The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (97 page)

to strengthen the defenses already in place. The ships themselves formed a barrier to entrance into the Cooper.
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Charleston's defenses on the north were in worse shape than those facing the harbor. Benjamin Lincoln, the commander of the city's garrison, expected invasion from the sea and consequently neglected completing the land-works that stretched across the Neck. The heart of these defenses was the citadel, or "hornwork" or "old royal work," a heavy fort made of "tapia" or "tappy," a material consisting of oystershells, lime, sand, and water. It had eighteen guns. There were redoubts on either side of it, but they were not complete; nor had their engineers located them well, had not at least in the judgment of the enemy that eventually captured them. One flaw might have been corrected had the Americans used their time more efficiently: the lonely isolation of these works. They sat apart from one another, and the main one on the left never enjoyed safe communications with the others. Communication trenches dug between the citadel and those on the right strengthened that side of the line, but the rear of even these works remained vulnerable because their defenders neglected to close them. Duportail, the French engineer who arrived late in April, urged the closing of the rear of the works, an extremely difficult process under fire.
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The people of Charleston did not rush into these fortifications; nor did the people from the state, and probably no more than one-third of the defenders were Carolinians. When Clinton landed, Lincoln had 800 South Carolina Continentals, 400 Virginia Continentals, around 380 of Pulaski's Legion (named after their commander, the Polish nobleman, Casimir Pulaski), 2000 militia from the Carolinas, and a small number of dragoons. In April, just before Clinton closed off the city, reinforcements, North Carolina and Virginia Continentals, arrived.
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Lincoln must have been grateful for the Continentals in this force. He had little else to be grateful for; be had stepped into waters over his head and he did not know how to swim. But no American commander could have stayed afloat easily in the depths of siegecraft: physical defenses in decay, or uncompleted, inadequate military forces, a civilian population eager to be defended but unwilling to expose itself, these were deep waters indeed. And of course Lincoln had no experience in defending a city under siege, nor did anyone else in his command.

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Not that Lincoln lacked ability. Before the Revolution he had got his living as a farmer in Hingham, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1733. He came up the way many able men in New England did through hard work and service to the community as town clerk, justice of the peace, and a militia officer in a Suffolk County regiment. In the years just preceding the war he sat on Hingham's committee of correspondence and in the Provincial Congress. A lieutenant colonel of militia when the war began, Lincoln rose to major general in a short time; and Congress, following a suggestion from Washington, brought him to the same rank in the Continental line early in 1777. His service thereafter, until Congress appointed him commander of the southern department in September 1778 in place of Robert Howe, was not undistinguished but it was not brilliant. He performed well at Saratoga, where he was seriously wounded in the leg. The command in the South followed a long period of recuperation.
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Lincoln did not know why the enemy did not attack and may not have given the delay much thought in his haste to complete his defenses. Expecting the British to force their way across the bar and up into the harbor, he at first concentrated on the lower tip of the Neck and the mouths of the rivers. Work also proceeded up the peninsula in case the British decided to approach the city from the rear.

Clinton seems never to have considered a landing on the tip, preferring to come around to strike from the mainland. He needed the navy for this move, and on March 20, Arbuthnot succeeded in getting half a dozen frigates over the bar. A game of seagoing cat-and-mouse preceded this success, with small craft of the Royal Navy marking the shallow spots along the bar with buoys, and Whipple's boats slipping out afterwards to destroy them.

Five days later Paterson and his 1500 who had been detached to Georgia returned, and on the night of March 29, Clinton began sending his reinforced army across the Ashley at Drayton's Landing, about twelve miles above Charleston. The Ashley was only 200 yards wide at this place, and bent just below so that it shielded from American observers the small boats manned by Arbuthnot's crews.
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The Americans did not oppose this landing, and by April 1, Clintons forces had moved within 1000 yards of the defenses across the Neck. The siege now began in a manner familiar in eighteenth-century warfare.

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Engineers opened a "parallel" across the Neck about 800 yards from the American lines. The parallel consisted of trenches and redoubts roughly paralleling the works some 800 yards away. Ten days later it was completed, and under the supervision of engineers the troops began digging saps toward the American lines. This procedure followed the usual theory and practice of sieges, which were called "regular approaches," that is, systematic and well-laid out approaches on the ground ever closer to enemy fortifications.
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A siege might bring the attackers close enough to permit them to make an all-out assault without exposing themselves until the last possible moment. Clinton hoped that an assault would not be necessary, hoped indeed that he could force Lincoln to surrender by cutting Charleston off from any relief. His purposes were as much political as military: to capture Charleston and its population intact and thereby help rally loyalist support to the king's cause. The destruction of the city would not contribute to this purpose, and Clinton remarked during the siege when Captain Elphinstone and "all the navy" rejoiced "at the town's being on fire": "Absurd, impolitic, and inhuman to burn a town you mean to occupy." In any case "the success of a storm [an assault] is uncertain. . . . I think we are sure of the place upon our own terms, and with it I think we conquer the southern provinces and perhaps more."
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No siege any more than a "storm" could be undertaken lightly. It tested the wills of the defenders watching their enemy dig his way into their guts, and it taxed the energies and resourcefulness of the attackers. The ground was generally flat north of the city; the soil sandy and marshy and full of sand fleas whose bites were "very painful" according to a German officer who experienced them. The ground had few high places to screen off American observers so most of the digging was done at night. The heat was not usually oppressive then; but the days of this April were described as "unbearable."
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The terrain made artillery fire especially effective -- effective, that is, by the standards of the eighteenth century. The first parallel was dug out of the range of most artillery, the accuracy of which was always problematical.
Generally, even heavy guns were unreliable at ranges over

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1200 yards, and some heavy guns beyond 400 yards. Mortars might throw shells much farther -- occasionally as far as two miles -- but they too lacked accuracy. As the British pushed closer, however, they increased their chances of being killed not only by artillery but by small arms as well.

Push closer they did throughout April. Major Moncrieff, a skillful engineer, directed most of their operations. He began his work one night by crawling up to the abatis in order to see just what he was up against. He then organized large working parties, sometimes as many as 500 men, and put them to constructing the siege works. At several points along the parallel, redoubts were put up, consisting of heavy wooden frames ten feet high and fourteen feet long sitting on three legs. These frames, called mantelets, had been shipped from New York where they were constructed. Assembled on the scene at Charleston, sixteen were fitted together to form the skeleton of a redoubt. Then sand and earth were piled against them until their walls were at least twelve feet thick. Embrasures were cut through their parapets to permit guns and howitzers to be fired. When the last parallel was completed the third -- in late April, several of the embrasures were usually occupied by infantry with rifles and muskets. Rifle embrasures were also built with sandbags along the trenches outside the redoubts to allow infantry to fire into the embrasures of the American redoubts.
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Building these works and digging trenches would not have been easy in peacetime. Lifting the mantelets was difficult; each required eighteen men, and carrying them in the dark to the right place while under fire was no trifling business. The digging also presented special problems. The sand was fairly loose, but it was wet -- at times the men worked in water -- and drainage ditches had to be dug. The shelling was often very heavy though usually, perhaps, inaccurate. But the lack of precision added a special kind of horror. No one knew when the next round was coming or where it would land. And the Americans fired terrible stuff, canisters filled with jagged fragments of old projectiles, broken shovels, pickaxes, hatchets, flat irons, pistol barrels, broken locks, and sometimes even shards of glass. The wounds this metal inflicted could be terrible: accounts of the siege mention legs torn off, arms shattered, and men blown apart by heavy explosions. A single solid cannon ball that smashed into seven jaegers one May night tore off one man's leg, damaged another's thigh, and crashing into a tree threw splinters into five others.
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The British and Germans fired more conventional rounds, but these too had the capacity to mutilate flesh and bone. As the sappers burrowed closer, artillery was dragged forward and aimed at the embrasures of the citadel and the supporting works. For this nice work, the royal artillerymen favored canisters filled with 100 bullets each. They also fired three-pound case shot and half-pound projectiles, called "bogy shot." Nor did they neglect heavy balls and explosive bombs. By late April, when the second parallel was complete and the third well under way, each side could see the damage and sometimes the casualties inflicted on the other. A shell struck an American platform behind an embrasure: "It burst as it fell, throwing two artillerymen from the embrasure into the trench and blowing up the enemy's platform."
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