The Battle of Sullivan’s Island, 1776

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.