After helping to capture an entire enemy army in 1777 at Saratoga, Samuel saw the tables turned in 1780 when his own army was forced to surrender, and he became a prisoner of war. This last chapter describes what can be gleaned from available sources about his experience and the experience of his comrades in arms in the Continental Army and from 1779 until the end of the war in 1783.
In February 1779, Major Samuel Cabell was granted a furlough, and returned home to Union Hill from New Jersey. It was only his second time home in three years. In 1779, he was not engaged in any documented battles, other than his struggle to get promoted to Lt. Colonel which started in May, continued in August when General Washington wrote to rescind the new rank, and ended in the autumn, when it was officially conferred. Samuel was in the 10th Virginia Regiment under Colonel William Davies, in the 1st Virginia Brigade commanded by Brig. General William Woodford.
In autumn 1779, George Washington received correspondence from General Benjamin Lincoln in Charleston, that his Southern Army was in a dangerous situation and urgently needed reinforcements. Washington soon dispatched 1,000 North Carolinians from New Jersey. Lt. Colonel Henry Laurens then arrived at Morristown and described the earlier battle at Savannah and the precarious situation. In December Congress and Washington made the bold decision to send the entire Virginia Continental line regiments, almost 2,500 men including Samuel, to support of Charleston. In peacetime, the trip would have been by sea. In 1780, however, lumbering troop ships would be too easy prey for the Royal Navy. So, an overland march almost 800 miles was necessary from Morristown, NJ to South Carolina– a long trip even by modern standards. The Virginia 1st Brigade departed sometime in December, and would be on the march during what would be the hardest winter in living memory to hit the Mid-Atlantic. The Hudson River would later freeze solid, connecting Manhattan to the New Jersey.
By early March 1780, the Virginians arrived in Petersburg, having covered over 300 miles. Given his rank at a Lieutenant Colonel, Samuel would likely have traveled on horseback – if a healthy horse was to be had. The Brigade’s numbers had dwindled significantly, from enlistments expiring, sickness and some deaths in the harsh conditions.
On March 9, 1780 Samuel’s father William noted in his commonplace book, that he sent a large shipment of supplies to his son, entrusted to “Isham Valentine, a free negro” for delivery. The supplies included, “1 pair silver mounted pistols and bullet moulds (sic) to Col. Sam’l J. Cabell, also one blue broad cloth coat, one white ditto vest and pr breeches with silver oval buttons, one pair musket curtains, seven shirts (5 of which ruffed at the hands), 2 pr sheets, 4 towels, white Jeans to make him 2 vests and 2 pr breeches, 5 bands, 6 pair thread stockings and 4 pocket handkerchiefs”.
On March 8, the day before William’s diary entry, Samuel’s brigade had actually departed from Petersburg. Whether Isham Valentine was able to catch up and deliver the care package to the Lt. Colonel is not known. General Woodford’s move was in response to a letter he received from besieged General Lincoln “to request that you would leave your wagons & spare Baggage and hasten your march to this Town. Your speedy arrival is most ardently wished for.” Before departing, Woodford wrote to Washington, “I hope we shall still be there in time to be useful.”
The forced march to Charleston was precipitated by a fundamental change in British strategy. The Crown’s results had been poor in New England, New York and the Middle States. The redcoats were victorious in most battles but could not hold the land they had won. Their new “Southern Strategy”, intended to build on the 1778 capture of Savannah. It was based on a belief that there were more loyal subjects in the South, waiting to be liberated and rise up to join the redcoats and help put down the rebellion.
On December 26, 1779, British General Henry Clinton left New York with his army of 13,500 British and German soldiers in 133 ships, leaving only one vessel to guard the harbor. Strong winter storms resulted in only 62 ships arriving at the assigned meeting place with General Cornwallis at the mouth of the Savannah River. So many ships and supplies were lost, that General Clinton did not have a horse to ride at first. Eventually, the redcoats mobilized and moved steadily towards Charleston 107 miles away. For Henry Clinton, the return to Charleston was personal, as well as professional. He had suffered a humiliating defeat there in 1776 when the rebels routed his army and the Royal Navy at the Battle of Sullivan’s Island.
He faced American General Benjamin Lincoln, who had tried unsuccessfully to retake Savannah in October 1779. After the loss, the Continental Southern Army fell back towards Charleston. Lincoln had half as many troops as the enemy. While it was the most fortified city in America, his job was to make it impregnable. Lincoln was not given the authority to set the army’s strategy, an authority that Congress had bestowed on Washington, who had used it to avoid catastrophic defeat. Lincoln was ordered to defend Charleston.
The Americans feverishly added to the defenses, building an outer fortification called the hornwork with protruding angle bastions, curved like bull horns. They created gun emplacements with mortars, supplemented moats that filled with each tide, installed abbatis of pointed logs and dug hundreds of “wolf holes” embedded with sharp stakes. 88 cannons were mounted that could sweep the open field with fire in front of the fortifications. General Lincoln supervised the work on horseback each day from before dawn until after nightfall. The sturdy former New England farmer occasionally joined the white and black work gangs to lend a hand with a pick and shovel. Captain Hinrichs, a German officer with the British, observed the rebel activity, noting “one trench, one battery after another was thrown up. Like mushrooms they spring from the soil.”
Lincoln knew he needed reinforcements urgently. He asked for 3,000 militia that spring, but only 300 reported for duty. Many were deterred by the threat of smallpox, given the low inoculation rates in the region. Lincoln asked planters in the area for help by lending 1,600 enslaved persons to build fortifications but received half that number. On March 24, 700 North Carolinians had their enlistments expire and departed. The Continental Congress authorized South Carolina and Georgia in March “to take measures immediately for raising three thousand able-bodies Negroes.” They would be armed with muskets, commanded by white officers, receive $50 and freedom when peace returned. Each owner would be compensated $1,000 per slave. The initiative was sponsored by Henry Laurens, a friend of Alexander Hamilton and son of the largest slave trader in South Carolina, whose European education had given him a different perspective on slavery than that of his father. The measure was vociferously rejected. South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Christopher Gadsden wrote John Adams, “We are much disgusted here at Congress recommending us to arm our slaves.”
In late March, the British were a closing in on Charleson from the north, having crossed the Ashley River. Surveying the city, a loyalist medic, Dr. Uzal Johnson, noted he “found it not a little like New York.” Surrounded by water, Charleston’s geography was in fact similar to Manhattan, which four years earlier, George Washington recognized as a fatal trap after escaping from Long Island. He did not defend the city but retreated to the mainland to live another day. General Lincoln in spring 1780 could start to sense the noose tightening on Charleston.
After a forced march over 505 miles from Petersburg, averaging 20 miles a day, Woodford’s Virginia Continental Line, including Lt. Colonel Samuel Jordan Cabell and his 10th VA Regiment, arrived in Charleston. In order to evade the British siege, they had traveled by boat for the final leg. In “The Fate of the Day”, Rick Atkinson writes, “At two p.m. on Friday, April 7, 1780, more than seven hundred long-striding Virginia Continentals clambered onto Gadsden’s Wharf from schooners that had carried them down the Wando River and into the Cooper. Lusty cheers, peeling bells and a thirteen-gun salute welcomed them. One witness declared they wore ‘the appearance of what they are in reality – hardy veterans.’ The schooners soon sailed back up the Cooper, carrying townsfolk desperate to flee inland.”
Samuel’s impressions on entering Charleston are not known. In his fourth year in the Continental Army, his unit had never been under siege. The Amherst Rifles were usually on the offensive, either in battle on open ground, or in hit-and-run raids on enemy foraging or scouting parties. General Woodford noted, “the Garrison appear in high Spirits, and our arrival seem’d to give them fresh confidence.” The British were close enough to hear the bells of St. Michael’s peeling most of the day to celebrate the arrival of the Virginians, who were considered among the best troops that America had. The redcoats understood these regulars, especially the feared riflemen, were worth far more than their equivalent in militia. British Generals Clinton and Cornwallis knew, however, that the additional 750 soldiers, would not alter the balance of power. Clinton wrote his reaction to the arrival of the reinforcements, “I rejoice at it. They will now defend their town and when we take it, we shall take all in it.”
The infant American Navy provided support for a while. Naval and civilian watercraft brought vital supplies by river from inland until these areas were eventually controlled by the British. Safety from the sea soon ended when the main British fleet arrived with 100 ships and transport craft to the 13 of the Continental Navy. The Charleston postmaster, Peter Timothy, was tasked with regularly climbing the 186-foot steeple of St. Michael’s Church to observe British military movements. He wrote “Our naval department is feebly and unfertile”. Looking at the British fleet, he said “I could not help admiring the regularity and intrepidity with which they approached…’Tis pity they are not friends.” On April 8, the day after Samuel’s arrival, the British took Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, the gateway to Charleson harbor. The Royal Navy promptly renamed the island for their admiral and sailed their ships within cannon shot of the city. The American navy, rather than attempt what they considered a suicide mission, did not engage the larger British fleet, but moved their cannons off the vessels to strengthen the city’s fortifications. They scuttled some ships to avoid capture and try to block a key channel.
The next day, with Charleston defenseless before the Royal Navy, General Clinton sent a note under flag of truce to General Lincoln warning of “havoc and devastation” unless the city surrendered. Lincoln replied, “duty and inclination” require resistance “to the last extremity”. Despite the odds, one American noted “the army and citizens are in high spirits and have no doubt of being able to defend their city.”
On the morning of April 13, Lincoln convened a war council. As a Lieutenant Colonel, Samuel may not have been part of the council, but his Brigadier General, William Woodford would have been a principal. General Lincoln soon asked the question of “the propriety of evacuating the garrison.” A subordinate officer answered immediately, that they should not wait “an hour longer.” At 10:00 AM, a large artillery barrage started from British batteries north of the city and across the Ashley River. American artillery answered in what became the largest bombardment to date in the war. Houses burned from incendiary shot. In the hours to come, property and people were mangled with devastating effect. An aide to General Moultrie was suddenly decapitated by a cannonball. The assault lasted for days. People began almost to be accustomed to walking the streets under fire.
The Americans fought back. Samuel’s regiment may have been part of keeping the British at bay. Atkinson writes, “Rebel riflemen fired at any movement across the lines, terrorizing the shovel men and shooting through the eye of an incautious infantryman who peeped over a trench wall.”
The patriots’ trouble was compounded when British forces under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton routed four hundred Continental cavalry inland at Monck’s Corner, effectively cutting off supplies from Charleston. A rebel in Charleston wrote that General Clinton “moves with all the care and deliberation of an old Roman….it seems to be the general opinion that we must at last succumb.”
On April 20, General Lincoln held another war conference. There was still a remaining evacuation route, along the road to Christ Church Parish to the Santee River. Enough boats had been collected to cross the wide Cooper River. No doubt some officers thought back to Washington’s successful overnight evacuation of his Army from Brooklyn in 1776 across the East River. During the war council meeting, Lieutenant Governor Gadsden and members of his privy council suddenly barged in. They indignantly stated they were “surprised and displeased” at the “thought of capitulation or evacuation.” American Brigadier General Lachlan McIntosh noted that council member Thomas Ferguson threatened if the army evacuated, he vowed “to be among the first who would open the gates for the enemy and assist them in attacking us before we got aboard.” Atkinson notes that instead of arresting Ferguson for sedition, Lincoln “meekly capitulated”.
Weeks of bombardment followed. The British lines crept within 250 yards of the hornwork. The defiant city fathers became subdued. Lincoln received a petition signed by over a hundred citizens urging him to surrender “in this perilous situation”. Nearly 600 South Carolina militiamen submitted a similar petition. In his diary, General Lachlan McIntosh noted “Militia abandon the lines,” despite orders to stand and defend the city.
On May 11, 1780, a white flag appeared above the fortifications. A Continental officer passed through the gate with the signed surrender, which was handed to German officer Ewald. In his journal, British commander Clinton later noted simply, “the place surrendered.”
At the surrender ceremony, Lincoln led the procession on horseback, followed by Moultrie on foot. After the artillery and the North Carolina line, the Virginians with Lt. Colonel Cabell brought up the rear. The British then entered and occupied the city. The British military governor, General Alexander Leslie asked Lincoln, “I take this sir, to be your first division?” Lincoln replied, “This body sir, contains my first and last division. They are all the troops I have.” Lincoln requested the customary honors of war for the surrender. Clinton refused, on the basis that the Americans were in rebellion, not soldiers of a legitimate state. Ranks stacked their arms, and militia were separated from Continentals. A Hessian officer who was present wrote that a few officers who shouted, “Long live Congress!” were stripped of their swords and sidearms that they had been permitted to retain.
Compared to other conflicts in the war, the Siege of Charleston saw relatively few casualties. The British suffered 316 killed and wounded to 227 for the patriots. The Americans, however, lost an army. 5,610 were taken prisoner of war, only a few hundred less than Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga. Seven generals and three signers of the Declaration of Independence were among the Charleston captives. The loss of most of the Southern Army, including virtually the entire Virginia Line, was a major blow to the American cause that reverberated across the country and beyond.
The British allowed the South Carolina militia to go home on parole. The Continentals would remain captive, with different conditions for soldiers and officers. A Hessian officer later theorized that the decision to separate the offices to the far side of the Cooper River was “to reduce the threat of a secret uprising.” 2,861 soldiers initially were kept imprisoned in barracks on Charleston Neck under relatively benign conditions. After several escape attempts, however, they were transferred to prison ships in Charleston Harbor. In years to come, more would die there than perished in the siege.
Samuel’s commander, Brigadier General William Woodford, for reasons unknown, was singled out for severe treatment. He was sent to New York, where he was confined in a prison ship and died in November, 1780. He was buried in Trinity churchyard, at the end of Wall Street, in Manhattan.
Other Continental officers, including Samuel, fared better. 274 were held separately from the troops across the Cooper River at Haddrell’s Point, present day Point Pleasant. Most were held in brick barracks originally built by the Americans, then taken by the British. The three brick buildings were arranged in a horseshoe in the vicinity of present-day McCants, Pherigo, and Adulah streets. The British allowed some officers to build quarters nearby. General Moultrie stayed in “excellent quarters, at Mr. Pinckney’s place, called Snee Farm.” A Virginia Lieutenant Colonel, Samuel Hopkins, was confined at a house on Lempriere’s Point. As the Point Pleasant Historical Society describes, “Officers were held on the honor system that they would not escape. However, after frequent escapes in May and June, Moultrie and other senior officers housed elsewhere were returned to Haddrell’s Point in hopes that they could maintain order per the conditions of surrender. Officers could move within the limits of Christ Church Parish, and some traveled to the harbor and other waterways to fish and collect shellfish.”
Rather than being held behind bars in cramped quarters, Samuel likely had some freedom as a captive officer. Some evidence of this came two months after the surrender, when the officers were able to throw a boisterous party to “celebrate the Anniversary of Independence”. The British were not amused. Captain J. B. Roberts, commander of Fort Arbuthnot (formerly Fort Moultrie), complained “that the conduct of the rebels at the barracks at Haddrell’s-point, during the course of this night, has been very irregular and improper. Not contented to celebrate this day, of their supposed Independence, with music, illuminations, etc. they have presumed to discharge a number of small arms …”.
Given that one of his soldiers later called Samuel Cabell “impetuous”, it would not have been out of character for him to have joined in the celebratory fire, unless his pistol had been confiscated earlier by the British for shouting “Long live Congress!” at the surrender ceremony.
General William Moultrie himself was part of the July 4th festivities. In response to the Roberts’ complaint, he wrote to British Brigadier General Pattison in Charlestown. He offered, “I had the satisfaction of being there, and can assure you I saw no ‘indecent abuse, or gross outrage’ in any manner committed … some women danced for two or three hours. I am sorry to find that some pistols were fired, which, at the same time, I disapprove. I trust they will not take it in the light, they seem to have done; that they will not imagine any gross outrage was meant, where none was intended; but impute it to the warmth of a cause which the continental officers at Haddrell’s-point have embraced through principle; in which some of them bled; and for which all of them are now suffering.”
Mindful of Samuel’s plight, five months after the surrender, his father, William, sent him another care package as noted in his commonplace book.
Septr. 24. Sent by George Gillespie 26 ½ pistoles, one coat, 4 shirts, 2 bands, three pair silk stockings and three pair thread ditto for my son Sam, to be delivered to James Buchanan to be by him delivered to Capt. Henry Young to be sent by Flag. Also a letter to Sam.
A concerned father’s tenderness is evident in “my son Sam”, in contrast to an earlier entry, “Col. Sam’l J. Cabell”. The fact that William knew how to line up three people to get the package to South Carolina, through enemy lines under a humanitarian flag of truce speaks to his government connections as a member of the Virginia Senate in 1781. The pistoles were not handguns, but European gold coins, still in circulation as an alternative currently. He knew hard money would be far more useful to Sam than Continental dollars, which were worth less and less as more were printed.
The only extant record of Samuel in prison is a 19th Century pension record which states on February 10, 1781, he was a Lt. Colonel in the Virginia 1st. (Brigade). Curiously, there is no mention that he was a prisoner.
In March 1781, associates of partisan fighter Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox”, staged a raid on Haddrell’s Point, freeing many of the Patriot officers there. As they departed the area, the Patriots met General Moultrie near Snee Farm and offered to take him, but he refused, telling them he thought he would be exchanged before long. He also may have been reluctant to break parole, since escape could condemn remaining officers to worse confinement in a prison ship, as had happened for the captive enlisted men. Samuel may not have tried to escape for the same reason.
In May of 1781, a year after the surrender, the two sides came to an agreement allowing prisoners to be exchanged. This could have been when Samuel was released. His terms would have included parole – giving his word not the engage in combat again. For General Moultrie, a prominent Charleston patriot, the pending exchange took an unexpected turn. He found that the local British official, Lord Nesbit Balfour, had amended the exchange terms to include “banishment of Patriot Charlestonians”. Moultrie was able to escape and avoid banishment, settling in Philadelphia.
The first record of Samuel’s release comes from his father’s commonplace book. An August 15, 1781 entry, William notes sent “Harry to Hanover with a chair and horses for my son Sam on parole.” Samuel stopped first in Hanover to visit Sally Syme, the daughter of family friend Colonel John Syme. Six days later, Samuel finally arrived home at Union Hill after 30 months away, and 14 months as a prisoner.
Samuel was not at Yorktown in October, 1781, like his uncles Nicholas and Joseph, and several cousins in the Virginia militia. On parole, he had sworn not to take up arms.
The British position at Yorktown had a fateful symmetry to the what Samuel had faced with the Americans at Charleston. Both were pinned on a peninsula by a far larger enemy army with a hostile navy behind blocking escape. Both endured a siege and relentless bombardment. General George Cornwallis, the British second in command at Charleston, was the commanding general at Yorktown. After his surrender, he claimed that illness made him unable to attend the ceremony, so sent his second, General Charles O’Hara. Washington took the opportunity to reciprocate at Yorktown for the British refusal at Charleston to Lincoln’s request to surrender with the honors of war. O’Hara first tried to surrender Cornwallis’ sword of the senior French officer, General Rochambeau, who refused it, gesturing to Washington. The commander in chief refused since he outranked O’Hara, pointing to the paroled General Benjamin Lincoln, who finally received Cornwallis’s sword. The British band supposedly played “the World Turned Upside Down” on the march to the surrender. The inversion could not have been more personal for Lincoln, Samuel’s former commander, who had gone from the bottom to the top.
On November 15, 1781, Sam Cabell married Sally Symes, three months after his return. Beforehand, William had sent a letter to Sally’s father John to confirm his approval of the marriage.
The war did not end with the Yorktown victory, however. Samuel’s fellow captive officers still at Haddrell’s Point were not released until five months later in March 1782, on exchange. The place of the negotiation and cause of the exchange each connected to Samuel’s earlier service. The parley was in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where Samuel’s 14th Virginia Regiment, held in reserve in 1778 at the Battle of Monmouth, sweltered in the summer heat and heard the roar of the distant fighting. The main catalyst for the exchange was a human grand bargaining chip – General John Burgoyne, whose loss at Saratoga owed much to Samuel’s former unit, Morgan’s Rifles. Burgoyne had long since returned to England but officially was still considered a prisoner on parole. He had become an object of scorn to his countrymen, unable to revive his reputation. The Elizabethtown exchange freed 10,431 Continentals, including the officers at Haddrell’s Point, in return for Burgoyne’s technical release in absentia.
The Continental soldiers still held prisoner in Charlestown harbor tragically had to wait even longer in miserable conditions before their deliverance. Benjamin Taliaferro, an original enlistee in the Amherst Rifles, was not released from prison until April 1783. He was fortunate to survive; 800 of his fellow prisoners of war died in the cramped, disease-ridden prison ships. Five months after Taliaferro’s release, the Treaty of Paris was signed, and the Revolutionary War was officially over.
On September 1782 and June 1783, Lt. Colonel Samuel Jordan Cabell received warrants for a total of 7,000 acres of land in recognition for his military service. Sam would start construction of a new house on land not far his parents at Union Hill, and name it “Soldiers Joy”. William noted in his diary on October 1, 1785, “my son Sam and his wife went home.”
The military historian Rick Atkinson has said it was a miracle that the Americans won the Revolutionary War, given what they faced. The fact that Samuel survived his five-year odyssey that covered many hundreds of miles, multiple battles and months in captivity is its own miracle.
Works Consulted
- Atkinson, Rick, “The Fate of the Day”, 2025
- Brown, Alexander, “The Cabells and Their Kin”, 1895
- Col. William Cabell, Sr. Commonplace Books, Virginia Museum of History and Culture
- The Town of Mount Pleasant Historical Commission, “Haddrell’s Point Barracks, 1777 Revolutionary War”
- Malloy, Mark, “The Virginian’s 800-Mile March to Save Charleston,” 2021, Emerging Revolutionary War
- Knight, Betsy. Prisoner Exchange and Parole in the American Revolution, William & Mary Quarterly Nov. 1992
- National Park Service, “The Siege of Charleston”
- Washington Library Center for Digital History, Digital Encyclopedia, The Siege of Charleston, 1780