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Chapter III - Moving South - The British in Georgia
Moving South - The British in Georgia 1778 - 1779
While Washington's troops struggled at Valley Forge, the British waited comfortably in Philadelphia. British military officials in England, however, agonized over the disaster at Saratoga and their failure to pacify the northern colonies. Perhaps their worry accounted for the shift in British attention toward the southern colonies. Exiled loyalists in England argued that Southerners would welcome the British army as "liberators," and British leaders assumed that once the region had been returned to loyalist control it would serve as a base for attacking the remaining rebellious colonies. As a result, the British would fight the last three years of the war under an "old delusions born of the wishful thinking that so often follows frustration." That delusion? That most colonists loved the King and Parliament and that only a few rebel Americans conspired against England.
British General Sir Henry Clinton dispatched thirty-five hundred men from New York and New Jersey to attack Savannah, Georgia, in November of 1778. By the first day of the new year, the British regulars and loyalists had quickly overcome any rebel resistance. As they had expected, the British initially found substantial support among the populace. Approximately fourteen hundred Georgians swore allegiance to the King, and loyalists organized twenty new militia units. In December 1779 a force of eight thousand British troops attacked Charleston South Carolina. After bitter fighting, the American troops in Charleston succumbed to a massive amphibious attack by the British and loyalists. Surrendering on May 12, 1780, the strategic southern port and its fifty-five hundred defenders were captured in the greatest American defeat in the war for independence. However, as one optimistic Marylander declared. "The fate of America is not to be decided by the losses of a town or two."
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