British shift to southern strategy

In 1778 and 1779, British ministers and commanders shifted the war south toward Georgia and the Carolinas after the stalemate around Philadelphia and New York. General Henry Clinton and Lord Cornwallis believed that Loyalist strength in the lower South would let the Crown rebuild authority colony by colony. The strategy opened a brutal new phase of the war that reached from Savannah to Charleston, Camden, Cowpens, and Guilford Courthouse.

The southern turn grew directly from Britain's failure to end the war in the North after Saratoga and from France's entry into the conflict in 1778, which forced London to defend a much wider empire. Lord George Germain authorized the new emphasis in late 1778 because he believed Loyalists in Georgia and the Carolinas would restore royal government once British troops gave them protection. The captures of Savannah in December 1778, Charleston in May 1780, and the victory at Camden in August 1780 seemed to confirm that calculation, yet the strategy depended on Loyalist strength that proved far weaker than ministers expected.

Partisan resistance under Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens kept the Carolinas unstable even after Charleston and Camden, denying Britain the pacification that Lord George Germain had counted on. The overextended southern campaign then drew Cornwallis north into Virginia, where the same strategy ended in the Yorktown siege of October 1781.