Siege of Ninety-Six

Late in the American Revolutionary War, western South Carolina became the setting for a prolonged military standoff at Ninety Six. Beginning on May 22 and lasting until June 18, 1781, Major General Nathanael Greene of the Continental Army directed 1,000 soldiers against a garrison of 550 Loyalists holed up in the fortified village. For 28 days the fighting revolved around Star Fort, an earthwork defense at the heart of the settlement. Although Greene commanded the larger force, he could not capture the town, and the arrival of Lord Rawdon's British troops marching from Charleston compelled him to abandon the effort.

Today the battlefield falls under the protection of Ninety Six National Historic Site, a site that has earned recognition as a National Historic Landmark. As for the Loyalists who survived the ordeal, many were eventually resettled with land grants in Nova Scotia, where they honored the man who had saved them by naming their new township Rawdon.

Background

By early 1781, British forces had made real headway with their plan to subdue the war in the south, having captured Charleston and forced much of South Carolina and Georgia into submission. That momentum faltered in March, when General Lord Cornwallis clashed with Continental Army General Nathanael Greene at Guilford Courthouse, near present day Greensboro, North Carolina. Though victorious, Cornwallis lost a great many men in the fighting and chose to withdraw his forces to Wilmington, North Carolina afterward. Greene's army, having emerged from the engagement largely unscathed, seized the opportunity created by this retreat and pushed into South Carolina to drive the British from the state entirely.

Working alongside militia leaders Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion, and Andrew Pickens, Greene's men steadily captured British strongholds scattered across the South Carolina backcountry, while still other posts were simply given up without a fight. By the middle of May, British control in the state had shrunk to just two heavily garrisoned locations: Ninety Six, situated in the northwest, and the coastal port of Charleston, lying roughly 200 miles to the southeast.

British Defenses

Lieutenant Colonel John Cruger commanded the fortified post at Ninety Six, where 550 seasoned Loyalist troops held their ground, among them De Lancey's Brigade, part of the Provincial regiments made up of regular soldiers drawn from Loyalist ranks across New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina. The British had held the position since 1780, and by this point its fortifications included a palisade ringed by a deep ditch along with abatis, felled trees whose sharpened branches pointed outward to slow any advance. Defenders benefited from the Star Fort, a substantial redoubt that let them catch attackers in crossfire along two sides of the stockade, while a second, smaller redoubt offered comparable protection for the remaining walls and safeguarded access to water. For artillery, Cruger's forces had only three light three pound field pieces at their disposal.

Siege

On May 22, Greene reached the outskirts of Ninety Six with roughly a thousand men, the very day Andrew Pickens and Henry "Light-horse Harry" Lee opened their own siege against Augusta, Georgia, not far away. Work on encircling the position began at once, with the Star Fort marked as the primary objective, and the effort fell under the direction of chief engineer Col. Thaddeus Kosciuszko of Poland. For his part, Cruger sought every opportunity to disrupt the digging, dispatching men under cover of darkness to strike at the laborers. On one occasion his troops succeeded in scattering the work crews entirely and made off with a number of their digging implements.

By the third of June, the besieging trench had crept to within thirty yards, about twenty-seven meters, of the Star Fort's walls. Greene's men borrowed a method Gen. Marion had used effectively against Fort Watson: they erected a timber Maham Tower roughly thirty feet, or nine point one meters, in height, topped with a shielded platform. From this vantage point, sharpshooters could look directly down into the fort's interior. Early on, these marksmen managed to strike down several of Cruger's gunners. Cruger responded by piling sandbags atop his parapet to gain extra height, leaving gaps between them through which his own riflemen could return fire toward the tower. He also attempted to burn the structure using heated cannonballs, though he never managed to get the shot hot enough to do the job. Meanwhile, the besiegers loosed burning arrows into the fort, a method that had proven effective during the capture of Fort Motte, hoping to ignite whatever might catch inside. Cruger countered by ordering his men to strip the roofs off the fort's buildings so there would be nothing left to burn.

Then, on June 7, Lord Rawdon marched out of Charleston with two thousand troops intending to break the siege. The following day brought Pickens and Lee to the scene, fresh from their successful capture of Augusta on June 6. Word of Rawdon's advance did not reach Greene until June 11, however. Facing a rapidly worsening situation, Greene resolved to launch a direct assault on the fort. Cruger himself only learned that relief was coming a day later, when a messenger, disguised as one of the enemy, managed to slip close enough to the fort before galloping the final stretch to deliver the news.

Assault

Greene's strategy called for one detachment to seize the smaller redoubt while a bigger force struck the Star Fort itself, with certain soldiers tasked to tear away the sandbags so the tower's defenders would be exposed to gunfire. As the fighting commenced on June 18, matters proceeded favorably at the outset: the lesser redoubt fell into their hands, and troops managed to push through the abatis and rip down the protective sandbags. It was then that Cruger responded with a pair of counterattacking sorties aimed at the sides of the advancing troops. What followed was brutal combat fought largely with bayonets and muskets swung like clubs, and during this struggle the officers leading the charge lost their lives, leaving their soldiers no choice but to fall back to their own trenches. Given this setback, and with Rawdon positioned merely 30 miles (48 km) distant, Greene decided to abandon the offensive and commanded his forces to withdraw.

Aftermath

Casualties from the engagement told an uneven story: Greene suffered 150 losses against fewer than 100 for Cruger. With Rawdon now free to unite with Cruger, Greene pulled his army back toward Charlotte, North Carolina. Rawdon dispatched a substantial detachment to pursue him, though scorching temperatures and exhausting marches over long distances hampered their progress. Eventually this pursuing force was ordered back to Ninety Six, a post Rawdon subsequently gave up entirely.

In assigning blame for the campaign's collapse, Greene pointed partly to Sumter and Marion, whose delayed support left his operations without timely backing. Other officers later turned their criticism toward Greene and Lee themselves, arguing they had erred by not severing the defenders' access to water at the Spring Branch.

Lee, in his own memoirs, placed much of the responsibility on Colonel Kosciuszko. He argued that the engineer had positioned the first parallel too near the Star Fort and had failed to anticipate how long his sappers, few in number and poorly supplied, would need to cut through ground as hard as stone to complete a workable trench for the siege. Yet despite these shortcomings weighing on the overall failure, Greene himself praised Kosciuszko for executing his assigned tasks well, remarking that with additional time the engineer's design could plausibly have succeeded.

Once word reached Greene that Rawdon had abandoned Ninety Six, he attempted to unify his scattered forces so as to strike Rawdon before the British commander could reach Charleston safely. This plan collapsed, again due to what appeared to be sluggish responses from Sumter and Marion. Greene then allowed his troops to recover through much of July and August, camped in the High Hills of the Santee, before renewing combat with British forces near Charleston at Eutaw Springs on September 8, 1781, the final major clash of the war in the southern theater.