1804. CORNWALLIS (Lord), Ravages of in Virginia.—
Lord Cornwallis remained
in this position [from Point of Fork along the
main James River] ten days, his own headquarters
being in my house [Elk-hill] at that
place. I had time to remove most of the effects
out of the house. He destroyed all my
growing crops of corn and tobacco; he burned
all my barns, containing the same articles of
the last year, having first taken what corn he
wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my
stock of cattle, sheep and hogs, for the sustenance
of his army, and carried off all the
horses capable of service; of those too young
for service, he cut the throats; and he burned
all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave
it an absolute waste. He carried off also
about thirty slaves. Had this been to give them
freedom, he would have done right; but it was
to consign them to inevitable death from the
small-pox and putrid fever, then raging in his
camp. This I knew afterwards to be the fate
of twenty-seven of them. I never had news
of the remaining three, but presume they shared
the same fate. When I say that Lord Cornwallis
did all this, I do not mean that he carried
about the torch in his own hands, but that
it was all done under his eye; the situation of
the house in which he was, commanding a
view of every part of the plantation, so that
he must have seen every fire. I relate these
things on my own knowledge in a great degree,
as I was on the ground soon after he left it.
He treated the rest of the neighborhood somewhat
in the same style, but not with that spirit
of total extermination with which he seemed to
rage over my possessions. Wherever he went,
the dwelling houses were plundered of everything
that could be carried off. Lord Cornwallis's
character in England would forbid the
belief that he shared in the plunder; but that
his table was served with the plate thus pillaged
from private houses, can be proved by
many hundred eyewitnesses. From an estimate
I made at that time, on the best information I
could collect, I supposed the State of Virginia
lost under Lord Cornwallis's hands, that year,
about thirty thousand slaves; and that of these
about twenty-seven thousand died of the small
pox and camp fever, and the rest were partly
sent to the West Indies, and exchanged for
rum, sugar, coffee and fruit, and partly sent
to New York, whence they went, at the peace,
either to Nova Scotia or England. From this
last place, I believe they have been lately sent
to Africa. History will never relate the horrors
committed by the British army in the
Southern States of America. They raged in
Virginia six months only, from the middle of
April to the middle of October, 1781, when they
were all taken prisoners; and I give you a
faithful specimen of their transactions for ten
days of that time, and on one spot only. Ex
pede Herculem. I suppose their whole devastations
during those six months amounted to
about three millions sterling.—
To Dr. William Gordon. Washington ed. ii, 426.
Ford ed., v, 39.
(P.
1788)
