burn the house of Hooper, the noble-minded delegate in the continental congress; Cornwallis, with nine hundred menit was his first exploit in America-landed in Brunswick county, and, with a loss of two men killed and one taken prisoner, burned and ravaged the plantation of Robert Howe. As the British retired from North Carolina, Clinton in a proclamation of the fifth of May invited the people "to appease the vengeance of an incensed nation," and offered pardon to all who would submit, except Robert Howe and Cornelius Harnett.

The peace of Charleston was undisturbed except by gathering rumors that an English fleet and transports had arrived in Cape Fear river. Its citizens, taking courage from the efficiency with which the government of the colony was administered, toiled in the trenches; and bands of negroes from the neighboring plantations were employed upon the works. The bloom of the magnolia was yellowing, when, on the first day of June, expresses from Christ Church parish brought news to the president that a fleet of forty or fifty sail lay anchored about twenty miles to the north of Charleston bar.

Rutledge ordered the alarm to be fired; and while the townsmen were looking out for horses, carriages or boats to remove their wives and children, he called down the militia from the country by expresses, and, in company with Armstrong who arrived toward the end of April, visited all the fortifications. Barricades were thrown up across the principal streets; defences were raised at the points most likely to be selected for landing; lead, gleaned from the weights of windows, was cast into musket-balls; and a respectable force was concentred at the capitol.

The invaders of South Carolina had come only upon the most positive assurances that the friends of the British government in the province would rise at their bare appearance. At a moment when instant action was essential to their success they were perplexed by uncertainty of counsel between Clinton and Sir Peter Parker, the respective commanders of the army and the naval force. On the eighth Moultrie received from Clinton the proclamation, in which the British general declared the existence of "a most unprovoked and

wicked rebellion within South Carolina," the "succession of crimes of its inhabitants," the tyranny of its congress and committees, the error, thus far incorrigible, of an "infatuated and misguided multitude," the duty of "proceeding forthwith against all bodies of men in arms, congresses, and committees, as open enemies of the state;" but "from humanity" he consented "to forewarn the deluded people," and to offer in the king's name "free pardon to such as should lay down their arms and submit to the laws." Having done this, he consulted Cornwallis on the best means of gaining possession of Sullivan's Island; and both agreed that they could not more effectually co-operate with the intended movement of the fleet than by landing on Long Island, which was said to communicate with Sullivan's Island at low water by a ford. Clinton had had four days' time to sound the ford; but he took the story of its shallowness on trust.

General Lee travelled leisurely to the south, in March taking up his quarters in the palace of the British governors at Williamsburg. As querulous as ever, he praised the congress of New York as angels of light compared with the Virginia committee of safety. He directed the arrest of Eden, the governor of Maryland, without ceremony or delay, though that province was not within his district, and resented the interference. Not till the fourth of June did he reach Charleston. On the ninth, attended by his aides-de-camp and by Robert Howe of North Carolina, he inspected Haddrell's point in the bay of Charleston. After examining its fortifications he crossed to Sullivan's Island, where he found a fort of which the front and one side were finished; and twelve hundred men encamped in its rear in booths that were roofed with palmetto leaves. Within the fort, mechanics and laborers were lifting and fitting heavy palmetto logs for its walls. He had scarce glanced at the work when he declared that "he did not like that post; it could not hold out half an hour; there was no way to retreat;" it was but a "slaughter pen," and the garrison would be sacrificed.

The battalions raised in South Carolina, although congress bore its proportion of their cost, still remained under the direction of the president of the colony and its officers. This cir

cumstance became of the greatest importance. To Armstrong no command whatever had been conceded; Lee was invested with the military command only through an order from Rutledge. Weeks afterward he continued in secret to express impatience at "this complex play they were acting of Duke and no Duke;" but with Rutledge he took care to avoid a rupture.

On that same day Clinton landed four or five hundred men on Long Island, showing that the first attack was to be made on the outpost of the city. Lee proposed to Rutledge to withdraw from Sullivan's Island without a blow; but Rutledge, interposing his authority, would not suffer it; yet on the tenth the very first order of Lee to Moultrie, except one which was revoked as soon as issued, directed that officer to construct bridges for his retreat, and he repeated and enforced the order 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 imperturbable confidence, formed his plan for repelling the impending attack by sea and by land; and never admitted the thought 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, and anchored at about three miles from Fort Sullivan. In Charleston, from which this movement was 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, in the principal streets, were continued to the water; and arrow-headed embankments were projected upon the landing-places. Every one without distinction "labored with alacrity" in sun and in rain.

On the eleventh the two regiments from North Carolina arrived. That same day Lee, 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

* Charles Lee to Patrick Henry, 29 July 1776.

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 South Carolina was with Moultrie, and mechanics and negro laborers were sent down to help in the work on his fort. On the twelfth the wind blew so violently that two ships which lay outside of the bar were obliged for safety to stand out to sea, and this assisted to postpone the attack.

On the fifteenth Lee stationed Armstrong, Moultrie's superior, at Haddrell's point; but the brave Pennsylvanian, manifesting for Moultrie a hearty friendship, never interfered with him. 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. The 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 in town. To capture and garrison Sullivan's Island, Clinton, consulting with Cornwallis, landed his army of more than three thousand men, thoroughly provided with arms, artillery, and ammunition, on Long Island, a naked sand, where nothing grew except a few bushes that harbored myriads of mosquitoes, and where the troops suffered from the burning sun, the want of good water and the bad quality and insufficient supply of provisions. After every man had been landed it occurred to Clinton to make a trial of the ford. He waded in up to his neck; so did others of his officers; and then he announced, through Vaughan to Sir Peter Parker, that there remained seven feet of water at low tide; and that therefore the troops could not take the share they expected in the intended attack. Compelled to propose something, Clinton fixed on the twentythird for the joint attack; but it was hindered on that day by an unfavorable wind.

In the following night Muhlenberg's regiment arrived. On receiving Lee's orders, they had instantly set off from Virginia and marched to Charleston without tents, continually exposed to the weather. Of all the Virginia regiments, this was

VOL. IV.-26

the most complete, the best armed, best clothed, and best equipped for immediate service.

To

The confidence of Sir Peter Parker was unshaken. make all sure, he exercised a body of marines and seamen in the art of entering a fort through its embrasures. Coming down to the island, Lee took Moultrie aside and said: "Do you think you can maintain this post?" Moultrie answered: 66 Yes, I think I can." Lee fretted at Moultrie's too easy disposition, and wished 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 next day. Letters of encouragement came from Tonyn, then governor of East Florida, who was impatient for an attack on Georgia; he would have had a body of Indians raised on the back of South Carolina and a body of royalists to "terrify and distract, so that the assault at Charleston would have struck an astonishing 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. With or without Clinton's aid, the commodore was persuaded that he could silence Moultrie's batteries, and that then 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 Lemprière, the same who in the former year had 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-of-war, 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 sea-breeze summoned to the attack. Lee, from Charleston, for the tenth