64 REMINISCENCES OF 



furnish incidents both pleasant and painful to re- 

 member. Not two miles from Black Oak, by the 

 roadside is seen the grave of Major John Majori- 

 banks. This officer was one of the most useful 

 and efficient of the British army at Eutaw. Having 

 under his command a flank battalion of infantry, 

 posted on the creek, he rescued victory from our 

 grasp when the day seemed fairly and completely 

 ours. The heat and the fatigues of that day, and 

 the unwholesome condition of the climate at that 

 season, gave him a fever. The British army (after 

 the worse than barren victory at Eutaw) was retreat- 

 ing to Charleston, now become their only place of 

 safety, and his comrades were forced to leave him at 

 Wantoot. Here, in the hut of a slave, this hero, 

 who but a fortnight before had saved the army of 

 his sovereign, now spent with disease, deprived of 

 all comforts, without hope and without sympathy, 

 lay, dependent on the slave of one against whom he 

 was waging a cruel war for all the assistance that 

 his situation required ; and in this humble hut he 

 sank, unwept and unknown, into the arms of death. 

 His remains received more honor from the Ravenel 

 family than from his comrades and associates. The 

 grave was long distinguished from the woody wil- 

 derness around it by a head-board, fashioned out of 

 a cypress plank lying about the plantation, the re- 

 mains of an indigo vat. This head-board with its 

 inscription remained in its place until 1836, and 



