First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [120]
What was the Chesapeake and why all the focus on it? Great Chesapeake Bay formed the coastline of Virginia, stretching for 200 miles along the Atlantic to Maryland and New Jersey. With its many doorways facing Europe and its many ports and estuaries facing inland and giving access to the interior, it was the widest opening to the southern section of the country. The Bay’s upper waters came within twenty miles of meeting the Delaware River near Philadelphia, thus forming a natural waterway connecting the South with the mid-Atlantic states and creating the strategic neck that Cornwallis believed should be cut.
The taking of Charleston had drawn the British into further investment in the South and had increased the importance of that region as a center of the war. Here was the place, it was believed, where the loyalty of the people would determine whether Britain could reclaim the allegiance of the Americans as a whole. It would be a long wait, if sentiment in the South were to be the test. “Defection” in South Carolina was reported by Colonel Balfour, who had been left in charge of occupied Charleston, “as so universal that I know of no mode short of depopulation to retain it.” Balfour’s radical solution reflected the attitude of the Loyalists, who felt the savagery of a civil war in their conflict with the patriots, and who, in their mutual feud, fostered the hostilities of the rebellion.
Strategically, the purpose of the battle for the South was to deprive the rebellion of the region’s resources and its trade with Europe through its Atlantic ports. The most intense and protracted fighting was taking place there; Loyalists joined destructive raids against the people and resources of the countryside. The British were pitted against the American General Nathanael Greene and such men as Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” and “unbeatable” Daniel Morgan, the “Old Wagoner”— so called because 25 years before, at the age of nineteen, he had driven a supply wagon in Braddock’s ill-fated campaign against the French and Indians. Enemy engagements in the South never took territorial hold because they were aimed mainly at trying to destroy the rebels’ forces and fighting capacity, rather than at occupying and taking control of territory. Destruction of manpower and seizure of territory are the twin objectives of all offensive campaigning. With respect to the first, the usual method since the beginning of time—or the beginning of warfare, which may be the same thing—short of killing the opposing soldiery, is to destroy the opponent’s supporting resources: food, shelter, transportation, labor and the revenue for purchasing all these. Pillage, burning and general devastation make occupation impossibly difficult, as Colonel Balfour dimly perceived, and were not helpful to Britain’s overall aim of reclaiming allegiance. Nevertheless, the British still saw in the South their opportunity for final victory, because they felt certain that a basically loyal population would at some near time rise for the Crown.
Charles, second Earl Cornwallis, Britain’s most aggressive general, was in command of the southern front, serving under a commander-in-chief of opposite temperament, the cautious and vacillating Sir Henry Clinton, based in New York. Between the two existed another of the antipathies that fractured British Army and Navy commands. Everybody hated somebody in the course of conducting the American war, and in this case the antipathy divided the parties in terms of policy and aims as well as personal dislike.
Clinton was a stand-patter determined to hold on to what he had—that is, his bases in New York and Charleston, especially New York, whose defense became his obsession—while Cornwallis