Around eleven in the morning on May 12, 1780, the Continental troops marched out of the Hornwork at the gate and laid down their arms between the lines. And here Clinton drove home the one piece of deliberate cruelty in an otherwise coldly professional siege. He refused them the honors of war, the precise humiliation Yorktown would one day answer. The colors were cased, furled and sheathed in their covers rather than flown, and the drummers were forbidden to beat a British march (to play a tune from the victor's own repertoire, the traditional salute that said the beaten enemy had fought with honor), the gesture by which a victor acknowledged a brave foe. It was a calculated humiliation, the formal denial of the courtesies owed a respected enemy. By Moultrie's account the drums were permitted only a Turkish march, the nothing-tune that said nothing. British and Hessian grenadiers lined the works, and the British flag went up over the Hornwork. The militia turned in their arms over the following days and were paroled (released on their word of honor not to take up arms again until formally exchanged for a British prisoner) to their homes; the Continentals went into captivity. More than 5,000 men had surrendered.

That number needs care, because it is the headline of the worst American defeat of the war and it is easy to get wrong. Clinton's official return counted 5,466 prisoners, but the figure is misleading: the return swept in militia, armed citizens, and sailors along with the regulars, and the genuinely effective Continentals numbered closer to 2,650. The honest statement is the one that holds: more than five thousand men were taken, the entire Continental army in the South, about half of them regulars, along with seven generals, more than 300 guns, some 5,000 muskets, fifteen stands of colors, and three frigates of the little Continental Navy squadron trapped in the harbor. It was the largest surrender of American troops in the whole war, a military disaster sitting inside a political one.

And then, three days after the city fell, came the deadliest single hour of the entire affair, and nobody had been shooting at anyone. On May 15, British work parties were stockpiling thousands of captured muskets in a brick magazine near the main powder store. American officers had warned that many of the surrendered muskets were still loaded; the warnings were ignored. One musket went off in someone's hands, the loose powder caught, and the magazine blew up. The explosion touched off stored cartridges and thousands of muskets, threw burning debris across the neighborhood, and set fire to the barracks, the jail, and the house of correction nearby. Bodies were flung across the streets; loaded muskets kept cooking off in the wreckage and hitting the men who came to help. Captain Johann Ewald (British), a Hessian officer a hundred yards away, recorded charred arms and legs scattered in every direction, a deplorable sight. A British officer of the 42nd, Captain John Peebles, called it a melancholy accident born of "Very Strange Management, to Store up loaded Arms in a Magazine, of Powder." The death toll was disputed even at the time, running from near a hundred to rumors of three hundred; the figure usually printed is about 200 killed, British and Hessian soldiers, American prisoners, townspeople, and the inmates of the burning jail. Perhaps two hundred people, in other words, more than had died on both sides in the whole six-week siege.

What happened to the prisoners afterward loaded the rest of the southern war with grievance. The paroled militia went home, for now. The Continental privates went first to the barracks and to Haddrell's Point across the harbor, and then, from later that summer, into prison hulks, old ships moored in the harbor and used as floating prisons. Over the following year, roughly 800 of about 2,500 Continental prisoners died in those hulks, of disease and heat and starvation, about one man in three. These were the regulars who had held Charleston's lines for six weeks; a third of them never left the harbor alive, and they died slowly, of neglect, after the shooting was over. Hundreds more escaped the hulks only by agreeing to enlist in British regiments bound for the West Indies, the Caribbean garrisons where fever killed more soldiers than any battle. The officers sat in crowded parole at Haddrell's Point, where one of Lincoln's brigadiers, James Hogun (American), died that January; Woodford, the Virginian who had marched in just in time to be captured, died on a British prison ship in New York harbor in November. The general exchange that freed the survivors did not come until the middle of 1781.

The city was won. And then came the order that turned the conquest against itself. At first Clinton offered easy terms: paroles, protection, and neutrality for any man who would stay quiet. Then, on June 3, 1780, days before sailing home, he issued the proclamation that undid all of it. The existing militia paroles were declared void; every man was now required to swear allegiance to the Crown and actively support it, or be treated as a rebel. Neutrality was abolished at a stroke. Thousands of paroled men who had been perfectly content to sit out the war did the arithmetic and concluded that if they were going to be forced to fight for somebody, it would not be for the king. The proclamation was one of the causes that helped ignite the partisan war, the war of the backcountry bands under leaders like Sumter and Marion and Pickens that ate the British conquest from the inside over the next year. Clinton had disarmed the rebellion; one piece of paper helped arm it again.

Clinton himself sailed for New York in early June with about a third of the army, not because he thought the South was fragile, he genuinely believed it was secured, but because a French fleet on the northern coast was the larger danger; he left Cornwallis behind with some 8,300 men and the whole conquered South to hold. And there is one more thread to pick up before this page ends, but only to set it down again. One American column had missed the trap: Colonel Abraham Buford's roughly 350 Virginians had been marching to reinforce Charleston and turned back when the city fell. Cornwallis sent Tarleton after them. On May 29, near the North Carolina line at a place called the Waxhaws, Tarleton's Legion ran them down. What happened there is a story this page does not tell. It belongs to the next one.

Which leaves Benjamin Lincoln, and the fairest reading of him, which is also the truest. His defeat was at least as much political as military. He could have saved the army in early April, and was forbidden to by the very government he was defending; the men who threatened to open the gates if he marched out were the same men who petitioned him to surrender five weeks later. Congress and Washington understood this. Lincoln was exchanged within six months, never charged with anything, and restored to Washington's side. And at Yorktown, on October 19, 1781, when Cornwallis surrendered his own trapped army, Washington refused to let Cornwallis's deputy hand over the sword to anyone but his own second in command. He directed the British surrender to Benjamin Lincoln, and he granted Cornwallis's garrison exactly, and only, what Lincoln's had been granted at Charleston. He had written it to Cornwallis in his own hand the day before.

The same Honors will be granted to the Surrendering Army as were granted to the Garrison of Charlestown.

Colors cased. The march denied. The most deliberate exchange in the entire war, and the man who gave up Charleston was standing there to collect it.