Further, Mr. Ramsay has the hardihood to write: ‘An aged citizen, who laboured under a natural inability of speech, had his tongue cut out by one of the Royal army.’ And again: ‘A sucking infant was plundered of part of its clothing, while a bayonet was presented to the breast of its mother.’ It is impossible for one who has been in America during a great part of the war, and actually taken part in much of the fighting, to read such gross falsehoods without being balanced between indignation and laughter. Any such wanton action as the former, proved on a British soldier, would have been punished by his officers with the greatest severity; as for the latter, the little cotton shirt that suffices an American infant in the heats of summer would be a curious booty for any but a madman.
Mr. Belsham, though somewhat more cautious than Mr. Ramsay, is equally off the mark. His assertion that ‘all the buildings and farmhouses for two miles in extent round the town were laid in ashes’, I can take upon me to contradict as a most cruel slander; and grieve that such misrepresentations can be transmitted under the pompous name of history to generations yet unborn.
Let me add that our cause was ill-served by Members of Parliament who sought to justify the burning of the towns not by a plain statement of the provocation that made such sad acts necessary, but by reference to the tomes of Puffendorf and Grotius. These two learned legal authorities had, it seems, long before declared that the burning of unfortified towns, which were the nurseries of soldiers, was consonant with the accepted rules of war. Mr. Burke, for the Opposition, however, protested that our acts had exceeded all that the rights of warfare could sanction, in annihilating humanity from the face of the earth! The Prime Minister and the Attorney-General successively rose to rebuke Mr. Burke for this exaggeration and falsification of fact, but Mr. George Johnstone, who had been a rapacious Governor of the Floridas in the year 1763, and, more lately, a Commissioner of Peace, in company with the Earl of Carlisle, impetuously agreed with Mr. Burke that a war of destruction was indeed being waged against the American people. ‘No quarter should be shown to the American Congress, and if the Infernals could be let loose upon them I, for one, Mr. Speaker, would approve the measure.’ Governor Johnstone’s foolish warmth was due to his resentment against Congress for repudiating the Saratoga Convention, and for treating him and his fellow-Commissioners with studied coolness.
***
On September 23rd, we were embarked at Sandy Hook, close to New York, four thousand of us, under the command of Lieutenant-General the Earl of Cornwallis, whom I have mentioned in my previous volume as the exemplary Colonel of The Thirty-third when I was at Dublin learning the new light-infantry movements. We were told that we were bound for the West Indies, for Jamaica was threatened by the French fleet. After succouring our garrison there we would seize all the French Sugar Islands, and the Spanish possessions too, for the Spaniards had by now entered the war against us. We were glad to learn of this expedition, as providing at least a change of climate. A new draft of recruits from England had brought the fever with them, which soon swept through the city and the island, so that within six weeks six thousand men of the garrison were unfit for duty. Our officers, who always took good care of our health, saw that we disinfected our tents frequently and also supplied us with Bark; nevertheless we had many men on the sick list and a few deaths. New York was extremely subject to such fevers, chiefly on account of the dirtiness and narrowness of the streets on the East Side of the town, where houses were set as closely as possible and the riverside crowded with confused heaps of wooden stores, built upon wharfs projecting one beyond the other in every direction. Companies of negro slaves employed by the City Council used to carry through the streets, balanced on their heads, stinking buckets of night soil from the privies of the well-to-do, and empty them upon the mud of the water-fronts, where noxious vapours were bred. The hovels of the poor destitute Tories in the burned-out part of the city were also centres of infection.
Our voyage to Jamaica was cancelled when we had been but two days at sea (in very foul weather), since it had been reported that the French fleet had left the West Indies and were making again for the mainland of America. We returned on September 29th, and had two months to wait before we were re-embarked for the South.
News came that greatly grieved me. The American General Sullivan had been ordered with four thousand men to attack those settlements of the Six Nations through which I had passed two winters before, in the company of my friend Thayendanegea; the Indians, supported by some Loyalist troops, had met the General in battle at Chemung by the Susquehanna River and been entirely defeated. He had thereupon burned all their villages and towns, some of which consisted of sixty, eighty and even one hundred houses, and visited upon them a far severer destruction than we upon the settlements of Connecticut. For his men destroyed the crops of the Indians with the greatest thoroughness, even pulling up the vegetables and currant-bushes in the gardens, and killed every orchard of cherry, apple and peach, by girdling the trees. In my later travels in the back country of America I fell in with a soldier who had served in this campaign and happened to be a man of finer feelings. Said he: ‘When we burned down the Indian huts, that was well enough. It seemed a just vengeance for what had been done to our own houses in the Wyoming valley. We laughed at the crackling flames. But when we came, according to orders, to cut down the corn-patches, then, I swear, my soul revolted. Who could see without tears the stalks that stood so stately with broad green leaves and gaily tasselled shooks—filled with sweet milky fluid, and flour—who could see these sacred plants bowing under our knives, to wither and rot untasted in the fields?’
The Indians, who were commanded by Thayendanegea, got safely away, but were forced that winter to move up into Canada and there rely upon General Carleton’s charity. The news, as it first reached us, described the massacre by the Americans of the whole population of the Six Nations, and it may be imagined what gloomy thoughts oppressed me. From the moment that I had bidden farewell to Thayendanegea in the woods near Saratoga before the capitulation I had never for a day ceased to think of Kate Harlowe and our child, and still played with the fancy that some accident of war or the eventual signature of peace would happily reunite us. In planning my escape from the Convention Army I had even first considered whether or no I should run, not downstream to New York, but upstream past Albany—with a view to making my way through the American frontier settlements, following up the Mohawk River, and attaching myself to the Rangers under Colonel Guy Johnson, who were operating in company with the Six Nations. For I believed that Kate would still be living in the Indian town of Genesee, where Thayendanegea had reported her to be. Kate was a magnet that I had found it exceedingly hard to pull against.
The grief that the false news of the massacre engendered did not have the expected effect upon me, of driving me to drink and debauch: I was now too old a soldier to take that foolish course. On the contrary, I bent all my energies upon improving my military knowledge by the reading of books borrowed from my officers and upon making myself worthy of the regiment in which I was now fortunately enrolled, by a strict attention to my duty. Though winter here did not usually set in until the New Year, snow fell in the middle of November, with premature frosts; and very hard weather was predicted by the behaviour of the birds and beasts. It proved to be the hardest winter of two centuries; when such common wild game as deer, turkeys, squirrels and partridges were almost exterminated throughout the Northern colonies, when every privet hedge in Pennsylvania was destroyed by the frost, and when Hudson’s River froze over as far down as New York City, and afforded a solid causeway of salt-water ice from shore to shore, a distance of above a mile. However, we escaped it. On the day after Christmas, 1779, the Commander-in-Chief, having received orders from Lord George Germaine in London to carry the war into the Southern provinces, sailed with us and a great part of the army to recapture Charleston, the capital city of South Carolina, which was then in the hands of the American General Lincoln. There was already
a great deal of ice in New York Harbour when we sailed.
***
We expected to arrive at our destination by Ladies’ Christmas, as we call Twelfth Night in my country, but soon were made to understand that we could not expect a continuance of the fair weather with which we set out. On December 28th, it blew a very hard gale of wind dead on the chore, from which we were distant thirty miles; we had to lie to until the next morning. The troops in our transport were very sick and in the morning the seas were still high and the fleet was scattered: one transport in the night had lost two masts. On the next day, fine weather; on the New Year’s Eve, an extraordinary fog on the surface of the water—the north wind blowing, and the sea boiling under a sort of steam which never rose more than a few feet from the surface. New Year’s day fine, as an augury for the year, but then suddenly another storm which blew from the north-west for no less than a week, forcing us to take down all our sail and lie to the whole while.
Our sick men grew very weak from this continual buffeting and, the hatches being battened down because of the huge seas, we could not ventilate the part where we were quartered, so that the air grew very foul. Salt pork and biscuit were never the proper medicine for sea-sickness, yet no other food was procurable. The water was cured with alum, which prevented it from rotting but was very disagreeable to the palate.
Sergeant Collins was the most active of us. When asked by what means he avoided this perpetual retching and vomiting, he gave us the old naval remedy, in rather a shamefast way: which was, to swallow a lump of greasy pork and as often as the stomach refused it, to swallow it again. At the fourth attempt the stomach being dominated, he said, by this expression of the throat’s firm will, the pork was no longer bandied about between them, but decently passed on to the guts. However, not one of us cared to try this receipt, though it were as old as Noah’s ark itself. I had brought two pounds of Souchong tea with me, and this was a great comfort to the sufferers while it lasted, as I laced it with rum.
There was one day’s abatement of the gale on the 9th, and then it blew continuously from the west for six days more, during which we again lay to. The green water poured continually over us and carried everything away that was on deck. Many men were hurt by being flung against oak or iron by the rolling and pitching of our craft. We shipped a deal of salt water, and our supply of fresh water began to get very low in the scuttle-butts. I believe that it was in this gale that the ship foundered which carried the heavy guns of the expedition, and three or four other ships. The Russia Merchant, a transport carrying artillerymen, their wives and children, settled down slowly within sight of us, having sprung her timbers beyond hope of caulking. She was an old, crank vessel and should never have been commissioned for so important a service. We were unable to render any help, being pooped ourselves by the heavy sea, and all our boats and the mizzen-mast carried away. However, in spite of the tremendous seas, the Lady Dunmore, a privateer sloop of ours, went alongside and took off the crew and passengers. We gave her three hearty cheers for this bold action. The last boat had hardly got away when the Russian Merchant turned on her side and went down in a great boiling of water.
Our scattered fleet was crossed a few days later by an American fleet of twenty-six sail, come from the Dutch island of Eustacia, the greatest depot for smugglers in the Indies—the Dutch not yet having openly joined the alliance against us. The sea was then calm. The Americans took a few of our ships which had become separated from our escorting fleet and plundered others. In return, a vessel of the Royal Navy captured a schooner of theirs which had lost its rudder. The transport that we were in, the name of which I disremember, being a difficult Dutch one, was hard put to it to escape from an American schooner; but we caught a wind which they missed and so drew out of range of her guns. This was most extraordinary, for she was gaining on us, and was within a mile and a half, when suddenly she lay becalmed. Our breeze then failed too, but a new one sprang up from another quarter which we caught while she continued to be ‘held in irons’. We had rigged up a jury mizzen-mast.
These trials continued until the first week of February, when having overshot South Carolina, we arrived at Tybee in Georgia, a port at the mouth of the River Savannah which separates the two provinces. Our company behaved throughout with the greatest discipline and fortitude; so that it was easy for me too to laugh in the face of danger and to appear indifferent whether we sank or swam. Much pity was expressed for the horses which we had on board, that starved for lack of forage; we were obliged to shoot six of them and the remainder did not live out the voyage. Indeed, of all the two hundred horses that we had with us, for the cavalry and artillery, not one came safe ashore.
Ours was among the last of the transports to reach Tybee, with hardly time to get water and fresh fruit aboard, especially oranges and lemons of which we stood greatly in need for the cleansing of our blood, before we sailed again. We arrived back again in the summer season, and I saw for the first time palm-trees and aloes, with other trees and plants which I knew only from the Scriptures. A heavy and delicious perfume mingled strangely with the stench of the harbour; for Georgia lies some fourteen hundred miles to the southward of Quebec, nine hundred from New York, and in the same degree of latitude as Jerusalem and the Delta of the Nile. The prodigious extent of North America is hardly realized in Europe: it equals that of the whole North Atlantic Ocean.
I should greatly have enjoyed a visit to Savannah, the principal town in Georgia, which lay a few miles up the river of the same name, but it was not to be. The small garrison of Savannah, a few weeks before, had successfully repulsed the first combined assault of a French fleet and an American army. Following the failure, there had been recriminations, as before, between these ill-assorted allies. The French fleet had then sailed away, part to Europe, part to the West Indies; and General Lincoln, the American commander, was now wintering his troops at the polite city of Charleston, a hundred miles up the coast. We meant to catch him there, and accordingly sailed from Tybee on February 10th, to a place called North Edisto, which lay thirty miles short of the city; arriving there without further misadventure. We took part of the garrison of Savannah with us, who had suffered greatly of late from the yellow fever.
CHAPTER VIII
Charleston, our object, was situated near the Ocean on a tongue of land formed by the confluence of Cooper River on the north side and Ashley River on the south: their united stream met the ocean below Sullivan’s Island, where the Americans had a fort provided with heavy batteries. Between the city and the island was a harbour commodious for ships. The swelling tides of these rivers, together with pleasant sea-breezes, made Charleston more healthy than the neighbouring low country, so that invalids from the West India islands frequently came there to recuperate from fevers. However, the drinking water was frequently putrid and the sultry climate had reduced all the white people thereabouts to a bilious suet-colour and so diminished their energies that any sustained physical effort seemed impossible to them. Every white man of consequence kept a number of slaves and none would think to demean himself by performing the least action that could be performed as well by dusky hands, whether it were loading his sporting gun, combing his hair, or cutting up the meat on his trencher preparatory to eating it. Even the schoolboy going to his lessons had a little slave to carry his satchel, and the young miss who let a fan fall from her relaxed fingers to the carpet would scream for a slave rather than stoop to recover it herself. Contempt or pity was expressed by these people for the ‘poor whites’ who, for lack of money to buy and support a slave or two, were obliged to do menial tasks themselves.
The institution of slavery being the most striking aspect of the Southern States, I shall be excused for enlarging upon it in the course of this account. Its familiarity prevented the inhabitants of Charleston from looking upon it as in any way shameful or odious, though they professed, as American citizens, to cherish civil liberty and to assert the freedom and honour of human nature. The Charlestonians were ind
eed known throughout America for their hospitality, urbanity and enlightened minds; and it should be mentioned in their praise that throughout the war they continued to import books and all the new improvements of the arts from England and other countries of the old world. Charleston was the centre, especially, of the musical art in America and almost every man could scrape on a fiddle, toot on a flute, or perform pleasantly on some other instrument; and every woman sang.
On the coast this side of Ashley River were a number of low-lying islands which we must successively occupy: Edisto Island, St. John’s Island, St. James Island. On our arrival at the village of North Edisto, the day after leaving Tybee, we landed unopposed and took possession of St. John’s Island, the further shores of which were bounded by Stono Creek. From this creek a winding canal called Wappo Cut led into Ashley River, directly opposite Charleston, with St. James Island lying on the right hand of it. I mention these particulars because on the day after our arrival at St. John’s Island I was selected to go with a detachment under Major Moncrieff, our Chief Engineer, to take soundings of Stono Creek. He wished to determine whether provision boats could be taken up to our camp from the sea. This was my first adventure in the Southern States and though little of military importance happened during it, I recall the whole itinerary with a vividness of first impressions that survive untarnished when many more notable later circumstances fade altogether away.
Major Moncrieff, a talented Scotsman, when we had almost finished our task, felt the heat in our boat highly oppressive and called for a halt and refreshment. We were passing a swampy field in which a number of negro slaves, both men and women, clad only in loin-cloths, were dabbling about. They were attending to the cultivation of the young rice. Rice was the staple of this province and required very much labour. We pulled to the bank and lieutenant Sutherland of the Engineers, who was with us, beckoned to a young negro, who came towards us. To my surprise the unfortunate creature hardly knew three words of English but jargoned in an incomprehensible gibberish—no doubt the native language of the Congo jungle from which he was stolen to be a slave.
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