15. The shift of the war to the south brought about a repeat there of the early days of the war in the north
With the Continental Army demonstrating that it could stand against the British in the open field, and with the growing influx of French supplies and troops, the British Army shifted its attention to the southern colonies, where there were few Continental troops and there existed a large number of militant Loyalists. The British held Savannah from 1778 and the two main Continental armies in the south suffered defeats in 1780, at Camden under Horatio Gates, though the main body of the troops escaped; and at Charleston the same year, when Benjamin Lincoln was forced to surrender the city to British army and navy units. Lincoln surrendered 5,500 Continental troops and supporting militia.
It was the largest surrender of American troops until the Confederates under Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865. The approximately 2,500 Continental Army regulars captured were for the most part housed in prison ships in Charleston and New York, where they endured conditions worse than any they had endured during their service in the war to that time. With the surrender of Charleston and the defeat at Camden, there existed no viable Continental Army presence in the American south, and those in Virginia were scattered and for the most part untested. The war in the south continued as a guerrilla war, one of considerable ferocity and violence, and tried and tested Continental regulars were shifted to the theater.