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prevailed. This was followed by a loud huzza for General Washington; death and the prison-ships was the unanimous determination.”
Fayssoux’s depiction of the harsh treatment
of American captives is consistent with the observations of General Moultrie and Dr. Ramsay, both of whom detested Balfour. Moultrie described Balfour as a “proud and haughty Scot, [who] carried his authority with a very high hand; [with] his tyrannical disposition, [he] treated the people as the most abject slaves.” Of the lethality of the prison ships, Balfour quipped that “the rebell [sic] Prisoners die faster even than they used to desert.” When Moultrie complained of the shocking mortality rate from jail fever (typhus) on board the Concord in Charlestown harbor, Balfour accused him of being pathetic.
General Moultrie had tried to exchange a captive British officer for Fayssoux multiple times but Balfour always refused. According to Moultrie, Fayssoux’s captors despised him and refused to grant him the pleasure of freedom. Moultrie observed, “Their principal dislike to Doctor Fayssoux was, that he was too faithful to his friends, and wrote and spoke too freely of
his enemies, respecting their conduct in his department.”
Finally, in January 1781, Fayssoux was exchanged for a British physician. He desperately wanted to join the army of Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, who then commanded the Southern Department, but the malicious Lieutenant Colonel Balfour
delayed his release from Charleston on a technicality until March 3, 1781. By March 31 he had reached Greene’s army, but soon left for Philadelphia where he testified to Congress about the conditions of the hospitals in the Southern Department.
By September 8, 1781, Fayssoux was back in the field and very busy with casualties after the Battle of Eutaw Springs, a situation made worse because nearly all the physicians were sick and unfit for duty. Fayssoux among them—he suffered from a severe attack of malaria. He recovered, and until the British evacuated Charleston in December 1782, he tended the hospital at Greene’s camp in the High Hills of the Santee, at Camden, and then on the Stono River.
After the war, Fayssoux settled down with his second wife Ann, produced six children, and cultivated rice. With his neighbors Moultrie, Laurens, Marion, Ramsay, and John Rutledge, he served as a member of the governor’s privy council from 1784 to 1786 and served in the house of representatives from 1786 until 1790.
Peter Fayssoux practiced medicine in Charleston until his death at age fifty on February 1, 1795. He acquired a reputation for taking care of
poor and disadvantaged people and offered conciliation to former loyalists. His obituary, published in the City Gazette, mourned him as a physician, patriot, and public servant. The South Carolina Cincinnati were requested to attend the funeral of “their deceased brother” at his home on the upper end of Tradd Street.
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