After a siege of many months, General Lincoln, who with a small number of troops had gallantly defended the city of Charleston, surrendered May 19, 1780. The British had thought that on account of the scattered population and the number of slaves, it would be easier to subjugate the inhabitants of the Southern states than those of the Northern and Middle, whose hardy population inured to labor, especially among the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, had successfully resisted all efforts to overcome them. But in this they were mistaken, for although Savannah and Charleston, the chief cities of Georgia and South Carolina, were now in the hands of the enemy, still from every brush and bracken, Marion and Sumter and their scouts would spring at unexpected moments and unlooked for times. Among those who were taken prisoners at Charleston was David Hamilton, the subject of this sketch. There is a tradition in the family that he held the rank of lieutenant.[15] This point, however, cannot be substantiated now, as the family papers and Bibles, which were in the possession of his daughter, Mrs. Sullivan of Hampton county, S. C., were lost or destroyed during the Civil War. When the city of Charleston was surrendered to the British commander, David Hamilton, being a member of a regiment taken under arms, became a prisoner of war. He was offered with others a parole if he would promise not to take up arms again against the mother country. This he declined to avail himself of, and Ramsay’s History of the Revolution in South Carolina records his name as among the prisoners confined on board the prison ship _Torbay_ in Charleston harbor in May, 1781. This vessel conveyed these prisoners to Philadelphia where they remained until the treaty of peace was signed at Paris in 1783. Family records tell that during his detention, receiving permission to go about the city, his wife Elizabeth, at his solicitation, joined him there. The voyage in those days was a long and tedious one, but David Hamilton having vessels of his own, Mrs. Hamilton and her two children were able to perform the journey in one of them. During her sojourn there a third daughter, Grizelle Agnes Hamilton, was born, who became in womanhood the wife of Capt. Joseph Taylor, U. S. N. After the Revolutionary War, David Hamilton, on his return to Charleston, became the partner in business of his brother-in-law, Christopher Fitz Simons, who, also an Irishman of wealth and culture, is the ancestor of the “Sir Rupert” of South Carolina, Wade Hampton, the third, the brave cavalry leader of the Southern army in Virginia. They carried on an extensive shipping, shipbuilding and wharfage business, Hamilton owning the ships and Fitz Simons the wharves. David Hamilton owned one hundred black men, slaves, with their families.