The Worst Day

Benjamin Lincoln had been trying to get out of Charleston since April. The siege lines were closing. The British had crossed the Cooper River and cut the last road north. He knew what the arithmetic said.

He attempted one negotiation in April, proposing terms that would allow the garrison to march out with honors and leave the city to the British. Clinton refused. Lincoln tried again in early May, proposing that the garrison be allowed to leave with their arms. Clinton refused again. The final exchange of notes on May 11 produced terms Lincoln accepted the following morning: the garrison would march out with their colors cased, to their own music rather than a British march. No honors of war. A deliberate humiliation.

What Lincoln was surrendering was not just the army. It was the only organized military force the United States had in the entire southern theater. The men who filed out of Charleston on May 12 would spend the rest of the war on prison ships in the harbor or paroled to their home states. The officers would eventually be exchanged, but most enlisted men simply disappeared from the war. South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina were left defended by whatever militia and partisans could organize themselves without regular support.

Lincoln's own reputation survived the surrender, partly because the strategic situation had genuinely been hopeless and partly because Washington treated him with respect in the aftermath. He was eventually exchanged and served at Yorktown, where his role in accepting Cornwallis's sword gave him a kind of symbolic redemption that military history rarely offers.

But on May 12, 1780, none of that was visible. What was visible was a column of American soldiers marching out between lines of British regulars, colors furled, trying to maintain whatever dignity a defeated army can carry. The British officers watching them were professional enough not to jeer. The city they were leaving behind had been their home, or the home of people they had sworn to protect.