estate. William Johnston left Savannah on a military expedition into South Carolina; Elizabeth pined for him in silence.68
But a war that had divided so many others brought this couple together again. In early September 1779, a French fleet appeared off Savannah, and a Franco-American force laid siege to the city, outnumbering the defenders by five to one. William’s regiment rushed to Savannah’s defense. Elizabeth by then had returned to the city and was again staying with Dr. Johnston’s family. When the shelling began, she and the elder Johnstons retreated to an island just offshore and huddled in a barn with fifty-eight women and children “who had each one or more near relatives in the lines.” Fortunately for the besieged civilians, the bombs sailed straight over the defenders’ heads and fizzled out in Savannah’s sandy unpaved streets. After six days of bombardment, the French and Americans tried to take the city by storm, but were resoundingly repulsed. Loyalist civilians returned after the battle to find the roads “cut into deep holes by the shells,” and their houses “riddled with the rain of cannonballs.” But the Lichtensteins and Johnstons had made it through the ordeal untouched. Perhaps having survived the siege encouraged John Lichtenstein to relax his concerns about his daughter’s personal future. The next month, Elizabeth Lichtenstein and William Johnston got married.69 The union marked an enormous step up socially for the new Mrs. Johnston, from the middling plantocracy into a highly educated, politically influential, and well-off segment of the Georgia loyalist elite. In the years ahead William’s family connections determined the course of the couple’s life in significant ways.
Southern loyalists saw the reconquest of Georgia as a happy omen of wider victory to come. Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the setbacks of the previous years had been put into reverse. In 1780, the British captured Charleston, South Carolina, turning that city, too, into a safe haven for loyalists.70 Where patriots had attainted prominent South Carolina loyalists, forcing them into exile as enemies of the state, some now returned to retrieve their confiscated property.71 Where patriots had imposed oaths of allegiance to the new state legislature, the British now made sure that hundreds of Charleston residents (including much of the city’s Jewish community) signed certificates pledging to be “true and faithful Subject[s] to His Majesty, the King of Great Britain.”72 Where the patriots had earlier confiscated loyalist property, now patriot plantations and slaves were “sequestered,” or requisitioned, for British use. A North Carolina merchant called John Cruden was appointed commissioner of these sequestered estates, and energetically set about managing them for maximum economic benefit to the British.73
The newly wed Johnstons especially enjoyed a period of upturn. William had been suffering from a “nervous complaint” triggered by a dangerous ride to Augusta to deliver military intelligence. He traveled to New York, in hopes that a more temperate climate would help him recover, and in a fit of “romantic folly” he insisted on bringing his bride across the war-torn country with him. The couple spent the summer of 1780 relaxing in the calm, British-held countryside of Long Island.74
But as the Johnstons’ belated honeymoon reached its end, so did Britain’s relative good fortune in the south. The strategy had called for the capture of Charleston in part to secure Savannah. Now, to maintain control over South Carolina, the general commanding the southern army, Charles, Lord Cornwallis, felt he had to conquer North Carolina, and to do that, Cornwallis believed he had to move north again into Virginia. Behind him, the Georgia and Carolina backcountry broke down into bitter conflict between patriot and loyalist militias. Thomas Brown felt the brunt of it. He had made Augusta into a loyalist base and cultivated Creek and Cherokee support in a new office as superintendent of Indian affairs for the south. In the autumn of 1780, patriots attacked Augusta, besieging Brown’s forces in horrid conditions. By the time reinforcements came to the rescue, Brown had been lamed again by a bullet through both thighs, while Andrew Johnston, one of his most trusted lieutenants, lay among the dead. Patriots responded to the loyalists’ pyrrhic victory by accusing Brown and his men of scalping the sick and wounded, summarily hanging prisoners of war, and kicking the decapitated corpses of their victims through the streets.75
Such appalling reports contributed to an increase in patriot insurgency across the interior of Georgia and the Carolinas and left the British struggling to contain what amounted to a guerrilla war. A few weeks after Augusta, a partisan battle at King’s Mountain in North Carolina left the British hopelessly weakened in the rear. Meanwhile, Cornwallis’s army staggered onward, low on supplies, manpower dwindling, harassed by patriot attacks.76 And Virginia still lay ahead.
THE OLDEST and by far the largest of the thirteen colonies, in both area and population, Virginia sat at the geographic center of revolutionary America. Together with Massachusetts, Virginia formed one of the revolution’s two ideological poles. It was the home of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among other founding fathers, and the heartland of America’s slaveowning plantocracy. Just a day after the first shots of the war were fired in Massachusetts, conflict erupted independently in Virginia’s capital, Williamsburg. Yet despite Virginia’s prominence, few military actions took place there until Cornwallis invaded in 1781. Rather, the colony stood out as the epicenter of another revolution, whose shock waves were felt hundreds of miles away. David George was one of that revolution’s twenty thousand black participants.77
Born a slave on a plantation in the Tidewater region of eastern Virginia around 1740, David went into the fields almost as early as he could remember, carrying water, carding cotton, picking tobacco with his callused fingers. His was a brutal boyhood: he watched his sister flogged until her bare back looked “as though it would rot.” He saw his runaway brother hunted down with dogs, hung by the hands from a cherry tree, and whipped so violently that he might not have felt the stinging salt water poured into the open wounds. He heard his own mother struck by the lash, “begging for mercy.” In his twentieth year, David decided to get away from all this. He walked through the night and all the next day and just kept on going, out of Essex County, out of Virginia, over the Roanoke River, over the Pee Dee, and on toward the Georgia border. There he worked peacefully for two years, until his master tracked him down again and David fled once more, as far as Augusta. Even there, five hundred miles away from his Virginia owner, David was not safe. After six months his master’s son turned up to seize him, and David ran yet again. This time, he landed in the custody of a powerful Indian trader called George Galphin, at Silver Bluff, on the opposite bank of the Savannah River from Augusta.
The Irish-born Galphin, with his Creek Indian wife and mixed-race children, stood out as a sort of southern counterpart to Sir William Johnson. Silver Bluff was a veritable multiethnic kingdom in the backcountry, where the runaway David joined a diverse community with more than a hundred slaves who mixed relatively freely with both whites and Indians. He worked comfortably for a master who “was very kind to me,” and met and married a part-black, part-Creek woman named Phillis. But David’s years at Silver Bluff imprinted him most forcefully for another reason. In the early 1770s, a black preacher arrived in the woods to spread Baptist teachings to the slaves. David found himself alternately captivated and disturbed by the preacher’s message. “I saw myself a mass of sin,” he confessed, and realized that he “must be saved by prayer.” After an exuberant meeting in a mill on Galphin’s plantation, David and Phillis were baptized together in the millstream. David could hardly contain his ecstatic faith. Listening to another charismatic black Baptist, George Liele, preach in a cornfield, David felt an overwhelming urge to lead prayers himself. Liele encouraged the new convert to follow his passion. With Galphin’s permission (notable in an era when many planters were wary of their slaves being exposed to Christian teachings), David began to preach to the slaves at Silver Bluff—adopting his mentor Liele’s first name George as his own surname. Soon he presided