The British had been receiving reinforcements throughout May until they reached a strength of about six thousand men.

Three generals had arrived on May 25, on HMS Cerberus: William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton.

Gage had begun planning to break out of the city.

The plan decided on by the British command is to fortify both Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights.

They fix the date for taking Dorchester Heights at June 18.

The colonists' Committee of Safety had learned of the British plans 0n June 15.

In response, they had sent instructions to General Ward to fortify Bunker Hill and the heights of Charlestown; he has ordered Colonel William Prescott to do so.

On the night of June 16, Prescott leads twelve hundred men over the Charlestown Neck, and constructs fortifications on Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill.

North Carolina's royal governor, Josiah Martin, with political and military tensions rising in the Thirteen Colonies in early 1775, had hoped to combine the recruiting of Scots settlers in the North Carolina interior with that of sympathetic former Regulators (a group originally opposed to corrupt colonial administration) and disaffected Loyalists in the coastal areas to build a large Loyalist force to counteract Patriot sympathies in the province.

His petition to London to recruit one thousand men had been rejected, but he has continued efforts to rally Loyalist support.

At about the same time, Scotsman Allan Maclean had successfully lobbied King George III for permission to recruit Loyalist Scots throughout North America.

In April, he had received royal permission to raise a regiment known as the Royal Highland Emigrants by recruiting retired Scottish soldiers living in North America.

One battalion was to be recruited in the northern provinces, including New York, Quebec and Nova Scotia, while a second battalion was to be raised in North Carolina and other southern provinces, where a large number of these soldiers had been given land.

After receiving his commissions from General Thomas Gage in June, Maclean had sent Donald MacLeod and Donald MacDonald, two veterans of the June 17 Battle of Bunker Hill, south to lead the recruitment drive there.

These recruiters are also aware that Allan MacDonald, husband of the famous Jacobite heroine Flora MacDonald, is already actively recruiting in North Carolina.

Their arrival at New Bern is cause for suspicion by members of North Carolina's Committee of Safety, but they have not been  arrested.

On January 3, 1776, Martin learns that an expedition of more than two thousand troops under the command of General Henry Clinton is planned for the southern colonies and that their arrival is expected in mid-February.

He sends word to the recruiters that he expects them to deliver recruits to the coast by February 15, and dispatches Alexander Maclean to Cross Creek (present-day Fayetteville) to coordinate activities in that area.

Mclean optimistically reports to Martin that he will raise and equip five thousand Regulators and a thousand Scots.

British Major General Henry Clinton and a small fleet set sail for the Carolinas in mid-January, on orders from London, with fifteen hundred men.

Their objective is to join forces with additional troops arriving from Europe, and to take a port in the southern colonies for further military operations.

George Washington had again proposed to assault Boston in October, but his officers thought it best to wait until the harbor has frozen over.

In February, when the water has frozen between Roxbury and Boston Common, Washington thinks that in spite of his shortage in powder he will try an assault by rushing across the ice; but his officers again advise against it.

Washington's desire to launch an attack on Boston arises from his fear that his army will desert in the winter, and how easily he knows that Howe can break the lines of his army in its present condition.

He has not yet learned how completely he can trust in Howe's inactivity; he abandons an attack across the ice with great reluctance in exchange for a more cautious plan, to fortify Dorchester Heights using cannon arrived from Fort Ticonderoga.

In early February a British raiding party crosses the ice and burns several farmhouses in Dorchester.

Henry Clinton, having left Boston on January 20 with two companies of light infantry, had first stopped at New York City to confer with William Tryon, New York's royal governor.

Major General Charles Lee, sent by Major General George Washington to see to the defense of New York, had coincidentally arrived there the same day as Clinton.

New York is at this time extremely tense; Patriot forces are beginning to disarm and evict Loyalists, and the British fleet anchored there is having difficulty acquiring provisions.

Despite this, Clinton makes no secret that his final target is in the south.

Lee observes that this is "certainly a droll way of proceeding; to communicate his full plan to the enemy is too novel to be credited."

This is not even the first notice of the expedition to the colonists; a letter intercepted in December had already provided intelligence that the British were planning to go to the South.

The city of Charleston in the colony of South Carolina is a center of commerce in southern North America.

The city's citizens had joined other colonists in opposing the British parliament's attempts to tax them, and militia recruitment had increased when word arrived of the April 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord.

Throughout 1775 and into 1776, militia recruits arrive in the city from the colony's back country, the city's manufacturers and tradesmen begin producing war materiel, and defensive fortifications begin to take shape around the city.

British army forces in North America are primarily tied up with the Siege of Boston.

Seeking bases of operations where they have more control, the British plan an expedition to the southern colonies.

Major General Henry Clinton, at this time in Boston, is to travel to Cape Fear, North Carolina, where he will join with largely Scottish Loyalists raised in the North Carolina backcountry, and a force of two thousand men from Ireland under the command of Major General Charles Cornwallis.

The plan had been beset by difficulties from the start.

The Irish expedition, originally supposed to depart at the beginning of December 1775, had been delayed by logistical difficulties, and its twenty-five hundred troops do not depart until February 13, 1776, escorted by eleven warships under the command of Admiral Sir Peter Parker.

John Rutledge, recently elected president of the General Assembly that remains as the backbone of South Carolina's revolutionary government, has organized a defense force under the command of forty-six-year-old Colonel William Moultrie, a former militiaman and Indian fighter.

These forces comprise three infantry regiments, two rifle regiments, and a small artillery regiment; they are augmented by three independent artillery companies, and the total force numbers about two thousand.

These forces are further augmented by the arrival of Continental regiments from North Carolina and Virginia (nineteen hundred troops), as well as militia numbering twenty-seven hundred from Charleston and the surrounding back country.

Moultrie sees Sullivan's Island, a sandy spit of land at the entrance to Charleston Harbor extending north about four miles (six point four kilometers) long and a few hundred yards wide, as a place well suited to build a fort that could protect the entrance from intruding enemy warships.

A large vessel sailing into Charleston first has to cross Charleston Bar, a series of submerged shoals lying about eight miles (thirteen kilometers) southeast of the city, then pass by the southern end of Sullivan's Island as it enters the channel to the inner harbor.

Later it will also have to pass the northern end of James Island, where Fort Johnson commands the southeastern approach to the city.

Moultrie and his 2nd South Carolina Regiment arrive on Sullivan's Island in March 1776, and begin construction of a fortress built out of palmetto logs to defend the island and the channel into Charleston Harbor.

The construction moves slowly; Captain Peter Horry of the Patriot naval detachment describes the site as "an immense pen 500 feet long, and 16 feet wide, filled with sand to stop the shot".

The gun platforms are made of planks two inches thick and fastened with wooden spikes.

Clinton arrives at Cape Fear on March 12, expecting to find the European convoy already here.

He meets with the royal governors of North and South Carolina, Josiah Martin and William Campbell, and learns that the recruited Scottish Loyalists had been defeated at Moore's Creek Bridge two weeks earlier.

Clinton also receives pleas for assistance from the royal governor of Georgia, James Wright, who had been arrested, then escaped to a navy ship.

Parker's fleet had had an extremely difficult crossing. Battered by storms and high seas, the first ships of the fleet did not arrive at Cape Fear until April 18, and Cornwallis had not not arrived until May 3.

After several weeks there, in which the British troops raid Patriot properties, Clinton, Cornwallis and Parker conclude hat Cape Fear is not a suitable base for further operations.

Parker had sent out some ships on scouting expeditions up and down the coast, and reports on the partially finished condition of the Charleston defenses are sufficiently promising that the decision is made to go there.