The Americans had demonstrated that they “were trained to stratagem and enterprise,” Clinton grudgingly acknowledged. “They knew every trick of chicane.” Yet the expedition sailed off with several convictions oddly intact, including the certainty that a faithful multitude of southern loyalists still awaited liberation and that defeat at Sullivan’s Island—“one of the most singular events that has yet conspired to degrade the name of the British nation,” in Captain Murray’s sour assessment—had resulted from bad luck and tactical blunders rather than faulty intelligence and strategic
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