The Battle of Stono Ferry, 20 June 1779

The Battle of Stono Ferry took place 20 June 1779 in South Carolina during the British retreat from an abortive raid on Charleston. Lieutenant Colonel John Maitland was in charge of the large rear guard left by British General Augustine Prevost upon his withdrawal to Savannah. A bridgehead was established on the north side of an area now known as New Cut Church Flats; this was meant to cover Stono Ferry. Three strong redoubts were built, circled by an abatis, and manned by Highlanders and Hessians. It was here that American Major General Benjamin Lincoln chose to lead his main attack. General William Moultrie led a smaller secondary effort to the east against a small group of British soldiers on Johns Island.

Lincoln deployed his troops after a night march of eight miles from the Ashley Ferry, located in the present village of Drayton Hall. Immediately upon their arrival at dawn, they began struggling through thick woods. The Americans advanced in two wings; General Jethro Sumner led his Carolina militia on the right, carrying two guns, while their right flank was covered by a company of light infantry, commanded by the Marquis de Malmady. Continental Army troops, under General Isaac Huger, made up the left wing; they carried four guns into battle. With Huger was a group of light infantry under John Henderson, and it was these troops who, shortly before sunrise, made first contact with the enemy.

The battle began well for the Patriots. They engaged the British positions with small arms and cannon fire for an hour, at which point they advanced to the abatis. Of the Highlanders, two companies resisted until only eleven men were left standing; a Hessian battalion finally broke. Here Maitland shifted his forces in an attempt to counter the larger threat posed by Huger's wing. The Hessians rallied and returned to the fight, and reserves were brought across the bridge. Lincoln chose this moment to order a withdrawal.

At 150 dead and a comparable number missing, Patriot losses had been heavy; among the dead was Andrew Jackson's brother Hugh, felled by heat and exhaustion. Also lost was Col. Thomas Neel. Most of the "missing" were deserters; the British claimed no prisoners from the battle. Huger was severely wounded. For their part, the British lost 150 officers and men, but only one was reported missing.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Gen. Charles Lee (1731–1782)

Charles Lee was born in Cheshire, England, the son of General John Lee and Isabella Bunbury (daughter of Sir Henry Bunbury, 3rd Baronet). He was sent to school in Switzerland and became proficient in several languages. He returned to England in 1746 at the age of fourteen to attend school at Bury St Edmunds. That same year his father, then colonel of the 55th Foot (later renumbered the 44th), purchased a commission for Charles as an ensign in the same regiment.

Lee purchased a lieutenant's commission in 1751. He was first sent to America in 1754 for service in the French and Indian War under Major General Edward Braddock, but was apparently not with the regiment when it suffered disastrous defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela. He purchased a captain's commission in the 44th Foot in 1756. The following year Lee took part in an expedition against the French fortress of Louisbourg, and in 1758 he was wounded in a failed assault on Fort Ticonderoga. After recovering, he took part in the capture of Fort Niagara in 1759 and Montreal in 1760. Lee went back to Europe, transferred to the 103rd Foot as a major, and served as a lieutenant colonel in the Portuguese army, fighting against the Spanish in Portugal. He returned to England in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War. His regiment was disbanded and he was retired as a major.

In 1765 Lee fought in Poland, serving as aide-de-camp under King Stanislaus II. After many adventures he returned to England. Unable to secure promotion in the British Army, in 1769 he returned to Poland, saw more action, and lost two fingers in a duel in which he killed his opponent. Returning to England again, he found sympathy for the American colonists in their quarrel with Britain. Lee moved to the colonies in 1773 and purchased an estate in western Virginia.

At the start of the Revolutionary War, Lee's military experience won him a commission as major general in the Continental Army. After directing the fortification of New York City early in 1776, he was sent to Charleston, South Carolina, and received credit for the successful defense of that city, despite having advised William Moultrie to abandon the fort that saved the city. Lee was afterwards recalled to New York.

Toward the end of 1776, Lee's animosity for Washington began to show. He dawdled with his troops in New York, disregarding General Washington's numerous pleas to cross the Hudson River and join the retreat following the battle of White Plains. In the meanwhile, Lee intensified a letter campaign to various Congress members in Philadelphia, trying to convince them that he should replace Washington as overall commander. During this time, Washington accidentally opened a letter from Lee to Colonel Joseph Reed, in which Lee condemned Washington's leadership abilities and blamed Washington entirely for the dire straits of the army. Although his army was supposed to join Washington's in Pennsylvania, Lee set a very slow pace. On the night of December 12, 1776, Lee and a dozen of his guard inexplicably stopped for the night at White's Tavern in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, some three miles from his main army. The next morning, a British patrol of two dozen mounted soldiers (including Banastre Tarleton) found Lee writing letters in his dressing gown, and captured him. Lee was eventually freed in a prisoner exchange, after which he rejoined Washington at Valley Forge.

Lee is most infamous for his actions during the 1778 Battle of Monmouth. Washington ordered him to attack the retreating enemy. Instead, Lee ordered a retreat. He retreated directly into Washington and his troops, who were advancing. Washington dressed him down publicly. Lee responded with "inappropriate language," was arrested, and shortly thereafter court-martialed. Lee was found guilty and relieved of command for a period of one year. He continued to criticize Washington abusively, and in 1780, Lee was finally dismissed from service.

(info: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lee_(general); and Infoplease, http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0829226.html)

1775: SC Regiment Command, per Wells

From History of South Carolina, by Yates Snowden, Henry Gardner Cutler, published 1920, The Lewis Pub. Co., page 316:

According to Well's "Register and Almanac" for 1775 the colonels of the thirteen regiments were as follows: Of the one regiment of horse, William Moultrie; and of the infantry, Charlestown district, Charles Pinckney; Berkeley County, Richard Singleton; Granville County, Stephen Bull, of Sheldon; Craven County, Job Rothmahler; Colleton County, Joseph Glover; Orangeburg, William Thomson; Cheraws, George Gabriel Powell; Ninety-six, John Savage; Camden, Richard Richardson: Forks of Saluda, Robert Starke; Upper Saluda, Thomas Fletchall; New [Acquisition] District, Thomas Neel. Probart Howarth was colonel and governor of Fort Johnson, and Owen Roberts was captain of the artillery company with headquarters in Charlestown.

Gen. Sir Henry Clinton & the Southern Theatre

In March 1775, King George III dispatched reinforcements to the American colonies under General Sir Henry Clinton and fellow Major-Generals William Howe and John Burgoyne to strengthen the British position in Boston. On 17 June, with the British army having been besieged in Boston since April, Clinton was one of the British field commanders in the Battle of Bunker Hill. This assault to drive the rebels from the heights north of Boston harbor was successful, but only at the heavy cost of over 1,000 British casualties.
In January 1776, Clinton was sent south with a small fleet and 1,500 men to assess military opportunities in the Carolinas. In June, Clinton led a naval assault on Fort Sullivan at Charleston, South Carolina, successfully defended by Colonel William Moultrie. It was a humiliating failure for Clinton. The British did not attempt to renew the battle to try to take the fort again, and by mid-July the fleet withdrew northward. Clinton and his twenty-five ships rejoined the main fleet to participate in General Howe's August 1776 assault on New York City.
In May of 1778, after the British disaster of the Saratoga Campaign, Clinton replaced Howe as Commander-in-Chief for North America. He assumed command in Philadelphia. France had by this time overtly entered the war on the American side, and because of this Clinton was ordered by his government to send 5,000 of his troops to the Caribbean, which forced him to withdraw from Philadelphia and retreat to New York. Having concentrated his forces, for a time he pursued a policy of making mere forays from there. Before year's end, however, Clinton regained the initiative for the British and sent an expedition south to strike at Georgia. This force took Savannah in December, and by early 1779 it had gained control of the hinterland.
The Georgia campaign presumed Loyalist support would appear as soon as redcoats were present in strength. The notion that the South was more likely to be friendly to British forces had been entertained by George Germain, the American Secretary, for much of the war to date, a notion fed by Loyalist exiles in London. Contrary to expectations, the wave of public support for the arrival of British troops never materialized, leaving Clinton and his subordinates isolated. For much of the remainder of the war in the South, British commanders aimed at mobilizing Loyalist support, but results were never as successful as they had anticipated.
By late 1779 Clinton assembled a force for the next step in his strategy, an invasion of South Carolina. he took personal command of this campaign, and a force with 14,000 men sailed south from New York at the end of the year. By early 1780, Clinton lay siege to Charleston. In May, together with Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot, he forced the surrender of the city, with its garrison of 5,000. It was during the siege and capture of Charleston that Clinton's inability to cooperate with equal ranking officers began to become more evident. Arbuthnot and Clinton did not work well together, and the feud would last until the end of the war with disastrous results for the British high command.
Clinton subsequently returned north, leaving 8,000 British troops in the southern theatre under the command of General Cornwallis, his second-in-command. From New York, he continued to oversee and take an active interest in the Southern campaign, as evidenced in his correspondence with Cornwallis. However, as the campaign progressed, he grew further and further away from his subordinate. As the campaign drew to a close, the correspondence became more and more acrimonious.
In 1782, after being replaced as Commander-in-Chief by Sir Guy Carleton, Sir Henry Clinton returned to England.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Gen. William Moultrie (1730-1805)

Until 1760 William Moultrie had a fairly undistinguished career as a member of South Carolina's provincial assembly. But after playing a central role in putting down a Cherokee uprising, he became a leader in his colony's military affairs. Early in the Revolution his expertise won him command of the Continental army's Second Regiment. Moultrie commanded the fort on Sullivan's Island on June 28, 1776, and he was successful in repulsing the British fleet when they tried to enter Charleston harbor. It is said that during the bombardment of Fort Sullivan, General Charles Lee continuously tried to micromanage Moultrie's situation from a distance. While the battle raged, Lee sent a letter to Moultrie by an aide, saying, "If you should unfortunately expend your ammunition without beating off the enemy or driving them on the ground, spike your guns and retreat with all order possible; but I know you will be careful not to throw away your ammunition." Moultrie, instead, asked for more gunpowder. In appreciation of his efforts the fort was subsequently renamed after him. He was promoted to brigadier general in the Continental service, and thereafter operated independently. After the fall of Savannah (1778), he decisively defeated the British forces at Beaufort in February of 1779. Moultrie was captured by the British after the fall of Charleston in 1780 and sent as prisoner to St. Augustine. Exchanged in 1782, he was then promoted to major general.
Following the war, William Moultrie was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1783. In 1784, he served as Lieutenant Governor. He was then elected governor for a two-year term in 1785. While governor, Moultrie created the county court system, and relocated the South Carolina capital from Charleston to Columbia in 1786. He was elected to the State Senate in 1787. He was elected to his second two-year term as governor in 1792, and retired from public office in 1794. In 1802 his Memoirs of the American Revolution were published in two volumes. William Moultrie died in Charleston on 27 September 1805 and was interred at Windsor Hill Plantation.

William Henry Drayton (1742-1779)

William Henry Drayton, born in 1742, was the oldest son of John Drayton and his second wife, Charlotta Bull, daughter of John Bull, the colony's Governor. Afer spending early childhood on his father's South Carolina plantation, Drayton Hall, William lived in England from age nine until twenty-one, and, while there, studied at Oxford University. His first political writings appeared in the mid 1760s under the name "Freeman," and his most famous early piece was the 1774 pamphlet Letter from Freeman of South Carolina to the Deputies of North American Assembled in the High Court of Congress at Philadelphia. The pamphlet, addressed to the Continental Congress, discussed in detail America's grievances and included a suggested bill of American rights.
In 1775, Drayton was appointed to the South Carolina Provincial Congress and became its president. As president, he oversaw the formation of South Carolina's first constitution and issued the state's first order to fire on the British when, on November 9, 1775—almost eight months before the colonies would officially declare their independence—he ordered Colonel William Moultrie to fire from Fort Sullivan on British ships as they tried to enter the harbor.
In fact, William Henry Drayton was one of the first South Carolinians to openly call for a break from England. Speaking before the South Carolina Provincial Congress in February of 1776, Drayton declared that the British "hand of tyranny" threatened to "spoil America of whatever she held most valuable" and that America needed to decide quickly between "independence or slavery!"
Later appointed first chief justice of South Carolina, Drayton led the colony further along its path to independence with a series of charges to South Carolina's grand juries. According to his famous April 23, 1776 charge, "Under color of law, the king and parliament of Great Britain have made the most arbitrary attempts to enslave America," and "true reconcilement never [could] exist between Great Britain and America." Printed in newspapers throughout the colonies, Drayton's charge was also read by Arthur Middleton, another South Carolina patriot, to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and has been credited with inspiring the delegates to push forward with the Declaration of Independence.

(info: Drayton Hall, http://www.draytonhall.org/research/people/drayton.html)