Charleston

After the stalemate in the North, Britain gambled the war on the southern colonies and their supposed Loyalist masses. Clinton sailed from New York into the worst winter of the century, lost his horses and an ordnance ship and one transport blown clean to England, then landed thirty miles from Charleston and spent six weeks working up the sea islands, refusing every shortcut, to put an army on the one land door into the city.

The methodical European siege: parallels creeping toward the lines, the fleet sailing past the fort that was supposed to stop it, and the one escape route across the Cooper River snuffed out by Tarleton's cavalry in two night strokes. Inside, a city government that would not let the army leave, and a council that threatened to open the gates if it tried. Then the night the houses burned.

An army marched out with its colors cased and forbidden to play a British march, the precise humiliation Yorktown would answer. Then a magazine explosion that killed more than the whole siege, prison hulks in the harbor, and a single proclamation that abolished neutrality and helped light the partisan war. The worst American defeat of the war, and the fuse of the one that followed.