The Americans were without

hundred and fourteen men. cannon, and the bluff was forty feet high; but the forest stretched all around them; in the night the troops cut and hauled logs, and erected a tower so tall that the garrison could be picked off by riflemen. Two days before the battle of Hobkirk's Hill it capitulated.

The connection of Camden with Charleston being thus broken, the post became untenable. On the tenth of May, after destroying all public buildings and stores and many private houses, the British abandoned Camden, never to hold it again. On the eleventh the post at Orangeburg, held by sixty British militia and twelve regulars, gave itself up to Sumter. Rawdon marched down the Santee on the north side, anxious to save the garrison of Fort Motte, to which Marion had laid siege. To hasten its surrender, Rebecca Motte, the owner of the house in which they were quartered, on the twelfth brought into camp a bow and a bundle of Indian arrows; and, when the arrows had carried fire to her own abode, the garrison of a hundred and sixty-five men surrendered. Two days later the British evacuated their post at Nelson's ferry. On the fifteenth Fort Granby, with three hundred and fifty-two men, surrendered by capitulation. General Marion turned his arms against Georgetown; and, on the first night after the Americans had broken ground, the British retreated to Charleston. The troops under Rawdon did not halt until they reached Monk's Corner.

The north-western part of South Carolina was thus recovered, but the British still held Augusta and Ninety-Six. Conforming to the plan which Greene had forwarded from Deep river, General Pickens and Colonel Clarke with militia kept watch over Augusta. On the twentieth of May they were joined by Lieutenant-Colonel Lee. The outposts were taken one after another, and on the fifth of June the main fort with about three hundred men capitulated. One officer, obnoxious for his cruelties, fell after the surrender by an unknown hand. Lieutenant-Colonel Brown, the commander, had himself hanged. thirteen American prisoners, and delivered citizens of Georgia to the Cherokees to suffer death with all the exquisite tortures which savage barbarity could contrive; but on his way to Sa

vannah an escort protected him from the inhabitants whose houses he had burnt, whose relations he had sent to the gallows.

On the twenty-second of May, Greene, with Kosciuszko for his engineer, and nine hundred and eighty-four men, began the siege of Ninety-Six. The post, though mounting but three pieces of artillery, was strongly fortified; five hundred and fifty men formed its ample garrison; and the commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Cruger, was an officer of ability and enterprise. A fleet from Ireland having arrived at Charleston with reinforcements, Rawdon on the seventh of June marched with two thousand men to secure a safe retreat for the garrison. Giving way to an eagerness to gain a victory, Greene on the eighteenth gave to a party of Marylanders and of Virginians the hopeless order to force a lodgment in the fort, in which no justifying breach had been made. Of the brave men whom he so rashly sent into the ditch, one third were killed, and but one in six came out unwounded. The next day the general raised the siege and withdrew to the North, complaining of fortune which had refused him victory at Guilford, at Camden, and at Ninety-Six.

Greene retreated as far as the Enoree. Rawdon, giving over pursuit and adhering to his purpose, withdrew the garrison from the insulated post of Ninety-Six. Leaving the largest part of his force to assist in removing the loyal inhabitants of the district, he marched with a thousand men to establish a post on the Congaree. Greene followed; and his cavalry, while watching the enemy's motions, made prisoners of fortyeight British dragoons within one mile of their encampment.

Avoiding an encounter, Lord Rawdon retired to Orangeburg, where he was reinforced. On the other side, Greene, after forming a junction with the men of Sumter and Marion, pursued him, and on the twelfth of July offered him battle. The offer was refused. On the thirteenth, Greene detached the cavalry of the legion, the state troops and militia of South Carolina, to compel the evacuation of Orangeburg by striking at the posts around Charleston; the rest of the army was ordered to the high hills of the Santee, famed for pure air and pure water. water. On the same day the force with Cruger, who

had evacuated Ninety-Six, joined Rawdon with his troops. He had called around him the royalists in the district and set before them the option of making their peace with the Americans or fleeing under his escort to Charleston. Once more loyalists who had signalized themselves by devoted service to the king learned from his officer that he could no longer protect them in their own homes. Forced to elect the lot of refugees, they brought into the camp of Cruger their wives, children, and slaves, wagons laden with the little of their property that they could carry away, sure to be pushed aside by the English at Charleston as troublesome guests, and left to wretchedness and despair.

The British, when united, were superior in number; but their detachments were attacked with success. They could not give the protection which they had promised, and the people saw no hope of peace except by driving them out of the land. Weary of ceaseless turmoil, Rawdon repaired to Charleston, and, pretending ill health, sailed for England, but not till after a last act of vengeful inhumanity. Isaac Hayne, a planter in the low country whose affections were always with America, had, after the fall of Charleston, obtained British protection; at the same time he avowed his resolve never to meet a call for military service under the British flag. When the British lost the part of the country in which he resided and could protect him no longer, he resumed his American citizenship and led a regiment of militia against them. Taken prisoner, Balfour hesitated what to do with him; but Rawdon, who was Balfour's superior in command, had no sooner arrived in Charleston than, against the entreaties of the children of Hayne, of the women of Charleston, of the lieutenant-governor of the province, he sent him to the gallows. The execution was illegal; for the loss of power to protect forfeited the right to enforce allegiance. It was most impolitic; for in moderate men it uprooted all remaining attachment to the English government, and roused the women of Charleston to implacable defiance. After the departure of Rawdon there remained in South Carolina no British officer who would have acted in like manner. His first excuse for the execution was the order of Cornwallis which had filled the woods of Carolina with assas

sins. Feeling the act as a stain upon his name, he attempted, but only after the death of Balfour, to throw on that officer the blame that belonged to himself. On the voyage to England he was captured by the French.

After a short rest, Greene moved his army from the hills of Santee in a roundabout way to attack the British at their post near the junction of the Wateree and Congaree. They retreated before him, and halted at Eutaw Springs. He continued the pursuit with so much skill that the British remained ignorant of his advance. At four o'clock on the morning of the eighth of September his army was in motion to attack them. The centre of the front line was composed of two small battalions from North Carolina, and of one from South Carolina on each wing, commanded, respectively, by Marion and Pickens. The second line was formed of three hundred and fifty continentals of North Carolina, led by General Sumner; of an equal number of Virginians, commanded by LieutenantColonel Campbell; and of two hundred and fifty Marylanders, under Otho Williams. Long and gallantly did the militia maintain the action, those with Marion and Pickens proving themselves equal to the best veterans. As they began to be overpowered by numbers, they were sustained by the North Carolina brigade under Sumner, while the Virginians under Campbell and the Marylanders under Williams charged with the bayonet. The British were routed. On a party that prepared to rally, William Washington bore down with his cavalry and a small body of infantry, and drove them from the field. Great numbers of the British fell, or were made prisoners.

Many of the Americans who joined in the shouts of triumph were doomed to bleed. A brick house sheltered the British as they fled. Against the house Greene ordered artillery to play from open ground; the gunners were shot down by riflemen, and the field-pieces abandoned to the enemy. Upon a party in an adjacent wood of barren oaks, of a species whose close, stiff branches by their stubbornness made cavalry helpless, Greene for a slight object ordered William Washington to charge with his horsemen; the order was obeyed, and the excellent officer, to whom belonged so much of the glory of the campaign, was wounded, disabled, and taken prisoner.

So

there were at Eutaw two successive engagements. In the first, Greene won a brilliant victory and with little loss; in the second, his own hasty orders brought upon himself a defeat, with the death or capture of many of his bravest men. In the two engagements the Americans lost, in killed, wounded, and missing, five hundred and fifty-four men; they took five hundred prisoners, including the wounded; and the total loss of the British approached one thousand.

The cause of the United States was the cause of Ireland. Among the fruits of their battles was the recovery for the Irish of her equal rights in trade and legislation. Yet such is the complication in human affairs that the people who of all others should have been found taking part with America sent against them some of their best troops and their ablest men. Irishmen fought in the British ranks at Eutaw. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who received on this day wounds that were all but mortal, had in later years no consolation for his share in the conflict; "for," said he, "I was then fighting against liberty."

Occupying the field of battle by a strong picket, Greene drew off to his morning's camp, where his troops could have the refreshment of pure water, and prepare to renew the attack. But the British in the night, after destroying stores and breaking in pieces a thousand muskets, retreated to Charleston, leaving seventy of their wounded. Resting one or two days, Greene with his troops, which were wasted not only by battle, but by the climate, regained his old position on the heights of Santee. From Morris, the financier, he received good words and little else; but his own fortitude never failed him. He says of himself: "We fight, get beaten, and fight again." He had been in command less than ten months; and in that time the three southern states were recovered, excepting only Wilmington which was soon after evacuated, Charleston, and Savannah. The legislature of South Carolina, at its next meeting, in testimony of its approbation and gratitude, voted him an estate in their "country" of the value of ten thousand guineas. To this Georgia added five thousand guineas, and North Carolina four-and-twenty thousand acres of the most fertile land in Tennessee.