"Sumter’s Rounds: The Ill-Fated Campaign of Thomas..." Topic
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Tango01 | 28 May 2018 11:39 a.m. PST |
… Sumter, February–March 1781. "n February 1781, Thomas Sumter emerged from his three-month convalescence to begin his next campaign in the South Carolina interior. Having been wounded seriously in the back, chest, and shoulder at the Battle of the Blackstocks, leading his militia army against a combined force of British regulars and volunteers commanded by the notorious Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton on November 20, 1780, Sumter was not yet completely healed. Yet he had good reasons to hurry a return to the field. As Sumter's biographer Anne Gregorie King notes, the planning of a militia campaign in the South Carolina backcountry often depended on the crop cycle and the contingencies of a six-week enlistment, and Sumter understood instinctively he would need to muster his militia in February if he hoped to campaign before the spring planting season. He also believed Cornwallis's foray into North Carolina, in the campaign that would culminate in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse on March 15, 1781, had left the remaining British force in South Carolina vulnerable to a decisive attack. Informing his men erroneously that Francis, Lord Rawdon had only three hundred men enforcing the British garrison in Camden, Sumter proposed a lightning strike on the Congaree and Santee outposts guarding the British supply line between Camden and Charleston. With Rawdon's reduced force unable to adequately reinforce these outposts, he argued, a successful campaign could isolate the British garrisons at Camden and Ninety-Six, forcing Rawdon to abandon the South Carolina interior. That these outposts also contained considerable stores of British supplies and captured loot was a fact not lost on Sumter. Ever the backcountry psychologist, Sumter knew his men would be as motivated by the promise of plunder as they were by a chance to deliver a decisive blow against the British…" Main page link Amicalement Armand |
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