Was in Central South Carolina last week and pulled a mile or two off I-95 near Lake Marion to see the overgrown Indian mound and site of Fort Watson, where a small but remarkable revolutionary war battle was fought. A band of patriots led by Francis (“the Swamp Fox”) and “Lighthorse” Harry Lee (future governor of Virginia and father of Robert E. Lee) used a cool tactic to capture the British outpost in 1781. This is from Alan Pell Crawford’s new This Fierce People: the Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South:
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Fort Motte
Interestingly, this very same group of patriots concocted a similarly creative tactic just three weeks later up the road at Fort Motte, a plantation home that had been converted to a military post and supply depot by the British. The post surrendered when members of the patriot force shot flaming arrows onto the roof of the house (and started to burn it down with the widow Motte’s permission). After the surrender, the colonials and British troops joined forces to put the fire out and then had a big barbecue.
www.battlefields.org
This was new territory for Marion and Lee. Their specialty was the ambush. Neither had any significant experience in siege warfare, which was what taking Fort Watson seemed to require. They decided to cut off the fort’s water supply, but this failed when McKay’s defenders, three or four days into the siege, dug a hole inside the stockade and hit water. Intermittent firing between the two positions accomplished little, except to litter the ground around the fort with the bodies of dead attackers.
But then Hezekiah Maham, a forty-year-old planter who had represented his home district in the South Carolina legislature, offered a plan they had not thought of. They could construct a wooden tower, much like those of ancient Rome, higher than the stockade—and from there, they could simply fire into the fort. With nothing to lose by trying, Marion and Lee ordered their men to gather axes from nearby farms and start chopping down trees. For five days and nights, the men collected the materials they would need, and the tower’s assembly, done out of sight of the fort, began on the night of Friday, April 20. When the structure was completed, Lee said, it formed “a large, strong oblong pen, to be covered on the top with a floor of logs, and protected on the side opposite to the fort with a breastwork of light timber.”
On Saturday, when the tower was just about ready, Marion asked McKay for a truce long enough for them to collect the American dead. Reminding them that their men continued to fire on the fort, McKay turned them down. On Monday morning, McKay awoke to see “a Wooden Machine which they had built, & were busy in raising a Scaffold made of rails [nearly] level with the top of our Works for their Marksmen to pick off our Centinels.” When they had reached the desired height, the riflemen in the crow’s nest rained fire into the fort, whose defenders, by one account, “crawled around behind their palisade,” unable to mount any kind of credible defense.
Back on terra firma, the Americans stormed the exterior, this time successfully pulling the abattis away and scrambling up the mound, further terrifying the men inside the stockade. Unable to defend the fort without being raked by the riflemen on the tower, McKay’s men quickly lost heart. Again, Marion and Lee demanded the fort’s surrender, and McKay was “reduced to the disagreeable necessity of capitulating,” thanks to “the Cowardly & Mutinous behaviour” of his men, who “grounded their Arms & refused to defend the Post any longer.”
Santee Indian Mound and Fort Watson Site · Summerton, SC 29148
âââââ · Historical landmark
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Fort Motte
Interestingly, this very same group of patriots concocted a similarly creative tactic just three weeks later up the road at Fort Motte, a plantation home that had been converted to a military post and supply depot by the British. The post surrendered when members of the patriot force shot flaming arrows onto the roof of the house (and started to burn it down with the widow Motte’s permission). After the surrender, the colonials and British troops joined forces to put the fire out and then had a big barbecue.
Siege of Fort Motte, South Carolina
Unknown to the family who built their homestead at the time, the Mount Joseph Plantation would serve as a pivotal intersection for supply routes during the...
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