What to Expect at the Battle of Camden

Later this month a new book will appear in the Emerging Revolutionary War series: All That Can be Expected: The Battle of Camden and the British High Tide in the South, August 16, 1780, by Rob Orrison and Mark Wilcox.

With the Battle of Camden, Britain seemed to find a strategy to win back the rebellious southern colonies. Crown forces took Savannah, Georgia, in the fall of 1779, then Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1780. The king’s army, which hadn’t penetrated far inland from the northern ports, now began to set up outposts in the Carolina backcountry.

The Continental Congress assigned Gen. Horatio Gates, victor at Saratoga, to rebuild its army in the south from Continental regiments in the middle states and militia from Virginia and North Carolina. He moved against Gen. Cornwallis’s troops near Camden, South Carolina. The two forces met on 16 Aug 1780.

The title of this new book comes from a report by Lt. Col. Benjamin Ford of Maryland: The British “have done all that can be expected of them; we are outnumbered and outflanked.” Gates’s career would never recover.

At 7:00 P.M. this Sunday, 6 August, Orrison and Wilcox will chat about All That Can be Expected with series editor Dan Welch live on the Emerging Revolutionary War Facebook page. The recorded conversation will be posted on the allied YouTube and Spotify a week later.

Dredging Up Details

Here are some recent dispatches from the realm of eighteenth-century marine archeology.

A few miles downstream from Savannah, a dredging operation has brought up nineteen cannon that experts believe date from the Revolutionary War.

Specifically, from the fall of 1779:

When French ships carrying troops were spotted off the Georgia coast, the British hurried to scuttle at least six ships in the Savannah River downstream from the city to block the French vessels.

Since the cannon would have been useful on other ships or ashore, the scuttling must have been hasty indeed.

Read more from WAMU here.

In Alexandria, Virginia, officials are trying to decide what to do with timbers from four ships discovered along the Potomac River from 2015 to 2018, as shown above. These were most likely merchant ships, not warships.

Preserving that wood requires keeping it wet. Since the finds, most of the timbers have been kept in city tanks while “Some pieces of the largest ship have been undergoing restorative treatment and study at Texas A&M.”

Now there’s a proposal to carefully place the pieces of at least one keel in a pond in a public park, which would be turned into a waterfront museum featuring the artifacts.

WJLA has more details.

Finally, with the 250th anniversary of the burning of H.M.S. Gaspee coming up next month, Rhode Islanders have renewed efforts to locate the remains of that ship.

Finding the Gaspee appears to depend on the wreck being preserved and hidden in deep silt that can nevertheless be penetrated by “sub-bottom-profiling sonar.”

Recovering artifacts would be a more expensive proposition for another season, and then there’s a legal issue: the Gaspee is still the property of the British government.

For more coverage, see the Providence Journal.

Uniforms Less Than Uniform

Last year Prof. Ashli White of the University of Miami wrote on the Omohundro Institute’s blog about her research at the institute and nearby Colonial Williamsburg.

As armies and navies were deployed throughout the Atlantic, they took with them uniforms, flags, banners, and even dinnerware, emblazoned with insignia that declared where they stood on the ideological spectrum of revolution. . . .

Sources show that soldiers were not wearing uniforms as we tend to think of them—snappy, carefully coordinated sets with various accoutrements and details that adhered to clear codes. Rather, soldiers’ and even officers’ clothing was much more mixed, if not at times downright ad-hoc. This situation resulted because of the difficulties of distributing clothing and its constant wear-and-tear. What’s more, armies appropriated their enemy’s clothing as spoils of war and then incorporated it into their kits. And whenever possible, soldiers exerted their own sartorial preferences, too.

Take, for example, a uniform coat in CW’s collections that had worn by a British Field officer in North America. I had the privilege to meet with Linda Baumgarten, curator of textiles, to look at examples of both civilian and military clothing, including this remarkable coat. It dates from about 1790, but as Erik Goldstein, the curator of mechanical arts and numismatics, has demonstrated, it is stylistically in keeping with coats worn during the American Revolution. So while gearing up for war with France, this British officer chose a cut for his coat that harkened to his service almost twenty years before, even though it was out of step with the latest trends.

I couldn’t find a picture of the coat White described, but this waistcoat (shown above) came into the Colonial Williamsburg collection with it.

The museum curators understand that the coat and waistcoat were made for Col. James Moncrieff, who had become a young army engineer in 1763 in time for the siege of Havana. During the Revolutionary War he served at Brandywine, Stono Ferry, Savannah (from the inside), and Charleston (from the outside). The museum says, “He attained the appointment to deputy adjutant general in 1790. The style of this coat is specific to deputy adjutant general and quartermaster general.” Moncrieff was mortally wounded at Dunkirk in 1793.