beginning that they rely on their bayonets. Their muskets were to remain unloaded at night when no targets could be seen anyway. Reliance on the bayonet meant discipline to Clinton -- discipline and pride and spirit.
Clinton visited the

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trenches often in April -- he always had physical courage -- and on one of his visits he discovered "GREAT NEGLECT," as he said in his journal, troops who had not fixed their bayonets.
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The troops had not presumably because they felt easier in the dark when their muskets were loaded. Even so they panicked on the night of April 24, when 200 Americans made a sortie against one end of the third parallel. The jaegers there ran back to the second, but even so the Americans killed or wounded fifty and captured a dozen more of them. For a few dreadful minutes the Americans seemed to have cut a part of the third parallel off from the second. The following night small arms fire and yelling from the American lines produced a further panic as Germans and English abandoned the third parallel in terror. Men in flight often overpower the reason of others, and in this instance when they tumbled into the trenches of the second they set off a wild firing from those who did not actually break and run. A jaeger officer later noted that "Everywhere they saw rebels. They believed the enemy had made a sortie and fired musketry [muskets] for over half an hour, though not a single rebel had passed the ditch."
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Within this carnage lesser struggles were enacted. One found Clinton growling in his journal about Cornwallis and Arbuthnot, and occasionally to them about their conduct. Clinton had learned ten days before he crossed the Ashley that his resignation had not been accepted. This news may have disappointed him; it more than disappointed Cornwallis who hoped to replace Clinton -- it caused him to withhold his advice from his chief. Clinton helped this sulking along by reproaching Cornwallis for having permitted someone on his staff to say with a "sneer" that if Clinton wished to resign all he had to do was to ask again. Cornwallis denied that anyone had sneered at Clinton, bitter words passed back and forth, though perhaps none so serious as Clinton's charge in his journal against Cornwallis for "UNSOLDIERLY BEHAVIOR, NEGLECTING TO GIVE ORDERS IN MY ABSENCE."
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Although the immediate effects of this conflict defy measurement, one result is clear: Cornwallis possessed fine tactical skills and Clinton did not employ Cornwallis well.

Of more obvious importance was the near break with Arbuthnot. The background of this quarrel is to be found in events that occurred before the siege commenced.
Arbuthnot rarely acted decisively, and his

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disagreement with Clinton left him even more reluctant than usual to exert himself. Clinton wanted him to push his ships up the Cooper River in order to trap Lincoln in the city. Arbuthnot never directly refused, but he failed to make the attempt. He offered a series of reasons-he needed more time, or he feared fireships might destroy his fleet in the confined reaches of the river -- and in the process he convinced Clinton that he was an incompetent and a liar. Thus Clinton to Arbuthnot: "I find by [the] Ad[miral's] letter to Elp[hinstone] he Still HARPS UPON DELAYS. He should recollect all the delays occasioned by himself. . . .I will once more enumerate them here." And: he "will LIE -- NAY, I KNOW HE WILL IN A THOUSAND INSTANCES." And about two weeks later -- on April 22 -- "In appearance we were the best of friends, but I am sure he is FALSE as HELL."
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During some of these worst days of bickering, Clinton's forces struck decisive blows and succeeded in cutting off the city without the navy's aid. On the night of April 14, Lt. Colonel Banastre Tarleton, commander of the Tory Legion, took Monck's Corner, a strategic point up the Cooper linking the city to the countryside to the north. And in another week, Tarleton and Lt. Colonel James Webster with two regiments dominated approaches all along the Cooper to within six miles of Charleston.
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With escapes closed off, Lincoln lost hope. Civilians in Charleston refused to allow him to surrender, however. Some evidently thought that Washington would march southward and save them. Lincoln tried to persuade them that defeat was inevitable, and on April 21 he offered to surrender to Clinton on the condition that he and his army would be permitted to leave on their own terms. Clinton turned him down immediately.

By the end of the first week in May the two armies were separated by only a few yards. The sappers had done their work well, digging right up to the American lines and actually draining the main ditch that cut across the Neck. Lincoln squirmed and fretted and tried to persuade Clinton both to let him surrender with full honors of war and to allow the militia to go free. Clinton would have none of this, and on the night of May 9 the two sides shelled one another heavily. This time, firing into wooden houses, the British artillery proved effective. With many houses burning, the citizens of Charleston decided they had had enough.
Surrender came on May 12. The militia were paroled

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and all the American officers were allowed to keep their swords until their shouts of "long live Congress" got on British nerves whereupon they were forced to give them up. Altogether 2571 Continentals were taken and 800 militia were paroled. The dead and wounded were surprisingly few on both sides -- 76 British killed and 189 wounded, and 89 Americans killed and 138 wounded. The American loss of weapons and supplies was heavy: 343 artillery pieces of various sizes, almost 6000 muskets, 376 barrels of powder, over 30,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, plus large stores of rum, rice, and indigo.
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Three days later a dreadful accident added to the dead and wounded. The captured muskets had been thrown carelessly into a wooden building where gunpowder was also stored. A loaded musket tossed onto the pile may have gone off. An explosion followed setting six houses afire and killing some 200 people, British, Americans, Germans, soldiers and civilians alike. A German officer wrote that "a great many" suffering from terrible powder burns "writhed like worms on the ground." Pieces of bodies were scattered all about, some so "mutilated that one could not make out a human figure." Thus an agonizing siege ended in a special sort of horror.
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Even during the worst of the siege, except perhaps for the long nights of terror, there had been some rudimentary sense of order. The lines separating the two sides were clear, and friend could identify foe. The shelling, though often ineffective, had brought fear to troops and civilians alike, but its special sort of dread had been confined to the besiegers and besieged of a city. And fear had become familiar, a part of ordinary existence, with its sources known, an enemy who lived just below ground level like one's own soldiers. Now, with Lincoln's surrender, the fear spread throughout the Carolinas, not usually so intense to be sure, but especially dreadful because it was unexpected and because it often issued from neighbors and onetime friends.

The spread took the British by surprise. Clinton did not expect that bringing order to South Carolina would be easy, but he did not think it impossible, and he had ideas on how to proceed. On June 1 he and Arbuthnot issued a proclamation offering full pardons to prisoners and other active rebels who would take an oath of allegiance.
This proclama-

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tion aroused discontent only among loyalists who expected that rebellion would be punished. And here was Clinton promising rebels who would swear allegiance that they would have the rights they had always possessed under British rule, plus exemption from Parliamentary taxation. Many rebels had already accepted parole, moved by the guarantee that in doing so their property would remain their own and perhaps by the rumors that Congress would cede the Carolinas and Georgia to Britain. Clinton did not trust all those he had captured and though he paroled several hundred, he also sent others, clearly disaffected, to islands off the coast and to prison ships in the harbor. There, in these pestilential tubs, eight hundred were to die in the next year.