“H.  CLINTON.

     “By his Excellency’s command,

“JOHN SMITH, Secretary.”

The proclamation had effect.  Many Negroes, weary of the hesitancy of the colonists respecting acceptance of their services, joined the ministerial army.  On the 14th of February, 1780, Col.  Laurens wrote Gen. Washington, from Charleston, S.C., as follows:—­

“Private accounts say that General Prevost is left to command at Savannah; that his troops consist of the Hessians and Loyalists that were there before, re-enforced by a corps of blacks and a detachment of savages.  It is generally reported that Sir Henry Clinton commands the present expedition."[568]

Lord Cornwallis also issued a proclamation, offering protection to all Negroes who should seek his command.  But the treatment he gave them, as narrated by Mr. Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Gordon, a few years after the war, was extremely cruel, to say the least.

“Lord Cornwallis 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 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