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seized the opportunity, broke through the
American centre, advanced to the summit of the ridge, and brought their whole force into action on the best ground; so that
Greene was forced to a retreat.
Each party lost about three hundred men. The battle was over before
Washington with his cavalry could make the circuit through the forest and attack their rear.
‘Had we defeated the enemy,’ wrote
Greene, ‘not a man of the party would have got back into town.
The disgrace is more vexatious than any thing else.’
The
Americans lost no more than the
British;
Rawdon was compelled to leave the field and return to
Camden;
Greene saved his artillery and collected all his men. Receiving a reenforce-ment of five hundred,
Rawdon crossed the
Wateree in pursuit of him; but he skilfully kept his enemy at bay.
No sooner had
Marion been re-enforced by
Lee, than they marched against the fort on
Wright's bluff below
Camden, the principal post of the
British on the
Santee, garrisoned by one hundred and fourteen men. The
Americans were without cannon, and the bluff was forty feet high; but the forest stretched all around them; in the night the troops cut and hauled logs, and erected a tower so high that the garrison could be picked off by riflemen.
Two days before the battle of Hobkirk's hill, it capitulated.
The connection of
Camden with
Charleston being thus broken, the post became untenable.
On the tenth of May, after destroying all public buildings
and stores and many private houses, the
British abandoned it, and they never held it again.
On the eleventh, the post at
Orangeburgh, held by sixty British
