XII

October Ninth

THERE was little rest for the Allies on the eve of attack. The men were out of their huts and tents at midnight, girding for this battle of nations and races—a struggle in which English Redcoat, Scotch Highlander, Tories from the Carolinas, Georgia, New York and New Jersey, hired Hessian, armed slave, Creek and Cherokee brave, all under a Swissborn general, were to be pitted against grenadiers of Old France, American patriot, Polish hussar, Irishmen serving under the Bourbon banner, and mulatto and black troops from the French West Indies.

The stakes were high. At this very moment General Clinton’s expeditionary force against Charlestown was embarking from New York. The main theatre of British aims and aspirations was being shifted to the South. “Should Georgia be lost I shall have little hope of recovering that Province and also of reducing and Arming South Carolina,” Clinton informed Germain when he learned of the arrival of the French fleet off Tybee.¹ The stakes may have been even larger than he supposed. Independence itself was a possibility. For if Savannah fell, Britain’s only remaining foothold between Canada and Florida was New York. Her tenancy was a precarious one should the French fleet co-operate in its reduction. Moreover, another setback as disastrous as Saratoga would make the peace party in England more clamorous than ever.

But somewhere above the fog which hung thick and grey across the early morning hours an evil star was shining for the Allies. From the beginning everything went wrong. There was grumbling in the French ranks as the troops formed at the camp. Under decided objections on their part regulars were drafted to fill out militia companies. Numerous changes were made at the last minute. In many instances the men found themselves led by strange officers. It was necessary to yield. “The General said he wished it,” declared Captain de Tarragon, implying that that was the way discussions with him usually ended.

D’Estaing seems to have been aware of the treachery before the attack. “Several American soldiers had deserted that very night,” wrote Meyronnet de Saint-Marc who asserted that the French commander “was not ignorant of it.” They were informed of the fact, he said, “almost at the very time.” As his troops marched out of camp, d’Estaing turned towards some officers at his side and remarked that “he had a very poor opinion of this attack” [“très mauvaise opinion de cette attaque”]. The men in the ranks seemed well disposed to second this view. But the General was encouraged to go through with the plan by several of his junior officers who, according to Meyronnet de Saint-Marc, “consulted their zeal and the fire of youth rather than prudence.” These, to say the least, were hardly favorable auspices for an attack on strongly defended lines.

The French arrived late at the American camp, d’Estaing attributing the delay to having to wait for guides. He says that he had to look around for General Lincoln who could not be found. He had reason to complain of the guides the Americans furnished. “They have assured us of a number of good guides to conduct the columns,” says a French memorandum of the preliminary agreement relative to the attack. One of them was a Frenchman in the Continental service named Roman who had helped erect the original defenses of Savannah. He assured the French that he knew the environs. As the troops of the left column emerged from the woods Colonel Stedingk inquired how far his particular point of attack was from the redoubt. Major Roman replied that the fortifications had been altered and that he was unacquainted with the terrain. He proceeded to wash his hands of the matter, refusing to accept further responsibility.² Jean-Rémy de Tarragon records a similar experience in connection with the right column. “On arriving at the head of the troops” the American sent to conduct them admitted that he “did not know the road and at the first musket shot disappeared.”

“Before the attack,” lamented Séguier de Terson, “a thousand men know the road by which the columns are supposed to pass; at the moment when we need to do it, all of them lose their heads and we no longer know who is to conduct us.” “Those who said they knew the way for the different Columns to take & who were to be our guides,” said Charles C. Pinckney, were not “such masters of the ground as they ought to have been.”³ It was typical of the disorganization and lack of foresight that marked the whole campaign.

There were other causes of delay. French military etiquette of the day gave precedence to regiments in accordance with their seniority. Within regiments themselves positions of honor went to the companies according to the date of commissions of their captains. As the French formed for battle an officer, entitled to a more privileged station than that in which he found his men, insisted on marching his company down the whole line to its rightful place, drums and fifes playing.⁴ Off Grenada a few weeks before d’Estaing had experienced the same sort of thing in the fleet. Instead of obeying the Admiral’s signals as to combat formation the captains crowded sail, according to the Journal d’un officier de la marine, in their race for the particular positions in the line of battle to which rank entitled them. In such a way the Bourbons sometimes waged war in the eighteenth century and in the process lost an empire.

A chill fell across d’Estaing as his troops began to debouch for the attack. The stillness of the pre-dawn was suddenly broken by the eerie skirl of bagpipes. Often during the Siege this music of the “Scotch mountains” (“most sad and most remarkable” as he described it) had drifted across the lines from the camp of the Highlanders. The French now heard the “lugubre harmonie” again. It came from a point near the place of attack and well to the right of the usual station of the Seventy-first Regiment. The sound of the bagpipes made “a very great impression” upon the spirit of the French troops, it not only showing, said the Count, that the enemy were aware of his designs but that they “wanted us to know their best troops were awaiting us.”

He would have called off the attack then and there “if we had not had the Americans for companions—that is to say,” d’Estaing corrected himself, “as masters.” But there was no turning back now. Another cogent reason led him on. “My indecision” at that stage, he confessed, “would have made me a laughing-stock” [“fourni une ample matière à la plaisanterie”].⁵ Better to die than be laughed at by the courtiers of Versailles!

Five o’clock came and the front files had only reached the edge of the wood on the right of the British line. Dawn broke. The troops grew restless. The columns began to form for the attack. The first shots were heard where the false attacks were being launched by the Americans at the extreme left of the British defenses and by the French at the center. They were the signal for the main assault, l’attaque de vive force. It was nearly five-thirty.

By this time the presence of the Allies had been discovered by the enemy sentinels. D’Estaing waited no longer for the columns to complete their formation. He would attack with the troops that were ready. The drummers were ordered to beat the charge. The Bourbon battle-cry rang through the ranks. Vive le roi! The vanguard “broke pell-mell upon the redoubt,” said Captain Séguier de Terson. Under heavy fire the grenadiers of Old France clambered over the abatis. They came on, white shadows that materialized out of the mist and swarmed up the glacis in front of Spring Hill redoubt.

The lines at this point were defended by a few troops of the Sixtieth Regiment, North and South Carolina Loyalists, marines, sailors, and a handful of dismounted provincial cavalry—a total of only 417 men, claimed the English, though the French insisted that the enemy were heavily massed in this sector. Certainly it was significant that on the morning of the attack Lieutenant Tawse and some dragoons had been assigned to the redoubt. In view of the fact that the Allies had been ordered to wear white cockades to distinguish one another during the attack it was also significant that the British would be wearing “large white cockades and shirts over their coats.”

Led by Jean-Gaspard Vence and the Chevalier d’Erneville, the storm troops scrambled up the steep sides of the redoubt. Lieutenant Levert de Genville of the Gâtinais Regiment was the first to penetrate the defenses. A French account says that the “defenders astonished at such bravery threw away their arms and ran.” The British admitted that “A body of French Grenadiers came on with such a Spirit to attack the old Redoubt upon the Ebenezer Road” that if Tawse and Wickham “had not thrown themselves in very opportunely, it must have been carried.”⁶

But no reinforcements arrived to support the vanguard. The two main columns had gone too far to the left, explained d’Estaing. The advance guard was ordered forward too quickly, said others. The initial wave had to fall back, “mown down by the right battery which took them in flank,” according to Captain de Tarragon. The French retreated in good order, carrying their wounded, among whom was Colonel de Béthisy.

The French right column now came into action—that is to say, the head of the column did; the rest was in disorder in the swamp. With about eighty grenadiers Colonel Dillon reached the entrenchments. It was a “very brilliant moment” and one that might have been “decisive if he had been supported,” said d’Estaing.⁷ But he was not. The enemy appeared in force and the French were driven back, the retreat being “infinitely murderous,” according to the General. There was desperate fighting along the entrenchments. The lily banners of France were planted on the berm. The valiant Tawse died defending the parapet, his sword in the body of the third man slain by his own hand. An English officer lost his nose, a blow for which a Frenchman paid with his life.

Though wounded in the arm Count d’Estaing continued to direct the assault. Standing on the causeway near the redoubt with his right arm in a sling, he exhibited what a French officer called “perfect self-possession.” Three times he rallied his troops and sent them forward. He complained that despite the “exhortations, entreaties, and threats” of the French officers the columns invariably bore to the left and into the marsh. Only the avant garde showed real ardor, d’Estaing reported. But who wants to advance, asked a cadet on the Guerrier, when soldiers “see and know that they are badly commanded”?

The soil of Savannah ran red with the best blood of Europe. Viscount de Béthisy was severely wounded in three places. Baron von Stedingk sustained a bad contusion on his leg; Chevalier Théobald Dillon a wound which partially crippled him for the rest of his life. The intrepid Major de Browne was killed at the entrance of the redoubt. Viscount de Fontanges went down during the third charge, his thigh ripped open by canister, crying: “We must retire.” Casimir Pulaski, representative of a famous Polish house, was mortally wounded.

The loss was terrific in the French ranks and among the under-officers. Of six Lebey brothers who had come with d’Estaing three were killed and another wounded at Spring Hill redoubt while the other two met death elsewhere in the attack. So family tradition goes, at any rate. Chains, nails, bolts, and scrap of all kinds as well as canister fired from cannon at short range and from an English galley at the mouth of Yamacraw Creek cut through the massed troops, making a “carnage affreuse,” to use Count d’Estaing’s words. In their white uniforms the French were easy targets for riflemen firing deliberately from the banquette of the entrenchments. “Believe me,” exulted a Britisher who served a nine pounder in the battery, “I never was happier in my Life than upon this Occasion.”⁸

Despite express orders “to take care not to go into the swamp” Stedingk’s column made too wide a circuit to the left. The men mired up to their knees. Under heavy fire and without formation they finally reached the causeway to which all the Allied troops seemed to gravitate. There they met the retreating right column which was thrown back upon them. “Jamais on n’a vu une Confusion pareille,” wrote Meyronnet de Saint-Marc who added, “The troops, the greater part of whom did not know the officers at their head, paid no heed to anyone.”

Colonel Stedingk and a part of his column eventually reached the entrenchments around Spring Hill redoubt. There he had the pleasure of personally planting an American flag. It was another great moment. The day had been won! They had succeeded! “My doubts were all gone,” said Stedingk. “I believed the day was our own.”

Could this lodgment have been sustained it would have been fatal to the defenders. But the rest of the column was pinned down in the morass. And Maitland’s “comprehensive eye” had seen the menace. “Always great,” wrote General Henry Lee, he “surpassed upon this occasion his former glory.” Major Glasier was ordered to advance with the grenadiers of the old Royal American Regiment and the Marines. There was a savage bayonet charge. The French and Americans had not succeeded in spreading along the parapet and they were driven back. “The moment of retreat, with the cries of our dying comrades piercing my heart,” was “the bitterest of my life,” declared Stedingk who “wished for death.” “Of nine hundred choice troops which I led into action,” wrote this officer, “four hundred men and thirty-nine officers were dead or wounded.” The Baron had upheld “in a most distinguished manner the honor of the nation of Gustave,” reported d’Estaing.

The Americans meanwhile had advanced to the entrenchments around the Spring Hill redoubt but the parapet could not be scaled in the face of the heavy fire. Huddled in the ditch, they were slaughtered by the British. There were heavy losses among American officers. Killed or mortally wounded were Baillie, Berand, Boyce, Bruneau, Bush, DeSaussure, Donnom, Dubois, Farrar, Gaston, Gray, Kinnill, Hume, Jones, Motte, Pulaski, Roux, Sheppard, Vleland, Wickom, Wise.

High praise for the Continental troops came from the French. They “showed the greatest courage, remaining at the foot of the ditch exposed to the enemy’s fire without wavering until they received the order of Monsieur le Comte d’Estaing to retire,” wrote Meyronnet de Saint-Marc. He was less content with the militia which “at the commencement of the affair took flight in every direction” [“prirent la fuite de toute part”]. To the same effect is the Journal d’un officier de la marine which speaks of the “astonishing gallantry” of the American regulars. “Although repulsed with severe loss” the Continental troops “return repeatedly to the assault thus furnishing a brilliant illustration of their valor,” said another French officer who, with the usual contempt for the American militia, added that “At the first discharge of a gun, two-thirds of the Virginia militia detach themselves.” The fact remains that the Virginians suffered the heaviest casualties of any American unit, a return showing 9 men killed and 51 wounded.⁹ D’Estaing declared that though Colonel Laurens personally exhibited the “greatest bravery” he was abandoned by his own detachment “au premier coup de fusil.” But much to the Count’s surprise the other American troops, including the Charlestown militia, “advanced with bravery and even order” up to the enemy entrenchments.¹⁰

Death had a carnival among the Continental standard bearers. Lieutenant James Gray and Lieutenant Alexander Hume were killed while carrying one of the flags which Sergeant McDonald planted on the parapet of the British entrenchments. McDonald later managed to bear it away. Lieutenant Bush, who bore the colors of the Second Regiment, was wounded, whereupon he passed the flag to Sergeant Jasper. The latter handed it back when he himself was struck. The flag fell under Bush in the ditch below the British works, according to the account of Lieutenant Legaré in Garden’s Anecdotes.

The story that the brave Jasper retrieved the banner which Mrs. Elliott had presented to his Regiment seems to have been the invention of a chronic romancer. A contemporary British Journal of the Siege states that “Two Rebel Standards were once fixed on the Redoubt on the Ebenezer Road; one of them was carried off again, and the other, which belonged to the Second Carolina Regiment, was taken.” The famous banner was carried to England as a war trophy. It is still there.

Arriving with General McIntosh’s column, Thomas Pinckney saw “such a scene of confusion” as is not “often equalled.” Laurens, who found himself separated from part of his command, came up to Major Pinckney and asked “if we had seen them.” D’Estaing made a somewhat pathetic spectacle. With the help of a drummer he had succeeded in collecting a few men around him. Asked what orders he had for the fresh American units, the Count instructed Pinckney to have them bear further left so as not to interfere with the troops he was rallying.

During the waning moments of the fighting d’Estaing was hit again. A bad wound in the calf of his right leg felled the Count. His had been the role of a “véritable grenadier dans cette affaire mais un mauvais général” [“a true grenadier in this affair but a poor general”], wrote Séguier de Terson. “It is not the fault of the troops that Savannah was not taken,” he added, “but rather of those who commanded us.” The French General owed his life to Laurent de Truguet. Fearful that he might not get an opportunity to participate in the attack, he had implored Count d’Estaing in a letter on September 18th not to forget his promise. “Mon général,” he said, “you will put me in despair if you break your word.” Count de Truguet was among the first to reach the British entrenchments. Later he found his commander lying among the dead. It was no easy feat to remove him from the field. The first two grenadiers enlisted in that task by d’Estaing’s aide were killed.

The circumstances under which Pulaski was mortally wounded have been and remain the occasion of controversy. Some say the brave Pole fell while leading a desperate cavalry charge on the British lines, a story supported by David Ramsay, Thomas Pinckney, and by Major Rogowsky (“two hundred strong. . . . We sped like Knights into the perir”). Such a version was emphatically denied by Captain Paul Bentalou, who was present. The idea of a charge by mounted troops against works which almost required an escalade was fantastic, declared that officer.

According to Bentalou, Pulaski had halted the cavalry at the edge of the wood, awaiting an opportunity to penetrate the works in the event of a breach achieved by the infantry. He saw what was happening at the front. Mon Dieu, what a paltry part for the hero of fifty fields! Word came back that the French commander-in-chief was wounded. The attack was flagging. Pulaski spurred his black charger and rode off toward the scene of carnage. A contemporary newspaper account stated that “The bold Pulaski rush’d with his usual ardor upon his horse, a considerable way before his legion, up to the parapet of the enemy” where “a bar shot from one of their cannon . . . gave him a large and mortal wound in his side, just above the hip.”¹¹

D’Estaing throws some light upon the controversy. The French commander reported that the Polish officer fell “by his own fault in placing himself where he should not have been at the moment,” explaining that he had “prematurely advanced in order to avail himself more promptly of the passage we were to open for him.”¹² Pulaski’s death was described by the Count as “an infinitely great loss to the American cause.” The British were something less than sympathetic. “No European power certainly would have employed him,” charged the Royal Georgia Gazette which scoffed that none but Americans would “have ranked with an assassin as an officer.”¹³

An hour after the attack began the order to retreat came. The German Fusilier Company of Charlestown is said to have disregarded the command, continuing to advance until death felled the popular Captain Sheppard, whereupon the outfit retired. Looking around on his fallen men, the despondent Laurens hurled his sword to the ground in wrath, exclaiming, “Poor fellows, I envy you!” Major Thomas Pinckney restored order in his ranks, Garden’s Anecdotes informs us, by addressing his men in these phrases: “Success, my brave fellows, though richly merited, has not crowned your exertions; yet do not disgrace yourselves by precipitate flight, and, though repulsed, quit the field like Soldiers.”¹⁴ Apparently not many French officers resorted to such Thucydidean speeches. “At midday,” said Captain de Tarragon, “little groups of men who had lost their way in the swamp were still coming back into the camp.” “Not ten soldiers from the same company returned into the camp together,” he added.

As soon as the retreat began Maitland ordered a counterattack. The British came out of their works. But the French reserves posted near the old Jewish Burial Ground stood fast. In the language of O’Connor: “The enemy who had advanced to the abatis, seeing the good order and firmness of our rear guard in the face of cannon charged with grape shot, did not dare venture beyond.”¹⁵ Colonel de Noailles’ maneuver in sending his troops forward to meet the challenge prevented a sortie which might have “caused the destruction of our army,” said another French officer. There were some losses among the reserves, including the Adjutant, M. Calignon, who was mortally wounded at de Noailles’ side. D’Estaing was a bit critical. “Our corps of reserves by being a little less impetuous would have better received those who were retiring than by going out to look for them,” he commented. “His excess of vigor and of courage (respectable fault) have increased the loss,” added the Count, who thought that the retreat “should not have cost him a single man.”

The false attacks by the Allies were quickly turned back on all fronts. The British paid not “the slightest attention” to them, reported d’Estaing. The feint by the militia under Generals Williamson and Huger on the eastern side of the lines bogged down in the rice fields where the American losses amounted to 6 killed and 14 wounded. The false attack at the center achieved nothing. Led by M. de Sablière, the volunteers from the West Indies and the French marines advanced from the Allied trenches to the ditch in front of the British works where they discharged their muskets. They were met with a volley that sent them quickly back to the defense of their own works after considerable losses. “The false attack from the trenches,” complained d’Estaing, “was not executed as the order specified.”

The amphibious assault led by Trolong Durumain never even got started. High hopes were staked on the venture which this young naval officer had enthusiastically pressed upon d’Estaing. It was not his fault that the river attack proved a fiasco. The Count blamed Durumain’s misfortune on the “poor will” of the Americans, claiming that one of the two Continental galleys which was to participate dropped her anchor as they got under way and that the other suddenly filled with water. It was easy for him to believe a rumor that an American sailor had been paid four hundred dollars to scuttle his ship.¹⁶ When Durumain saw that the operation was hopeless he ordered the troops assigned to him to debark. Hastening ahead by land with the Comte de Puysegur, he reached the front just as the battle was ending.

Durumain was “accustomed,” d’Estaing said, “to play his life as his fortune.” He had predicted to M. de Sartine that the Chevalier would become another “Duguay-Trouin” if given a vessel. Lieutenant Durumain got his ship but never lived long enough to play the role of that hero. A few months later he was killed in action at sea.