Governor of South Carolina
A few months after Rutledge’s resignation, the British, having suffered several defeats in the North, decided to try to retake the South. British Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Campbell landed in Georgia with 3,000 men and quickly took control of the entire state.
In 1779, Rutledge was elected to head the government of South Carolina under a revision of the new constitution. Governor Rutledge sent a detachment of troops under General Benjamin Lincoln into Georgia to harass the British. The new British commander, General Jacques Prevost, learned what Rutledge was doing and set out toward Charleston with 2500 troops. When Rutledge heard about the British, he hurried back to Charleston and worked furiously to build up defenses. In spite of Rutledge’s efforts, when General Prevost arrived outside Charleston, the British force had been greatly increased by the addition of Loyalists, and the Americans were vastly outnumbered.
Rutledge privately asked Prevost for surrender terms. Prevost made an offer, but when Rutledge submitted it to the council of war, the council instructed Rutledge to ask if the British would accept a declaration of South Carolina’s neutrality in the Revolution. They forbade Rutledge from surrendering mainly because William Moultrie, who was now a general, believed that the Americans had enough troops to at least equal the British force, which consisted largely of untrained civilians. When given the offer, Prevost replied by saying that as he was faced with such a large military force, he would have to take some of them prisoner before he could accept. Moultrie advised the council that he would never stand by and allow the British to simply take them prisoner, so the council decided to fight it out. The city braced itself for an attack, but the next morning, the British had disappeared. Prevost had intercepted a letter from General Lincoln to Moultrie saying that he was marching to the aid of Charleston, and Prevost decided that he could not hold out if the Americans got reinforcements.
Read more about this topic: John Rutledge
Famous quotes containing the words governor of, governor, south and/or carolina:
“[John] Brough’s majority is “glorious to behold.” It is worth a big victory in the field. It is decisive as to the disposition of the people to prosecute the war to the end. My regiment and brigade were both unanimous for Brough [the Union party candidate for governor of Ohio].”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Three years ago, also, when the Sims tragedy was acted, I said to myself, There is such an officer, if not such a man, as the Governor of Massachusetts,—what has he been about the last fortnight? Has he had as much as he could do to keep on the fence during this moral earthquake?... He could at least have resigned himself into fame.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I need not tell you of the inadequacy of the American shipping marine on the Pacific Coast.... For this reason it seems to me that there is no subject to which Congress can better devote its attention in the coming session than the passage of a bill which shall encourage our merchant marine in such a way as to establish American lines directly between New York and the eastern ports and South American ports, and both our Pacific Coast ports and the Orient and the Philippines.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)