A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780. By Carl P. Borick. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xx, 332. $29.95, ISBN 1-57003-487-7.)

South Carolina and the American Revolution: A Battlefield History. By John W. Gordon. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xxii, 238. $29.95, ISBN 1-57003-480-X.)

A steadily increasing number of new Revolutionary War books are finally appearing on the market. This output is the result of both the earlier bicentennial and the current 225th anniversary. During the bicentennial, many historians and participants found glaring omissions in the war’s historiography but did not have the time to conduct adequate research. A quarter-century later, the situation is being rectified, with more books emerging especially on the southern states, for which detailed campaign studies were lacking.

These two works dramatically expand our knowledge of South Carolina’s role in addition to providing good accounts of the Revolutionary War’s southern campaigns. John W. Gordon presents an overview of South Carolina’s engagements during the entire war while Carl P. Borick concentrates on the 1780 siege of Charleston. Each author fills gaps related to southern participation in the Revolutionary War.

Reading Gordon helps explain many activities surrounding the 1780 Charleston campaign, as well as later efforts to retake the city during 1781 and 1782. His text is not a travel guide; readers wishing to visit battlefields should use Daniel W. Barefoot’s Touring South Carolina’s Revolutionary War Sites (Winston-Salem, N.C., 1999) to locate the sites and then reference Gordon’s new book to find out what happened there and who was involved.

Gordon organizes his text chronologically. Each chapter introduces the strategic situation, then presents short vignettes of the engagements as they occurred during the year. A most important contribution is found in the concise detailing in chapter 2 of frontier fighting early in the war and explanations of how Tories and Whigs chose sides. Most of the material is already available, but in widely scattered venues. Gordon has done everyone a service by making so much information accessible in handy reference form.

 

Borick sets the stage for Charleston’s defense in three chapters, covering the war’s first four years and suggesting how easy it would have been to take the town during 1779-1780, when a British campaign ended with the encounter at Stono Ferry. Borick might be seen as somewhat controversial because he points out that Charleston and South Carolina were defended by soldiers from all the southern states. A significant portion of the Charleston garrison was from Virginia or North Carolina in 1780. The Palmetto State did not do the same for her sisters, excepting Georgia. A close reading of Gordon seems to confirm this observation since much backcountry fighting was done by, or with the assistance of, Georgians, North Carolinians, and “Over-Mountain men” (p. 113).

 

Borick also mentions the somewhat ambivalent attitude of elite Charlestonians toward the Continental army, the upcountry, and other states. Yet, in one telling paragraph, he discusses Rawlins Lowndes, a South Carolina war governor, who wrote to a British officer, “Consider … the feelings of a man in this Condition, used hitherto to all the Comforts and Conveniences of Life, and now divested, in the most necessary Exigency even of the use of a Horse” (p. 232). How that statement would be taken by a piedmont farmer, whether Whig or Tory, who had been burned out and whipped by opponents, does much to explain backcountry animosity toward Charleston. A similar attitude is alluded to when Borick, pulling no punches, writes, “the members of the Privy council were willing to sacrifice the security of the rest of the state, and possibly of the entire south, for the security of Charleston” (p. 170). Facing sentiments such as these, is it any wonder backcountry folk were slow to rally to Charleston’s defense?

 

Gordon addresses this same issue in relating how some leading Charlestonians offered South Carolina neutrality when the city was threatened in 1779. He does so again when discussing war in the backcountry after Charleston fell. The emerging backcountry elite had problems with their Lowcountry counterparts but wished to join them in terms of status. The backcountry was very divided, and some evidence suggests that scores were being settled for old-world feuds as well as the more recent Regulator movement and political jockeying.

 

Gordon uses rather a convoluted style that distracted this reviewer. It seems a mix of military and academic writing without the precision of either. His broad-brush approach to nearly eight years of wax caused errors. For example, he states that Greene’s Continentals were “barefoot, clothed only by pieces of blanket” at Ninety Six, which seems unlikely since they were to have received a full clothing issue in the midst of the siege, on June 10, 1781 (p. 158). Some errors might be due to poor source material; Gordon does not list the published papers of Nathanael Greene in his references.

 

Both authors also occasionally make the usual error of identifying a “… pound gun.” No one–including Borick and Gordon–really thinks those guns weighed only twelve or twenty-four pounds, the weight of the shot; the proper terms are “twelve pounder” or “twenty-four pounder.” Although Borick does provide one precise explanation of the relative weights of shot and guns, and though both authors often use the correct terms, it is unfortunate that these errors of terminology keep slipping into texts here and elsewhere.

 

Complaints aside, Borick’s work is a most useful addition to the historiography of the Revolutionary War’s southern campaigning. It was long overdue. Gordon’s work is a valuable reference for dates, major participants, and some engagement details, as well as the sequence of events.

 

LAWRENCE E. BABITS

 

East Carolina University