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be to recall Lincoln from Georgia, and perhaps to afford an opportunity of engaging him with advantage. Determined by these considerations, he put himself at the head of a corps of three thousand men, among English, loyalists and Indians, and passed the Savannah with its adjacent marshes, though not without excessive difficulties. The militia under Moultrie, surprised and dismayed at such intrepidity, gave way, and after a feeble resistance fell back upon CharlesMoultrie, with the handful he had left, and the light horse of Pulaski, exerted his utmost efforts to retard the enemy; but he was soon compelled to yield to force. Astonished himself at the facility with which he had triumphed over the natural impediments of the country, and the resistance of the republicans, Prevost extended his views to objects of greater moment. The drift of his expedition was at first merely to forage; he was disposed to give it a nobler aim, and ventured to meditate an attack upon the important city of Charleston. He promised himself that it would soon fall into his power, when he should have acquired the control of the open country.

The loyalists, in the eagerness of their hopes and wishes, which they too frequently substituted for realities, failed not to improve this disposition, which was so favorable to them. They assured Prevost that they had correspondence with the principal inhabitants of the city, and that the moment the royal standard should be descried from its battlements, their adherents would rise and throw open its gates. Moreover, they offered to serve as guides to the army, and to furnish all the information that could be desired respecting the nature of the country. Another consideration came to the support of their representations; though general Lincoln could not but know the British had crossed the Savannah, and menaced the capital, yet he manifested no intention of moving to its relief; so fully was he persuaded that the royalists designed nothing more than to pillage the country. General Prevost, therefore, pursued his march towards Charleston in great security, hoping in the consternation at his sudden appearance to enter it without opposition. Meanwhile, when Lincoln was convinced by the continual approaches of the enemy of the reality of his designs, he immediately detached a body of infantry, mounted on horseback, for the greater expedition, to the defence of the capital, and collecting the militia of the upper country, returned with his whole force to act as circumstances might offer for its relief. The English had arrived at Ashley river, which bathes the walls of Charleston on the south; they passed it immediately, and took post within little more than cannon shot of that city, between the river Ashley and another called the Cooper, which flows a little to the north of it. The Carolinians had made all the preparations for defence which the shortness of time admitted. They had burnt the suburbs, and cut a trench in the rear of the city from one river to

the other. The fortifications had been repaired, and batteries erected upon all the chain of works which formed the cincture of the town. Governor Rutledge had arrived there two days before, with five hundred militia, as well as colonel Harris, who had brought the succour sent by general Lincoln, after a forced march of more than forty miles at every stage. The count Pulaski was also come to reenforce the garrison with the dragoons of his legion, which was called the American Legion. The presence of all these troops reassured the inhabitants; they would have thought themselves fortunate in obtaining an honorable capitulation if this succour had not reached them, or if the English, instead of suspending their march, as they did, had made their appearance two days sooner. The garrison passed the whole night under arms; the houses, and the entire circuit of the walls, were illuminated. On the following morning, the British general summoned the town, offering very favorable conditions. The Americans sent out their commissioners to negotiate, and the conference was opened. But they neglected nothing that could draw it into length as soon as they discovered that the besiegers were not in force sufficient to carry the place before, in all probability, general Lincoln would arrive to its deliverAccordingly, they proposed that their province should remain neuter during the war; and that at the conclusion of peace, it should be decided whether Charleston was to belong to the United States or to Great Britain.

The English answered that their generals had not come there with legislative powers, and that since the garrison were armed, they must surrender prisoners of war. Other proposals were made on both sides, which were not accepted, and the English lost the whole day in this negotiation, which was not broken off till in the evening. The inhabitants, expecting to be attacked during the night, made every preparation for a vigorous defence. Finding himself totally disappointed in every hope that had been held out to him relative to Charleston, general Prevost began to reflect that the ramparts were furnished with a formidable artillery, and flanked by a flotilla of armed shipping and gallies; that the garrison was even more numerous than his own army; that he had neither battering artillery, nor a naval force to cooperate with his land forces; that the vanguard of the army of Lincoln had already appeared, and that himself was fast approaching; and lastly, that if he were repulsed with any considerable loss, which was much to be apprehended, his situation, involved as he was in a labyrinth of rivers and creeks, surrounded on all sides by a superior enemy, seemed scarcely to admit of a hope that any part of his army could have been preserved. Under these considerations, he profited of the obscurity of night, and directed his retreat towards Georgia. But instead of taking the way of the land, which was too dangerous, he passed his troops into the islands of St.

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James and St. John, which lie to the southward of Charleston, and whose cultivation and fertility offered abundant resources. As from Charleston to Savannah there extends along the coast a continued succession of little contiguous islands, so separated from the continent as to afford both navigable channels and excellent harbors, Prevost could be at no loss about the means of repairing to the latter city.

His immediate design was to establish his camp in the island of Port Royal, situated near the mouth of the Savannah, and no less remarkable for its salubrity than fruitfulness. These quarters were the more desirable as the sickly and almost pestilential season already approached in the Carolinas and Georgia, and the British troops, not yet accustomed to the climate, were peculiarly exposed to its mortal influence.

While Prevost was engaged in passing his troops from one island to another, general Lincoln, who by the main land had followed the movements of the enemy, thought it a proper opportunity to attack colonel Maitland, who with a corps of English, Hessians and Carolinian loyalists, was encamped at the pass of Stono Ferry, on the inlet between the continent and the island of St. John; this post, besides its natural advantages, was well covered with redoubts, an abattis, and artillery. The Americans attacked with vigor, but they found a no less obstinate resistance. At length, overwhelmed by the enemy's artillery, and unable with their field pieces to make any impression on his fortifications, they retired at the approach of a reenforcement which came to the support of Maitland. The English, after establishing posts upon the most important points, proceeded to occupy their cantonments in the island of Port Royal. The Americans returned, for the most part, into theirs; and the unhealthiness of the season put a stop to all further operations of either party. The English thus remained in peaceable possession of the whole province of Georgia; and the Americans found some consolation in having raised the siege of Charleston, though the vicinity of the enemy still left them in apprehension of a new invasion in South Carolina. The incursion of which this rich and flourishing province had just been the theatre, so far from serving the interests of the king, was highly prejudicial to his cause. If it enriched his officers and soldiers, it caused the ruin of a great number of inhabitants. The royal troops were not satisfied with pillaging; they spared neither women, nor children, nor sick. Herein they had the negroes for spies and campanions, who being very numerous in all the places they traversed, flocked upon their route in the hope of obtaining liberty. To recommend themselves to the English, they put every thing to sack, and if their masters had concealed any valuable effects, they hastened to discover them to their insatiable spoilers. Such was the rapacity of these robbers, that not content with stripping houses of their richest furniture, and individuals of their most pre

cious ornaments, they violated even the sanctuary of the dead, and, gasping for gold, went rummaging among the tombs.

Whatever they could not carry off, they destroyed. How many delightful gardens were ravaged! What magnificent habitations were devoted to the flames! Every where ruins and ashes. The very cattle, whatever was their utility, found no quarter with these barbarians. Vain would be the attempt to paint the brutal fury of this lawless soldiery, and especially of those exasperated and ferocious Africans. But the heaviest loss which the planters of Carolina had to sustain, was that of these very slaves. Upwards of four thousand were taken from them; some were carried to the English islands, others perished of hunger in the woods, or by a pestilential disease. which broke out among them soon after.

And here should be recollected the barbarous manifesto published by the British commissioners on quitting America, after the failure of their negotiations; their abominable threats were but too faithfully executed in Carolina. A cry of horror arose throughout the civilised world against the ferocity of the British armies. Such also was the disordered state of things to which Georgia, by various progressive steps, was at length reduced.

About the same time, general Clinton meditated, in his camp at New York, a project whose execution appeared to him to correspond with the views of the ministry, or, at least, proper to second the expedition of Carolina. He expected to insure its success by keeping Virginia in continual alarm by cruel but useless devastations upon the coasts of that opulent province. Having assembled a suitable number of ships, under the command of commodore Collier, he embarked a corps of two thousand men, conducted by general Matthews. They proceeded to the Chesapeake, and leaving a sufficient force in Hampton Road to block up that port and the entrance of the river James, went to take land on the banks of Elizabeth river. The British immediately pushed forward against the town of Portsmouth, and entered it without resistance. Fort Nelson was also abandoned to them at the first rumor of their approach. They found it equally easy to occupy the town, or rather the ruins of the town of Norfolk, on the opposite side of the river. Pursuing their march with the same celerity, they made themselves masters of Suffolk, on the right bank of the Nansemond river. In all these places, as well as at Kempers Landing, Shepherds, Gosport, Tanners Creek, in a word, throughout the extent of territory into which they penetrated, their passage was marked by cruelty and devastation. They demolished the magazines, brought off or destroyed the provisions, and burned or took away an immense quantity of shipping. Several thousand barrels of salted provisions, which had been prepared for Washington's army, and a great quantity of stores, also fell into their power. Their booty in tobacco even surpassed their hope; in brief, this rich and fertile

country was converted in a few days into one vast scene of smoking ruins. In their indignation, the Virginians sent to ask the English what sort of war this was? They answered, that they were commanded to visit the same treatment upon all those who refused to obey the king. Listening to the insinuations of the refugees, who incessantly affirmed that Virginia contained a host of loyalists, that were only waiting for a rallying point to raise the province in revolt, the British commanders were much inclined to prolong their stay in it; and thought of fortifying themselves in Portsmouth, in order to make it their place of arms. They wrote accordingly to general Clinton, demanding his orders. But Clinton, weary of this piratical war, and less eager than commodore Collier to swallow the brilliant delusions of the refugees, did not approve the plan proposed. On the contrary, he directed the chiefs of the expedition, after securing their prizes, to rejoin him at New York. He needed this force himself for an enterprise of no little importance, which he was upon the point of undertaking up the Hudson. Virginia, therefore, ceased for that time to be the theatre of these barbarous depredations.

The Americans had constructed, at great labor and expense, very strong works at the posts of Verplanks Neck, and Stony Point, situated on nearly opposite points of land, the first on the east, and the other on the west side of the Hudson. They defended the much frequented pass called Kings Ferry, which could not fall into the power of the English without compelling the Americans to take a circuit of ninety miles up the river in order to communicate between the northern and southern provinces. General Clinton had therefore resolved to seize these two positions. Washington, who lay with his army at Middlebrook, was at too great a distance to interrupt the execution of the design.

The English, accordingly, set out upon this expedition about the last of May. Commodore Collier conducted the squadron that ascended the river, general Vaughan the column of the right, which landed on the eastern bank, a little below Verplanks, and Clinton in person, the column of the left, with which he disembarked on the western bank, below Stony Point. The Americans, finding the enemy so near, and not being prepared to receive him, evacuated Stony Point, where they were soon replaced by the royal troops. But at Verplanks there was more resistance; the republicans had erected on this point a small, but strong and complete work, which they called Fort la Fayette; this was defended by artillery and a small garrison. It was unfortunately commanded by the heights of Stony Point, upon which the English, by their exertions during the night, had planted a battery of heavy cannon, and another of mortars. Early on the following morning, they opened a tempest of fire upon Fort la Fayette. The attack was supported in front by commodore Collier, who advanced with his gallies and gun boats within reach of the fort; and general

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