The Tower That Won Augusta

The problem with Fort Cornwallis was the walls. Thomas Brown had been a careful engineer as well as a ruthless commander, and the fort he had built on the high ground near the Savannah River had walls thick enough and high enough to make a direct infantry assault suicidal. Andrew Pickens and Henry Lee had begun the Augusta siege on May 22, 1781. By the end of the first week, it was clear that conventional approaches were not going to work.

Lee had seen the Mayham Tower work at Fort Watson in South Carolina earlier that spring. Colonel Hezekiah Maham, a South Carolina militia officer, had proposed the technique: construct a log tower tall enough to overtop the enemy's walls, platform it, and post riflemen who could fire down into any part of the fort's interior. The British could not depress their own cannon enough to hit a tower at close range, and the riflemen on top could reach anyone inside the walls.

Building it was the challenge. The tower required straight timber — not easy to find quickly — and it had to be assembled under fire. Brown's garrison sortied twice to try to destroy the construction. Both sorties were beaten back. The men building the tower worked through the night to get it to height before Brown could organize a third attempt.

When the tower became operational, the effect was immediate. Brown's men could no longer move freely inside the fort. The water supply was exposed to fire from above. The magazine, the officers' quarters, the entire interior of the fort was visible to the riflemen on the platform. Brown held out for a few more days — the man had demonstrated throughout the siege that he would not surrender easily — but by June 5 there was no rational military case for continued resistance.

Brown's surrender on June 5, 1781 ended the British presence in the Georgia interior. The Mayham Tower was a small tactical innovation in the larger context of the war, but at Augusta it was decisive. Lee wrote about it with evident satisfaction in his memoirs, noting the elegance of a solution that achieved through engineering what could not have been achieved through frontal assault. The men who would have died in a direct attack on Fort Cornwallis did not have to die. That mattered.