Siege of Ninety Six

Coordinates: 34°8′49″N 82°1′28″W / 34.14694°N 82.02444°W / 34.14694; -82.02444
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The siege of Ninety Six was a siege in western South Carolina late in the

Lord Rawdon approached from Charleston
with British troops.

The area is now protected as Ninety Six National Historic Site and was designated a National Historic Landmark. Many of the surviving Loyalists were later relocated by the Crown and granted land in Nova Scotia, where they named their township Rawdon to commemorate their rescuer.

Background

The

Battle of Guilford Courthouse in Greensboro, North Carolina. Cornwallis had suffered significant casualties and subsequently moved his army to Wilmington, North Carolina. Greene, whose army was still largely intact after that battle, took advantage of Cornwallis' move to march into South Carolina
and begin operations to eliminate the British from that state.

With the assistance of militia commanders Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion, and Andrew Pickens, the Patriot forces took a number of British outposts in the backcountry of South Carolina; others were abandoned to them. By mid-May, the only places in the state with significant British garrisons were Ninety Six, in the northwestern part of the state, and the port of Charleston, nearly 200 miles southeast on the Atlantic coast.

Order of Battle

The order of battle for the forces involved in the battle was:[2]

Continentals

British

British Defenses

The British outpost at Ninety Six was garrisoned by 550 experienced

field pieces
.

Siege

Nathanael Greene

Greene and about 1,000 men arrived outside Ninety Six on May 22, the same day that

Thaddeus Kosciuszko
of Poland. Cruger did what he could to interfere with the siege works, frequently sending out parties at night to harass the workers. In one notable incident, his forces drove the workers away and captured some of their digging tools.

By June 3 Greene's men had dug a trench within 30 yards (27 m) of the Star Fort. They used a tactic similar to one used by Gen. Marion to

sharpshooters would have a clear firing line into the fort. At first, the crack snipers in the tower were able to pick off a number of Cruger's artillerymen. Cruger quickly countered by using sandbags to raise the height of his parapet, giving enough cover so his own marksmen could fire on the tower through slats between the bags. He also tried to set the tower on fire with heated shot, but was unable to get the balls hot enough. The attackers fired flaming arrows into the fort (a tactic that had worked when Patriots captured Fort Motte
), in order to set anything flammable within the fort on fire. Cruger had work crews remove the roofs from the buildings in the fort to prevent them from burning.

On June 7 Lord Rawdon left Charleston with 2,000 British forces to relieve the siege. The next day, Pickens and Lee arrived, having successfully captured Augusta on June 6. Greene did not learn of Rawdon's move until June 11. With the situation becoming critical, Greene decided to try an assault on the fort. (Cruger learned of Rawdon's approach the next day when the messenger, posing as a Patriot, got close enough to the fort to race the remaining distance on his horse.)[4]

Assault

Greene planned to have one party capture the smaller redoubt, while a larger attack force went after the Star Fort, where some men would pull down the sandbags to expose the defenders to fire from the tower. When the attack began on June 18, all went to plan at first—the smaller redoubt was taken, and men successfully penetrated the abatis and pulled down the sandbags. At this point, Cruger launched a counterstrike with a pair of

sorties to strike at the flanks of the attacking party. In a fierce battle dominated by bayonets
and the use of muskets as clubs, the leaders of the attack were killed and their men forced to retreat back to their trenches. With the failure of the attack, and Rawdon only 30 miles (48 km) away, Greene called off the assault and ordered a retreat. "My men did horrible and some will be shot"

Aftermath

Greene's losses amounted to 150 men, while Cruger's casualties were under 100. Greene retreated toward Charlotte, North Carolina, allowing Rawdon to join forces with Cruger. Rawdon sent a sizable force after Greene, but heat and the toll of the long forced marches slowed them. The force was recalled to Ninety Six, which Rawdon then abandoned.

General Greene blamed the failure of the operations against Ninety Six in part on Sumter and Marion, who failed to act in support of his operations in a timely manner. Later, other officers blamed Greene and Lee for failing to cut off the defenders' water supply at the Spring Branch.

Writing in his memoirs, Lee singled out Col.

Kosciuszko
for much of the defeat. He believed the engineer began the first parallel too close to the Star Fort, as well as underestimating the lengthy amount of time his undermanned and ill-equipped sappers needed to excavate the rock-hard soil enough to make a trench to support the siege. Though these issues contributed to the failure of the operation as a whole, Greene commended Kosciuszko's efforts in carrying out his orders, noting that given more time, his chief engineer's plan might well have succeeded.

When Greene learned of Rawdon's retreat from Ninety Six, he tried to pull all of the elements of the Patriot military forces together to attack Rawdon before he reached Charleston. He failed because of Sumter's and Marion's apparently tardy movements. Greene rested his men for most of July and August in the

High Hills of the Santee before engaging the British again outside Charleston at Eutaw Springs
on September 8, 1781, in the last major battle in the South.

Legacy

Ninety Six National Historic Site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1973.

Many of the Loyalists who were saved by Rawdon in the siege were resettled by the Crown in Nova Scotia. They named the township Rawdon, Nova Scotia, after Lord Rawdon to commemorate his having rescued them. The entire De Lancey's Brigade, which protected the Loyalists until Rawdon's arrival, was disbanded in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada in 1783.

Citations

  1. ^ A Brave Soldier of the Revolution, Acadiensis. Vol. 2. p. 238
  2. ^ George Nafziger, The Siege of Ninety-Six 22 May-19 June 1781, United States Army Combined Arms Center.
  3. ^ "Patriot siege of Ninety Six, South Carolina begins". HISTORY. Retrieved 2020-08-26.
  4. ^ Pancake, p. 213

Cheese pg3

General bibliography