The Battle of Sullivan’s Island, 1776

M. Foster Farley describes how a powerful attack on the State of South Carolina, by the British fleet and army was met and valiantly repulsed.

When success eluded both the Americans and the British in the first year of the American Revolution - the Americans had been forced out of Canada, and the British had evacuated Boston for Halifax, Nova Scotia - the British turned their attention to the South and its Royal governors.

They based their assumptions on rebel weakness from poor intelligence sources; ‘experience should have taught’ them that the South was ‘as vigorously insurgent as New England’.1 The Governor of Virginia, John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, was defeated by the rebel militia at Great Bridge in December, 1775; Josiah Martin, North Carolina’s last Royal Governor, also suffered defeat at rebel hands at Moore’s Creek Bridge in February, 1776; and the Governor of South Carolina, Lord William Campbell, was run out of the colony, and had to take refuge aboard a British man-of-war in Charleston harbour, in September, 1775.

Despite these reverses, the British believed that if a large naval force, backed by a strong army, appeared on the Southern coast, the Loyalists would rally, and the rebels would return to the fold. So it was that in 1776 a ‘Southern strategy’ was formed in London.

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