The siege continued, and late on the second day, hearing the terrible cries of suffering men and seeing the piles of dead bodies pushed out of the fortification during the night, Clarke called on Brown to surrender. He refused, calling Clarke a bloody traitor who would be held responsible for this illicit attack using militiamen whom Brown had paroled with their solemn pledge to fight no more. Clarke had his own serious problems. By now, some of his men had broken into the storehouse, and they began dividing up the valuable stocks of Indian presents and imbibing freely of the rum, while Clarke struggled to keep the others at their posts. Not knowing that Brown was in desperate straits, Colonel Cruger had been in no hurry to relieve him, but he finally left enough troops to defend Ninety Six and took five hundred men with him to Augusta, including one hundred mounted dragoons, and was approaching the town from the east side of the river.

Clarke had already lost twenty men, killed and wounded, plus an almost equal number who had simply left the battle and defected with stolen goods. He counted only 140 men left, while Brown had more than 100 Florida Rangers, about the same number of Indians, and would now be supported by the large force under Colonel Cruger. When Clarke sighted them, he was forced to order the siege lifted. He paroled his Tory prisoners and began to withdraw, but a contingent of Cruger’s men had crossed the river upstream to encircle the town from the west, and they, the Indians, and the Rangers attacked the Georgia militia simultaneously. Cruger said, “I am sending out patrols on horse to pick up the traitorous rebels, who will be roughly handled, some very probably ‘suspended from trees’ for their good deeds. We can end this rebellion by hanging every parolee that has taken protection and then acted against us.” Twenty-three of the Georgia militiamen were captured, including Chesley Bostick.