From Sea to Shining Sea (23 page)

“No,” he said. “I’m on business for Kaintuck, and I’ll tell you what it is in a bit. Listen, I’m off for Williamsburg next week first thing, but I’ve got a lot o’ stories to tell before I go, stories to make your back-hair rise up.”

Ann Rogers Clark hugged her waist and looked at him, slowly shaking her head.

Nothing’s changed, she thought. Nothing’s changed.

T
HE DAY WAS DAWNING TO BE BRIGHT AND HOT
. T
HE SUN WAS
scarcely out of the Atlantic, peeping over the scrub and huts around Fort Sullivan, just gleaming on the windows of the stately waterfront houses along The Battery of Charles Town
across the harbor, but already Jonathan Clark could feel it blazing on his back where he sat under the awning of the officers’ mess. Jonathan was sweaty and dizzy. He had hardly slept; he had been shivering all night and wishing for the warmth of morning; now it was morning and he knew the sun would be almost unbearable again today.

There were about two dozen officers on benches at the tables, among them this morning General Charles Lee himself, who had come over from his headquarters to discuss Fort Sullivan’s powder supply with Colonel William Moultrie, the South Carolina militia officer in command of the fort. General Lee was giving the fort very little powder. General Lee had made it clear that he did not believe in Colonel Moultrie’s squat, unimposing, unfinished little fort. General Lee expected the British fleet to sail right past it, demolish it with a few contemptuous passing shots, then sail on into the harbor to bombard Charles Town. Lee expected the main attack would be made by the 3,000 Redcoats that had been landed and encamped on Long Island, east of Fort Sullivan, and thus Lee had diverted most of the available powder to his Continental troops, which he had placed between the Redcoats and the city. General Lee wanted to give Moultrie only enough powder for twenty-eight shots from each of the fort’s twenty-six eighteen-pounders. Lee had repeatedly called the unfinished fort a “slaughter pen” and every day since his arrival at Charles Town he had mocked Moultrie’s belief that it could serve any purpose. Their quarrel over this was the current gossip of the American officers. Jonathan now heard Lee say, in that contemptuous tone of voice his officers had come to know so well:

“What is it you call that, that
stuff
your little fort’s made of?”

“Palmetto, sir,” sighed Colonel Moultrie for perhaps the fourth time, staring cold-eyed across the table at the slovenly General Lee, who, now that he had liberally spotted his waistcoat with pork grease, was feeding scraps to his “honest quadruped friends,” as he called the dogs that were always around his feet. “As I’ve opined already,” Colonel Moultrie said, “palmetto may prove better than oak, under fire. I’ve seen men ruined by oak splinters, but I sure don’t reckon palmetto will splinter.”

Jonathan wiped his face with a napkin. He was sweating to soak his clothes.

There was no more denying it: malaria had caught up with him.

But Jonathan wouldn’t go on sick call with it. He was determined not to be sick abed on his first day of war, which, he was sure, would be any day now.

The city of Charles Town was as ready for siege as it could make itself. Men had sent their families into the country for safety, then had turned to, alongside soldiers and slaves, to build barricades in all the principal streets, and to tear down waterfront warehouses that might have obscured the defenders’ view of the harbor. Citizens had even contributed their lead window-sash weights to be melted down for bullets.

Most of General Lee’s army had been deployed to defend the city itself and the approaches to it. A large body of regular troops under General Armstrong stood by on the mainland, at Haddrell’s Point, as the northern defense for the city. On the northeast end of Sullivan’s Island were concealed 700 South Carolina sharpshooters, directly across Breach Inlet from the Redcoats encamped on Long Island. Thus the sharpshooters were outnumbered four to one, but that was of little concern; Moultrie knew the swift and tricky currents of Breach Inlet would keep Redcoats from fording it as well as bullets could. Apparently without knowing it, General Clinton had stranded his Redcoat army on a shadeless, mosquito-plagued sandbar where they could hardly bother anybody. And thus it was that Moultrie firmly believed that the defense of Charles Town ultimately would turn out to be a cannon duel: his fort against Admiral Sir Peter Parker’s fleet. That was why he kept demanding more powder.

Lee, a British officer who had resigned his commission to fight on the rebel side, scorned militia, and thought Moultrie was too democratic with his men. There was talk that Lee wanted to replace him with a more authoritarian, less popular, officer. Just now Lee was scoffing.

“Your little fort’s but half made! Only two walls. It’s a slaughter pen, I say, and there’s no retreat from it.”

“I don’t intend to retreat,” Moultrie said.

“The fleet will knock your little fort down about your ears in half an hour.”

“Then we’ll fight from behind the ruins of ‘my little fort.’”

“And after they’ve knocked it down they’ll shoot right up your rump through that unfinished side, then turn round and bombard the town. Ha! Huh!”

“I say give me some powder, General, sir, and they’ll never get past our muzzles.”

Jonathan looked at the mild, persistent Carolinian with a rush of admiration. Then an onslaught of feverishness came over him, making sweat prickle on his face and causing his senses to extend and contract like a telescope.

“I think Moultrie’s right,” said Ensign Croghan’s soft, deep
voice. Jonathan mopped his brow and nodded to his friend across the table. William Croghan, dark-haired, with deep-set blue eyes and a jutting chin, was English-born. He had turned down an offer of high rank in the British army because he believed in the American cause. He had joined the 8th Virginia in April and had become Jonathan’s closest friend. He pronounced his name “Crawn.” Everybody was fond of Bill Croghan, for his candid irreverence and unfailing cheerfulness. Though his skin was fair and smooth as a child’s, he was hard-muscled and manly. He was a grand raconteur. Being a great-nephew of George Croghan, Britain’s deputy Indian agent under Sir William Johnson, Bill Croghan was full of wondrous Indian anecdotes—many of them about Sir William’s legendary procreative powers that had increased the North American Indian population by an estimated thousand halfbreeds.

Now a stirring in another part of the pavilion signaled General Lee’s brusque departure. Everybody was rising to attention. The general stalked out of the tent, wiping his chin with his coat sleeve, followed by his pack of canines and his staff officers, in that order. “I believe they like their master so well because he always reeks o’ meat,” an officer remarked.

“Who does,” Croghan asked, “his dogs or his staff?”

Jonathan laughed despite his misery.

The atmosphere relaxed after Lee’s departure, and there was familiar, easy talk, that casual after-breakfast hubbub that was one of the most pleasant parts of an officer’s life, in Jonathan’s estimation; it was so much like mornings at the Clark home. While most of the officers jabbered about the eternal politics of soldiering, Jonathan and Bill talked nostalgically about homes and families. If Jonathan was malaria-sick, he was twice as homesick. Bill Croghan had heard about every member of the Clark family, and had heard probably a hundred of Ann Rogers Clark’s “Maxims to Live Decent By,” as Jonathan liked to call them.

“Up! Up, gents!” someone was shouting. “Look! The fleet’s on the move!” There was a lively turning of heads, scooting of benches, press of bodies. Jonathan rose, heart pounding, and looked out toward the Atlantic.

Offshore to the southeast, beyond low, scrubby Sullivan’s Island with its squat fort, above the sun-silvered horizon, stood the topsails of the British men-o’-war. The vessels were under full sail, their tall canvas looking creamy and translucent against the backlight of the morning sun. Colonel Moultrie had risen, pausing to button his waist-length artillery jacket and don the glossy
black-leather Romanesque helmet of his Corps. He squinted at the fleet, then limped rapidly toward the exit on his gouty foot.

“Wishing you a good shoot, sir,” Bill Croghan called as he passed. Officers were pouring out of the pavilion, mounting their horses outside.

“Thank y’ kindly,” Moultrie answered without looking back. “That’s what we aim to have.”

T
HEY STOOD ON THE SWAMPY GROUND OF THE MAINLAND
north of Sullivan’s Island and watched with pounding hearts as the awful moment approached. Still full of breakfast, the Continentals stood like spectators in some enormous coliseum, voices murmuring with awe and dread.

The towering fleet glided ominously toward the channel, the ships’ massive bows munching the blue water. There was a terrible sense of unstoppability in the moment now, no way to call it off, no way to prevent the impending destruction. In the fort on the beach of the island, off to the east, Moultrie’s black-jacketed cannoneers were swarming like black ants over their huge iron guns. Their shouts came up as voice-wisps on the wind. Each cannon, longer than a man’s body, squatted on its massive oaken carriage on four small wooden wheels, pyramids of the eighteen-pound black iron balls stacked behind it, and the tools of the trade were in the cannoneers’ hands: the sponge-staffs, ramrods, shovels, sledgehammers, waterpails, powder barrels. The muzzles faced through apertures in the thick ramparts, faced that narrow channel of blue water through which the slow-moving ships would have to pass within a few moments. The ramparts were crudely made, but massive: ten feet thick, walls of shaggy-looking palmetto trunks laid horizontally, the spaces between the walls filled with tons of sand. The ramparts looked like flood dikes rather than walls. The fort seemed impregnable.

But then there were the ships, nine of them in a file, and each one of them was a fortress bigger than the one on the beach. Jonathan and Bill Croghan looked at each other, then looked back to the ships.

The ships, seen in the terrible clarity of fatal moment, were both monstrous and sublime. Their hulls were as big and heavy as courthouses; the canvas and intricate rigging that pulled them on looked fragile as spiderwebs and moth wings. Their sails were taut-full of the onshore wind, and the Union Jacks, blood-red with blue and white crosses, rippled from mastheads and fantails. Dozens of pennants and many-colored signal flags ran through the riggings. Flags. Flags in the wind. The flag of South Carolina
stood out from its staff above the fort in the stiff, hot wind, a blue-black banner with a white crescent moon in its corner and the word
LIBERTY
in its center. And a few feet from where Jonathan stood, the little salmon-pink banner of the 8th Virginia Regiment crepitated atop its pole. Flags fluttered as the moment compressed. Jonathan could see men on the ships now, tiny as fleas; he could see cannon ports checkering the hulls; each of the warships carried more guns than Colonel Moultrie had in his whole fort. The size and the relentless, quiet progress of the fleet into the mouth of the gauntlet now for the first time made Jonathan doubt Moultrie’s confidence, made him fear that the ships
would
drive right past the fort and into the harbor.

Jonathan drew out the gold watch his father had given him, attached to the fancy fob George had given him, and opened the cover. It was ten o’clock in the morning. He heard snatches of voice from the fort. His mouth was dry; his heart raced. The first ship was almost abreast of the fort now, in the neck of water between Sullivan’s Island and James Island. “That’s a frigate, right?” he asked Bill Croghan.

“Yes. The
Active
, I think.” The defenders knew much about the enemy fleet that had lain at anchor so long outside; South Carolina fishermen were daring spies.

Farther down the line there was the towering canvas of the
Bristol
, Sir Peter Parker’s fifty-gun flagship.

“Great God in Heaven,” someone exclaimed in the ranks, “why don’t somebody shoot them boats?”

And then Jonathan nearly jumped off the ground when the morning burst open with a crash of cannon. Four or five of the fort’s big guns discharged at once, shaking the swampy earth underfoot. Seconds later, a sail of the
Active
caved in. A yell went up from the fort.

Now the sides of the
Active
spewed orange tongues of spark and fire, and blue smoke hid her hull. Jonathan had never heard such a peal of noise in his life, not even the great cracking, rumbling thunderstorms that rolled up the Shenandoah Valley on summer evenings, and his heart quailed.

“She’s dropped anchor!” Bill shouted. “She’s going to stand there and fight!” It was plain now. The
Active
was going to sit right in the face of the fort and pour broadsides into it while the other ships passed on her far side. The earth seemed to quake every time the concussion from the ship’s guns rolled ashore. They were belching out their horrendous fire and noise with an amazing rapidity, and geysers of sand leaped up in and around the fort. Between the blasts and through the ringing in his ears
Jonathan could hear men’s voices shouting and whooping in the fort. Sandspouts leaped, shrubs and trees behind the fort disappeared, an old fishing hut burst apart in a flash of splinters and spinning boards and roof thatch. Jonathan was surprised that anyone could still be alive in the fort, but apparently there were many, still quite alive. The troops of the 8th Virginia were still dumbstruck, overawed by the tumult and watching like an audience as the fiery panorama unfolded under the blue sky.

Now the
Bristol
flagship, the largest vessel ever to have entered this channel, her high oaken side checkered with twenty-five gun ports, drew abreast of the fort and erupted in such a storm of cannon fire that she disappeared in her own smoke. The rampart of the fort shuddered with the impact of at least a dozen simultaneous direct hits. Bright sand sprayed fifty feet into the air, and behind its windblown, drifting veil, Jonathan saw the South Carolina flag go down, its staff snapped off at the base by a cannonball.