that the British were on the opposite side of the river, and in possession of boats and the ford. On the eighteenth he advanced only eight miles; and on the north bank of Fishing creek, at bright mid-day, his troops stacked their arms; some took repose; some went to the river to bathe; some strolled in search of supplies; and Sumter himself fell fast asleep in the shade of a wagon. In this state a party under Tarleton cut them off from their arms and put them to rout, taking two or three hundred of them captive, and recovering the British prisoners and wagons. On the twentieth Sumter rode into Charlotte alone, without hat or saddle.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE WAR IN THE SOUTH. CORNWALLIS AND THE PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH-WEST.

1780.

FROM the moment of his victory near Camden, Cornwallis became the principal figure in the British service in America -the pride and delight of Germain, the desired commanderin-chief, the one man on whom rested the hopes of the ministry for the successful termination of the war.

We are come to the series of events which closed the American contest and restored peace to the world. In Europe, the sovereigns of Austria and of Russia were offering their mediation; the Netherlands were struggling to preserve their neutrality; France was straining every nerve to cope with her rival in the four quarters of the globe; Spain was exhausting her resources for the conquest of Gibraltar; but the incidents which overthrew the ministry of North, and reconciled Great Britain to America, had their springs in South Carolina.

Cornwallis, elated with success and hope, prepared for the northward march, which was to conduct him from victory to victory, till he should restore all America south of Delaware to its allegiance. He appeared to believe that North Carolina would rise to welcome him; and was attended by Martin, its former governor, eager to re-enter on his office. He requested Clinton to detach three thousand men to establish a post on the Chesapeake bay; and Clinton knew too well the wishes of the British government to venture to refuse.

In carrying out his plan, the first measure of Cornwallis in 1780 was a reign of terror. Professing to regard South Carolina

as restored to the dominion of George III., and accepting the suggestions of Martin and Tarleton and their like, that severity was the true mode to hold the recovered province, he addressed the most stringent orders to the commandants at Ninety-Six and other posts to imprison all who would not take up arms for the king, and to seize or destroy their whole property. He most positively enjoined that every militia-man who had borne arms with the British and had afterward joined the Americans should be hanged immediately. He set up the gallows at Camden for the indiscriminate execution of those among his prisoners who had formerly given their parole.

The destruction of property and life assumed still more hideous forms, when the peremptory orders and example of Cornwallis were followed by subordinates in remote districts away from supervision. Cruel measures seek and find cruel agents; officers whose delight was in blood patrolled the country, burned houses, ravaged estates, and put to death whom they would. The wives and daughters of the opulent were left with no fit clothing, no shelter but hovels too mean to attract the destroyer. Of a sudden the woodman in his cabin would find his house surrounded, and he or his guest might be shot, because he was not in arms for the king. No engagement by proclamation or by capitulation was respected. There was no question of proofs and no trial. For two years coldblooded assassinations, often in the house of the victim and in the presence of his wife and little children, were perpetrated by men holding the king's commission. The enemy were determined to break every man's spirit, or to take his life.

The ruthless administration of Cornwallis met the hearty and repeated applause of Lord George Germain, who declared himself convinced that "to punish rebellion would have the best consequences." As to the rebels, his orders to Clinton and Cornwallis were: "No good faith or justice is to be expected from them, and we ought in all our transactions with them to act upon that supposition."

In violation of agreements, the continental soldiers who capitulated at Charleston, nineteen hundred in number, were transferred from buildings in the town to prison-ships, where

they were joined by several hundred prisoners from Camden. In thirteen months one third of the whole number perished by malignant fevers; others were impressed into the British service as mariners; several hundred young men were taken by violence on board transports and forced to serve in a British regiment in Jamaica, leaving wives and young children to want. Of more than three thousand confined in prison-ships, all but about seven hundred were made away with.

On the capitulation of Charleston, eminent patriots remained prisoners on parole. Foremost among these stood the aged Christopher Gadsden, whose unselfish love of country was a constant encouragement to his countrymen never to yield. Their silent example restrained the timid from exchanging their paroles for the protection of British subjects. To overcome this influence, eleven days after the victory at Camden, he and thirty-six of his most resolute associates, in flagrant disregard of the conditions on which they had surrendered, were early in the morning taken from their houses and beds and transported to St. Augustine. Gadsden and others, refusing to give a new parole, were immured in the castle of St. Mark. After some weeks a like cargo was shipped to the same place.

The system of slaveholding kept away from defensive service not only the slaves, but numerous whites needed to watch them. Moreover, some of the men deriving their livelihood from the labor of slaves, had not the courage to face the idea of poverty for themselves, still less for their wives and children. Many fainted at the hard option between submission and ruin. Charles Pinckney, lately president of the South Carolina senate, classing himself among those who from the hurry and confusion of the times had been misled, desired to show every mark of allegiance. Rawlins Lowndes, who but a few months before had been president of the state of South Carolina, excused himself for having reluctantly given way to necessity, and accepted any test to prove that, with the unrestrained dictates of his own mind, he now attached himself to the royal government. Henry Middleton, president of the first American congress, though still "partial to a cause for which he had been so long engaged," promised to do nothing to keep

up the spirit of independence, and to demean himself as a faithful subject.

But South Carolina was never conquered. From the moment of the fall of Charleston, Colonel James Williams, of the district of Ninety-Six, did not rest in gathering the armed friends of the union. From the region above Camden, Sumter and his band hovered over all British movements. "Sumter certainly has been our greatest plague in this country," writes Cornwallis.

In the swamps between the Pedee and the Santee, Marion and his men kept watch. Of a delicate organization, sensitive to truth and honor and right, humane, averse to bloodshed, never wreaking vengeance nor suffering those around him to do so, scrupulously respecting private property, he had the love and confidence of all in that part of the country. Tarleton's legion had laid it waste to inspire terror; and volunteer partisans gathered round Marion to redeem their land.

A body of three hundred royalist militia and two hundred regular troops had established a post at Musgrove's Mills on the Enoree river. On the eighteenth of August they were attacked by inferior numbers under Williams of Ninety-Six, and routed, with sixty killed and more than that number wounded. Williams lost but eleven.

At dawn of the twentieth a party, convoying a hundred and fifty prisoners of the Maryland line, were crossing the great savanna near Nelson's ferry over the Santee upon the route from Camden to Charleston, when Marion and his men sprang upon the guard, liberated the prisoners, and captured twenty-six of the escort.

"Colonel Marion," wrote Cornwallis, "so wrought on the minds of the people that there was scarcely an inhabitant between the Pedee and the Santee that was not in arms against us. Some parties even crossed the Santee and carried terror to the gates of Charleston." Balfour, the commandant of Charleston, wrote home: "In vain we expected loyalty and attachment from the inhabitants; they are the same stuff as all Americans." The British historian of the war, who was then in South Carolina, relates that "almost the whole country seemed upon the eve of a revolt."