arles II, had been a center
of British influence before the war. That critical traveler, Lord
Adam Gordon, thought its people clever in business, courteous, and
hospitable. Most of them, he says, made a visit to England at some time
during life and it was the fashion to send there the children to be
educated. Obviously Charleston was fitted to be a British rallying
center in the South; yet it had remained in American hands since the
opening of the war. In 1776 Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander,
had woefully failed in his assault on Charleston. Now in December, 1779,
he sailed from New York to make a renewed effort. With him were three
of his best officer--Cornwallis, Simcoe, and Tarleton, the last two
skillful leaders of irregulars, recruited in America and used chiefly
for raids. The wintry voyage was rough; one of the vessels laden with
cannon foundered and sank, and all the horses died. But Clinton reached
Charleston and was able to surround it on the landward side with an army
at least ten thousand strong. Tarleton's irregulars rode through
the country. It is on record that he marched sixty-four miles in
twenty-three hours and a hundred and five miles in fifty-four hours.
Such mobility was irresistible. On the 12th of April, after a ride
of thirty miles, Tarleton surprised, in the night, three regiments of
American cavalry regulars at a place called Biggin's Bridge, routed them
completely and, according to his own account, with the loss of three men
wounded, carried off a hundred prisoners, four hundred horses, and
also stores and ammunition. There is no doubt that Tarleton's dragoons
behaved with great brutality and it would perhaps have taught a
needed lesson if, as was indeed threatened by a British officer, Major
Ferguson, a few of them had been shot on the spot for these outrages.
Tarleton's dashing attacks isolated Charleston and there was nothing for
Lincoln to do but to surrender. This he did on the 12th of May. Burgoyne
seemed to have been avenged. The most important city in the South had
fallen. "We look on America as at our feet," wrote Horace Walpole. The
British advanced boldly into the interior. On the 29th of May Tarleton
attacked an American force under Colonel Buford, killed over a hundred
men, carried off two hundred prisoners, and had only twenty-one
casualties. It is such scenes that reveal the true character of the war
in the South. Above all it was a war of hard riding, often in the night,