Volume 4, Part 3. The War in the First Half of 1776. Volume 4, Chapter 19. The British Assault on Charleston.
Bereft of hope for loyalist aid in the South and ordered to return north in a short while, General Clinton still had his powerful expeditionary force.
And there was no point in not using it. He decided, not unexpectedly, to attack and seize the key southern port of Charleston, or at least Fort Sullivan in its harbor, which the British could then use as a firm base for invasion of the entire Southland, aided by General Charles Lord Cornwallis, over 3,000 regulars and a strong fleet of over 50 warships under Commodore Sir Peter
Dr. Harker, Clinton sailed against Charleston to assault it by land and by sea.
The American leadership knew that General Charles Lee was perhaps the only man who could
save Charleston.
Indeed, Lee was in urgent demand everywhere as John Adams wrote to him, We want you at
New York.
We want you at Cambridge.
We want you in Virginia.
George Washington wanted him in New York to counter the expected transfer there of the
main British force from Boston. As Washington, later to be Lee's mortal enemy, wrote to his
brother at the time, he, Lee, is the first officer in military knowledge and experience
we have in the whole army. If he could have been spared, Lee probably would have been
John Adams and Franklin and the unpredictable Hancock sent him glowing and optimistic letters
of congratulation. But no sooner had he accepted the post and asked his assistance for either
General John Sullivan or the able young General Nathaniel Green, an admirer of Lee, who had
served under him at Boston, then Congress changed its mind. The Southern leaders were
were now beginning to dread a British attack on the South, so at the end of February, the
Southern members persuaded Congress to name Lee Head of a newly established Southern military
department covering Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia.
Lee hastily left New York, where he'd been cowing the Tories in strengthening defenses
to assume his Southern military post, virtually independent of Washington. Indeed, with the
In his imminent retirement of aging Artemis Ward, Lee was soon to be the second ranking general in the Continental Army.
Taking up his post at Williamsburg at the end of March, Lee, in veteran scourge of the Tories, was horrified to find Maryland's royal governor, Robert Eden, basking unmolested in wide personal popularity.
Learning from captured dispatches that Eden intended to help a British invasion of the South, Lee urged Maryland to arrest him.
When Maryland's newly constituted rebel authorities refused, Lee, with the support of the Virginia Council of Safety, boldly went over their heads to appeal for Eden's arrest to Samuel Perveance, Chairman of the Baltimore Committee of Safety.
Perveance and the Baltimore Committee readily agreed and sent a small troop to the capital at Annapolis to arrest Eden.
The angry conservatives of the Maryland Council of Safety at Annapolis prevented Perveance and his men from fulfilling their task and issued condemnations of the actions of the Baltimore Committee.
The Council of Safety would do no more than place Eden on parole, and even an order of the Continental Congress could not persuade the Council to place him under arrest.
Instead, in June, the Maryland Convention peacefully suggested the Eden leave for England, allowing him to depart, unsearched and unseized.
Soon after his arrival, Lee learned of Clinton's projected invasion of North Carolina from captured documents and swiftly organized defenses and armed forces in the South.
The Tories, having been crushed in North Carolina, it was clear to him that Clinton would soon strike in force either at South Carolina or Virginia.
When Clinton appeared off North Carolina in early May, Lee moved his 1300 Virginia troops south to New Bern, slowly, so as not to be committed erroneously to a South Carolina theater of war while neglecting Virginia.
By the beginning of June, Lee had learned that the British were probably sailing to Charleston, and he rushed down to the defense of that city in a battle that would decide the fate of the South for several years at the least.
Both the Americans and the British fleet arrived at Charleston in early June 1776.
Leigh found the defenses at Charleston hopelessly inadequate. President John Rutledge of South
Carolina's rebel government, in charge of the South Carolina militia, refused to abandon
Fort Sullivan on Sullivan's island in Charleston Harbor, which Leigh found to be in an exposed
and unsound position. Fortunately, however, bad weather and harbor conditions delayed
The British attack for several weeks, allowing Lee to shore up the defenses of the fort and
Charleston Harbor with great energy. On June 28, the British fleet attacked, but clumsy
piloting ran several of their frigates aground. The gallant band at the fort under Colonel
William Moultrie were almost miraculously able to outgun and batter the vaunted British
of the British Fleet, even though they were badly short of ammunition, and there were
very few American casualties. After a few weeks of hesitation, the British abandoned
their plans and sailed north. Lee, Moultrie and their heroic men at Fort Sullivan had
saved Charleston and with it much of the south. Paul Smith, in opposition to other historians,
makes a quite unconvincing case for deprecating the importance of the Battle of Sullivan's Island.