g 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 every thing
which 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
eye-witnesses. From an estimate I made at that time, on the
best information I could collect, I suppose _the State of
Virginia lost, under Lord Cornwallis's hand, that year,
about thirty thousand slaves; and that, of these,
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, from whence they went, at the peace, either to
Nova Scotia or to 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."[569]

Col. Laurens was called from the South, and despatched to France on an
important mission in 1780. But the effort to raise Negro troops in the
South was not abandoned.

On the 13th of March, 1780, Gen. Lincoln, in a letter to Gov. Rutledge
of South Carolina, dated at Charleston, urged the