Link.
This is a short video that asks a false hypothetical. There is almost no need to respond, but I’ll do it anyway just in case another stupid “historian” is tempted to raise the same question.
England had no chance of winning the American war of independence. Washington had fought Clinton’s troops to a standstill in the North. The only strategy the English saw forward was to send Cornwallis South to the port of Charleston, take S.C. (where they were told that there were loyalists), co-opt the support of the loyalists, retain the South, and then eventually encircle Washington.
It had no chance at all of working. The battle of Kings Mountain proved that. It was a battle of loyalists versus patriots (the over mountain men). The over mountain men had stupidly been told (by the British) that the British were coming for them. The men were harvesting crops at the time and couldn’t go to meet the British (or loyalist forces), so they sent their sons into battle. The women stood on the sides of the streets and sang hymns as their sons went off to battle. They travelled mostly at night, but virtually continuously. The average age of the fighters sent by the families to fight the loyalists was 14 years old.
They lost very few fighters, but the loyalist forces were dealt a staggering defeat. Thus ended Cornwallis’s plan to use the loyalists. His position in S.C. was no more secure. He couldn’t maintain logistics to far flung outposts because fighters using insurgent tactics were harassing them. A number of battles occurred, but eventually it all came to a head at the battle of Cowpens, where Cornwallis lost a third of his army.
Another third was in the infirmary, sick with heat exhaustion, diseases borne by mosquitos, and wounds inflicted by insurgent fighters. Cornwallis took the remaining healthy third of his army to transport the ailing third from the infirmary and headed into N.C., targeting Yorktown for resupply and reinforcements. His forces were harassed all through N.C. on the way to Yorktown, with fighters shooting from behind trees and then melting into the bush, never to be seen again (until the next skirmish, of course).
The French were there waiting at Yorktown to bombard them from the sea, but they may not have been. In the end it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the war, just prolonged it.
South Carolina was a foreboding place for the British to be. There are ticks, snakes (rattlesnakes, water moccasins and copperheads), chiggers, mosquitos, leeches, red ants, and vermin of all sorts, the swamp mud and water will eat your feet off without proper protection, and the swamp is the blackest of black at night without a single ray of light. Once dark, you’d better not move. You’ll get bitten by a snake, snapping turtle or crayfish, or step into a fire ant mound or hole where yellow jackets nest.
There is both life springing into the landscape coupled with the smell of rot and decay. The days are brutally hot and humid, and the nights are so humid that you’ll freeze to death in moderate temperatures. There is no relief from the humidity, not even in the winter. It’s a bad place to have an infection while in the bush.
The storms will blow and wash away virtually anything you have planted or built. There are rivers and swamps everywhere impeding your travel, juxtaposed by mountains in the upstate that will exhaust weary travelers and foot soldiers. You can’t drink any of the water you see. The noises coming from the swamps and bush at night are troubling enough to interfere with your sleep. All the while, the British were being fought by boys who grew up in this beautiful hellscape and knew how to navigate and survive it – and disappear into it like a ghost or phantom, apparitions with no form beyond a few seconds before melting into the darkness and sounds of various hundreds of types of animals and insects.
If you’ve ever spent time in the low state of S.C., you know what I mean when I say this. Cornwallis and his troops were doomed from the minute they set foot onto the shores of S.C.
They never had a chance.
