by John Oller
More telling, perhaps, is what happened the next day. Greene returned to the field, intending to offer battle to any British who remained there, but the rainy weather would have hampered the firing of weapons, so he gave up on the idea. Significantly, Stewart was already beginning to retreat down the road to Charleston. He burned his supplies, destroyed a thousand sets of small arms, and dumped casks of rum (what was left of it) into Eutaw Creek. He also left seventy wounded behind and his dead unburied—normally signs of losing. Greene buried both sides’ dead and tended to the enemy’s wounded, common indicators of victory in those days.
Although Greene had not scored a clear-cut victory in this—or, indeed, any other battle he fought in the South—he had achieved his overall strategic objective. Like Cornwallis’s and Rawdon’s armies before him, Stewart’s was a spent force. The last substantial British field army in South Carolina withdrew to within the perimeter of Charleston and vicinity. “The more he is beaten,” one British officer said of Greene, “the farther he advances in the end.” Henry Lee, whose eloquence, unlike his battlefield judgment, was never questioned, summed it up as follows: “The honor of the day was claimed by both sides, while the benefits flowing from it were by both yielded to the Americans: the first belonged to neither and the last to us.”
A few years after the battle the following opening stanza from an equally eloquent eulogy was penned by Philip Freneau, the romantic Huguenot poet of the American Revolution:
At Eutaw Springs the valiant died;
Their limbs with dust are covered o’er;
Weep on, ye springs, your tearful tide;
How many heroes are no more!
a In his memoirs Lee claimed that his cavalry was hampered by an order for it to assist William Washington in his ill-fated attack on Marjoribanks and that absent that order, his mounted soldiers would have destroyed the British army during its retreat toward the brick plantation house.
22
“Watchful Anxiety”
Although Eutaw Springs had broken the back of British power in South Carolina, in many ways Francis Marion was just as busy after the battle as before it. Greene now looked to Marion to keep the enemy in check between the Santee and Charleston. Always fearing the worst, Greene also told Marion to be prepared at a moment’s notice to join him should Cornwallis leave Virginia to return to South Carolina, as was frequently rumored. Governor John Rutledge, as part of his effort to restore civil government to the state, had a whole plateful of tasks he looked to Marion to carry out. Meanwhile the long-simmering dispute between Peter Horry and Hezekiah Maham over rank threatened to boil over with far more destructive consequences than before.
Immediately after the battle at Eutaw Springs, Greene had dispatched Marion’s and Lee’s forces, now including Maham, to cut off Stewart’s retreat toward Charleston. Maham’s dragoons managed to capture some British and Tory stragglers to the army’s rear, but the Americans were unable to get behind Stewart’s main force, as three or four hundred fresh British troops came up to Monck’s Corner to cover his withdrawal. On September 12 the British received additional reinforcements from Charleston under Colonel Paston Gould, who took command of the army while Stewart, with his elbow wounded, retired to the city.
Upon his arrival in Charleston in June 1781, Gould had been placed in overall command of British forces in the Carolinas and Georgia, succeeding Balfour, who remained commandant of Charleston. But Gould, unfamiliar with the territory, had mostly stayed in Charleston, content to leave matters in the field to Stewart. He now would get a firsthand look at what the war in the South was like.
Passing Greenland Swamp near Eutaw Springs, he came upon a gruesome sight—the head of a black man placed on a stake beside the swamp as a warning to others. He was later identified as Harry, a slave owned by the Gaillard family of Tories. Frequently employed by Rawdon and Balfour to spy on partisan groups in the Lowcountry, Harry was near Monck’s Corner, gathering intelligence on Marion, when he fell into the hands of a group of Whigs and was beheaded. A year later, in documenting the deaths of loyalists during the war, British officers attributed Harry’s murder to an unidentified party of Marion’s men. Marion did not hesitate to hang spies and at this time was under specific orders from Governor Rutledge to execute any slaves found to have spied for the enemy. So there is no reason to doubt the incident took place. But it is unlikely Marion would have approved of a grisly beheading.
After a brief maneuver in Greene’s direction that took him as far as Laurens’s plantation above Eutaw Springs, Gould turned back toward Charleston and stopped fifty miles from the city. He set up camp at Ravenel’s Wantoot Plantation, where he and half the army were down with the seasonal fever and where Marjoribanks would die. Gould soon left for Charleston and was promptly succeeded in overall command by fifty-year-old General Alexander Leslie, who was better acquainted with the southern theater. Meanwhile Stewart resumed operational command at Wantoot, seven miles above Monck’s Corner. From there his force of twelve hundred effectives raided neighboring plantations for food and collected slaves, including women and children, to send off to Charleston. There they could be used to strengthen the British fortifications, serve as domestics, and compensate loyalists for their abandoned property.
With the British below the Santee, Greene retired north again to the High Hills of Santee to rest his own tired and sickly army. Marion remained on the Santee near Murray’s Ferry, fifty miles from Greene, low on troops and ammunition and—rare for him—slowed by the fever that had lately struck so many others. At least this one time, Marion’s favorite vinegar-and-water concoction had failed to ward off illness.
Throughout the late summer and fall of 1781 Marion was in constant communication with Greene, providing him intelligence on the enemy’s troop movements and strength. Marion was also being peppered with almost daily and sometimes twice-daily letters from Governor Rutledge issuing directives or seeking advice or favors on both military and civil matters. As head of the government-in-exile during the previous year and a half, Rutledge had been wielding virtual dictatorial power, limited only by what he chose to delegate. He put Marion in charge of appointing justices of the peace in each district and issuing passes for civilian travel to Charleston. Rutledge specified that women who went to town without leave were not to be allowed to return, while wives and children of Tories were to be sent off to the British lines in retaliation for the enemy practice of sending the families of Whigs out of the state. To make “severe examples” of them, Rutledge had ordered on September 2 that all slaves who took provisions or carried intelligence to the enemy were to be put to death—the fate that befell Harry.
Rutledge wanted the names of Marion’s men who had switched sides to the Tories and details on the houses burned and Whigs hanged by the enemy. The governor also sought Marion’s recommendations for administrators to process matters such as wills and property transfers that had lacked official sanction during the previous eighteen months of anarchy. That Rutledge, a London-educated, highly successful lawyer and politician, had brought Marion into his inner circle demonstrates how much trust and respect the partisan leader had earned.
Following the Battle of Eutaw Springs, Rutledge decided to offer all Tories, with certain exceptions, a pardon and permission to reunite with their families if they agreed to serve six months in the patriot militia. Those who declined to serve faced banishment and abandonment of their properties. Now that the British hold on the state was unfastened, Rutledge believed he could induce—or coerce—many men who had taken British protection after the fall of Charleston and even fought for the Tory side to return their allegiance to the patriot cause. It was the obverse of the original Clinton proclamation that offered pardons and paroles to Whigs who swore oaths of allegiance to the Crown and punishment for those who did not.
After seeking Marion’s opinion on several points relating to the proposed amnesty, Rutledge issued a proclamation on September 27, 1781, and gave Marion responsibility f
or circulating it. It provided that those seeking pardons had to appear before a brigadier general of South Carolina within thirty days to swear oaths of allegiance and accept the terms of militia service. Marion therefore assumed the additional job of accepting the surrenders of the “six month” enlistees and keeping detailed lists of those who accepted pardons. Rutledge also kept him busy levying fines against men who shirked militia duty, finding places in the military for various prominent men or their relatives, selecting men fit to be magistrates, gathering up indigo and salt for public use, and performing sundry other assignments of an executive assistant nature, including finding the governor a printing press, paper, and ink.
Even as he was handling all of these tasks, Marion found time to attend to family matters. In October 1781 he sought to arrange for the shipment of indigo to Philadelphia for the support of his nephews in college there, adding that “I wish it could be soon as my boys are suffering from want of winter cloths.”
In addition Marion had to deal with the growing insubordination of Peter Horry and Hezekiah Maham. Although Greene had previously directed both of them to follow Marion’s orders, they continued to resist. Horry was also frustrated by his inability to find enough cavalrymen to satisfy Greene’s earlier directive to raise state dragoons for extended service.
Perhaps perturbed at Horry for having been absent at both Parker’s Ferry and Eutaw Springs, Marion gave his old friend a serious dressing down. On September 23 he wrote to say he had been informed that Horry or one of his officers had ordered a tar-kiln of John Brockinton, the Black Mingo Tory, to be set on fire to make coals for Horry’s workmen. Marion told Horry that those responsible would have to pay the value of the destroyed property. Another of Horry’s men allegedly tried to commandeer some property from a citizen; if true, Marion warned Horry, he would have the man arrested and court-martialed.
Marion added that he had heard that Horry’s officers had taken a number of other liberties beyond their authority and that his infantry was full of men only pretending to do militia duty. (Three were performing the work of one, as Marion put it.) Marion also thought that many of Horry’s officers seemed to be idle at that point. He sent Horry a list of the men he was allowed to keep and concluded with an icy brushoff: “The time is lost when your Horse would have been of service to me. You will therefore send your men to Gen. Greene, agreeably to his orders.”
Rutledge followed up with a letter to Horry saying Marion had informed him that some of Horry’s officers had “behaved very much amiss” in impressing citizens’ horses that were not fit for dragoon service, including plow horses and breeding mares, which the governor ordered returned to their owners. Another letter from Rutledge accused Horry’s men of taking “every step in their power to abuse, insult and exasperate the militia” and warned Horry that if he did not put a stop to the bad behavior, he (Rutledge) would.
Horry exploded. He sent a lengthy, point-by-point rebuttal to Rutledge in which he denied having countenanced any misconduct and complained that “Gen. Marion’s charges always say ‘your officers,’ but do not name the officers in particular.” Never in seven years of service, Horry added, had he received such a severe reprimand from a superior officer. He offered to submit to a court-martial trial to vindicate himself and silence Marion’s complaints.
Then Horry separately wrote to Greene to label Marion’s charges as groundless and to suggest he could no longer serve under him. “I used to submit to Gen. Marion’s orders with pleasure,” Horry said, “but at present I assure you it is disagreeable to me and all my officers who have experienced his late usage.” Horry claimed to know what Marion’s motives were for attacking him, but although they were “obvious” to him, he said he would not bother Greene with the details. Horry never did specify what he was referring to; possibly he thought Marion was envious that Horry had been commissioned to lead an elite cavalry unit, whereas Marion was still stuck with the lowly militia. Horry himself was still unclear whether he and his corps were on the Continental or state establishment, but if the former, he told Greene, “I shall receive orders from no other person but yourself.” He concluded by asking how he was expected to complete his recruiting, as he had no money and Rutledge had ordered a stop to the practice of allowing men to buy their way out of military service by hiring substitutes.
Marion’s relations with Maham were, if anything, worse. After Maham appropriated for his regiment the high-quality horse of one Mr. Oliver, the father of one of Maham’s cavalrymen, Marion ordered him to return it. When Maham refused, Marion threatened to court-martial him. “It is high time, I think,” Marion wrote to Maham on October 18, “that you and I should know whether I have the power of commanding you or not.” Five days later Greene told Maham to mend his ways. “You will please to consider yourself under the command of General Marion,” Greene wrote. To reassure Marion, Greene simultaneously wrote to him, enclosing his letter to Maham and a similar one to Horry, adding that “no man can command them better than yourself.” Maham returned the horse.
No one had handled the conflict in command very well. Greene and Rutledge had failed to lay down clear lines of authority from the beginning. Marion had been cold and peremptory in his dealings with his more junior officers. And Horry and Maham exaggerated their own importance, fancying themselves as favored commanders on par with Light-Horse Harry Lee—while forgetting that Lee himself had acted cooperatively with Marion.
Although Maham would not be mollified, Horry and Marion managed to patch things up between them for the time being. Greene facilitated their reconciliation, writing Horry on November 6 to say that
General Marion cannot wish to injure you after knowing how much you have done and suffered for the cause. It is your interest to be friends. . . . The General is a good man; few of us are without faults; let his virtues veil his if he has any. . . . Your bleeding country demands a sacrifice of little injuries and your own good sense will point out the best mode of avoiding them.
Marion, while stopping short of a formal apology, told Horry that he meant nothing personal; if he found fault with any officers for things he believed they had done wrong, he was not angry with them as individuals but with “the very action itself,” especially if contrary to the public good. At Marion’s request he and Horry met in person during the first week of November, and with Marion’s promise to give Horry the first opportunity to refute or redress any future complaints against him, Horry pronounced himself satisfied.
These distractions aside, there was much cause for jubilation on the part of Greene, Marion, and company at this time. Although it took a couple of weeks for the official word to arrive, they learned that on October 19 Lord Cornwallis had surrendered his entire army to General Washington and the French forces at Yorktown. Coupled with the vote of thanks for his efforts at Eutaw Springs and Parker’s Ferry, which he received around the same time, the victory at Yorktown prompted Marion to take the unprecedented step—for him—of throwing a party. On the evening of November 10 at John Cantey’s plantation on the north bank of the Santee, Marion hosted a ball for his officers and the area ladies. Reportedly he was subdued that night, but whether that was due to a specific worry or his general nature is hard to know. “The general’s heart was not very susceptible of the gentler emotions,” William Dobein James explained. “His mind was principally absorbed by the love of country. . . . But if he did feel joy upon a few occasions, certain it is that watchful anxiety was the daily inmate of his breast.”
Weighing on his mind was the fate of two patriots languishing in prison. One was John Postell, still being held in Georgetown despite Marion’s repeated pleas to Greene to arrange a release of him in exchange for one or more British prisoners. Marion believed Greene was giving preference to other American prisoners over Postell, and said so, but Greene explained that the execution of Isaac Hayne had suspended all prisoner exchanges in the normal course. Marion asked Greene at least to stop paroling various captured British officers until Postell
was freed, but Greene was not willing to go that far. Postell would remain in jail for the duration of the war.
A more recent and urgent case was that of Peter Sinkler, a fifty-five-year-old prominent patriot who owned a plantation adjacent to Eutaw Springs. He had provided frequent service to Marion’s brigade and had other close connections to Marion: Sinkler’s sister, Dorothy, was the widow Richardson who had helped Marion escape Tarleton’s clutches (and paid dearly for it), and his first wife was the sister of Marion’s cousin and best friend, Henry Mouzon. Shortly after the Battle of Eutaw Springs, while the British were still in the area, Sinkler’s own brother-in-law betrayed him to the enemy by revealing his favorite hiding spot. The British captured the unarmed Sinkler and put him in irons in the basement of Charleston’s dark, dank Exchange Building. Before being removed to that place he was forced to witness the destruction of his property and was denied a farewell visit with his wife and children.
Marion could not bear the thought of Sinkler wasting away in jail. Drawing on the goodwill he had developed with Rutledge, Marion prevailed upon the governor to take up Sinkler’s case with Greene. Rutledge reported back to Marion to say that “between ourselves” Greene consented to Marion’s exchanging any prisoner he already had or could “get” for Sinkler—as long as it were done without Greene’s knowledge. Marion took that as a green light to seize some unarmed loyalists in hopes of exchanging them for Sinkler and some others of Marion’s men being held by the British.
