Colonel William Henderson

William Henderson was born around 1748 in South Carolina and came of age in a colony that was already experiencing the internal tensions between backcountry and lowcountry, patriot and loyalist, that would make South Carolina the most bitterly contested theater of the Revolutionary War. He entered Continental service as an officer in the South Carolina line, serving through the grinding campaigns of the Southern theater where American forces were repeatedly defeated but never permanently destroyed. The South Carolina Continentals endured the fall of Charleston in May 1780, the disaster at Camden in August 1780, and the grueling partisan war that followed, emerging as battle-hardened veterans of a particularly demanding form of warfare.

At the Battle of Eutaw Springs on September 8, 1781, Henderson commanded a regiment of South Carolina state troops in Nathanael Greene's army. The battle was one of the most ferocious engagements of the Southern campaign — a confused, close-range fight that moved through the British camp, around a fortified brick house, and into surrounding gardens. Henderson's regiment maintained discipline through the chaos, pressing the British line and participating in the initial American advance that overran the British camp. When British regulars rallied and counterattacked, using the brick house as a stronghold from which they poured devastating fire, the Americans were eventually forced back. Henderson was severely wounded during the engagement, one of the heavy officer casualties that Greene's army absorbed in a battle that was technically a draw but strategically a devastating blow to British strength in South Carolina.

Henderson recovered from his wounds and outlived the Revolution. His service at Eutaw Springs was part of a pattern of Southern Continental officers who fought with distinction in engagements that their northern counterparts rarely remembered — battles that were decisive for the outcome of the war but that have never achieved the popular recognition of Bunker Hill or Yorktown. Henderson's role in that overlooked campaign of attrition represents the essential contribution of South Carolina's Continental officers to American independence.