This lesser known leader of the Revolution comes to us courtesy of our founder, North Callahan, who is still reading and researching at 93. North says if he were five years younger, he would tackle a book on Moultrie. For the time being, he has persuaded a younger scholar, Warren Gardner, to write an interesting article on him in Prologue, the Journal of the South Carolina Historical Society. What follows is an adaptation of that text.
Forty five years old when the Revolution exploded in 1775, William Moultrie was the son of a Scots physician who emigrated to South Carolina in 1729. The son had an early attraction to military life, serving as a captain in the Cherokee Wars of 1759 and 1761. One of his subordinate officers was Francis Marion.
As tensions between England and America grew acute, the blunt burly Moultrie made no secret of his allegiance. He called one South Carolina loyalist ``a stupid ignorant blockhead.'' He also had no illusions of a peaceful solution and urged the government to raise an army. By the fall of 1775, Moultrie was commanding a regiment. He enthusiastically obeyed an order from the Provincial Congress to seize Fort Johnson in Charleston's harbor, which was held by a handful of loyalists. Moultrie promptly raised South Carolina's flag over the fort. The loyalists called it an act of war.
Moultrie swiftly seized other strong points around the harbor and fortified them, forcing British men of war to anchor off Sullivan's Island, northeast of the port. Realizing this island could become a staging area for an enemy attack, the grimly determined Moultrie built a fort on it, large enough to hold 1000 men. It was a daunting task. The place, Moultrie later wrote, was ``nothing more than a wilderness, covered with oak, myrtle and palmetto trees."
The fort was only half finished when a British fleet attacked it on June 28, 1776. With the sailors was General Henry Clinton and 2,000 picked troops, ready to suppress the revolution in the palmetto state. The British fleet had 270 guns to Moultrie's 25. For eleven and half hours, the battle raged. When the battered British retreated, they left one of their frigates aground and were forced to burn her. Moultrie had only 12 men killed and 27 wounded.
The victory sent a surge of patriotic confidence through the entire South. Moultrie was promoted to brigadier general. He served the rest of the war in the South, most of it as second in command to the inept Benjamin Lincoln, whose bungled attacks on the British in Georgia had much to do with demoralizing the patriot cause in the Carolinas.
When Sir Henry Clinton attacked Charleston with a large fleet and army in late 1779, Moultrie and Lincoln became prisoners of war. The British tried to persuade Moultrie to switch sides. Former Royal Governor Charles Montagu urged him to retreat to Jamaica until the war ended. Moultrie replied: ``Would you wish to have [a] man whom you have honored with your friendship to play the traitor? Surely not.''
Moultrie remained a prisoner until 1782, when he was exchanged for Major General John Burgoyne -- an interesting glimpse of what the British thought this doughty warrior was worth. After two terms as governor of South Carolina, Moultrie retired to write his memoirs, still a sourcebook for the beginnings of the Revolution in the South.
---Warren Gardner/North Callahan