Victory at Charles Town
9-28 JUNE 1776
250th ANNIVERSARY
VICTORY AT CHARLES TOWN
The British evacuation of Boston in 1775 turned their attentions to the southern American colonies. To Anglican eyes, the origin of revolution in the northern mercantile colonies left the southern agrarian colonies as passionate Loyalists. For much of the war the British mistakenly believed that Loyalists would flock to the ranks of a Royal Army marching through the Carolinas. As such, MGEN Sir Henry Clinton was sent to Cape Fear with the fleet of Commodore Sir Peter Parker to rendezvous with a convoy from England carrying MGEN Earl Cornwallis’ Southern Expeditionary Force. From there they would attack across the North Carolina coast. But the plan unraveled when Cornwallis was delayed. Worse, North Carolina Scots Loyalists under Donald McDonald were defeated by patriot militia at the battle of Moore’s Creek near Wilmington. Cornwallis’ arrival in the Spring of 1776 found Clinton reasoning that an assault further south at Charles Town (Charleston) would be more successful.
Yet again, everything went wrong. A planned June 9th landing of Clinton’s troops on Long Island (modern Isle of Palms) would position troops to wade across the 18-inch-deep inlet to adjacent Sullivan’s Island, while Parker staged a coordinated naval bombardment of patriot Fort Sullivan protecting the harbor entrance. But it took an unexpected five days to land the troops, then another fifteen days to position Parker’s ships!
And on this day, the spongy palmetto logs from which COL William Moultrie had built Fort Sullivan simply absorbed the British shot. British bombs rolled harmlessly off the fort’s slanted walls into a perimeter ravine. And despite having only 28 rounds apiece for the 26 guns, American fire was telling. Many British vessels were hulled–one American shot exploded the quarterdeck aboard Parker’s flagship, HMS BRISTOL, 50, blowing Parker’s uniform pants clean away! HMS ACTEON, 28, ran aground and was scuttled, and two other ships were badly damaged. Meanwhile Clinton’s troops on Long Island discovered to their surprise that the inlet they needed to ford was not 18 inches deep, rather seven feet deep, even at the lowest low tide. Army-navy dyscoordination doomed the attack. By 2130 the same day it began, the firing stopped and Parker retired his battered fleet and 300 casualties. It took a week to re-embark Clinton’s troops, after which the British sailed back to New York.
“Huzzah!” arose from Sullivan’s Island. Only ten men inside the fort had been killed and 24 wounded. The jubilant defenders renamed the fort “Moultrie” in honor of their commander, and Charleston stood in patriot hands for three more years. Fort Moultrie remained a continuously active Army installation until the post-WWII years.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 4 JUL 2026
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Griffith, Samuel B., III. The War for American Independence. Urbanna, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002, pp. 279-80, 285-86.
Langguth, A.J. Patriots: The Men who Started the American Revolution. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1988, pp. 331-33.
McDowell, Bart. The Revolutionary War: America’s Fight for Freedom. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1967, pp. 80-85.
Site visit. Fort Moultrie, part of Fort Sumter National Monument, Charleston, South Carolina, 16 August 2005.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Historians credit this battle more as a British debacle than a Patriot triumph. Nevertheless, this battle is revered in local South Carolina legend, and the success of the palmetto log fort on Sullivan’s Island was key to the derivation South Carolina’s nickname, the “Palmetto State.” The palmetto tree on the South Carolina state flag commemorates this battle, as does the crescent, a reference to the protective metal neckguards worn under the chins of the defenders of Fort Moultrie. HMS ACTEON’s wreck is still marked on modern charts.
After the British withdrew from Philadelphia in 1778, they would renew their interest in the southern colonies—again errantly believing them to be staunchly Loyalist. This time Charles Town would fall to a six-week siege on 12 May 1780. The surrender was a serious blow to the Patriot cause and cost GEN Washington 5300 Continental soldiers captured and 300 cannon lost, along with 6000 muskets and 49 military, privateer, and civilian ships.
