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Battle Of Eutaw Springs

click image to enlarge Operations in the Carolinas

Leaving the pursuit of Cornwallis to Washington and the French, a force under Major-General Nathanael Greene moved into South Carolina, where British garrisons and Loyalist forces held much of the state. Greene was defeated at Hobkirk's Hill (25 April) and failed to capture the main remaining British fortress (Fort Ninety-Six), but despite these failures, the British position began to weaken. A pursuit of Greene failed, and Fort Ninety-Six had to be abandoned. The British withdrew to the coast and Greene followed.

Eutaw Springs was thirty miles northwest of Charleston. Greene found Stewart there after maneuvering cautiously so as to conceal his desire to engage. That desire arose as his army received reinforcements and supplies and as the British lost control of the state. If Stewart could be destroyed, Charleston might be retaken and the war in the South brought to a stop.

That Greene was able to conceal the movements of his army, a force of some 2,200 men, from Stewart bespeaks the loss of whatever civilian support the British had. Stewart remarked on the absence of information about his enemy, an absence so complete that he was taken almost by surprise by Greene's attack.

Greene's army included Lee's Legion, Francis Marion's partisans, militia from both the Carolinas, and Continentals from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. He also had the ever faithful Colonel William Washington and his cavalry. Stewart's force was just about equal in numbers. It consisted of companies from three regiments of regulars, eight companies of the "Irish Buffs" as the 3rd Regiment was called, and loyalist provincials commanded by John Cruger and John Coffin.

Early on the morning of September 8, the Americans started toward Stewart's camp from their own at Burdell's Plantation, seven miles away. At about eight o'clock the van of Major John Armstrong's North Carolina Continentals ran into a small party of enemy soldiers who had been sent out to dig yams. Short of bread, the British were substituting yams which could be found in nearby fields. Armstrong shot up the yam diggers and a small covering party of Coffin's cavalry, but the action deprived the Americans of surprise. Warned that an unknown number of enemy was approaching, Stewart placed a battalion on his far right next to the Santee in heavy blackjack, a shrub so tough and thick as to prevent cavalry from riding through it. To the south he stretched out his regiments in a line, with most of tlre Tories near the center, about a hundred yards west of his camp.

Greene had formed his column as the rules of warfare enjoined, so that it might deploy into line easily with its units arrayed as he wanted them. He wanted them in two heavy lines, militia in the lead and regulars following about a hundred yards behind. He placed Lee's Legion on his right flank and partisan units under John Henderson and Wade Hampton on his left. The two sides made heavy contact about an hour after the yam diggers were driven in. Greene's lines were probably a little uneven by this time, for they had to make their way through trees and heavy brush. Nonetheless, the militia fought well until a charge by Stewart's men broke thern in the center. The flanks held, however, and Greene sent the North Carolina Continentals into the gap. These men restored the American line until a second attack by the British broke them. Greene then inserted the Virginia and Maryland regulars, Richard Campbell and Otho Williams comrnanding, and had the satisfaction of seeing them use their bayonets as skillfully as European professionals. He later gave these regiments considerable praise in his report to Congress: "I think myself principally indebted for the victory we obtained to the free use of the Bayonet by the Virginians and Marylanders, the Infantry of the Legion and Captain Kirkwood's Light Infantry." Indeed the rush of American regulars forced the British back, some units apharently in great disorder and confusion.

In a few miuutes the Americans shared this disorder and confusion. As they pursued the British they ran into the enemy's camp and paused to plunder it. What they found in ample supply seems to have been rum. The pause found them milling around entirely without discipline; and the few that maintained the attack ran into a large, heavily fortified brick house at the northeastern end of the British camp. This house produced further confusion as the troops lost their units in their attempts to take it. The one British battalion still in good order now asserted itself. This battalion belonged to Major John Marjoribanks. It had held together despite assaults from the cavalry of William Washington and Wade Hampton. After pretty well demolishing the American horse, Marjoribanks pulled back close to the brick house. From that position, he, aided by reformed British regiments, drove the disorganized looters from the British camp. A battalion of Maryland regulars slowed this counterattack and prevented the withdrawal from degenerating into a rout.

After more than four hours of indecisive battle under a merciless sun, both armies had had enough. Casualties were extremely high. "Blood ran ankle-deep in places," and the strewn area of dead and dying was heart-breaking. Greene collected his wounded and returned to Burdell's Plantation. Stewart remained the night at Eutaw Springs but hastily retreated the next day toward Charleston, leaving behind many of his dead unburied and seventy of his seriously wounded. The gallant Majoribanks, wounded and on his way to Moncks Corner, died in a Negro cabin on Wantoot Plantation. Still, the British, despite many casualties, held the field.

The Continental Congress awarded a gold medal to Greene in honor of Eutaw Springs. It was one of six gold medals struck in Paris under the supervision of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin during 1785-6 to honor significant actions of the recent war. The largest medal was given to Washington for the retreat of the British from Boston; the second largest went to Greene for Eutaw Springs. The presentation of this medal to Greene is one of the eight scenes from history on the bronze doors of the United States House of Representatives.

At Eutaw Springs both the Continental soldiers and the militia served with great gallantry. Soldiers from at least eleven of the thirteen states fought in the battle. (Among them was Greene’s orderly, a free black man from Maryland, who gave his life and was cited for bravery by Greene.) Over forty counties in twenty-one states are named in honor of the heroes of Eutaw Springs.

The British held the field, but they had lost the Carolinas and Georgia. Stewart retired to Charleston; to the south a small British force remained in Savannah. But these units were too weak to do much more than sit and wait for the end of the war. The countryside belonged to the Americans.

Shifting the war to the South had seemed especially promising to British commanders after Charleston fell in the spring of 1780. In reality they faced enormous problems even after that victory. For they had erred in their estimates of loyalist support. If they had ever had a chance of holding a population loyal to the king, they squandered it by neglecting the southern colonies after the defeats at Moore's Creek Bridge and Charleston in 1776. And until Archibald Campbell captured Savanah in January 1779, they had remained inactive.

During the years before the British turned southward again, patriot militia proved that they could maintain order in the Carolinas and Georgia. They defined this mission as one which required the suppression of loyalism. And for the most part they succeeded in putting down, or at least discouraging, loyalist attempts to organize. They continued in this work after British regulars arrived.

Cornwallis confessed to feeling disappointment at the absence of loyalist support - the Carolinians neither joined his army nor fed it willingly. Worse, they did not give him, or his successors, information about his enemy's movements. Instead Carolinians ambushed his dispatch riders, attacked his supply trains, and wiped out the Tory forces that dared to show themselves.

The South, like New England and the middle colonies, was enemy country. Southern militia may have been no more reliable in set-piece battles than most irregulars to the north, but they were brutally effective in fighting loyalist militia. They fought well in these irregular engagements for at least two reasons: they shared the faith in the glorious cause, and they had the support of most of the ordinary people of the South.

Nathanael Greene may not have recognized these realities in the dreadful days following Camden. Yet he fought his war with skill and imagination - and gradually carne to understand that when he ran from the enemy he would be succored by the people of the Carolinas. The support was not lavish - the countryside's resources were lean and decimated by the war - but it was enough to enable him to make the struggle he called the "fugitive war" the means to victory in the lower South.

In the battle of Eutaw Springs, South Carolina, the last major action of the Revolutionary War before Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, over 500 Americans were killed and wounded. Nathanael Greene had led some 2,200 men into the Springs; his casualties thus represented almost one-fourth of his army. More men would die in battles in the next two years, and others would suffer terrible wounds. The statistics, although notoriously unreliable, show that the Revolution killed a higher percentage of those who served on the American side than any war in our history, always excepting the Civil War.

Robert Middlekauff. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789. Oxford University Press New York (1985), New York, 1985.

Forgotten Patriot: The Life & Times of Major-General Nathanael Greene A Biography of one of Americas first hero's. Nathanael Greene was a Quaker from Rhode Island who abandoned his religious upbringing and strived to learn more than only what he found in his own backyard. Educated by some of the greatest minds of the late eighteenth century, as well as be self-taught, Nathanael Greene became a master of human nature, politics and military tactics. As a young man he served in the Rhode Island Assembly prior to the Revolutionary War and with a fever pitched love of freedom, soon joined the members of the Sons of Liberty in their quest for independence from their oppressor, England. With the onset of the Revolutionary War, Greene joined the militia as a private and rocketed to the rank of Brigadier General in less than a year. He soon would be George Washington's most trusted general and the most dreaded foe the British would face in the war. Contrary to what is in most history books, the war did not end in 1781, and Greene was alone in the American struggle to oust the British from our shores. For two years, Greene fought a bitterly contested war in the Southern States and ultimately emerged victorious. Denouncing the call of his fellow countrymen to enter politics, Nathanael Greene chose instead to settle down with his family and live the life of a gentleman farmer on his plantation in Georgia. The service and devotion Greene gave to his country has never been recognized and is long overdue. This author intends to rectify that situation.

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