Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/269

 Rh from Wappoo Neck, and only on the 29th did the British army cross the Ashley River. Meanwhile fortifications had been springing up like mushrooms in the Charleston sand.

No serious opposition was offered to the landing, nor to the advance of the army. Yet the opportunities for resisting or, at least, for annoying the British, must have been such as to have tempted a more able and energetic commander than Lincoln. The invaders were landing from a long and exhausting voyage, and were without horses to drag their cannon and stores. Lincoln's true course would probably have been to imitate Washington in the campaign before Philadelphia. He might have risked a battle, and, if defeated, have abandoned Charleston and preserved his army for the protection of the Southern States. Those states were now to be given up to plunder and blood. The war in the Carolinas and Virginia was marked by a degree of barbarity which had no parallel in the Eastern and Middle States, except in the small plundering expeditions in the neighborhood of New York. Already in the preceding year Prevost's soldiers had begun this barbarous style of warfare. The marks of their plundering were visible in every house on the islands they had occupied near Charleston.

While Lincoln was throwing up his sand-works in the town, the English were receiving reinforcements from Savannah. The men-of-war, all but the heaviest, were lightened, brought over the bar and refitted. Fort Moultrie, however, still defended the town, and the American and French ships in the harbor, and between it and Charleston the besieged had sunk