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Updated: May 5, 2025
But the feebleness and timidity of Stewart, and his ignorance of the state of affairs in Marion's camp, saved these generals from the necessity of a retreat which would have been equally full of danger and humiliation. The movement of Greene across the Congaree induced him to draw towards Charleston, and Marion was left in safety.
Doyle, with some instinctive notion that his time was short, busied himself in a career of plunder which threatened to strip the plantations south of the Santee and Congaree, and westward to the Edisto, not only of every negro which they contained, but of all other kinds of property.
Fort Motte, Fort Granby, Fort Watson, the fort at Orangeburg, and every other post in South Carolina, except Charleston and Ninety-Six, had yielded successively to the American arms, under the command of Greene, Sumter, Marion, and Lee; and now General Greene turned all his energies to the reduction of Ninety-Six, giving orders at the same time, for General Sumter to remain in the country south and west of the Congaree, so as to cut off all communication between Lord Rawdon, who was at Charleston awaiting reinforcements from England, and Colonel Cruger, who was in command at Ninety-Six.
Finding Rawdon strongly entrenched there, Greene deemed it prudent not to attack him; and the sickly season approaching, he crossed the Congaree with his little army, and encamped upon the High Hills of Santee, below Camden, where pure air and water might be found in abundance.
Although this matter of firing into Columbia has been the subject of much abuse and investigation, I have yet to hear of any single person having been killed in Columbia by our cannon. On the other hand, the night before, when Woods's division was in camp in the open fields at Little Congaree, it was shelled all night by a rebel battery from the other aide of the river.
An attempt upon such a position, with a force consisting chiefly of mounted infantry, would have been folly, and Greene, after a brief demonstration, determined to withdraw one half of his army towards the Congaree, while the other was sent forward upon that memorable incursion into the lower country, by which the enemy, from all quarters, were driven into Charleston; and, with the exception of the force at Orangeburg, for a brief period, every vestige of British power was swept away, down to the very gates of the former place.
Although this matter of firing into Columbia has been the subject of much abuse and investigation, I have yet to hear of any single person having been killed in Columbia by our cannon. On the other hand, the night before, when Woods's division was in camp in the open fields at Little Congaree, it was shelled all night by a rebel battery from the other aide of the river.
Such were the relative positions of the two armies until the 22d of August, when Greene, calling in all his detachments except those under Marion, Mayham and Harden, broke up his camp at the High Hills and proceeded to Howell's ferry, on the Congaree, with the intention immediately to cross it and advance upon Stewart.
In the fertile bottoms on the Congaree River not far above Columbia, lay the well famed estate of Colonel Wade Hampton, which in 1846 had some sixteen hundred acres of cotton and half as much of corn.
Without this junction he had no apprehension that the latter, with an inferior force, would venture an attack upon him, in the strong position which he held. On the afternoon of the 7th September, the army reached Burdell's tavern on the Congaree road, seven miles from the Eutaws. The force under Greene amounted to two thousand men, all told. That under General Stewart was probably about the same.
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