Logs against the Royal Navy

What happened

In the spring of 1776 General Clinton, with three thousand regulars and a fleet of more than fifty warships under Commodore Sir Peter Parker, set out to take Charleston, or at least Fort Sullivan in its harbor, as a base for invading the whole South. Rothbard has Charles Lee, the one general Congress thought could save the city, rushing south to shore up its defenses, though Lee thought the fort exposed and unsound. The fort was unfinished: two walls of palmetto logs sixteen feet apart, filled with sand, around thirty-one assorted guns. On 28 June the fleet opened fire about half past ten. The British shot bounced off the spongy logs or buried itself in the sand. Moultrie, short of powder, had his gunners fire four guns at a time, and a British engineer wrote that their fire was "slow, but decisive indeed." Rothbard says clumsy piloting ran several frigates aground. When the flagstaff was shot away, Sergeant William Jasper climbed out and raised the blue flag again. The garrison lost a few dozen men; the fleet lost hundreds. A few weeks later the British sailed north. Rothbard gives the credit to Lee, Moultrie and their men: they saved Charleston, and with it much of the South, for years.