The Cost of Winning

The British won the siege of Ninety Six. That sentence is accurate. It's also a nearly complete mischaracterization of what happened in 1781.

When I teach this period, I try to get students to think about what victory meant at this stage of the southern campaign. Rawdon arrived, Greene withdrew, and the garrison celebrated. Then Rawdon looked at his supply situation and the state of the roads and the strength of partisan activity between Ninety Six and Charleston, and he ordered the post abandoned.

The Loyalist civilians who had been sheltering under the fort's protection — and there were hundreds of them, families who had been fighting their Patriot neighbors since 1775, people who had tied their futures to the British cause because they believed in it or feared the alternative — those families had to leave. Many of them walked to Charleston with what they could carry. Many eventually wound up in East Florida, or Nova Scotia, or the Bahamas. They never came back.

The archaeological and historical record at Ninety Six tells a story that the standard military narrative doesn't: a six-year civil war within a war, a community that destroyed itself along political lines, and a defeat that looked, from the outside, like a British victory until you counted the people who had to leave and never returned.

That's what Greene's campaign actually accomplished. Not winning battles. Making British victories cost more than the British could sustain.