The Partisan/I
"Oh, grievous desolation! look, and see |
Our narrative begins in South Carolina, during the summer of 1780. The arms of the British were at that time triumphant throughout the colony. Their armies overran it. Charleston, the chief city, had stood a siege, and had fallen, after a protracted and honourable defence of eight weeks; succumbing finally to famine, rather than the force of arms. One-half of the military strength of the lower country, then the most populous region, had become prisoners of war by this disaster; and, for the present, were thus incapacitated from giving any assistance to their brethren in arms. Scattered, crushed, and disheartened by repeated failures, the whigs, in numerous instances, hopeless of any better fortune, had given in their adhesion to the enemy, and had received a pledge of British protection. This protection secured them, as it was thought, in their property and persons, and its conditions simply called for their neutrality. Many of the more firm and honourably tenacious, scorning all compromise with invasion, fled for shelter to the swamps and mountains; and, through the former, all Europe could not have traced their footsteps. In the whole State, at this period, the cause of American liberty had no head, and almost as little hope: all was gloomy and unpromising. Marion, afterwards styled the "Swamp Fox," and Sumter, the "Game Cock"—epithets aptly descriptive of their several military attributes—had not yet properly risen in arms, though both of them had been engaged already in active and successful service. Their places of retreat were at this time unknown; and certainly, they were not then looked to, as at an after period, with that anxious reliance which their valour subsequently taught their countrymen to entertain. Nothing, indeed, could be more deplorably prostrate than were the energies of the colony. Here and there only did some little partisan squad make a stand, or offer a show of resistance to the incursive British or the marauding and malignant tory—disbanding, if not defeated, most usually after the temporary object had been obtained, and retreating for security into shelter and inaction. There was no sort of concert, save in feeling, among the many who were still not unwilling for the fight: they doubted or they dreaded one another; they knew not whom to trust. The next door neighbour of the staunch whig was not unfrequently a furious loyalist—as devoted to George the Third as the other could have been to the intrinsic beauty of human liberty. The contest of the Revolution, as far as it had gone, had confirmed and made tenacious this spirit of hostility and opposition, until, in the end, patriot and loyalist had drawn the sword against one another, and rebel and tory were the degrading epithets by which they severally distinguished the individual whose throat they strove to cut. When the metropolis fell into the hands of the British, and their arms extended through the State, the tories alone were active and formidable. These, hitherto outlawed in all the provinces, had mostly sought shelter in Florida; whence they emerged as soon as the British arms had established their ascendency in Georgia and Carolina. They now took satisfaction for their own previous trials; and crime was never so dreadful a monster as when they ministered to its appetites. Mingled in with the regular troops of the British, or forming separate bodies of their own, and officered from among themselves, they penetrated the well known recesses which gave shelter to the fugitives. If the rebel resisted, they slew him without quarter; if he submitted, they hung him without benefit of clergy: they spoiled his children of their possessions, and not unfrequently slew them also. But few sections of the low and middle country escaped their search. It was only in the bald regions of North Carolina that the fugitives could find repose; only where the most miserable poverty took from crime all temptation, that the beaten and maltreated patriots dared to give themselves a breathing-space from flight. In the same manner the frontier-colony of Georgia had already been overrun and ravaged by the conquerors; and there, as it was less capable of resistance, almost all show of opposition had been long since at an end.
The invader, deceived by these appearances, declared, in swelling language, to his monarch, that the two colonies were properly subjugated, and would now return to their obedience. He knew not that,
"Freedom's battle once begun, |
But, though satisfied of the efficiency of his achievements, and himself convinced of the truth of the assurances which he had made to this effect, the commander of the British forces did not suffer the slightest relaxation of his vigilance. Earl Cornwallis, one of the best of the many leaders sent by the mother-country to the colonies in that eventful contest, had taken charge of the southern marching army soon after the fall of Charleston. He was too good a soldier to omit, or to sleep in the performance of any of his duties. He proceeded with due diligence to confirm his conquests; and, aptly sustained by the celerity and savage enterprise of the fierce legionary, Colonel Tarleton, the country was soon swept from the seaboard to the mountains. This active but cruel commander, who enacted the Claverhouse in South Carolina with no small closeness of resemblance to his prototype,[2] was as indefatigable as unsparing. He plunged headlong into fight, with a courage the most unscrupulous, with little reflection, seeming rather to confide in the boldness and impetuosity of his onset than to any ingenuity of plan, or careful elaborateness of manœuvre. Add to this that he was sanguinary in the last degree when triumphant, and we shall easily understand the sources of that terror which his very name was found to inspire among the undrilled, and, in half the number of instances, the unarmed militia which opposed him. "Tarleton's quarters" was the familiar and bitterly-derisive phrase by which, when the whigs had opportunities of revenge, his bloodthirsty treatment of the overthrown and captive was remembered and requited.
The entire colony in his possession—all opposition, worthy the name, at an end—the victor, the better to secure his conquest, marched an army throughout the county. His presence, for the time, had the desired effect. His appearance quelled disaffection, overawed all open discontents, and his cavalry, by superior skill and rapidity of movement, readily dispersed the little bands of Carolinians that here and there fell in his way. Nor was this exhibition of his power the only proceeding by which he laboured to secure the fruits of his victory. With an excellent judgment, he established garrisons in various eligible points of the country, in order to overawe by his continual presence: these stations were judiciously chosen for independent and co-operative enterprise alike; they were sufficiently nigh for concert—sufficiently scattered for the general control of an extensive territory. Rocky Mount, Ninety-Six, Camden, Hanging Rock, Dorchester, and a large number of military posts besides, were thus created; all amply provided with munitions of war, well fortified, and garrisoned by large bodies of troops under experienced officers.
These precautions for a time compelled submission. The most daring among the patriots were silent—the most indulgent of the loyalists were active and enterprising. To crown and secure all, Sir Henry Clinton, who was at this period commander-in-chief of the southern invading army, proclaimed a general pardon, with some few exceptions, to all the inhabitants, for their late treasonable offences—promising them a full re-instatement of their old immunities, and requiring nothing in return but that they should remain quietly in their homes. This specious and well-time indulgence had its due effect; and, in the temporary panic produced by Lincoln's defeat, the fall of the metropolis, the appearance of an army so formidable as that of the British, and the establishment of military posts and fortresses all around them, the people generally put on a show of acquiescence to the authority of the invader, which few in reality felt, and which many were secretly but resolutely determined never to submit to. Thus much is necessary, in a general point of view, to the better comprehension of the narrative which follows. The reader will duly note the situation of the colony of South Carolina; and when we add, that the existing condition of things throughout the Union was only not so bad, and the promise of future fortune but little more favourable, all has been said necessary to his proper comprehension of the discouraging circumstances under which the partisan warfare of the South began. With this reference, we shall be better able to appreciate that deliberate valour, that unyielding patriotism, which, in a few spirits, defying danger and above the sense of privation, could keep alive the sacred fires of liberty in the thick swamps and dense and gloomy forests of Carolina—asking nothing, yielding nothing, and only leaving the field the better to re-enter it for the combat. Let us now proceed to the commencement of our proper narrative.
Annotations[edit]
- ↑ From Lord Byron's 1813 poem, "The Giaour" (Wikisource contributor note)
- ↑ Simms is likely comparing Tarleton's actions to John Graham of Claverhouse's ruthless persecution of Covenantors in Scotland in the 1670s. (Wikisource contributor note)