Twenty-Eight Days

Cruger had 550 men. Greene had a thousand, and more militia operating on his flanks. Cruger had no way to know when or whether relief would come — Rawdon was still organizing his column in Charleston, and communications between the fort and the coast ran through partisan country that Greene's forces were actively watching.

The siege began on May 22. By the first week of June, Greene's Maham tower — a timber frame tall enough to fire down into the fort — had been raised within range of the Star Fort. The garrison responded by piling sandbags on top of the parapet, raising the height enough to restore cover. The daily fire from the tower killed and wounded men steadily.

On June 18, Greene received word that Rawdon was three days away. He ordered the assault that night. Two picked detachments went in with poles fitted with iron hooks, tasked with pulling down the sandbag parapet. They reached the ditch. Some of them got into the fort. Cruger's men fought them out of it hand to hand.

The next morning the assault had failed and Greene knew it. He began preparations to lift the siege. Rawdon arrived on June 21. The garrison had held.

What Cruger could not have known — what Rawdon understood and acted on almost immediately — was that the tactical success was meaningless. The garrison had held the fort. The supply lines to it could not hold. Six weeks later, Cruger marched his men out of Ninety Six for the last time, the Loyalist families who had sheltered there trailing behind them, heading for a coast that could not accommodate them all.