Augusta

Augusta sat at the head of the Savannah River navigation, where the coastal plain meets the piedmont. Whoever held Augusta held the key to the Georgia interior: access to the Cherokee and Creek nations, the supply lines that fed British operations across the upcountry, and the loyalties of thousands of backcountry settlers who had not yet chosen a side. The British understood this. So did the Patriots.

The struggle for Augusta was not one battle but a grinding, brutal sequence of them. In September 1780, Elijah Clarke led a Georgia militia force in a desperate assault on the British garrison that came close to succeeding before Clarke was driven off and forced to retreat all the way into North Carolina with his wounded men and their families. The British response — Thomas Brown's Loyalist rangers hunting Clarke's supporters through the backcountry — made the Georgia frontier a theater of reprisal and counter-reprisal that erased any clean distinction between military operations and civil war. Brown had reason for his ferocity: Patriots had tortured him in 1775, burning his feet over a fire and forcing him to walk barefoot on hot coals until he passed out. The conflict around Augusta was personal in ways that the formal military narrative cannot fully contain.

The final Patriot recapture of Augusta in June 1781 required an 18-day siege by Andrew Pickens, Light-Horse Harry Lee, and Elijah Clarke working together — a collaboration that was itself remarkable, given the fractious relationships among the Patriot commanders. Lee's Legion constructed a Mayham Tower — a log platform raised above the fort's walls — to fire down into Fort Cornwallis. Brown surrendered on June 5, 1781. Augusta thereafter served as the seat of Georgia's reconstituted Patriot government, eventually becoming the state capital in 1786 after Savannah's wartime destruction had made that city an impractical choice. The town that had been the center of the backcountry civil war became the center of the new state.