Independence - The Southern Strategy

In December 1778, a British army took Savannah in an afternoon — guided around the American line by an enslaved man betting on which side would make him free. It was the opening move of Britain’s new plan: the South was said to be full of Loyalists who would rise if the army gave them cover, so take the ports, arm the King’s friends, and roll the rebellion up from Georgia. For a year and a half, it worked. This is the story of how the war moved south — the bloody failed attempt to retake Savannah where Casimir Pulaski fell, and then the great prize, Charleston, where General Benjamin Lincoln let his whole army be sealed inside a city and, in May 1780, surrendered some 5,000 men in the worst American defeat of the war. Through Lincoln’s siege, Clinton’s proclamation freeing the slaves of rebels, and the thousands who walked toward the British lines to collect on it, this is Britain at its southern high-water mark — holding every port and every capital, and about to discover it does not hold the country.