by Tim McGrath
Samuel Tucker, with the other Continental captains in tow, proposed that a boom, consisting of chain, rope, expendable vessels, and enough anchors to secure them, be laid across the channel—it might prevent Arbuthnot’s ships from getting any closer to Charleston. Lincoln and Whipple approved the idea, and for two weeks Yankee sailors, southern militiamen, Charleston citizens, and plantation slaves toiled to complete the obstruction. And each day Clinton’s army inched closer to Charleston.32
At a council of war in Whipple’s cabin, Lincoln interrogated the naval officers. Would the boom stop or at least delay the enemy? Would their ships and the guns of Fort Moultrie be a match for Arbuthnot’s firepower? Was there anywhere on the Cooper River where the ships could hold back the British? The answer to each question was no. The captains recommended that the three Continental ships head farther upriver, and Lincoln reluctantly agreed.
Accordingly, Whipple sent the ships to Gadsden’s wharf, where their guns were removed and placed at the shore batteries Lincoln had prepared. A host of ships in the harbor were freed from their moorings; led by the Queen of France, they were sunk in a long line from the Charleston docks across the Cooper River to Shute’s Folly, with chevaux-de-frise anchored between them. Other ships and galleys were sunk at Hog Island Channel. Whipple’s officers and crews were sent ashore to serve as artillerymen. The addition of these men to the shore defenses was more than offset on March 25, when 800 North Carolinians, their enlistment up, slipped out of Charleston, hoping to evade Clinton’s army and get home. Four days later, Clinton’s numbers also changed, with the addition of 1,400 troops from Savannah. He now commanded close to 10,000 men.33
The ring continued to tighten when, on April 9, with ideal conditions of wind and tide, Arbuthnot’s frigates ran the gauntlet of fire from Fort Moultrie and the shore batteries. Newspaperman Peter Timothy watched transfixed as the British warships came on: “They really make a most noble appearance, and I could not help admiring the Regularity and Intrepidity with which they approached . . . tis Pity they are not Friends!”
One by one, beginning with the Roebuck, the frigates took the heavy fire from the fort, returning it double-fold. Hamond’s frigate, “after putting out Fire on both Side[s],” passed unharmed. One transport carrying naval stores, the Acetus, was damaged so badly by the American cannonade that she ran aground and had to be abandoned and burned. But the other ships got through with minimal damage and casualties—twenty-seven men killed and wounded.34
The next morning, Clinton and Arbuthnot sent a message to Rutledge and Lincoln. “Regretting the effusion of blood and the distress which must now commence,” they warned “of the havock and devastation . . . from the formidable force surrounding them by land and sea.” Save yourselves, they concluded, or face the consequences. Lincoln replied that “duty and inclination” dictated that the Americans decline this kind offer.35
If Lincoln had any lingering doubts about continuing resistance they were dismissed out of hand by Rutledge and Gadsden—Charleston would not surrender. Clinton’s forces soon established a beachhead on Sullivan’s Island, seizing the rebel batteries there. Thirty miles from Charleston, at Monck’s Corner, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s cavalry, “the British Legion,” routed five hundred mounted troops under General Isaac Huger. With most of their horses killed during the southbound passage, Tarleton’s dragoons were forced to ride “tackies,” the small but hardy horses native to the Carolinas, hardly dashing mounts for Tarleton’s green-coated horsemen. After their victory they had plenty of suitable steeds. Charleston was now completely surrounded. Clinton began bombarding the town.36
For a month the Americans held out despite the intense shelling. The firing from Arbuthnot’s ships was especially devastating; one British officer sneered, “Send twenty-four-pound shot into the stomachs of the women to see how they will deliver them.” Fires broke out throughout the town from the ceaseless cannonade; one shot smashed a statue of William Pitt brandishing the Magna Carta. Again, Clinton called for Lincoln to surrender. Again Lincoln refused.37
Throughout the siege, Continental sailors manned their guns, returning fire as best they could. Along with Lincoln’s quartermasters, Whipple’s pursers kept watch over their rapidly dwindling supplies of food and ammunition. Fort Moultrie fell on May 5; three days later, Lincoln was informed that there was enough food to last five more days. For the past month, Clinton had conducted the siege efficiently but not ruthlessly. Now he acted otherwise. On May 11, British guns poured hot shot into the city, setting hundreds of roofs afire. Clinton planned an all-out assault for the next morning, but it was unnecessary. Lincoln surrendered.38
The fall of Charleston was bad enough, but the surrender of Lincoln’s 5,000 soldiers and sailors made it the greatest American defeat of the war. Clinton also captured 400 cannon, 5,000 muskets and pikes, and Arbuthnot gained three more ships for his fleet: the Boston (now the Charlestown), the Ranger (now called the Halifax), and the Providence (which kept her name). On May 15, Whipple, Tucker, Simpson, Rathbun, and Hacker petitioned Arbuthnot for paroles, promising to refrain from taking up arms until notified that they were exchanged for Royal Navy officers of suitable rank. Their request granted, they sailed for Philadelphia aboard the cartel Friendship.39
As crushing as Clinton’s victory was to Washington and Congress, it was a tonic to the British, especially at home. Lord North’s government had been in danger of toppling, due to a financial panic and increasing opposition to the war—both in Parliament and in the streets of London, where “King Mob” ran amok in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. King George had to send for Lord Amherst and his army to quell a riot that many feared could start a civil war. One Irish politician declared, “The English Military seem determined to conquer North America, if they beggar the nation.”40
Clinton’s triumph over the rebels did give heart to English Tories and American Loyalists. From New York, exiled Pennsylvanian Joseph Galloway believed that most Americans were ready to swear fealty to the king. Clinton and Arbuthnot soon returned to New York, leaving Cornwallis, Tarleton, and 8,000 Redcoats to continue the pacification of the south.41
Philadelphians were dealing with a smallpox outbreak when the Friendship docked on June 20. Within weeks, all of the sailors, marines, and officers found themselves exchanged except Whipple, as no British officer of similar rank was captured. He would remain “on the beach” for the remainder of the war, but he had no regrets, having “bent our whole force and strained every nerve for the defense of the town.”
With the rapidly diminishing number of Continental vessels, Tucker, Rathbun, and Simpson also saw their naval careers come to an end. After Charleston, the navy was down to five ships: the frigates Alliance, Confederacy, Deane, and Trumbull, and the sloop-of-war Saratoga—the same exact number the navy had started with nearly five years earlier.42
As General Lincoln and Commodore Whipple surrendered Charleston and the last squadron of the Continental Navy, Captain number 1 was, for the first time since receiving his commission in 1776, sailing a frigate into the Atlantic.
Since September 1779, when Congress rewarded James Nicholson’s farcical loss of the Virginia with command of the frigate Trumbull, the Maryland native had been in New London, getting his ship ready to sail. Frigate and captain were a perfect match—she had never been to sea, either. As with the Virginia, Nicholson took months to get to sea, much again to Congress’s consternation. In fairness, Nicholson had parochial issues to deal with; like Barry and Jones, New Englanders considered him a “foreigner,” a southerner being just as alien as the Irish Barry or the Scottish Jones.
By the spring of 1780, Nicholson had rounded up a crew of 199, most of whom he described as “green country lads” who did not know a keelson from a gunwale. He did have thirty seasoned marines under Captain Gilbert Saltonstall, Dudley’s younger brother. Most of them were veterans of Penobscot.43
As the last stor
es were being loaded aboard the Trumbull, the Eastern Navy Board and the Board of Admiralty haggled over where to send the frigate. A proposed cruise to Hudson Bay, with Nicholson leading a squadron of privateers, was immediately refused by Congress, which had already seen how well privateers obeyed navy orders at Penobscot. No, the Trumbull would cruise alone until the end of June, then sail for Philadelphia, where a joint venture with the Saratoga was planned.44
In size, the Trumbull was similar to the Virginia: more than 125 feet long with a 34-foot beam. Designed for twenty-eight guns, she put to sea with thirty—twenty-four 12-pounders and six 6-pounders. Her sides were painted a burnished yellow. With so many landsmen aboard, Nicholson drilled them whenever their bouts of seasickness allowed. The Trumbull sailed smoothly enough, and by late May was 250 miles off Bermuda when Nicholson took his first prize as a Continental captain, the schooner Queen Charlotte. The capture was good for morale—most of Nicholson’s “green-country lads” were still getting their sea legs, and taking the Queen Charlotte did much to steady their nerves.45
About ten a.m. on June 1, the Trumbull’s mastheader sighted a much larger sail. The ship was to windward, so Nicholson ordered the sails “handed”—taken in—“to keep ourselves undiscovered until she came nearer to us.”46
Nicholson’s ploy worked. Once the distant ship spotted the Trumbull, her captain, John Coulthard, changed course, making straight for the Americans. A half hour passed; as she closed in, Nicholson discerned she was not a frigate, but to his eye more “a French East-Indiaman cut down”—another Bonhomme Richard. He coolly kept his frigate into the wind. Few, if any, of the crew knew Nicholson had fought in the Royal Navy during the French and Indian War, nor had he shown his warrior side since joining the Continental Navy. He was about to.47
Seeing the ship shift her course to come up on the Trumbull’s stern, Nicholson called, “Make all Sail!” and brought the frigate through the wind to meet the approaching vessel. Coulthard changed course again, to come up on the Trumbull’s beam and see how many guns she carried. For another half hour the ships jockeyed for position, like two gunfighters each trying to put the sun in the other’s eyes. Nicholson ordered his smaller sails taken in, hauled up his courses (the large sails set on the lower yards), and “hove the maintopsail to the mast” while clearing the decks for action. He ordered the guns loaded, but their ports closed—he did not want to show his teeth yet.48
The approaching ship was on the Trumbull’s beam when Nicholson’s helmsman turned the frigate, allowing her main topsail to fill and letting Nicholson see both how this ship sailed and how many guns she carried. The oncoming vessel carried twenty-six 12-pounders and at least eight or ten 6-pounders on her quarterdeck and fo’c’sle. She was no British warship but a Liverpool privateer, the Watt. As the Trumbull picked up speed, Coulthard again took Nicholson’s bait and tacked to pursue.
Nicholson spoke to his men. They were going to fight, he told them—a fight he knew they could win. His confident words gave them heart, and “they most chearfully agreed to fight her.” After his “short exhortation,” he sent Saltonstall’s marines to the tops. From his quarterdeck, Coulthard watched them ascend the ratlines and noted how nimbly the Trumbull glided through the water, “she having a clean bottom and we foul,” he later reported. A burgeoning hold from the Watt’s prizes also slowed her down. As to the Trumbull, “We took her for one of his Majesty’s cruizing frigates,” Coulthard recalled. But as the Watt edged away, Coulthard fired three shots at the Americans while he raised British colors.49
“Wear Ship!” Nicholson ordered his helmsman, and as the Trumbull came through the wind he ran British colors up the flagstaff as well “to get peacefully alongside her.” But Coulthard was not gullible, and raised a private signal that any British warship in these waters would recognize. The game playing was at an end. The ships were about a hundred yards apart, and Coulthard’s gunners had their slow matches lit, their hands cupping them until the order was given to fire.
Nicholson immediately lowered his false colors and ran up the Continental ensign just as the Watt’s first broadside slammed into the Trumbull. The ships sailed closer—about eighty yards of ocean were between them. “A fine close action commenced,” Nicholson called it. The captains gave different orders to their gunners: Coulthard had his men firing on the up-roll, aiming for the Trumbull’s deck, rigging, and masts in order to disable her and take her as a prize; Nicholson’s men fired on the down-roll, aiming for the Watt’s hull—to sink her.
For “five glasses”—two and a half hours—the ships hammered away at each other, sailing so close to each other that at one point the yardarms almost enlaced. At such short range, the gun crews could not miss. In one broadside, Lieutenant David Bill was struck by a piece of langrage—a case-shot with jagged pieces of iron, used by privateers particularly for its lethalness and its effectiveness at shredding rigging. It killed Bill instantly, taking off part of his head. Twice, wads discharged from the Watt’s guns set the Trumbull afire; once, the Americans returned the favor, forcing Coulthard’s men to cut all the larboard netting away to stop the fire from spreading.50
The Watt carried more marines than the Trumbull, but the advantage in the fighting tops belonged to Saltonstall’s seasoned men. Over the course of the engagement the privateer’s men in the tops were either killed or driven below deck by the Americans’ withering and accurate volleys. Standing by Nicholson, Saltonstall beheld a scene he never forgot: “It is beyond my power to give an adequate idea of the carnage, slaughter, havock, and destruction that ensued. Let your imagination do its best, it will fall short.”51
Despite their limited practice, Nicholson’s gunners were effective. A British tar came up a hatchway to the Watt’s quarterdeck, shouting to Coulthard that the privateer was “very leaky from a number of shot under water.” American broadsides had destroyed all but one pump as well. But Coulthard’s men were equally accurate and courageous. “My officers and men behaved like true sons of England,” he would later report. They, too, were deadly accurate shots this day. “We were literally cut all to pieces,” Saltonstall remembered, “not a shroud, stay, brace, bowling or any other of our rigging standing.” Every mast, every spar of the Trumbull had been hit repeatedly.52
Throughout all this, Nicholson maintained his presence on the quarterdeck, urging his men to continue the fight and oblivious to the dangers around him. Now he ordered his gunners to direct their fire at the Watt’s deck, masts, and rigging. Soon “All our braces and rigging were shot away,” Coulthard recounted, “and the two ships lay alongside of one another, right before the wind.”53
Nicholson had every intention of finishing off the Watt. But then his first lieutenant approached, pointing out to the captain the tenuous condition of the frigate’s masts and rigging. Reluctantly, Nicholson sheered off, hoping to quickly steady the masts and resume the fight. Coulthard, seeing his chance, hauled his wind. The Watt began slipping away.
Disregarding the peril to his masts and the fears of his officers that the Watt would capture them once any mast came down, Nicholson sent the Trumbull limping in pursuit. The painstakingly slow chase went on for eight hours, until the inevitable cracks were heard. From the deck, the exhausted Trumbulls watched as their maintop mast and mizzen top came crashing down. Only the wobbly foremast, “badly wounded and sprung,” teetered in place. Before the maimed Watt slipped over the horizon, the Americans watched her mainmast go over the side.54
Nicholson, still anxious to renew the action, realized that further pursuit was both impractical and imprudent. Eight men were dead and thirty-one wounded—ten of whom died shortly afterwards. Saltonstall had eleven wounds himself—“from my shoulder to my hip; some with buck-shot, others with the splinters of the after quarter-deck gun. I had some shot through the brim of my hat,” he wrote home, “but was not so disabled as to quit the quarterdeck till after the engagement.” He later stayed with one of his lieut
enants, Daniel Starr, “who was out of his head” after nearly being bisected by grapeshot. “I suppose his bowels was mortified,” he reported, “as he was insensible to pain.”55
Disappointed as he was in not taking the Watt, Nicholson was nevertheless proud of his men. “No people shewed more true spirit and gallantry than mine did,” he wrote Congress. “Many of them [were] not clear of the sea-sickness, and I am well persuaded they suffered more in seeing the masts carried away than they did in the engagement.” Of the Watt, he was equally effusive in his praise: “I give you my honour that was I to have a choice tomorrow, I would soon fight any two-and-thirty gun frigate [the British] have on the coast of America, than to fight that ship over again.”56
Both ships reached their destined ports without meeting the enemy or stormy weather. The Watt received a hero’s welcome in New York. Coulthard had lost thirteen killed and seventy-nine wounded. Combined with the Trumbull’s losses, only the Randolph-Yarmouth and Bonhomme Richard-Serapis battles saw a higher percentage of casualties. The Trumbull slipped past British warships cruising off New Jersey and New York and reached Boston on June 14.57
For more than three years, sailors and politicians had questioned Nicholson’s patriotism and courage behind his back (and Joshua Barney right to his face). Gilbert Saltonstall summed up the battle this way: “Upon the whole there has not been a more close, obstinate and bloody engagement since the war. I hope it wont be treason if I except even Paul Jones—all things considered [we] may dispute titles with him.” On June 1, 1780, James Nicholson truly was the top captain in the Continental Navy.58
