The Last Charge

The assault on Spring Hill Redoubt began at dawn on October 9, 1779. D'Estaing and Lincoln had planned a three-column attack, and on paper it was sound: the British were outnumbered, the allied artillery had been hammering the defenses for weeks, and if the columns hit simultaneously the garrison could not concentrate fast enough to stop them all.

The plan depended on coordination that the Franco-American command could not achieve. The French columns and the American columns did not arrive together. The British had time to concentrate. The first French column went in and was cut apart by musket and artillery fire in the abatis — the tangle of sharpened branches in front of the walls. The second column came up and went in and was cut apart too. The South Carolina Continentals in Jasper's element reached the parapet and planted their colors and were shot off it.

Pulaski had his cavalry behind the French columns, waiting for the moment when a breakthrough would let him exploit the gap. The gap never opened. What opened instead was a space in the confused fighting where cavalry might still force something — might still, by speed and shock, change the outcome that was hardening against them.

He led the charge. Grapeshot — a canvas bag packed with iron balls, fired from a cannon at close range — hit him in the groin. He was carried from the field and put aboard the brig Wasp. He died two days later.

There is a particular quality to dying in a failed assault that battlefield deaths in successful ones do not share. The men who fell at Bunker Hill fell in a defeat that became a moral victory — the British took the hill but paid for it enormously and the courage of the defenders was the story that survived. The men who died at Spring Hill Redoubt died in a defeat that simply failed. The wall was not taken. The city was not retaken. D'Estaing sailed away. Lincoln retreated to Charleston. The suffering at Spring Hill did not purchase anything except the knowledge that they had tried.

Pulaski understood that the charge might not work. He led it anyway. Whether that is courage or recklessness or simply the logic of the moment — when everything else has failed and you still have cavalry and there is still a chance — is a question that the documents do not answer. What the documents show is that he charged, was hit, and died. He was 34 years old. He had been fighting someone's revolution for most of his adult life.