I

Imperiled City

SAVANNAH sprawled indolently in the September sun atop its great sand bluff. Below the town, the slow-tided river coursed round the big crescent bend and out to sea. The top sails of the brigs that crowded the harbor scarcely reached the level of the houses on the Bay, for the height of the bluff was such as to “put a man out of breath before he can reach the Top,” remarked a visitor of the day. From it there was a sweeping view of the luxuriant rice fields and savannas that stretched as far as one could see toward the north and the east.

“Let the English reader picture to himself a town erected on the cliffs of Dover, and he will behold Savannah,” wrote a British traveller. There, however, comparison with the old country both began and ended. More than four decades had passed since Oglethorpe had come and time had moved on to 1779 and the nineteenth year of the reign of George III. But Savannah was still a frontier community standing in a tiny clearing in the endless pine forests—a remote seat of British rule at the edge of the vast wilderness called Georgia whose chief link with the outside world was still the river that emptied into the Atlantic eighteen miles eastward.

Three highroads connected the town with the country around. The Augusta or Ebenezer Road with its South Carolina connection at Zubly’s Ferry wandered off westward through the pine-barrens and across the piedmont country to lose itself finally in regions where the sound of the ax of the first settler was yet to echo through the virgin forests. The Ogeechee Road struck southward down the coastal plain along ancient trails of the Guale Indians past Midway to Darien. The Sea Island Road crossed the swamp southeast of Savannah and forked out toward Thunderbolt, Beaulieu, and other settlements on the inland waters, that fantastic lacework of sounds, rivers, and creeks that nature had woven along the seaboard of Georgia and Carolina.

The population of Savannah, which was ordinarily about 750 whites, had been greatly swollen by war. The people crowded into what the British army had not commandeered of the town’s four hundred and fifty houses and spilled over into the nearby hamlets of Yamacraw, Trustees’ Garden, and Ewensburg. The Georgia capital received few compliments from visitors of the period. The scarcity of buildings in the town made it hard for them to perceive the symmetrical plan of streets and squares of which the residents boasted. It was “very straggling built,’’ wrote a traveller. “The Houses lie Scattered, and are poorly built mostly of wood—in Short the whole has a most wretched miserable appearance,’’ was a British officer’s description of the place.¹

The streets, which were wide and unpaved, were either incredibly sandy or quagmires, depending on the weather. It was “white sand so deep’’ that “it is just like walking through fresh fallen snow a foot deep,” complained a Hessian.² On windy days “A man runs no small risk of being chocked [sic] by the clouds of sand and dust,” observed another visitor of the day who imagined that in the summer Savannah, “what between Sand Flies (of which even now there are Legions) Musquettoes, etc. must certainly be a most agreeable place to reside in.”³

The public buildings were as little impressive as the dwellings. Pierre Colomb, who was at Savannah in 78, could later recall “no one building I can describe.” His only lasting impression was of the “vast rice plantations” that surrounded the town, requiring “a perpetually flooded soil, and whenever the waters are drained off, give forth a noxious air full of disease. . . .” The largest structure was probably “Y^e great or English church” on Bull Street about which the traveler John Bartram (more interested in botany than architecture) had found nothing worth recording beyond the fact that the edifice was “80 foot long & 48 or 50 wide.” Other landmarks in the town were the Governor’s Mansion, the Market, the old silk-house called the Filature, the big new military barracks, and several public taverns in at least one of which patrons found wines “good and plentiful” and dinners “chosen and served with taste.” The omission of a Court House from this chronicle of the town’s sights deserves a word of explanation. Recently the Chief Justice had returned to Savannah to find the erstwhile seat of royal justice “filled with Soldiers & their Wives, and in a very disagreeable Situation.” The “Soldiery” had even used the “Bench & Bar” for firewood, complained that dignitary to whom the sacrilege must have seemed a perfect symbol of the disrespect the military establishment paid the civil government His Majesty of late had been “graciously pleased to re-establish” in the Province of Georgia.

But if there was little to admire in the architecture of the town, a visitor might be impressed by Savannah’s “delightful society” as was Elkhannah Watson of New England who passed that way in 1778. The gay balls and dinners in Savannah homes and after Major Habersham’s marriage a morning reception where the guests enjoyed “a collation of fruits, wine, and salt fish, etc.” would never be forgotten by a young American soldier from Virginia named Brooke. Officers fortunate enough to be invited to the homes of the wealthy merchants were “sumptuously” entertained, he reminisced—“breakfast in the morning, luncheon at eleven o’clock, dinner at two, tea and coffee in the evening, and a hot supper at night.”⁴

This Whig society had been supplanted a few months before by a Tory regime. State had reverted to Province. The social and political life of the little capital now centered about the Governor’s House on St. James Square. There astute Sir James Wright lived in state and there most of the public business of the Province was conducted. The Royal Governor had returned in triumph a few weeks before to the wooden mansion in which the rebels once held him captive. The bullet marks were still discernible where the “Western” riflemen who guarded him had fired at the building while he and his family were prisoners there. Eight months had now passed since the day a slave named Quash revealed to Colonel Archibald Campbell the route that led across the swamp southeast of the town—a path which Colonel George Walton had once frequented “with young ladies, picking jessamines,” as he testified at the court-martial of General Robert Howe. By some oversight that ill-starred American commander failed to fortify the approach. Turning Howe’s right flank, the British had stormed into Savannah on the heels of the fleeing Americans. That night the Rebel Governor, John Houstoun, paused long enough in his westward flight from the capital to dash off a note informing General Benjamin Lincoln that the day had been lost. Thus had been restored His Britannic Majesty’s dominion over this realm of palmetto and pine.

Though war had dried up most of Savannah’s once flourishing export trade in rice, lumber, pitch, hides, and indigo the port remained a place of great strategic value to the King. It was “the key of the southern provinces, and the Gibraltar of the Gulf passage,” wrote Chief Justice Stokes, explaining that “to the south of this province there is not a port on the continent that will receive a sloop of war.”⁵ It was a dagger at the back of South Carolina. “What barrier have we to secure us from the conquerors?” asked Charles C. Pinckney, Jr., in discouragement after Savannah fell. It was the keystone in the master English plan of invading Carolina and salvaging the Southern colonies out of the Revolution—that wicked rebellion in which, complained a charming Tory female in Savannah, “everywhere the scum rose to the top.”⁶

The revolt in America was now in its fifth weary year and Seventeen seventy-nine had dragged through a long summer to September 8th. A strangely accelerated tempo pervaded the drowsy Georgia town that day. Startling news was filtering back from Tybee Island at the mouth of the river. Unwonted activity was noted at the headquarters of General Augustin Prevost on Broughton Street. Couriers wheeled away, the horses leaving trails of dust as they clattered out the highways. His aides-de-camp had not been so busy in months. In the face of grave emergency, however, they maintained their solid English composure. At least Captain Alexander Shaw of His Majesty’s Sixtieth Regiment did. In phrasing an important dispatch sent that day to St. Augustine Shaw summed up the situation as “the little hurry we are now in.” Red-coated regulars, Provincials from the North, and Wissenbach’s Hessians were moving out into assigned posts. There was a stir and bustle at the Governor’s House where a special meeting of Council had been convened. Wagons filled with slaves bringing shovels and tools were rolling into Savannah from the plantations around.

Something portentous was in the air that the town could be shaken in any such manner as this from its summer doldrums. Even the Indians in the service of George III had roused themselves from the torpor of grog and tobacco. His Cherokee and Creek allies, the Governor soon discovered, were not nearly “so hearty in the Cause, & so Warmly attached, as I Expected.” Like the Hessian auxiliaries they left an impression on the English that while they were not at all averse to taking the King’s shilling they were at heart quite indifferent as to which side ultimately triumphed. The principal contribution of the redskins to the British war effort was the plundering of slaves from the Carolina plantations. They brought their booty into over-crowded Savannah, scaring the women-folk of the town out of their wits with the shorn heads, gaudily painted faces, and the tomahawks which they threw with inconceivable skill.

The monotony of life in this outpost of British empire had been broken by something more exciting than the “Dancing Assemblies” or the dramas at the little theatre on Broughton Street with “characters by gentlemen of the garrison” or even the Jockey Club events in which hard-riding Stephen De Lancey of New York usually captured the purse—gala afternoons topped off at night by “a very genteel ball” where the ladies “made a brilliant appearance.” Such was “the spirit of the Turf, and Entertainment” during this summer that the Royal Georgia Gazette had recently extolled it as “An happy presage of happier days.” The editor proved something less than oracular.

Before daybreak on this Wednesday, September 8th, 1779, Governor Wright had been awakened by a note from General Prevost. Sir James’ face must have blanched as he read it. The message confirmed the worst fears of the past few days. Off Tybee bar “There were 42 Sail of French Ships of War in Sight, most of which appeared to be large Ships.” It was now plain that an attack on Savannah was intended. “No Man could have thought or believed” such a thing, said the Governor.⁷ It was almost incredible. Everyone knew that Monsieur d’Estaing’s fleet was hundreds of miles away, preoccupied with France’s lush possessions in the West Indies and by no stretch of the imagination interested in this poor, remote Province. Nothing seemed further from Savannah than England’s hereditary enemies, those giddy opportunists who had taken the side of the Americans for no better reason than to avenge Britain’s rape of the Bourbon empire.

Yet here these light-minded people were—come with a fleet of 22 sail of the line, 10 frigates and other ships, carrying 4,000 troops. At the stormy season of the year, too! It was still hard for Prevost to believe Savannah was the real enemy objective. “It is not improbable but his serious views are to the Northward of this—Perhaps Rhode Island, or New York—but I can only conjecture,” the British commander was saying as late as the 9th.⁸

Several strange sail had been sighted off Tybee Island a few days before. The flotilla consisted of two large two-deckers, two frigates, and two small sloops. When Lieutenant Lock went out in the pilot boat to investigate they immediately weighed anchor and stood out to sea, indicating an “inclination not to be discovered.” However, the French uniforms could be plainly distinguished on one of the frigates. In a dispatch heavy with misgivings General Augustin Prevost had reported their appearance to Sir Henry Clinton. To the relief of the British the vessels disappeared. But those ships were merely the faster sailers of Admiral d’Estaing en route to Charlestown to inform the Americans of the arrival of the French off Georgia. The main body of the fleet had now come up.

For this sudden turn of affairs the British were ill-prepared. Reports had previously reached Prevost that a “French Squadron with land Troops on Board were . . . destined to this Quarter.”⁹ But the news had not been seriously credited. His forces, General Prevost apologized in a hasty dispatch to Admiral Byron, were “somewhat disjointed.” The flower of the army was at Beaufort. Nine hundred troops, consisting principally of the Seventy-first Regiment of Scotch Highlanders, had retired to that port after the failure to capture Charlestown a few months before. Another garrison was at Sunbury. Scarcely a thousand men could be mustered at the moment in the Georgia capital.

The route by land was cut off by the Americans. Beaufort was all of fifty tortuous miles from Savannah by water. And now the puissance of France had come up out of the Caribbees through the Windward Passage. The cause of George III in America was in mortal peril.