serve.

The continental troops of Maryland and Delaware formed the reThey were inured to war, and upon their valor rested the chief hope of success. They were commanded by general Smallwood. The artillery was placed in part upon the right of the continental troops, and in part upon the highway.

Such was the order of battle of the two armies; when just as the action was about to commence, Gates, not satisfied with the position of the divisions of Caswell and Stevens, very imprudently ordered them to change it for another which appeared to him better. Cornwallis at sight of this movement, resolved to profit of it instantly. Accordingly, he ordered colonel Webster to advance and make a vigorous attack upon Stevens, whose troops were still undulating, from their not having yet been able to reform their ranks. Colonel Webster obeyed with celerity. The battle thus commenced between the right of the English and the left of the Americans; it soon became general. The morning being still and hazy, the smoke hung over and involved both armies in such a cloud that it was difficult to see the state of destruction on either side. The British troops, however, intermingling a quick and heavy fire with sharp charges at the point of the bayonet, evidently gained ground upon the Americans. At length the Virginians, pressed by colonel Webster, and already half broken by the unadvised movement directed by Gates, after a feeble resistance, shamefully betook themselves to flight. The Carolinian militia, finding themselves uncovered, soon began to give way, and at last turned the back with a similar baseness. Their officers attempted in vain to rally them; they were themselves involved in the rout. The left wing of the Americans was totally broken; Gates and Caswell made some efforts to reform it; but - Tarleton adroitly seized the decisive moment, and with a furious charge, carried to its height the confusion and consternation of that wing; all the troops that composed it threw themselves into the neighboring woods. Their flight exposed the left flank of a Carolinian regiment, and of the regulars of Maryland and Delaware, who were already attacked in front. The right wing of the English, now completely victorious, turned furiously upon the American centre. This division defended themselves with the utmost gallantry; if it was not in their power to restore the fortune of the day, they saved at least the honor of the republican standard.

Opposing the enemy with a terrible fire, or the push of their bayonets, they withstood all his efforts. The baron de Kalb led them several times to the charge; and they even recovered lost ground. But at length, surrounded on all sides, overwhelmed by number, and penetrated by cavalry, they were constrained to abandon the field of battle, but without having left a bloodless victory to their foes. Pierced with eleven wounds, the baron de Kalb fell dying into the power of the victors. The rout was general; each provided for his

own safety. General Gist could rally no more than an hundred infantry, and the dragoons of Armand. The British cavalry pursued the vanquished with vehemence for the space of twenty-three miles, and without halting, till exhaustion imposed the necessity of repose.

The loss of the Americans in this action was very considerable. The number of the dead, wounded and prisoners, was estimated at upwards of two thousand. Among the first was general Gregory, and among the prisoners, the baron de Kalb, and general Rutherford, of Carolina. Eight pieces of brass cannon, two thousand stand of arms, several colors, with all the baggage and stores, fell into the hands of the conqueror. The loss of the British in killed and wounded amounted, including officers, only to three hundred and twenty-four.

Three days after the battle, the baron de Kalb, perceiving the approach of death, requested his aid-de-camp, the chevalier Dubuisson, to express in his name to generals Gist and Smallwood, his high sense of the valor displayed in the battle of Cambden by the regular troops of Maryland and Delaware. He spent his last breath in declaring the satisfaction which he then felt in having fallen in the defence of a cause so noble, and, to him, so dear. The Congress ordered that a monument should be erected him at the city of Annapolis, the capital of Maryland.

The

General Gates was reproached with several grave errors. least excusable was doubtless that of having undertaken to change his order of battle in presence of the enemy. Perhaps he was also in fault to march in the night unwarlike militia, who knew not even how to keep their ranks. He retreated to Hillsborough, in North Carolina. Generals Gist and Smallwood fell back upon Charlottetown, and afterwards upon Salisbury, where they endeavored to rally the fugitives and to reorganise their divisions; but the cause of England triumphed throughout the province of South Carolina; the banners of the republic no longer waved in any part of it. Colonel Sumpter alone continued to show himself upon the banks of the Wateree, with a corps of about a thousand men, and two field pieces. But on the news of the late discomfiture of Gates, he retired promptly towards the fords of Catawba, in the upper parts of North Carolina. Lord Cornwallis, a man of great activity, reflecting that his advantages were insecure till he should have destroyed this last body of republicans, detached colonel Tarleton in pursuit of it. The latter, moving with his accustomed celerity, fell unexpectedly upon the position of Sumpter, who had thought he might take some repose on the banks of Fishing Creek. Tarleton surprised him so completely, that his men, lying totally careless and at ease, were mostly cut off from their arms. Their only resource was in a prompt flight; but a great number fell into the hands of the enemy, who slaughtered them after they had surrendered. Tarleton alleged

that he could not grant them life, because his whole party was not equal in number to one third of Sumpter's. At length the carnage ceased, when the English and loyalists that were detained prisoners in the rear of Sumpter's position had been liberated. The cannon, stores and baggage, were the prey of the victors. Colonel Sumpter, with a few of his followers, made good their escape. The disaster of his corps could not be imputed to him; he had not omitted to send out scouts upon the direction of the enemy, but that service was acquitted with an unpardonable negligence. Tarleton returned. to Cambden the third day, with his prisoners, booty, and the loyalists he had retaken.

After the battle of Cambden, Cornwallis, in order not to lose by his tardiness the fruits of victory, could have wished to advance immediately into North Carolina, a feeble province, and very ill disposed towards the Congress. Thence he could march to the conquest of Virginia. Unquestionably, the presence of the victorious army in that part would have dispersed the relics of the vanquished, prevented their rallying anew, and encouraged the friends of the royal cause to show themselves, and even to act. But the British general encountered divers obstacles that opposed the execution of this plan. The heat of the season was excessive, the climate unhealthy, and the hospitals were encumbered with wounded and sick. The necessaries for encampment were almost entirely wanting; there was not a single magazine upon the frontiers of the Carolinas; and North Carolina could furnish but very little provision. Yielding to these considerations, Cornwallis relinquished all ulterior operation, distributed his troops in cantonments, and returned to Charleston. He thought himself sure at least of the submission of all South Carolina and of the not distant conquest of North, as soon as the season and the state of his magazines should favor the enterprise. In the meantime, he wrote frequently to the friends of royalty in North Carolina, exhorting them to take arms, to assemble in force, and to make themselves masters of the most ardent republicans with their munitions and magazines. He counselled them even to seize the fugitives and stragglers of the rebel army. He promised them, that it should not be long before he marched to their assistance. And to inspire them with confidence in his words, even before he could move with his whole army, he detached major Ferguson, an able and enterprising partisan, upon the western frontiers of North Carolina. He had under his command a thousand loyalists and a corps of cavalry. His mission was to encourage by his presence the enemies of the revolution, and especially to open a correspondence with the inhabitants of Tryon county, who, more than the others, showed themselves attached to the name of England.

Unable to operate in the field, Cornwallis turned his attention towards the internal administration, in order to consolidate the acqui

sition of South Carolina. Resolved to have recourse to extreme remedies for terminating the crisis in which that province found itself, he purposed to spread terror among the republicans by the rigor of punishment, and to deprive them of the means to do harm, by depriving them of the means to subsist. Accordingly, he addressed orders to all the British commanders, that without any delay they should cause to be hung all those individuals, who, after having served in the militia levied by the king, had gone over to the rebels; that they should punish with imprisonment and confiscation those, who, having submitted at first, had taken part in the last rebellion, to the end that their effects might be applied to indemnify those subjects whom they should have oppressed or despoiled. It cannot be denied, that if it was possible to excuse such severity towards those who had exchanged the condition of prisoners of war for that of British subjects, it was worthy of an eternal blame in respect to those who had wished to remain in the first of these conditions. In effect, had they not been released from their parole by the authentic proclamation of Cornwallis himself, under date of the third of June? But victors, too often, by vain subtilties, or even without deigning to have recourse to them, especially in political convulsions, make sport of violating their faith, as if it were a necessity for them to add to the evils inseparable from war, all the vexations of perfidy! However this might be, and however rigorous were the orders of Cornwallis, they were every where punctually executed. Carolina was become a theatre of proscriptions. Several British officers openly testified their abhorrence of this reign of blood; but the greater part, and Tarleton more than any other, commended it without shame, as useful and necessary to the success of the royal cause. Already Tarleton had complained bitterly of the clemency, as he called it, exercised by Cornwallis prior to the battle of Cambden; this clemency, he said, was not only good for nothing, but also prejudicial in every thing, since it rendered friends less hearty, and enemies more audacious. This reproach would certainly have been founded, if it were true that in war utility alone deserves regard, and that nothing is due to humanity, good faith and justice. Nobody denies, for example, that to poison springs, massacre all the prisoners that can be taken, bring off into slavery all the inhabitants of a country, without distinction of age or sex, and without regard for the law of nations, might sometimes have a useful tendency. We see, nevertheless, that in all time, civilised nations, and conquerors not entirely barbarous, have abstained from these horrible extremities. But in the present occurrence, the English showed themselves without pity for the most respectable men of the country. The inhabitants of Cambden, of Ninety Six, of Augusta, and other places, saw inhumanly gibbeted men, whose only crime. was that of having been too faithful to a cause which they considered as that of their country and of justice.

All minds were penetrated with horror; all hearts were inflamed with an implacable and never dying hatred against such ferocious victors. A cry of vengeance resounded amidst this exasperated people; all detested a king who had devoted them to the oppression of these brutal executors of his will. His standard became an object of execration. The British generals learned by cruel experience, that executions and despair are frail securities for the submission of a people planted in distant regions, actuated by a common opinion, and embarked with passion in a generous enterprise. Nor were these the only rigors which Cornwallis thought it expedient to exercise, in order to confirm the possession of the provinces conquered by his arms. To complete the reduction of the patriots, he employed arrests and sequestrations. He feared that the presence in Charleston of the leading men, who, persevering in their character of prisoners of war, had refused to accept that of subjects, might tend to keep alive a spirit of resistance. He likewise learned, as the British writers affirm, that these prisoners had maintained a secret correspondence with the enemies of the English name, the proofs of which had been found in the baggage of the American generals captured at the battle of Cambden. These motives appeared to him sufficient to justify the seizure and imprisonment at St. Augustin, in East Florida, of more than thirty of the most influential chiefs of the American party. They were all of the number of those who had taken the most active part in the organisation of the republican government, and who had shown themselves the most ardent partisans of the present war. Then desirous to prevent those who were, or whom he believed, opposed to Great Britain, from assisting the Congress with their pecuniary means, or with a hope to constrain them to submission, he issued a proclamation purporting the sequestration of the possessions of whoever should hold correspondence with the Congress, act in its name, join the enemies of England, or excite the people to revolt by word or deed. He constituted at the same time, a commissioner over sequestrated estates, with obligation to account to the families of the forfeited for a part of their nett revenue; a fourth to those consisting of a wife and children, and a sixth to wives without children. A clause required, however, that these families should reside in the province. These different measures, combined with a rigorous watchfulness over the movements of the suspected, appeared to the English a sure guaranty for the return of tranquillity and obedience in the province of South Carolina. And as to North Carolina, it could no longer hope to resist them when the weather became temperate, and the harvests were over. We shall see, in the course of this history, how far these hopes were confirmed by the event.

Whilst the season had caused the suspension of hostilities in the two Carolinas, and while, in the state of New York, the superiority of the Americans by land, and that of the English by sea, had occa