Fusiliers (37 page)
The 23rd moved that day beyond the abandoned train of enemy wagons. They tramped through the looted American baggage and were placed in a defensive line, sending out their pickets. They bivouacked that night just beyond the battlefield, Fusiliers swapping tales of the extraordinary day they had just survived.
Four years before, at Long Island, the 23rd had been part of Brigadier James Grant’s attack, fighting their way with some difficulty through an American force half their size (composed largely of Maryland and Delaware troops); at Camden the equation was reversed. A British army, far inland, had beaten a larger American enemy, a transformation made possible by having experienced troops, new tactics, and, above all, superior leadership. The soldiers at Camden had just given the rebels the drubbing some had longed for years to administer, and were not slow to recognise what had made it possible.
Serjeant Lamb praised Captain Champagne, as acting commanding officer, for ‘perfect intrepidity and valour’, and Colonel Webster, whose manoeuvre onto the enemy flank had gained the day, was lauded as ‘cool, determined, vigilant, and active’. Lieutenant Barretté felt the results showed ‘what a British army can do when they undertake [a task] with alacrity and have confidence in their officers’.
As for Major General Gates, his reputation was ruined. The loss of a battle might have been forgiven, but he had quit the field when he saw the militia on his left flank broken, leaving the Continental troops to their fate. He set spurs to horse and did not stop until he reached Charlotte, 60 miles to the north, that evening. ‘Was there ever an instance of a general running away as Gates has done from his whole army? And was there ever so precipitous a flight?’ asked Alexander Hamilton, one of Washington’s inner circle. ‘It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life. But it disgraces the general and the soldier.’
The losses taken by the 23rd on 16 August were mercifully light – just six men killed and eighteen wounded. The 33rd by contrast,
standing under withering American fire, had eighteen killed and eighty-one wounded. The casualties for Cornwallis’s army as a whole were sixty-eight killed and 238 wounded. This was a significant figure as a proportion of those who took part, but the earl’s men were phlegmatic about losses taken when fighting aggressively so it did not dent the general’s popularity in the days after the battle. In any case, the accounting for the victory of Camden looked a little better after 18 August, when Tarleton surprised Colonel Sumpter at Fishing Creek, recapturing a hundred British prisoners who had been taken in an action shortly before the main battle. As for the Americans, 650 Continentals were killed or captured, and about a hundred militia suffered the same fate. One British officer at New York, reading of Camden, enthused that it was ‘the handsomest and most complete affair that has been done in this war’. Cornwallis himself, in his victory dispatch to Lord Germain, wrote that ‘the behaviour of His Majesty’s troops in general was beyond all praise – it did honour to themselves and their country’.
During the dog days of August, Lieutenant Colonel Balfour measured his new responsibilities as Commandant of Charleston, and surveyed the surroundings. Headquarters was on King Street, a fine three-storey building possessed of an attic in which the owner had hidden her daughters during General Clinton’s residence there. Being Patriots, they had gone upcountry by the time Balfour was at work. King Street was a couple of blocks removed from the bustle and stink of the port, a comparatively tranquil haven for the merchant elite who had built fabulous mansions on this and several other thoroughfares. For many of these dynasties, the town residences were supplemented by plantation homes on the estates that produced their wealth.
The oligarchs of Charleston had divided when the city fell. Some dozens of Whigs or Patriots had been deported by Cornwallis, sent to a form of open arrest at the British base of St Augustin. Others had disappeared into the backcountry. Many families stayed though, and for them the opulent lifestyle – decadent even – for which the city was known continued. There was still money to be made, even if trade with the Caribbean or England was depressed and interrupted by enemy shipping.
Balfour was briefed about Camden by Captain Ross, Cornwallis’s aide-de-camp, who passed through Charleston with the general’s dispatches. Having given Ross this task, the earl would get his favourite
to the top of the queue for promotion to major, just as Howe had done with Balfour in 1776. Balfour, seeing his chance to ingratiate himself further with his new patron, suggested to Cornwallis that Mecan’s death presented an opportunity to promote Ross to the 23rd’s vacant majority. What could be better – this way their fortunes could be bound even more closely? Cornwallis though proved the more subtle player of the army patronage business and politely rejected Balfour’s suggestion, saying, ‘I don’t think it would be right for me to meddle.’ The decision would have to be made by the powers in London.
This left Balfour with the task of finding another man to take the Welch Fusiliers’ majority, for he had been promised by Cornwallis that he could continue to control promotions in his regiment, even as they marched far from Charleston. Balfour chose that Scottish veteran Frederick Mackenzie. Richard Temple, who had spent the war recruiting at home, complained loudly, but there was nothing he could do, for it was the King’s desire that those serving in America take precedence. Mackenzie thus reaped the reward for his long years on that Continent. Somehow he scraped together the money, for he had enjoyed several years on staff pay (roughly doubling his salary) and may, like many of the Scots climbing the ranks, have borrowed from friends and relatives.
Mackenzie, however, was tied to his staff duties in New York, just as Balfour was to Charleston, which meant that the 23rd would have to soldier on with a captain in command. Balfour did not want it to be Champagne, instead summoning Thomas Peter, commander of the 23rd Grenadier Company down from New York. Peter, another zealous officer in his early twenties, a Scot to boot, had been in the 23rd for more than two years but had been present since the beginning of the American war in other regiments. He had seen much hard service in the 2nd Grenadier Battalion during the battles of 1776 and 1777, being wounded at Brandywine. Balfour told General Clinton that Peter was ‘an attentive officer’.
In the days and weeks that followed Camden, Balfour was sanguine about whether lasting good would come from the victory. Some of the Continental prisoners were re-taken by Colonel Francis Marion’s partisan party even as they were being marched down to Charleston. Marion, who became known as the Swamp Fox, played a similar role disrupting the King’s authority on the coastal plain to that Sumpter managed in the piedmont.
After his victory at Camden, Cornwallis harboured ideas of pushing into North Carolina in order to begin the conquest of that state. There were many obstacles to such a step though. As August became September, the illnesses that had afflicted the army at Camden worsened. Cornwallis moved Webster’s Brigade and Tarleton’s British Legion north, closer to his next target, but explained to Balfour, ‘I find the ague and the fever all over this country, full as much as at Camden, they say go 40 or 50 miles farther and you will be healthy. It was the same language before we left Camden, there is no trusting such dangerous experiments.’ Among those stricken down by fever was Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton himself, and whatever that officer’s lack of caution or compassion, he was essential to the army’s advanced guard. Indeed the general reflected that ‘the whole of the men are very different when Tarleton is present or absent’.
In addition to the sickness in his army, which tended to make him wait until the cooler winter months, Cornwallis would need to build up supplies before launching his next advance. The existence of enemy partisan bands meanwhile would complicate the sending of recruits and stores upcountry, one of Balfour’s principal tasks. The character of clashes between Tory detachments and these Patriot groups became increasingly desperate and brutal, with the latter in particular using murder and intimidation to neutralise their enemies.
Balfour was worried by the growing rural violence, but adjusted his message according to the person with whom he was communicating. Being Commandant at Charleston required him to be in regular contact with General Henry Clinton at New York, an onerous duty given their mutual antipathy, but one which Balfour had to conduct with professional decorum. Out of loyalty to General Cornwallis, furthermore, Balfour had to trumpet the earl’s achievements, writing to Clinton some weeks after Camden that it had ‘produced a very great change … in affairs here’. This chimed with Cornwallis’s message to London, in his Camden dispatch, that, as a result of the victory ‘the internal commotions and insurrections in the province will now subside’. In fact, Balfour knew exactly what to expect. Reports of raids and Tory setbacks simply confirmed in him the view expressed in a private letter to a friend, that ‘the rebels, according to custom, have managed to collect again, and make many very serious incursions into this province’.
Colonel Charles O’Hara, a Guards officer of considerable American experience who by the summer of 1780 was on his way back from
England and would soon be serving under Cornwallis, took an even stronger line. He felt the victories of Charleston and Camden had revived ‘the old fatal delusion’ among the army’s political masters: that giving the enemy one more good hiding would stoke an unstoppable loyalist revival. O’Hara noted that ‘whenever a rebel army is said to have been cut to pieces, it would be more consonant with the truth to say that they have been dispersed, determined to join again at the first favourable opportunity’. O’Hara, it must be owned, was one of those officers tied to Whiggish high society in England, who habitually questioned the competence of the King’s Ministry. Nevertheless he and Balfour were in possession of the essential truth that the British army’s victories in South Carolina were all very well but that the enemy, in the words of the general that Washington would send to replace Gates, would ‘fight, get beat, rise, and fight again’.
During September and early October, Balfour had to deal with some fruits of victory, namely what to do with the prisoners taken at Camden and Charleston. He realised that if he took them out of prison camps and sent them aboard ships in the harbour, he could free an entire redcoat regiment for service in the countryside. This he did, following an example of the imprisonment of Tory sympathisers in that city before it fell or of the British practice in New York. Even so, the results, in terms of horrendous sickness and death among the prisoners, might have been predicted.
On 7 October British plans for the subjugation of the Carolinas received their first serious check. It happened to the north, on the borders of the two states at King’s Mountain. Major Ferguson had gone into the country, with a force of Tory militia, challenging his enemy to fight. This they did with great vigour, defeating and killing the Scottish officer, capturing most of his 1,000 men and hanging nine of them from trees after summary proceedings. This disaster validated Balfour’s earlier gloomy assessments about the quality of Tory militia, and the folly of Ferguson’s work. Hearing of the debacle, Balfour did not stoop in his letters, private or public, to a tone of ‘I told you so.’ Instead the lieutenant colonel sympathised for the loss of a dedicated officer and understood that the event would give fresh vigour to Whigs across the Carolinas, cowing the loyalists correspondingly. He worried too about the wisdom of pressing north.
The defeat caused Cornwallis to abandon his first push into North Carolina. Instead he brought his main army back to Winnsborough, a
plantation around twenty-five miles north-west of Camden, in order to rest while he completed the build-up of supplies required for a fresh advance. Whatever was in that Camden dispatch, he had evidently grasped that the enemy would recover and re-organise, bringing fresh pressure to bear as soon as it could. Cornwallis was determined not to be at the mercy of events but to master them. This aggressive spirit earned the general great respect in his army, which was just as well, for as soon as he received the recruits, clothing and supplies that he needed, Cornwallis would call upon them to give their all in the new campaign.
EIGHTEEN
Or Balfour Delivers the Goods
The scene about the roadside in Landsford, a small upcountry trading post on the Catawba River, was bustling and purposeful that early morning, 22 October 1780. The army had abandoned its march into North Carolina following Ferguson’s defeat at King’s Mountain and was trying to find a good place to recover itself. Dozens of sick men were that day draped on to wagons or set off on unsteady feet towards Camden. They were the visible, febrile consequence of weeks of hard marching and scanty diet.
There were intermittent fevers, putrid fevers, fluxes so bad that the men were passing blood, and running sores that would not heal. Even many of those who declared themselves fit to send the Whigs to the devil looked little more than skin and bone.