Colonel John Laurens, a soldier and statesman from South Carolina, was killed in his home state on the banks of the Combahee River. The day he died, in August 1782, he was just 27 years old. At the time, British forces were close to defeat; they had lost badly at Yorktown the previous October. But while the ramparts of Yorktown were preserved—as were other Revolutionary War sites, such as the places where Alexander Hamilton and George Washington died—the location of Laurens’s last battle was lost to time. His death is…
