Siege of Savannah, 1779: the allied assault that killed Pulaski

Savannah had been in British hands since 29 December 1778, when a British force seized the port as the main theater of the war shifted to the southern colonies. Its recapture became possible a year later because France was now in the war. After the American victory at Saratoga, France signed treaties of commerce and alliance with the United States on 6 February 1778, and Louis XVI sent Vice-Admiral Charles Henri d'Estaing across the Atlantic with the Toulon squadron. D'Estaing fought at Rhode Island in August 1778 and took St. Vincent and Grenada in the West Indies in July 1779.²

A landing in hurricane season

On 3 September 1779 a British lookout reported five French ships of the line off Tybee Island. The rest of the fleet, thirty-three warships and transports carrying more than 4,000 troops, arrived on 9 September, at the worst time of year on the Georgia coast. The British sank six ships in the Savannah River to block the approach. The French began landing at Beaulieu, fourteen miles south of the city, on the night of 11 or 12 September, without pilots; some soldiers sat in open boats for three nights, and once ashore they had no tents in the rain.³

From the north General Benjamin Lincoln reached Cherokee Hill, ten miles northwest of Savannah, with 600 Continental troops, 200 horsemen of Casimir Pulaski's legion and 750 militiamen. In all, the National Museum of the United States Army puts the allied army at some 7,700 men.⁴

The surrender demand of 16 September

On the morning of 16 September d'Estaing demanded that General Augustine Prevost surrender the garrison. Prevost asked for time. While he delayed, Lieutenant Colonel John Maitland marched in from Beaufort, South Carolina, with about 800 Scottish soldiers of Fraser's Highlanders, bringing the British regulars to 3,200, besides militia, Native warriors and armed Black Loyalists. Prevost's council of war then rejected the demand.⁵

Lincoln and d'Estaing chose a formal siege. On 22 September the French began landing their heavy guns at Thunderbolt and Causton's Bluff and hauling them five miles overland through heavy rain. Meanwhile the British protected their line with an abatis of sharpened stakes and covered the strong Spring Hill redoubt on their right with the Sailors' Battery and the armed brig Germain. The allied batteries opened fire on the night of 3 to 4 October. An American officer, Major John Jones, wrote to his wife that he expected the town to surrender within forty-eight hours, and that otherwise the army would have to storm it.⁶

The assault on Spring Hill

The bombardment did not break the garrison, and with the season worsening d'Estaing ordered an assault for the night of 8 to 9 October. It was to be three coordinated attacks. A column of 500 militia under General Isaac Huger feinted against the redoubt on the White Bluff Road and was met with musketry and music. Colonel Arthur Dillon's Irish battalion lost its way in the swamp and was driven back. The main blow fell exactly where Prevost had predicted, on the Spring Hill redoubt, in Maitland's sector. D'Estaing himself later wrote that two American deserters had warned the British of the point of attack the day before.⁷

Three French and two American columns were meant to go in together at about 5 a.m. The French arrived late, and d'Estaing sent his first column forward before the others were ready. It crossed some 500 yards of open ground to the cry of "Vive le roi!", answered by the Highlanders' bagpipes, and was torn apart by grapeshot and musketry at the abatis. The second and third columns met the same fate. On the left, Colonel John Laurens's 2nd South Carolina Continentals and the Charleston militia, followed by General Lachlan McIntosh, got into the ditch and planted the colors of South Carolina and France on the earthwork, but the parapet was too high to scale under such fire. A counterattack led by the grenadiers of the 60th Regiment and a company of marines drove them out. "The action did not last longer than an hour; it was very violent," d'Estaing wrote.⁸

The death of Pulaski

Pulaski had waited with his 200 horsemen to charge through a breach that never opened. Hearing that d'Estaing had been cut down, he rode forward with his aide, Captain Paul Bentalou, to see the ground for himself, and grapeshot from either the Sailors' Battery or the Germain struck him in the groin. According to the account of the assault reproduced by the National Museum of the United States Army, as he was carried off he told Colonel Daniel Horry, who took over the cavalry, to follow his lancers. He lingered for two days before dying.⁹

Aftermath

The New Georgia Encyclopedia counts about 1,094 allied dead, some 650 of them French. British losses are less certain: Sir Henry Clinton reported 16 killed and 39 wounded among the King's troops, while most authorities accept about 40 killed and 63 wounded. Clinton called the repulse "the greatest event that has happened in the whole war". The French sailed away, Lincoln fell back to Charleston, and Georgia remained a British colony, the base for the British advance into the Carolinas and Virginia.¹⁰

George Washington drew a different lesson. Writing to Lincoln two months later, he took comfort that the failure had increased, not destroyed, the trust between the French and American armies. Two years later that trust was rewarded when a Franco-American army captured a British army at Yorktown.¹¹ › George Washington