Fusiliers (34 page)

The formation of local regiments was a key part of Balfour’s mission. Even by early 1780, the number of these corps and the thousands of troops employed had grown considerably since General Howe had made a tentative start. Clinton proved the more committed and effective recruiter of loyal Americans and by late 1780 there were about 7,500 under arms. These regiments fell roughly into three categories: provincial corps that were well established, such as the British Legion or the Volunteers of Ireland (the latter under the
colonelcy of Lord Rawdon, the army’s darling from the dark days of Boston); provincial regiments, such as the Prince of Wales’s Volunteers that had been recruited in the northern states with the men serving full time for the duration of the war; and local militia units, subject to temporary call-out, much like those serving the Patriot or Whig cause.

From the outset, as Balfour and Cornwallis prepared to lead different columns into the backcountry, they understood that the task of re-imposing royal authority would be difficult and that there would be many restrictions in how they could discharge it. In giving Cornwallis his terms of reference, Clinton had, for example, limited the power of general courts martial, making it impossible for Cornwallis to execute anyone or very hard to dismiss any officer. Those men who were guilty of what were normally capital offences were therefore to be broken from their regiments and sent aboard Royal Navy ships or to regiments serving in pestilential Caribbean garrisons. Denied the ultimate sanction, Cornwallis had to lead his redcoats by positive exhortations and by his own vigorous example. Even more importantly for his mission, the general understood the critical importance of winning over the people of South Carolina, telling his men early on:

The great object of his Majesty’s force in this country is to protect and secure His Majesty’s faithful and loyal subjects, and to encourage and assist them in arming and opposing the tyranny and oppression of the rebels. His Lordship therefore recommends it to them in the strongest manner to treat with kindness all those who have sought protection in the British army.

Cornwallis knew that leadership would be at a premium in his army, since advancing into the American hinterland held myriad dangers obvious to anyone who had experienced the hornet’s nest of a roused American countryside as Mecan had at Lexington, or Lamb at Saratoga. The general knew that he must inspire his officers and none was considered insignificant in this effort. Thus, as he travelled about, the earl jotted a note to himself that one of his correspondents in England ‘desired that I should be civil to Lt Calvert of the Welsh Fuzileers. He is from Richmond.’ Thus the teenage subaltern would earn an invitation to sup at the general’s table one evening or a kind word on the line of march. The young officer would never forget it, and would exert himself prodigiously to please the great man. Of course Calvert’s uncle was an MP and his father a rich man, but by
making similar examples of his kind condescension, Cornwallis would tie his subordinates to him in the execution of the great enterprise now under way.

Balfour and Ferguson were ordered to head up the Santee River, then about 100 miles inland, to the point where the river forked into several tributaries in the uplands. Here, they were to spread into detachments, with Balfour taking his men furthest to the west, to Ninety Six, less than 20 miles from the Savannah River, which marked the beginning of Georgia. There were several thousand loyalists at Ninety Six (so named because it was supposedly that number of miles from Fort St George, a frontier outpost). Earl Cornwallis, meanwhile, would be heading to Camden, about 100 miles north of Charleston, and almost the same distance east of Ninety Six, in order to establish the fortified supply base necessary for the British army’s operations in the backcountry. As the colonel and his general got going, they exchanged in their letters knowing and complicit remarks about Ferguson, their shared suspicion of him increasing their mutual bond. The general displayed his trust in Balfour, giving him carte blanche to act, assuring him, ‘I have a thorough confidence in your ability and attention … you may depend upon it that every step you take shall meet my hearty approbation.’ Cornwallis was already sufficiently impressed with Balfour to urge, ‘I beg you to continue to mention your opinions freely to me.’

Cornwallis had sent ahead Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton with his British Legion to push up to the borders of North Carolina. Tarleton was a twenty-six-year-old cavalry officer who had made a name for himself as one of the officers who had captured Major General Lee near New York in 1776. Stocky, red-haired and utterly aggressive, Tarleton’s credo was simply expressed in a letter he sent in 1780: ‘The more difficulty, the more glory.’ Guided by this idea, he plunged into the backcountry in May 1780 as he would plunge into action many times, apparently oblivious to all that might go wrong. In the absence of the light infantry battalions and main body of the 17th Light Dragoons, who were sent back to New York, Tarleton’s Legion combined forty British dragoons of the 17th, 130 loyalist cavalry and about 120 more of them on foot, to become the advanced guard of Cornwallis’s army.

Tarleton and his Legion had already distinguished themselves fighting inland of the siege of Charleston and on 29 May approached
an enemy force under Colonel Abraham Buford at Waxhaws close to the North Carolina line. Tarleton demanded Buford’s surrender, was refused and promptly charged his enemy. The Americans, a Virginia regiment of foot and some troops of horse, were quickly broken and Tarleton’s men, who believed for a time that he had been killed by an American abusing a white flag of truce, went on a rampage killing many of their enemies, even when they tried to surrender.

At the end of the battle, Tarleton jotted a note of enemy casualties: there were 113 killed, 150 wounded and left where they were on their word to quit the enemy army, and 53 prisoners marched away. To the experienced reader of such documents these figures are suggestive: the number of killed is higher than the normal ratio of dead to injured, so there must have been some merciless swordplay by the Legion, but the survival of at least 203 Americans (others escaped into the woods) implies that there was no blanket order of ‘no quarter’. Tarleton’s abandonment of the injured fits in with military doctrines of the time that the commander of an advanced corps could not slow himself down with wounded prisoners.

The episode of Paoli soon after Brandywine in 1777 had already shown the tendency for Britain’s enemies to respond to defeat with allegations of massacre, and so it proved again after the Waxhaws. Cries of ‘Tarleton’s Quarter!’ or ‘Revenge Buford!’ were adopted by American commanders stirring their men following the disaster at Charleston. But even before the news of the ‘Waxhaws Massacre’ was broadcast about the backcountry, some partisan bands were forming, ready to contest that land.

It was already roastingly hot by the time Balfour got to Ninety Six in mid-June, after an arduous fortnight’s march, with sickness beginning to sap his regiments. He had formed an assessment of the rural mood on his way up, and understood that few of the inland settlements shared Ninety Six’s loyalism. Many were itching for some activity from their Whig friends while others simply wanted to stay neutral while waiting to see what would happen. Balfour put forward two ideas of how the country might be dominated – one involved marching into disaffected villages, disarming and punishing people, and the other proposal was to ‘get the leading men to be answerable for the conduct of their people’.

The British and their loyalist allies set about creating seven militia regiments in that part of the uplands and were soon training 4,000
men. Balfour, from the start, was dubious about the idea of embodying them for any active service, believing most of their officers incapable. He thought that militia might have uses in patrolling the wagon routes, suppressing banditry, and defending their own homes as a last resort. Ferguson, though, was much more ambitious for the new recruits.

Within a couple of weeks of starting, Balfour was already aware of a challenge emerging in the backcountry. He wrote to Cornwallis on 12 July, telling him about Colonel Thomas Sumpter raising a force of militia, with a sprinkling of Continentals, that had launched itself from North Carolina and had already ‘made inroads into this province with large plundering parties chasing the loyalists from their plantations’. The uncertainty and poor leadership of Tory militias was exposed in some early skirmishes, where, by contrast, the ardent spirit of their enemies manifested itself too. Balfour warned his general, ‘I find the enemy exerting themselves wonderfully and successfully in stirring up the people’, and he detected that some of the American militia pardoned and released by the British after the fall of Charleston ‘have already joined them and a very great number are ready at the smallest reverse of our fortunes’.

In many of the piedmont settlements, Britain’s most hard-bitten adversaries were Irish immigrants or those of so-called Scotch-Irish descent. The latter type came from the ranks of Scottish Presbyterian settlers in Ireland who, having lived one or two generations on that island, had left for America, many after losing their livelihoods when the British raised taxes on imported linen. They were thus embittered against the British Crown. There were more general Irish grievances too, General Clinton noting, ‘the emigrants from Ireland were in general to be looked upon as our most serious antagonists. They had fled from the real or imagined oppression of their landlords.’ Clinton believed the Irish retained a greater sense of national identity than other immigrant groups and tried to play on this by forming two distinct loyalist regiments, the Volunteers of Ireland and Roman Catholic Volunteers. There was some success, and one British general estimated early in 1779 that half of all Continental deserters received in British lines were Irish.

However, the Hibernian strain that had planted itself in the hills between Camden and the North Carolina border was to prove well-nigh irreconcilable. The meagre existence scraped from the sandy soil
of the uplands created a tough, self-reliant patchwork of communities that greatly resented outside interference, be it from redcoats, the Charleston merchant elite, or even tithe-gathering churchmen. One officer of the British Legion called these backcountry settlers ‘Crackers’, recoiling at both their miserable existence and their lax morals, saying they were ‘more savage than the Indians, and possess
every
one of their vices, but
none
of their virtues’.

Settlements of Scots who had not lived in Ireland, by contrast, were often loyalist. The fact that so many of General Cornwallis’s commanders were Scots contributed to an easier relationship with them, as did the perception that many prominent Caledonians at home or in America saw in the war a chance for rehabilitation and profit after the Jacobite rebellions of the previous generation.

Balfour, however, was given little time for Old Country reminiscences with the many Scots at Ninety Six. He had only been in place for one month, when his efforts to nurture the shoots of royal authority in the scorching ground of the backcountry were cut short by a dramatic letter from Earl Cornwallis. The commandant of Charleston, Major General Pattinson of the artillery, had quit his post pleading sickness and was to return to New York. Pattinson had a reputation as an inefficient drunk, so this was no great loss. An able man was needed in that city, for it formed the main supply depot for the south as well as being a great trading and political hub. Who to replace Pattinson then? There were no other generals willing to serve in South Carolina, whereas aggressive youngsters like Rawdon or Tarleton were best left on the battlefield. The earl chose Balfour:

I know you will say that you would rather go with your Regiment but they must go where they are most wanted, and it is absolutely necessary for the good of the service, that you should take the management of the town, which will, in fact, be the management of the province. I must insist on hearing no excuses.

So, the lieutenant colonel was ordered to forsake the chance of leading the 23rd in battle, and undertake a complex administrative office instead. Balfour instantly worried about the money – if he was expected to entertain and hold court in Charleston from his existing pay, and with his many debts, he would be ruined. Cornwallis succeeded in getting him brigadier’s money. In addition, as commandant, Balfour would have the use of a large public purse, a
chance to make sure his pockets were never empty. The post thus offered Balfour the chance to set right his finances but avoid the dangers of the battlefield that might once more bring sorrow to his poor mother’s heart.

While Balfour travelled down from Ninety Six to Charleston, Cornwallis was receiving reports that a powerful enemy force – several thousand troops under Major General Gates, the victor of Saratoga – were moving towards Camden. Several British regiments, including the Royal Welch Fusiliers, were concentrated at that place under Lord Rawdon. Earl Cornwallis was in Charleston awaiting Balfour.

On 6 August, Cornwallis handed over business at that headquarters to the new commandant. There were disturbing reports from the inland settlements – one of the newly formed militia battalions had defected in its entirety to Sumpter, having been convinced by a local officer paroled by the British after the fall of Charleston. Reports from Camden meanwhile suggested Gates might have as many as 5,000 troops at his disposal, whereas the King’s troops at that post numbered little more than 2,000.

Balfour settled in to his splendid new office. Meanwhile, 100 miles away, the 23rd, under Major Mecan, awaited their general and fate at Camden. Despite the privations of service at that remote post and of the summer heat reaching its boiling peak, morale was good.

With the enemy approaching, Rawdon wrote urgently to Cornwallis on 11 August, ‘Gates may attack me tomorrow morning: if he does, I think he will find us in better spirits than he expects.’ The general had already left Charleston and was on his way.