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Charleston map showing the distribution of British forces during the siege Siege of Charleston map 1780 A sketch of the operations before Charlestown, the capital of South Carolina 1780 Siege. Cutting the city off from relief, Clinton began a siege on 1 April, 800 yards from the American fortifications located at today's Marion Square.
The history of Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the longest and most diverse of any community in the United States, spanning hundreds of years of physical settlement beginning in 1670. Charleston was one of leading cities in the South from the colonial era to the Civil War in the 1860s.
Major operations in the South during 1780. Clinton moved against Charleston, blockading the harbor in March 1780 and building up about 10,000 troops in the area. His advance on the city was uncontested; the American naval commander, Commodore Abraham Whipple, scuttled five of his eight frigates in the harbor to make a boom for its defense. [29]
Lincoln was forced to surrender Charleston and more than 5,000 Continental Army troops on 12 May. It was the worst American loss of the war. The United States Army did not suffer a loss of similar size until the Battle of Harper's Ferry during the American Civil War .
When the American Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, the city of Charlestown, in the Province of South Carolina, was a center of commerce in southern North America. The city's citizens joined other colonists in opposing the British parliament's attempts to tax them, and militia recruitment increased when word arrived of the April 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord. [4]
At the end of 1779, Clinton and Cornwallis transported a large force south and initiated the second siege of Charleston during the spring of 1780, which resulted in the surrender of the Continental forces under Benjamin Lincoln. [42] Cornwallis and Clinton at first worked closely together during the siege, but their relationship deteriorated. [43]
The American defenders had been refused the honours of war when they surrendered after the Siege of Charleston (1780). When negotiating the surrender of a British army at Yorktown a year later, American General George Washington insisted: "The same Honors will be granted to the Surrendering Army as were granted to the Garrison of Charles Town."
The Day It Rained Militia: Huck's Defeat and the Revolution in the South Carolina Backcountry, May–July 1780. Charleston, SC: The History Press. ISBN 978-1-59629-015-0. OCLC 60189717. Wilson, David K (2005). The Southern Strategy: Britain's Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775–1780. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.