Women: ♪ Sit down, servant, sit down... ♪ Taylor: It's pretty clear the British are not gonna win the war in New England.

They're not gonna get enough popular support, probably not gonna win the war in the Middle Atlantic region either.

Woman: ♪ I know you tired... Taylor: The great potential place where their relatively more reduced forces can have more leverage is the South, so the goal is just see what you can retain.

You probably can't keep all of these 13 colonies.

Maybe you can keep the most valuable of these colonies.

Woman: ♪ I know you're mighty tired... ♪ Conway: The Southern Colonies are seen as an integrated part of an economic system that generates great power and wealth for Britain, so keeping the Southern Colonies with their ability to provision the West Indian islands, and particularly their plantation economies, is seen as a vital British interest, and that, more than anything else, is why the war shifts to the South from 1778.

Woman: ♪ Sit down Narrator: After General Clinton learned the French fleet had sailed away from Boston, he prepared for the invasion of the South that London had ordered him to undertake.

♪ Jasanoff: Another reason that the British pursue a Southern strategy after Saratoga is that they assume that there are many more Loyalists in the South who will come to their aid.

There was also, of course, the question of the enslaved population.

Voice: A great majority of the inhabitants of North and South Carolina are loyal subjects.

It is also well known that the principal resources for carrying on the rebellion are drawn from the labor of an incredible multitude of Negroes in the Southern Colonies.

But the instant that the King's troops are put in motion in those colonies, these poor slaves would be ready to rise upon their rebel masters.

Moses Kirkland.

So the Southern Strategy was to recapture the Southern Colonies one by one, starting with Georgia, and move up the coast, and in each place, they hoped to put Loyalists in charge, and that way, the British Army could continue moving north.

Narrator: from New York, General Clinton sent a squadron south to try to capture Savannah, the capital of Georgia and its only city of any size.

♪ With the help of an African American river pilot named Sampson, the British fleet sailed up the Savannah River and began disembarking below the city at dawn on December 29, 1778.

♪ Some 700 Continental troops and 150 local militia were waiting.

The British commander saw that a direct assault was certain to be bloody.

♪ Then Quamino Dolly, an elderly enslaved man, led part of the British force through a swamp that allowed them to get behind the startled Americans and open fire.

[Gunfire] The Patriots panicked.

British troops chased them through the town.

83 Americans were killed and 30 more drowned trying to swim across the Yamacraw Creek.

453 surrendered.

The British lost just 7 dead.

♪ Over the weeks that followed, The British captured Augusta and reimposed royal rule in Georgia.

"I have," their commander boasted, "ripped one star and one stripe from the rebel flag."