But Clinton reached Charleston and was able to
surround it on the landward side with an army at least ten
thousand strong. Tarleton's irregulars rode through the country.
It is on record that he marched sixty-four miles in twenty-three
hours and a hundred and five miles in fifty-four hours. Such
mobility was irresistible. On the 12th of April, after a ride of
thirty miles, Tarleton surprised, in the night, three regiments
of American cavalry regulars at a place called Biggin's Bridge,
routed them completely and, according to his own account, with
the loss of three men wounded, carried off a hundred prisoners,
four hundred horses, and also stores and ammunition. There is no
doubt that Tarleton's dragoons behaved with great brutality and
it would perhaps have taught a needed lesson if, as was indeed
threatened by a British officer, Major Ferguson, a few of them
had been shot on the spot for these outrages. Tarleton's dashing
attacks isolated Charleston and there was nothing for Lincoln to
do but to surrender. This he did on the 12th of May. Burgoyne
seemed to have been avenged. The most important city in the South
had fallen. "We look on America as at our feet," wrote Horace
Walpole. The British advanced boldly into the interior.
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