John Dooly - Tides of War

Tides of War

This campaign should have been a last turning point that proved to be more decisive than the siege of Yorktown two years later. The professional British army, however, could hardly have been in a better position. Redcoats stranded in South Carolina succeeded in reaching Savannah to join the garrison in concentrating behind extensive fortifications and batteries that the engineers and slave labor erected almost overnight. Within Savannah, the British army, with its white, black, and red allies, had ample supplies of cattle and stores. The besiegers, by contrast, suffered from hunger, disease, and exposure while engaged in grueling but ineffective trench warfare. As part of an ad hoc brigade under Lachlan McIntosh, Dooly and his men participated in the disastrous Franco-American attack upon the British lines on October 9, 1779. The Georgia militia traveled half a mile across a swamp and into a barrage of musket and artillery fire as a British band serenaded them with Come to Maypole, Merry Farmers All. The bullets that fell around them often came from guns fired by Georgia Loyalists. Dooly and his militiamen hastily retreated. Elsewhere on the battlefield, the French army and the American continentals took huge losses while being repulsed largely by North and South Carolinians loyal to the king, some of whom had survived Kettle Creek. Overall, the allied forces suffered the second highest casualties of any side in a single battle of the Revolution, even without counting the many Americans who had already deserted. Immediately afterwards, the allies began to lift the siege and withdraw. Both sick and discouraged, Colonel Dooly returned home with his men.(n48)

The aftermath of these failures came to visit Dooly with a vengeance. Georgia's northern frontier had been a partner in the new state's government. With the British capturing Savannah and overrunning the coastal counties, the frontier had now become the state. Regular elections in December 1779 restored a functioning state government. The electorate, however, likely disenchanted with the council and its members from the refugees of occupied Georgia, as well as with the failures of the war, voted in new leadership from the radical anti-establishment party of the late Button Gwinnett. George Wells and other members of that faction had previously campaigned against the council to which Dooly belonged, even to the point of forming their own competing government. Wells now became governor, but quickly followed the example of Gwinnett and died at the hands of a political opponent, in this instance in a duel with the future governor James Jackson.(n49)

Initially, the new political leadership did try cooperation with Dooly. It approved his requests for more men and forts, as well as the right to sell slaves captured at Savannah to raise money for the militia. The question of Thomas Lee's claim to Leesburg reemerged, however. Georgia's original state government had ordered Dooly evicted from the Lee property but various circumstances (including Dooly being absent while leading militiamen against hostile Indians) had prevented the orders from being carried out before the British army captured Savannah and the state government disappeared. Exactly one year after the fight at Kettle Creek, the new government aided Thomas Lee in his suit to reclaim the land that Dooly had borrowed so heavily to improve, and even ordered Elijah Clarke to evict the Dooly family, by force, if necessary. The members of the governor's council stayed that order temporarily when they learned that Lee had never received a grant for the land in question, but they also ordered Dooly and Burwell Smith to answer for their past confiscation of cattle and supplies for use by the military.(n50)