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The lower South became the decisive theatre of the Revolutionary War. After the struggle settled into stalemate in the north, the British mounted their second campaign to conquer the region. British expeditionary forces captured Savannah in late 1778 and Charleston in May 1780. By late in that summer, most of South Carolina was pacified, and a powerful British army under Cornwallis was poised to sweep across the Carolinas into Virginia.

This map traces the marches of Cornwallis (red) and his wily adversary Nathanael Greene (blue). The campaign opened at Charleston in August 1780 when Cornwallis marched north to confront Gen. Horatio Gates moving south with a Continental army. It ended at Yorktown in October 1781 with Cornwallis’s surrender of the main British army in America. In between were 18 months of some of the hardest campaigning and most savage fighting of the war.

On this 14th of January, 1781, a great many people in South Carolina and North Carolina were badly in need of the reassurance that Daniel Morgan communicated. The year just completed had been a series of military and political disasters, with only a few flickering glimpses of hope for the Americans who had rebelled against George III and his Parliament in 1776. In 1780 the British had adopted a new strategy. Leaving enough troops to pin down George Washington’s main American army near New York, the British had sent another army south to besiege Charleston. On May 12, 1780, the city and its defending army, under the command of a Massachusetts general named Benjamin Lincoln, surrendered. Two hundred and forty-five regular officers and 2,326 enlisted men became captives along with an equal number of South Carolina militia; thousands of muskets, dozens of cannon, and tons of irreplaceable gunpowder and other supplies were also lost.