The Miracle of Fort Moultrie

O n June 28, 1776, the South got its first major taste of the Revolutionary War. It liked the flavor. Two hundred and fifty years later, the Battle of Sullivan’s Island, whose outcome stunned the British, is commemorated in a state holiday, on the state flag, and in the nickname of South Carolina as the Palmetto State. It was the last major battle between the colonists and the British for control of territory before the colonies declared independence six days later, on July 4.

In 1776, Charleston — known until the end of the Revolution as Charles Town, as it was founded in honor of King Charles II — was the wealthiest city in British America, its fourth-largest port, and by far the largest port south of Baltimore. Its upper crust was inclined to side with the Crown, not least out of fear of British-induced slave insurrections. That made it a logical target for the British in aiming to subdue the rebellion. The British, with far too few troops to control the American interior and with supply lines stretched across the Atlantic, fell back on their traditional strategy of keeping the army within sight of the Royal Navy’s guns.

Three thousand men under General Henry Clinton — the most aggressive of the British commanders at Bunker Hill the previous June, now free of the command structure that had restrained his plans in Boston — were prepared to land and take the city. Clinton had originally aimed for North Carolina before changing course after learning of the patriot victory at Moore’s Creek Bridge in February, which deflated Loyalist organizing in North Carolina. Moore’s Creek Bridge, in fact, set the stage for the Halifax Resolves on April 12, in which North Carolina’s legislature became the first to instruct its delegation in Congress to vote for independence.

Still optimistic about promoting Loyalist militias in the South, Clinton was carrying 10,000 muskets to distribute to insurgents. The general expected to be greeted as a liberator — but his plans didn’t consider what the South Carolina patriots had in store.

Like other great deep-water harbors — for example, Boston (in its natural layout) and New York — Charleston harbor has a central tongue-shaped peninsula set back from the open sea, guarded by two spurs of land on either side of the entrance. As one enters the harbor from the Atlantic, downtown Charleston (where Rainbow Row stands today) is straight ahead, but one must first pass between the Scylla and Charybdis of land on the left (guarded by the small island upon which Fort Sumter was still under construction in the spring of 1861) and Mount Pleasant on the right, guarded by the much larger Sullivan’s Island. For my fellow New Yorkers, Sullivan’s Island occupies the same relative position in the harbor as Coney Island (indeed, what is now the Isle of Palms was then called Long Island). At the time, before the construction of Fort Sumter, the opposite shore was guarded by Fort Johnson on the mainland. The American Battlefield Trust map of the battle illustrates well the setting.

The Continental Army, recognizing the potential threat, dispatched its most prestigious major general, Charles Lee. Lee, unlike his rival George Washington, had been a commissioned officer of the British Army. He had also been a major general in the Polish army, commanded Russian Cossacks, fought alongside the Turks, conversed with Frederick the Great, and been dubbed “Boiling Water” by Native Americans for his volatile personality. He seemed the natural man to send to the Charleston gentry, and outside of South Carolina, he would reap the glory of what followed. But inside South Carolina, the commander on the spot, Colonel William Moultrie, won the hearts of the locals. South Carolinians would, within a week of the victory, establish an American state.

Clinton — as would be his pattern throughout the war — was not quiet about his plans, which gave the Americans ample notice of what was coming. But when Lee arrived in South Carolina, he found that the Continental Army’s writ did not run to South Carolina; the local soldiers were militia who reported to Moultrie, a veteran of Indian wars. All three commanders (Clinton, Lee, and Moultrie) were between the ages of 44 and 46; the British naval commander, Admiral Sir Peter Parker, was 55. While Moultrie’s men in the fort numbered only a few hundred, the overall patriot force consisted of some 6,000 men, divided about evenly between South Carolina militia and Continental troops drawn from Virginia and North Carolina — the latter being available only after the victory at Moore’s Creek Bridge had relieved pressure on their own backyard.

Moultrie determined to make his stand at what was then dubbed Fort Sullivan, on Sullivan’s Island. As with Fort Sumter 85 years later, the fort was put to the test before it was completed. It was largely mounds of earth, with a seawall constructed of palmetto logs. Lee considered the position a ridiculous, indefensible “slaughter pen” and ordered Moultrie to abandon it; on the eve of battle, he was ready to relieve Moultrie of command, but the arrival of the battle intervened.

Like William Howe at Bunker Hill, Clinton went ashore at the head of his own men, landing on the Isle of Palms on June 8 with the intention of flanking Moultrie’s position from behind — almost exactly the strategy he had been thwarted from deploying at Bunker Hill. Clinton could not be dislodged by Moultrie, who refused Lee’s orders to make an impractical march across the marshes to his rear to face Clinton. This time, it was the unsuitable terrain rather than his fellow generals that stopped Clinton. The channel between the Isle of Palms and Sullivan’s Island was reported to be less than two feet deep. Nine days after landing, Clinton discovered that the channel was actually shoulder-deep, and he needed boats to cross it. This was a blunder that stained Clinton’s reputation for some time. When he and his men tried to cross the channel in boats, American forces strafed them with grapeshot. They soon realized that they needed the navy to dislodge the Americans from Sullivan’s Island before the redcoats could make headway on land.

The Royal Navy, accustomed to ruling the waves, expected no great trouble. With nine men-of-war, Parker was amply supplied with enough guns to disregard the conventional wisdom against fighting forts with ships. After all, what Moultrie commanded barely looked like a fort. While it was bristling with guns, some of them firing menacing chain shot (cannonballs chained together), he was short of gunpowder. He made up for his shortfall of ammunition with buckets of grog served liberally to the men in the sweltering heat, which were fondly remembered by the battle’s veterans.

But, despite their on-paper superiority, many things went wrong for the British from the start. Some of Parker’s ships ran aground crossing uncharted sandbars, limiting their maneuverability; one ship later had to be abandoned and burned. And then the event occurred that would enter into South Carolina legend: Parker’s cannonballs seemed to bounce right off the fort. It turned out that the soft palmetto wood of the makeshift, unfinished fort was too spongy to take damage from conventional round shot (not until the 1850s would naval guns fire explosive shells). The frustrated British soon found themselves in an unexpectedly one-sided exchange in which their more powerful force took a pounding that it couldn’t return.

The British took 85 percent of the day’s casualties. Parker’s flagship, the Bristol, was badly damaged. Parker was wounded by shot that tore off his breeches and exposed his rear end, a humiliation that provoked much patriot mirth. The 45-year-old royal governor, Lord William Campbell, was seriously wounded aboard the Bristol and died two years later without having ever fully recovered.

After an entire day of pointless bombardment, Parker and Clinton withdrew. Clinton landed his men back in New York five weeks later. While South Carolina would ultimately see more battles in the war than any other state, Charleston was secured until 1780.

Moultrie’s battle flag, dark blue with a crescent moon, drew much acclaim when Sergeant William Jasper kept it flying under fire. Jasper, being illiterate, declined a promotion for his valor and died four years later at Savannah (by legend, also grasping his standard). But his legacy would live on as he entered the pantheon of early American history.

Moultrie, captured by the British in 1780, would be elected to two terms as South Carolina’s governor in 1785 and 1794, and lived long enough to write a memoir of the war. The state flag of South Carolina combines Moultrie’s emblems with the iconic palmetto tree. Only the outline of the fort, renamed Fort Moultrie, remains today (unlike the well-preserved Fort Sumter), but any visitor to Charleston should be sure to see its mounds and memorials to American patriots. They ensured that when the colonies declared independence, the South was still unconquered.