Sullivan's Island: The Fort That Would Not Splinter

After abandoning Boston in March 1776, the British turned south, betting that loyalist sentiment in the Carolinas would let them retake the rebellious colonies from below. Charleston, the wealthiest port in the South, was the target. Standing in the way was an unfinished fort on Sullivan's Island, built from palmetto logs and sand by South Carolina troops who had been at the work since March, commanded by Colonel William Moultrie. On June 28, nine British warships anchored within a few hundred yards of the fort and opened fire for hours. The fort did not fall. Major General Charles Lee, sent by Congress to oversee Charleston's defense, wrote Washington with the news three days later, in a letter that survives at Founders Online with its uncertainty about what to even call what had just happened still intact.

Moultrie took command of Sullivan's Island in March 1776, inheriting a half-built fortification that engineers had only recently begun. With British attention fixed on Boston through the winter, South Carolina had time, though not as much as anyone would have liked, to prepare. The fort's walls were built from two parallel rows of palmetto logs sixteen feet apart, the gap packed with sand. By the time the British fleet appeared offshore in early June, only the seaward-facing walls were finished. Moultrie later recorded the scale of the labor force he found already at work when he arrived to take command.

Moultrie's account comes from his own published memoir, written more than two decades after the war from his personal papers, not from a document composed in 1776 itself. It remains a firsthand source, written by the man who commanded the fort, but it carries the perspective and hindsight of a published memoir rather than a contemporary report.

Admiral Sir Peter Parker brought his squadron, two fifty-gun ships, six frigates, and a bomb vessel, to anchor a few hundred yards off the fort's front battery around eleven in the morning and opened a sustained bombardment. General Henry Clinton's land forces, meant to cross from a nearby island and attack from the rear, were stopped by water too deep to wade and never seriously engaged. The fight became almost entirely a naval one: British guns against a wall of logs and sand that, against every expectation, did not splinter.

Major General Charles Lee, the senior Continental officer overseeing Charleston's defense, wrote to Washington three days later with the first full account to reach his commander.

Lee's hesitation over what to even call the engagement, a success, perhaps not yet a victory, reflects how uncertain the outcome still looked from outside the fort while the guns were firing. By the time he wrote, the answer was no longer in doubt.

Lee's letter to Washington enclosed an intelligence report from five British deserters captured at sea shortly after the battle, men who had served aboard Parker's own ships during the engagement. Their account, preserved alongside Lee's letter in Washington's papers, gave the first detailed picture of what the bombardment had actually cost the British fleet.

According to the deserters' account enclosed with Lee's letter, the flagship Bristol alone suffered 44 killed and 30 wounded, and the frigate Experiment lost 57 killed and 30 wounded, with additional casualties reported aboard the Solebay and the Active. Several of the wounded were reported to have died in the days following the battle. By contrast, the fort's defenders lost a small fraction of that number. The disparity, an unfinished log fort outlasting a Royal Navy squadron's sustained cannonade with comparatively few casualties of its own, was what made the engagement worth writing home about at all.

South Carolina's legislature renamed the fortification Fort Moultrie within days. Congress promoted Moultrie to brigadier general that September. The palmetto tree that had absorbed the British bombardment without splintering was added to South Carolina's state flag, where it remains.