Fusiliers (45 page)
Among those heading for Williamsburg, the state capital, were Lieutenant Calvert, Serjeant Lamb and Thomas Barretté. George Watson, the former Serjeant Major who had been serving as adjutant, was with them too. Balfour had tried to get him a second lieutenancy by borrowing money from a loyalist colonel, but the loss of William Robinson, killed in action at Guilford, allowed the matter to be settled without money changing hands. Robinson (another ex-ranker) left a vacant commission, which, after Lord Cornwallis’s intervention, was given to Watson. In small ways like this, the privations of the Fusiliers’ campaigning in the Carolinas were being recognised, but the regiment would soon face fresh hardships and danger.
The Fusiliers’ embarkation on the evening of 12 August came as a relief to many of them. Brigaded with their old comrades of the 33rd, they had several days earlier appeared in Portsmouth. The story of their short stay by that harbour was like so many others during the years of the revolution; the King’s troops had arrived, compromised their friends, and then left. ‘How will this look to the loyal subjects there?’ asked one officer. ‘Have we not made enough people unhappy already?’
In the case of Portsmouth, the circumstances had been particularly ghastly. Behind the town was a deep morass and if ever a name could be appropriate it was that of the Great Dismal Swamp. From this mire, toxic vapours and miasmas had very nearly ruined the health of the small British garrison that stayed there briefly during the summer of 1781.
Brigadier O’Hara was commandant of Portsmouth during those few weeks, when epidemics had broken out, particularly among the camp followers and those who had fled their masters seeking British protection. On 5 August O’Hara had asked Cornwallis what to do with ‘hundreds of wretched negroes that are dying by the scores every day’. Four days later, O’Hara took it upon himself to break open government stores rather than take them with the evacuation, arguing that the blacks struck down by illness ‘above 1,000 in number, they would inevitably perish if our support were withdrawn’. Whites too were stricken; shortly before he finally abandoned Portsmouth, O’Hara told his general that he could barely load up his troops because ‘we are become extremely sickly’.
The 23rd had somehow maintained the record of its previous summer in South Carolina, remaining the fittest corps for a complicated task. O’Hara did not have enough ships to take everything from Portsmouth around to where the army had been ordered to concentrate, so he ferried dozens of horse and his heavy cannon across the water to Newport News under the protection of the 23rd. They had orders to march overland the dozen or so miles to where they would meet the general. The remainder of O’Hara’s command would await news of their safe arrival before sailing around to the same rendezvous.
On 13 August, the Fusiliers, therefore, began the first of two marches that would bring them across the peninsula from its James River side to the York River. The temperature was devilish hot, discomfiting anyone who might have thought that Virginia would be a healthier place to campaign in August than South Carolina.
‘For six weeks the heat has been so unbearable’, wrote one officer, ‘that many men have been lost by sunstroke or their reason has been impaired. Everything that one has on his body is soaked from constant perspiration. The nights are especially terrible, when there is so little air that one can scarcely breathe.’
By mid-August the swarms of insects had at least abated, but many left their own slow-acting death in the veins of men they had fed off. On the 14th, Cornwallis reported to O’Hara that the 23rd had arrived safely and that he should conclude the evacuation of Portsmouth and the concentration of the army on the York River. The Fusiliers began to take in their surroundings at Yorktown.
The settlement dated from 1691; it had grown quickly, profiting from the tobacco and cotton trades. It had 300 or so dwellings, several of them grand brick-built mansions, with a similarly handsome Custom House. During the years leading up to the revolution, Yorktown had become depressed. A few score soldiers had garrisoned it as part of Virginia’s defence against coastal raiding, but there were no formal works when Cornwallis arrived there.
Although the town occupied an excellent position for trade, it was less favourably sited as a place of war. Cornwallis and his (rather junior) engineer only realised this after they had started collecting the whole army in Yorktown. It was built on low sandy hills and vulnerable from every point of the compass.
From the north, Gloucester Point, half a mile across the York River, could be used by any attacker to hurl cannon shot into the centre of town. Cornwallis, therefore, seized Gloucester during the latter part of August, and sent the 23rd and others out to work there erecting defences. To the east of Yorktown, a deep cleft in the sandy soil allowed the defenders to site some defensive works that would make it harder for any attacker to approach in any order. West of town too there was an obstacle, a low swampy creek between the plateau of Yorktown and a higher ridge overlooking the river; here a redoubt would be built (by the 23rd Fusiliers) on that commanding ground. Attack from the south presented the greatest difficulty, for there the ground was open. The great majority of British guns were therefore dug in to defensive batteries in this sector.
The days of late August and early September passed in a kind of torpor at Yorktown. On many, the officers declared it too hot for their men to work, insisting that only negroes could labour under such
conditions. Cornwallis was initially confident that most of the men would be lifted off by British transports and taken to New York. Defensive preparations seemed to be carried on sporadically and apparently oblivious to the fact that their defence or deliverance would rely upon the Royal Navy.
Day by day unfavourable reports reached Yorktown. Captain Ewald commented caustically in his diary that each was greeted by the general or his staff with ‘That cannot be!’ By mid-September two particularly worrying items of news were circulating: that Washington was marching down from near New York and that the Royal Navy had fought an unsuccessful engagement against the French off the Virginia Capes. Washington and his French counterpart had successfully humbugged Clinton, who had been convinced until the last that New York would be attacked and that British naval forces would maintain their superiority in American waters.
During these days, working parties were drawn from the various regiments to toil away with pick and shovel, throwing up earthworks, a backbreaking task as the sick list grew daily. Each new portentous report seemed to prompt some measure here or there on the defences; cannon were taken from the lower decks of two frigates to add to the shore batteries; a system of pickets and patrols to prevent an enemy surprise was set in place; the town was divided into defensive sectors.
On 5 September, the 23rd were given custody of a redoubt to the west of town in the shape of a four-pointed star. This work, which would soon become known as the Fusiliers’ Redoubt, had a key role in defending Yorktown from an attack along the cliff overlooking the York River. Behind it, the ground sloped down a couple of hundred yards to the Creek, beyond which was a redan, or small work, and a section of the inner defences that were also the responsibility of the 23rd.
While these preparations were made to defend the fixed points around Yorktown, Earl Cornwallis abandoned the mobile, aggressive warfare that had typified his progress through the Carolinas. Why?
‘I am now busy fortifying a harbour for line of battle ships,’ Cornwallis wrote to a friend from Yorktown during the third week of August. ‘Please to observe that it is no plan of mine, and I take no merit in it.’ This attitude, whether it arose from pride, petulance, or a belated spirit of subordination to his commander-in-chief, showed how Cornwallis allowed his formidable drive to become disconnected for a few vital weeks in Virginia. It also indicated an over-confidence in the
British ability to beat the French in a stand-up fight, since the Comte d’Estaing was disposed of a powerful naval squadron, siege artillery and excellent engineers.
From the moment on 30 August that large numbers of French ships were sighted off the coast, it must have become apparent to the earl that evacuation by sea or the succour promised by General Clinton from the same quarter might prove impossible. After several reconnaissance missions towards Williamsburg, Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton believed that a breakout and march back towards the Carolinas might be attempted. Cornwallis, though, had received General Clinton’s definite orders to make a base on the Chesapeake. He hoped still to give battle in front of the lines in any case. Tarleton felt his reluctance to attempt a breakout ‘proceeded from the noble Earl’s misconception, or from the suggestions of confidential attendants, who construed the Commander-in-chief’s letters into a definite promise of relief’.
As September wore on, however, the concentration of American and French forces proceeded apace. Matters at Yorktown assumed the form of crisis.
Far to the south, Lieutenant Colonel Balfour could only follow reports of events in Virginia with perplexed concern. There had been a time, five or six years before, when he had believed the war could be won with just a few thousand more men. Even as Cornwallis had set off into North Carolina at the beginning of 1781, Balfour had told one friend that he still hoped for ‘some better prospects than have of late presented’. But the failure to raise the North Carolina loyalists, followed by the eruption of Greene’s army into the south, had ground down any optimism that might have remained.
During the sultry days of July and August, Charleston’s high-living society had dwindled to nothing. It was a season when the rich would traditionally retire to their plantations or further north for relief, but at this stage of the war, with the city almost cut from the backcountry by enemy patrols, the boarded-up mansions or quiet streets communicated a quite different message to the commandant. Even among the people of Charleston, there was growing defection to the enemy cause.
Balfour retained the company of Fusiliers whom he had co-opted into the administration of his dwindling fief, but in general he found himself with much work and few reliable collaborators. As the enemy had disposed of countryside loyalists by simple murder or summary
execution, Balfour was hamstrung from responding in kind. The commander-in-chief had specifically withheld powers of capital punishment from courts martial sitting there, so Balfour had been forced to back down swiftly when he tried to make some captured militia officers ‘hostage’, insisting on humane treatment of their British or loyalist counterparts. In the commandant’s eyes there was a complete inequality between the methods he was allowed to use and those adopted by his enemies. This was particularly noticeable with those American officers who had been captured when Charleston fell. Once freed and given British ‘protections’ from further punishment, many had joined the enemy side. In May 1781, Balfour told Clinton that he yearned to ‘make the most striking example of such, as having taken protection, snatch every occasion to rise in arms against us’. In July Balfour got his chance.
During one of the innumerable skirmishes of that summer Colonel Isaac Hayne, a one-time horse breeder of York County, South Carolina, was taken. Previously captured in May 1780, Hayne had been given a certificate of protection before being allowed home to his farm. When summoned months later to join the royal militia, he had opted to join the Patriots instead, trying to lead across men of the loyalist militia with him. Balfour locked Hayne up in the provost, the dank cellar beneath Charleston’s Exchange, while he considered how this rebel might be dealt with. A civilian trial was out of the question, for the prospect of acquittal by a local jury was too damaging to ponder; likewise, the Commandant did not have the power to bring his prisoner before a general court martial on capital charges.
Balfour decided to invent his own tribunal, which he termed a ‘court of inquiry’. This dubious legal expedient had already been followed by the Patriots on several occasions, including the trial of Major John Andre. Knowing that he was treading on potentially dangerous ground, also that he served a commander-in-chief who longed to break him, Balfour sought support, writing to Colonel Lord Rawdon who was fighting in the backcountry, seeking his approval. Once again the commandant argued for ‘making an example’.
Rawdon had already shown a taste for summary punishments. He had hanged five Americans in Camden for violating their promise not to join the rebellion. In October 1780, he had executed a deserter from his own regiment, the Volunteers of Ireland, after he was captured in arms with the enemy. Even so, when Rawdon arrived in Charleston in
July 1781, he had, despite such instincts, agreed to look into the Hayne case, after appeals from several female relatives. Rawdon soon satisfied himself that, to use his own pungent phraseology, ‘By all the recognised laws of war, nothing was requisite in the case of Hayne, but to identify his person previous to hanging him from the next tree.’ On 4 August, that punishment was duly effected, Hayne being taken from the Exchange in a wagon to a place of execution just beyond the city limits.
Hayne was the only person executed while Balfour was commandant of Charleston, but he and Rawdon were excoriated for it by the Whigs who lauded Hayne as a martyr. Certainly the enemy’s partisans ensured through their hue and cry that Hayne’s execution served as the opposite kind of example to the one Balfour wanted. Compared to the dozens of loyalists hanged or shot after summary proceedings, for example following King’s Mountain and during Greene’s march through the backcountry in May 1781, Balfour was responsible for this solitary entry on the balance of executions in the battle for South Carolina. The noisy reaction to it helps explain why British officers were so often angered or bemused by the hypocrisy they saw on the other side of the divide. But their enemy was possessed of determination for a cause, as well as a belief in ends justifying means, that they could not match. With Cornwallis’s removal from South Carolina, there were some instances of British military executions carried out after summary proceedings. Interestingly, though, the prime offenders in dispensing this type of execution were loyalist Americans. Cornwallis or Balfour embodied, on the other hand, the professional restraint of men who apparently decided that even if they could not win the war, they could at least fight it honourably. Even Rawdon, when criticised later for his role in the Hayne affair, angrily defended himself, arguing, ‘Humanity… ought to be as dear in a soldier’s estimation as valour itself.’
