LXVI. 1776. June. at that time very great; he had power from the CHAP. general congress to order, and he had ordered battalions from North Carolina and Virginia; his presence was a constant pledge of the active sympathy of the continent; and on his arrival he was invested with the military command through an order from Rutledge. On that same day Clinton began his disembarkation, landing four or five hundred men on Long Island. It was therefore evident that the first attack was to be made not on the city but its out-post; yet Lee proposed to Rutledge to withdraw from Sullivan's Island and abandon it without a blow. Had he acted in concert with the invaders, he could not have more completely promoted their design. But Rutledge, interposing his authority, would not suffer it, and Lee did not venture to proceed alone; yet on the tenth his very first order to Moultrie, except one which was revoked as soon as issued, directed that officer to construct bridges for his retreat, and the order was repeated and enforced several times that day, and on almost every succeeding one. Happily Moultrie's courage was of that placid kind that could not be made anxious or uneasy; he weighed carefully his danger and his resources; with quiet, imperturbable confidence, formed his plan for repelling the impending double attack of the enemy by sea and by land; and never so much as imagined that he could be driven from his post. On the tenth, while the continental congress was finishing the debate on independence, the Bristol, whose guns had been previously taken out, came over the bar, attended by thirty or forty vessels, LXVI. June. CHAP. and anchored at about three miles from Fort SulliVan. In Charleston, from which this movement was 1776. distinctly visible, all was action; on the wharfs, warehouses of great value were thrown down to give room for the fire of cannon and musketry from the lines along East Bay; intrenchments surrounded the town; the barricades, raised in the principal streets, were continued to the water; and arrow-headed embankments were projected upon the landing places. Negroes from the country took part in the labor; the hoe and the spade were in every citizen's hands, for all persons, without distinction, "labored with alacrity," some for the sake of example, some as the best way of being useful. Neither the noonday sun, nor the rain, which in that clime drops from the clouds in gushes, interrupted their toil. On the eleventh the two regiments from North Carolina arrived. That same day Lee, being told that a bridge of retreat from Sullivan's Island to Haddrell's Point was impossible, and not being permitted by Rutledge to direct the total evacuation of the island, ordered Moultrie immediately to send four hundred of his men over to the continent; in his postscript he added: "Make up the detachment to five hundred." On the thirteenth he writes: "You will detach another hundred of men," to strengthen the corps on the other side of the creek. But the spirit of South Carolina had sympathy with Moultrie, and mechanics and negro laborers were sent down to complete his fort; yet hard as they toiled, it was not nearly finished before the action. On the twelfth the wind blew so violently that two ships which lay LXIV. outside of the bar, were obliged for safety to stand CHAP. out to sea, and this assisted to postpone the attack. June On the fifteenth, Lee stationed Armstrong at Had- 1776. drell's Point; and the brave Pennsylvanian, as the superior officer, ever manifested for Moultrie a hearty friendship. On that same day, Sir Peter Parker gave to the captains of his squadron his arrangement for taking the batteries on Sullivan's Island; and on the sixteenth he communicated it to Clinton, who did not know what to do. The dilatory conduct of the British betrayed hesitation and unharmonious councils; and the Carolinians made such use of the consequent delay, that by the seventeenth they were in an exceedingly good state of preparation at every outpost and also in town. But Clinton intended only to occupy and garrison Sullivan's Island. For that end, consulting with Cornwallis, he completed the landing of all his men on Long Island, a naked sand, where nothing grew except a few bushes, that harbored myriads of musquitoes, and where the troops suffered intensely from the burning sun, the want of good water, and the bad quality and insufficient supply of provisions. A trial of the ford was made; Clinton himself waded in up to his neck; so did others of his officers, and on the day on which he succeeded in getting all his men on shore, he announced through Vaughan to Sir Peter Parker, that no ford was to be found; that there remained a depth of seven feet of water at low tide; and that therefore the troops could not take the share they expected in the intended attack. His six full regiments, and companies enough from others to make up one more, a body of more than three thousand men, thoroughly provided with CHAP. arms, artillery, and ammunition, had left the transLXIV. ports for a naked sand-bank that was to them a 1776. prison. Compelled to propose something, Clinton fixed on the twenty third for the joint attack; but it was hindered on that day by an unfavorable wind. June. In the following night, Muhlenberg's regiment ar rived. On receiving Lee's orders they had instantly set off from Virginia and marched to Charleston, with out tents, continually exposed to the weather. The companies were composed chiefly of Muhlenberg's old German parishioners; and of all the Virginia regiments, this was the most complete, the best armed, best clothed, and best equipped for immediate service. The Americans were now very strong. The confidence of Sir Peter Parker in an easy victory was unshaken. To make all sure, he exercised a body of marines and seamen in the art of entering forts through embrasures; intending first to silence Moultrie's battery, then to land his practised detachment, and by their aid enter the fort. His presumption was justified by the judgment of Lee. That general, coming down to the island, took Moultrie aside and said: "Do you think you can maintain this post?" Moultrie answered: "Yes, I think I can.” But Lee had no faith in a spirited defence, fretted at Moultrie's too easy disposition, and wished, up to the last moment, to remove him from the command. On the twenty fifth the squadron was increased by the arrival of the "Experiment," a ship of sixty guns, which passed the bar on the twenty sixth. Letters of encouragement came also from Tonyn, then governor of East Florida, who was impatient for an attack on Georgia; he would have had a body of LXVI. June. Indians raised on the back of South Carolina; and a CHAP. body of royalists to "terrify and distract, so that the assault at Charleston would have struck an astonish- 1776 ing terror and affright." He reported South Carolina to be in "a mutinous state that delighted him;" "the men would certainly rise on their officers; the battery on Sullivan's Island would not discharge two rounds." This opinion was spread through the fleet, and became the belief of every sailor on board. With or without Clinton's aid the commodore was persuaded that his well drilled seamen and marines could take and keep possession of the fort, till Clinton should "send as many troops as he might think proper, who might enter the fort in the same way.' One day Captain Lempriere, the same who in the former year had, with daring enterprise, taken more than a hundred barrels of powder from a vessel at anchor off St. Augustine, was walking with Moultrie on the platform, and looking at the British ships-ofwar, all of which had already come over the bar, addressed him: "Well, Colonel, what do you think of it now?" "We shall beat them," said Moultrie. "The men-of-war," rejoined the captain, "will knock your fort down in half an hour." "Then," said Moultrie, "we will lie behind the ruins and prevent their men from landing." On the morning of the twenty eighth a gentle 28. sea-breeze prognosticated the attack. Lee, from Charleston, for the tenth or eleventh time, charged Moultrie to finish the bridge for his retreat, promised him reënforcements, which were never sent, and still meditated removing him from his command; while Moultrie, whose faculties, under the outward show VOL. VIII. 34* |