Quinby Bridge, South Carolina

QUINBY BRIDGE, SOUTH CAROLINA. 17 July 1781. While General Nathanael Greene's army was resting in the Santee Hills, General Thomas Sumter got authority to employ the forces of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Lee and General Francis Marion with his own to attack the outpost at Monck's Corner. The latter position was commanded by Lieutenant John Coates, who had his unseasoned Nineteenth Regiment and some mounted South Carolina rangers led by Major Thomas Fraser. When Sumter attempted a turning movement on 14 July, Coates withdrew to a strong defensive position around Biggin Church. On the afternoon of the 15th, as the Patriots settled into a camp expecting to do battle the next day, Coates launched a bold attack. Caught off guard—and without proper pickets—Sumter's forces were on the verge of collapse when Lieutenant Colonel Edward Lacey led a counterattack that drove Fraser's Loyalists back to their positions around the church. Sumter again prepared for a difficult assault on Coates's force. But at about 3 a.m. on the morning of the 17th, he set fire to the church and withdrew another eighteen miles down the Cooper River toward Charleston, stopping at Quinby Bridge and placing his troops along the creek. To frustrate a cavalry pursuit he had loosened the flooring of the bridge but was waiting for his rear guard and baggage to cross before removing the planks. Unknown to Coates, Lee had captured his rear guard and the dragoons charged across the bridge, surprising the British and driving off all but Coates and a few men who stood by him. But the planks in the bridge had been loosened by the horses rushing across, creating an impassable gap that prevented anyone else from crossing. The British infantry rallied to their hard-pressed commander, forcing Lee's dragoons to retreat into the adjacent woods.

Marion arrived to reconnoiter with Lee and they decided the enemy position was now too strong to attack, especially as Coates had an artillery piece and they did not. But when Sumter came on the scene with his infantry at about 5 p.m., he overruled them. The British had formed a hollow square with a howitzer covering their front and their flanks protected by outbuildings and the rail fences of Captain Thomas Shubrick's plantation. Sumter formed Marion's infantry on the left, Colonel Thomas Taylor's veteran militia regiment and his own troops in the center, and Colonel Peter Horry's cavalry on the right flank. Taylor charged across an open field and took position along a fence, but the British counterattacked and drove Taylor's militia back. Marion's infantry moved over to reoccupy the fence line but had to withdraw after sustaining fifty casualties and almost exhausting its ammunition supply. Sumter's men, meanwhile, had been firing from the protection of buildings, and he had failed to bring forward his artillery. Furious at this useless sacrifice and at Sumter's failure to support the attack properly, Taylor walked up to his commander and informed him he would no longer serve under him. Marion and Lee, disgusted by Sumter's mismanagement of the approach march and by the abortive attack (in which Lee had not participated), retreated fifteen miles with their dead and wounded. The next morning they both left Sumter. Meanwhile, British reinforcements, numbering about seven hundred men, were on the way to join Coates, and Sumter's position was no longer tenable. The British suffered forty-four casualties, the Americans sixty.

                          revised by Michael Bellesiles