♪ [patriotic fife and drum music] ♪ [mortar fire booming] ♪ ♪ [musket fire popping] ♪ [mortar fire booming] ♪ [mortar fire booming] ♪ [mortar fire booming] After Yorktown... after the British surrender of Yorktown... no major fighting occurred in any theater of the war... and the British were doomed to lose the war and to lose the 13 colonies, which, of course, gained their independence.

Why did the British lose the war?

There are many reasons which we shall consider.

We must remember that the war dragged on for another year.

There were some Indian raids.

There was some fighting with various Loyalist bands.

But the British main bases at Charleston and Savannah eventually were evacuated without serious fighting or loss.

The Americans let them evacuate Savannah and Charleston... and the Americans gained the independence for which they'd fought for seven long years.

The British concept of strategy in the South was excellent.

They won several of the major battles.

Possibly they should have carried out that strategy to a successful conclusion.

One sometimes wonders why they did not.

But the South-- and South Carolina, particularly-- became the battleground of freedom.

In South Carolina there were almost 200 battles and skirmishes and onfalls alone.

In North Carolina and Virginia and Georgia, there were many more.

And so the South was the area where the war was decided.

Stalemated in the North, with British forces poised in Canada and New York to strike, with the royal fleet dominating the coast, the British planned to win the war in the South, and they lost that war in the South.

Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, William Davie, Elijah Clarke, Nathanael Greene, all the great partisan fighters and commanders who maintained opposition against all odds and against all hope and chance and, eventually, won the victory, which made us the country we are today.

I think we should remember, in this bicentennial year... that we, as a country, were born in war and blood and terror.

This was a very hard birth, indeed, and one to which we may look back with intense pride and a great feeling... of success and satisfaction.

We won the war.

Now let us go to a plantation in the Midlands of South Carolina.

♪ ♪ When the British high command in London and New York decided in 1778 to transfer major military operations from the North to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, they already had been guilty of a serious psychological error in a long-range Southern strategy.

The great warrior Indian tribes of the South here, in 1776, occupied much of their ancient lands from the mountains to the Mississippi River.

These were not primitive wandering folk, but settled peoples with comparatively complex social systems.

They also could field their warriors in the thousands, and most of the tribal fighting men by the middle-18th century were musket armed.

Extended contact with the white man had changed in no way the totally cruel nature of Indian warfare.

The Cherokees, the nearest of the big tribes to the British settlements, still held their territories in north Georgia and upper South Carolina.

Through the work of two very able royal agents, John Stuart and Alexander Cameron, the Cherokees in 1776 also were firm supporters of the British government.

On the 3rd of October 1775, John Stuart wrote to General Thomas Gage, the British commander in Boston, that he opposed an indiscriminate attack by Indians on anti-British elements in the South.

He would dispose of them in executing any concerted plan, and to act with and assist their well-disposed neighbors.

This message and its bearer, a confirmed Loyalist named Moses Kirkland, were captured, and the letter published by order of the Continental Congress to demonstrate that the British were willing to use savages against the rebellious colonists.

The last happened to be quite true.

John Stuart and Alexander Cameron had arranged for the Cherokees to hit the southern frontier from Virginia to Georgia as a diversion in support of a British amphibious assault on the coast.

Such an attack occurred on 28 June 1776, when Admiral Sir Peter Parker and General Sir Henry Clinton mounted a joint operation against Charleston, South Carolina's island cities, and defenses.

The Cherokee struck along the entire southern frontier on the 1st of July, two days after the British had been repulsed successfully by Charleston's defenders.

If Peter Parker and Sir Henry Clinton had been successful, with so many of South Carolina's defenders tied down at Charleston, the Cherokee coordinated assault would have been far more effective.

The southerners of the backcountry, however, held the British responsible for loosing the horrors of Indian warfare on the frontier.

The British decision to move their main military efforts southward was based on sound, strategic reasoning, although why they had not done so earlier in the war is difficult to understand.

Pro-British feeling was strong in South, and Loyalist leaders had been imploring the British for years to make a major effort in the Southern theater.

Saratoga, fought in 1777, had been the first and last big American victory in the North, but Canada remained safely in British hands.

New York and its environs were strongly held by the British, and the royal fleet maintained a reasonably tight blockade along the coast of the 13 rebellious colonies.

British raiding parties hit northern ports and American military depots so hard that George Washington was, at times, almost in despair.

He even warned the Continental Congress in 1779 that it might be necessary to dissolve his army and stop active warfare for a year until the country and American fortunes, with hoped-for active military aid from the French alliance of 1778, could recover.

Sir Henry Clinton, therefore, felt with considerable justice that the war in the North was at a stalemate, which could end only in a British victory.

In Sir Henry Clinton's opinion, Georgia and South Carolina, with the two big ports of Savannah and Charleston, were the key to control of the South.

With Savannah and Charleston in British hands, His Majesty's forces, cooperating with Loyalists, could fan out and occupy both states.

With Georgia and South Carolina occupied and pacified, the waverers and neutrals could be brought over and the two provinces used as a secure base for operations against North Carolina and Virginia.

It was a good plan in its general concept, even a wise plan, and might have succeeded except for incredible British blundering and an equally incredible failure to establish unity of command and command planning.

Parenthetically, it has been stated in this bicentennial year that one monument which a grateful nation should erect is a memorial to the British generals who won the Revolution for us.

The first part of the plan was executed by the British with smooth efficiency.

Savannah, Georgia, was taken on December 29, 1778.

Colonel Archibald Campbell, the British commander in this operation, was not only an excellent soldier, but a wise, high-minded, and honorable gentleman.

His treatment of the American prisoners taken in the fighting and his understanding attitude toward the Georgians of all political convictions was such that many came in to swear allegiance and enlist-- enlist-- in the Loyalist units being formed.

Unfortunately for the British cause and fortunately for the American, Archibald Campbell relinquished his command to superior officers far less perceptive.

Three weeks after the victory, Major General Augustine Prevost arrived at Savannah with reinforcements from British Florida.

He promptly assumed direction of the fighting and sent Colonel Campbell upriver to Augusta, which he seized and garrisoned.

Posts were established through the state, and by the middle of February 1780, Georgia appeared to be completely under British control.

A strange and interesting commentary on the war in 1779, in the attitude of many southerners to the long, weary, indecisive struggle, was the offer made by the city of Charleston to Augustine Prevost when he arrived before its land defenses with 3,000 men in May of 1779.

On this occasion, the port city, so gallantly defended against the British attack in 1776, proposed to remain neutral for the duration of the war.

Almost a year later, on May 6, 1780, Charleston, South Carolina, fell.

General Benjamin Lincoln and the entire American Army of the South were captured with the city.

Sir Henry Clinton had insisted, as part of the surrender terms, that all the defenders and the citizens of the city of Charleston should be considered prisoners of war.

The Continental regulars and their officers were to be confined.

The militia and citizens, having submitted on parole, would be allowed to return to their respective homes.

Shortly after the fall of Charleston, Andrew Williamson and Andrew Pickens, commanding South Carolina militia at Ninety Six, surrendered to the British under the same terms, taking parole for themselves and their men as prisoners of war.

Joseph Kershaw, the militia commander at Camden, South Carolina, surrendered himself and his troops with the same conditions.

The same terms were offered by Henry Clinton to the people at large... come in and swear allegiance, with full pardon, and serve loyally with the King's forces against the rebels, or take parole as prisoners of war.

Many persons, especially in the coastal area where the British power lay, accepted the terms.

Sir Henry Clinton, on the 3rd of June 1780, committed a major error of judgment to rank with encouraging a Cherokee attack on the southern frontiers.

He issued a proclamation which declared that all-- all-- inhabitants of the province who were prisoners on parole should, from and after the 20th of June 1780, be freed and exempted from all such paroles and be reinstated to all the rights and duties of citizens and inhabitants.

The same proclamation further stated that all citizens so described who did not return to their allegiance and a due submission to His Majesty's government should be considered as rebels and enemies to the same and be treated accordingly.

All those who'd taken parole after the fall of Charleston considered that their duty was performed and they could spend the remainder of the war quietly at home.

The South Carolinians had surrendered honorably under conditions honorably offered.

Now, a pledge had been broken by the British commander, and men on parole were ordered by proclamation to take up arms against their own people or be considered rebels and treated accordingly.

Having issued his proclamation, Sir Henry Clinton returned to his command base in New York, leaving Lord Charles Cornwallis with about 4,000 British and Loyalist regulars to complete the final subjection and organization of a South Carolina beginning to boil with resentment.

Feelings among the inhabitants, particularly the Scots-Irish settlers in the Waxhaws, already were raw because of the conduct of that dashing and ruthless British cavalry commander, Banastre Tarleton.

On May 29, 1780, just after the fall of Charleston, Banastre Tarleton pursued and caught at the Waxhaws in South Carolina Lieutenant Colonel Abraham Buford, retreating northward with the 3rd Virginia Regiment, and the remnants of William Washington's cavalry.

Two hundred and sixty-three of Buford's command were either killed outright or badly wounded and captured.

Banastre Tarleton's action at the Waxhaws, thus, set the tone for the fighting to come.

Many settlements in South Carolina, separated by the great river swamps, were so isolated that the war hardly had touched their lives.

Now it came to them as it had to the Waxhaws.

Some British field commanders, such as Major James Wemyss of the 63rd Regiment, considered all dissenters from the established Church of England to be real or potential rebels.

James Wemyss burned the dissenting church at Indian Town in what was then Saint Mark's Parish because he considered all Presbyterian churches to be "sedition shops."

Again, at the Waxhaws, the minister to the Scots-Irish community had his house and books burned by British troops on patrol in that area.

In a few short months, the British had antagonized thoroughly and in many cases forced into open rebellion men who would have been quite content to remain at home as paroled prisoners of war.

In the same period, the British managed to shock, anger, and estrange large elements of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Welsh Baptists by, as I have said, attacking their churches, the very center of settlement life.

The ruthless brutality of Banastre Tarleton undoubtedly frightened some.

Most South Carolinians and Georgians were only made thoroughly angry and vengeful.

The hard, dour Scots-Irish Calvinists, the Welsh Baptists, the Huguenot and English planters now took the field with Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, Elijah Clarke, and William Davie.

There still were many persons in the Carolinas and Georgia, however, who supported the royal cause for personal advantage or, in most cases, honest political conviction.

Here again, the British high command in the South was guilty of blundering miscalculation.

The only chance-- the only chance-- of British success lay in a steady, methodical subjugation and organization of Georgia and South Carolina.

It was not enough to defeat Patriot armies in the field and establish a network of garrison outposts.

Those already loyal to the British cause must be encouraged and protected... while the people as a whole had to be convinced of the inevitability of British victory, and the latter never was accomplished.

Lieutenant Roderick McKenzie of the British 71st Highland Regiment, who served with courage and distinction through most of the fighting in the South, wrote in August of 1781, "We cannot with reason "expect those that are loyal "will declare their sentiments "until they find us so strong in any one place "as to protect them after having joined.

"Our taking posts at different places, "inviting the Loyalists to join us "and then evacuating those posts "and abandoning the people "to the fury of their bitterest enemies, "has deterred them from declaring themselves "until affairs take a decisive turn in our favor.

"We shall then find the people eager to show their loyalty.

"While the issue remains doubtful, we should not expect it."

Lord Charles Cornwallis was to find this all too true as he marched through North Carolina in pursuit of Nathanael Greene.

The failure of the British to establish unity of command and command planning has been cited as another reason for their failure in the South.

This had been an important factor in early campaigns in the North.

Sir Henry Clinton believed, quite correctly, that Georgia and South Carolina were the keys to victory in the South.

Lord Cornwallis, who succeeded Henry Clinton as commander in chief in the Southern theater, thought differently.

He felt, instead, that wealthy and populous Virginia was the key to a sound southern strategy.

Seize and control Virginia, and the rest of the South could be conquered with comparative ease.

Unhappily for the British chance of victory, Lord George Germain, the secretary of state for American colonies, at the seat of power in London, agreed with Cornwallis, not with Clinton.

After Sir Henry Clinton returned to New York following the fall of Charleston, Cornwallis acted accordingly.

His first attempt to invade North Carolina was checkmated by Patrick Ferguson's savage defeat at Kings Mountain on October 7, 1780.

This action destroyed an important element of Lord Cornwallis's light troops, and he fell back to winter quarters in Winnsboro, South Carolina.

On January 17, 1781, at the Cowpens in South Carolina, Banastre Tarleton's command was smashed totally by Daniel Morgan.

Again, Lord Charles Cornwallis lost valuable and essential units for the necessary, fast-moving campaign.

In spite of two grim lessons, British field commanders consistently underrated American fighting ability, even after they were taught otherwise by experience.

Lord Charles Cornwallis advanced into North Carolina in pursuit of Nathanael Greene's retreating army.

He left South Carolina and Georgia inadequately garrisoned and patrolled, with a general population turning against their conquerors and the southern partisans holding the hinterland and rampaging along the British supply lines.

Lord Cornwallis, on March 15, 1781, met Nathanael Greene and won the Pyrrhic victory of Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina.

He then made his final and fatal error, for falling back to the coast at British-held Wilmington with his badly hurt and battered army, Cornwallis decided to move his main operations from Wilmington up to the Petersburg area of Virginia, where a strong British force already was stationed.

He did this without consulting Sir Henry Clinton, his commander in chief, who bitterly condemned Charles Cornwallis's decision.

When Cornwallis marched north, Nathanael Greene marched back into South Carolina, and the war in the South essentially was lost by the British, even before the final siege and capture of Yorktown on October 19, 1781.

After the comparatively easy captures of Savannah and Charleston, the British, thus, committed one serious error after another.

As that distinguished Marine, Brigadier General Samuel Griffith, says in his introduction to a translation of Mao Tse-tung's "On Guerilla Warfare," "Historical experience suggests that there is very little hope "of destroying a revolutionary guerilla movement "after it has survived the first phase "and has acquired the sympathetic support of a significant segment of the population."

Since it became increasingly clear that the British could not protect their adherents or control the hinterland, an ever-growing number of southerners supported the partisans and kept the war alive in the South.

Only a handful of British officers ever understood or tried to understand the men they fought or the land in which the fighting took place... its intense summer heat, its incapacitating diseases, the vast swamps and forests, the wide, deep, and unbridged rivers, and the impenetrable laurel thickets of its mountains.

Here was a natural country for guerilla warfare and an almost impossible terrain for classic European operational concepts.

Both sides made blunders, but the British mistakes could not be remedied.

The British lost the war in the South, and the climactic Franco-American victory in the South at Yorktown, at Yorktown, Virginia, assured our independence.

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