1775 (74 page)

Ironically, when Carolina civil war threatened in 1775, Patriots in Pennsylvania were called to send letters and dispatch preachers who might be able to soothe backcountry disaffection. Patriot leaders in South Carolina organized a mission that included Presbyterian William Tennent of Charleston’s Independent Church, and Oliver Hart, the Regular faction pastor of Charleston’s First Baptist Church. Both ministers were originally from Pennsylvania. However, their effectiveness in the backcountry was limited. If Pennsylvania had its own incipient civil wars, how much more could have been expected from its southward migrants, with their considerable admixture of failures, runaways, and quirky religious zealots?

1775: The Carolinas and Civil War

When the American Revolution ended in 1783, bitter memories of local civil war remained fresh in New York and New Jersey, about which much has been written. The ill will had been visible in 1775—reliable Connecticut troops were time after time sent into unreliable districts of New York—but little shooting occurred, save in the Champlain region. Not until 1776 were New Yorkers and New Jerseyans busy organizing the surprising disproportion of American Loyalist regiments for which they became famous or infamous.
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In the Carolinas, however, open civil warfare began in 1775, just not on a large scale. Potential backcountry Loyalist strength in both colonies was already prompting the calculations of royal governors—and, through their overenthusiasm, the plans of the king and his ministers.

The coming of civil war in the South Carolina backcountry—a grittier stage of confrontation than Patriots seizing Charleston forts and sinking hulks in harbor channels—only began in midsummer. Lack of meaningful local government across most of the interior had made backcountry militia colonels powerful men within their districts, and not all supported the Revolution. The colony’s 10,000 to 14,000 militiamen were divided among twelve district-based regiments. In July, as tensions grew, Charleston-based Patriot leaders began to question the reliability and leadership of several units and commanding officers.

The principal dissatisfaction, as generations of South Carolina historians have reiterated, concentrated in the Delaware-sized stretch of land between the Broad River on the east and the Saluda River in the west. This was the district of the Upper Saluda Regiment, commanded by Colonel Thomas Fletchall of Fairforest, a wealthy landowner privately critical of the new regime. Even as a letter was on its way asking him to sign the Patriot faction’s Association, Fletchall assembled 1,500 men—most of his own regiment, along with other militiamen—and read them the rebel Association, which they refused to sign. They thereupon endorsed a “counter-association” that reaffirmed loyalty to the king and expressed a hope to live in peace with their neighbors. This alarmed the Council of Safety, as did a further development. With the connivance of an erstwhile Patriot officer, Moses Kirkland, 200 of Fletchall’s Loyalist militia had recaptured the Patriot powder supplies, taken some days earlier on July 12 when South Carolina militia
had captured Fort Charlotte on the Savannah River. The seeds of civil war were starting to sprout.
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The Council of Safety’s next move was to send a political and religious mission to the backcountry. Headed by Patriot firebrand William H. Drayton, then chairman of the Secret Committee of the Provincial Congress, it also included New Light Presbyterian Tennent and Regular Baptist Hart. The dissident area between the Broad and the Saluda held the colony’s principal concentration of Separate Baptist congregations—many were part of a network centered on Loyalist Reverend Philip Mulkey’s Fairforest church—together with some Presbyterians and unchurched Scotch-Irish. The Patriot mission had some success in Presbyterian portions of the interior, but little in the area where Fletchall held sway. Tennent reported to the Council: “We soon found the unchangeable malignity of their minds and…bitterness against the gentlemen as they are called…[They] believe no man that comes from below.”
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Drayton seems to have been radicalized by this August setback, as well as by Royal Governor Campbell’s collusion with Fletchall, Kirkland, and other backcountry loyalists.
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He ordered some of the more reliable militia units to keep pressure on Fletchall and to counter Kirkland’s rumored plan to retake Fort Charlotte. The firmness succeeded. Kirkland left for Charleston, and some of the other Loyalist leaders fled the province. Fletchall, increasingly a weak reed, met with Drayton in mid-September and negotiated a neutrality agreement, nicknamed the “Treaty of Ninety Six” after the upcountry town where they met.

In mid-September, confrontation shifted to Charleston, where Patriots seized Fort Johnson, with artillery that controlled part of the harbor. The backcountry, meanwhile, remained relatively quiet until late October, when Patriot forces, on a slim pretext, arrested and jailed Captain Robert Cunningham, the leader of a family about to make a name for bold and stalwart Loyalism. On November 6, his brother Captain Patrick Cunningham, with 150 men, retaliated by seizing 1,000 pounds of gunpowder that the Patriot Council of Safety was sending to the Cherokee as part of a regular seasonal shipment. This was a supply the tribe depended on, had come to expect, and would be angry to see held back. Stunned Patriot leaders moved to placate
the Cherokee, sending word that the annual shipment was still coming. But now Cunningham made a too-clever move. Together with a prominent white Indian trader, who provided an affidavit, he identified the gunpowder as evidence that the Charleston Patriots were arming the Cherokee to fall on the upcountry Loyalists. Their professed neutrality, Cunningham argued, was just a sham.
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After the Loyalists’ tactic produced a furor, the Provincial Congress replied with its own “declaration.” The notion that it was raising the Indians against the frontier Loyalists was absurd: how could raiding Cherokee know Patriots from Loyalists? The Congress further authorized a large call-up of Patriot-leaning militia to resolve the matter. Several units linked up at the town of Ninety Six, scene of September’s unsustained promises, and 500-odd Patriots threw up a stockade.

By November 19, this force was surrounded by roughly 1,900 Loyalists under Patrick Cunningham and several other backcountry Tories. During a three-day siege, one Patriot defender and a larger number of Loyalists were killed in intermittent fighting. On November 22, the two sides signed an agreement that amounted to little more than a prolonged truce. The defenders had been low on ammunition, while the besiegers knew that more Patriot militia was coming. Colonel Richard Richardson, who commanded that reinforcement of 1,500 men, quickly decided he was not bound by the truce negotiated by a subordinate at Ninety Six. However questionable, his interpretation swung the balance of power. As Richardson marched north to the Saluda in early December, his army swelled to 3,000, as Patriots sensed a decisive moment. The assembled Loyalist army, not surprisingly, in two weeks dwindled to 400, and key officers, including Fletchall, were captured or gave themselves up. In touch with the Patriot leadership in Charleston, Richardson granted lenient terms: “mercy, and protection” in return for laying down arms and promising neutrality.
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November’s First Battle of Ninety Six—all civil war, because South Carolinians were fighting South Carolinians—was something less than a major engagement. Even so, it is proudly recalled locally as “the second battle of the Revolution in South Carolina and the first that involved bloodshed.”
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With the arrival of Richardson’s overwhelming force, only a few hundred bitter-end Loyalists held out under Patrick Cunningham. Retreating into Indian country, they camped at the Great Cane Brake on the Reedy River, southeast of present-day Greenville, and sought help from the Cherokee, which was not forthcoming.

On December 21, the Tories were overtaken by 1,300 men under Colonel William Thomson, a senior Ranger officer, whose attack the next morning achieved almost complete surprise. Cunningham escaped but was soon captured. Some of those surprised were killed, but 130 were taken and sent to Charleston as prisoners. As Richardson had done, Thomson opted for leniency, and that policy succeeded. The Loyalist threat of 1775 was over. When the Cherokee war broke out six months later, many erstwhile Loyalists were part of the Carolina armies that routed them.
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The day after the Battle of the Great Cane Brake, as Richardson, Thomson, and their men started home, a snowfall began that lasted 30 hours and left two feet on the roads and trails. Local historians still call the expedition the Snow Campaign. But although backcountry civil war ended, embers remained. Four years hence, the area burst into flame again, and a Second Battle of Ninety Six would be fought in April 1781.

As to the civil war in North Carolina, its beginning is harder to date. Royal Governor Martin, whose letters did so much to fuel British expectations of Loyalist uprisings, had become attentive to both the Highland Scots and the former Regulators shortly after taking office in late 1771. In the summer of 1772, a year after the backcountry insurgents of the Regulation had been defeated at the Battle of Alamance, Martin visited the Piedmont and came away convinced that they had been mistreated and wronged. He reported to London that “the farmers had been provoked by insolence and cruel advantage taken of the people’s ignorance by mercenary, tricking attornies, clerks and other little Officers.”
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By the summer of 1775, as we have seen, Martin had sent London a plan for a Loyalist rising involving greater numbers than any proposed by Virginia’s Dunmore. Much of its appeal lay in extraordinary enlistment estimates. Martin did not ask for troops, just supplies and equipment for his 10,000 or 20,000 friends and putative allies in plaids, homespun, and buckskin who would march down to Wilmington to meet arriving British ships and regiments.

The North Carolina of 1775, which very few in British politics had ever visited, seemed to be doubling its population every decade—from 70,000 in 1750 to as many as 250,000 in 1775. High-range predictions could not be dismissed. The Highland Scots, for their part, also bathed in an Old World aura of suddenly available military manpower. If the bens and braes of Inverness-shire had a soldier potential of 12,000, the burgeoning upper Cape Fear Valley—with its large influx of McDonalds and McLeods—
might be a New World competitor. General Gage, also enlistment minded, had sent two Scottish officers to North Carolina in July to recruit for a proposed Royal Highland Emigrants regiment. And John Stuart, the southern Indian superintendent, agreed that the greater ratio of frontier North Carolinians leaned toward the Crown.
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Wilmington Patriots, in the crosshairs of British calculation, had been as forward as New Englanders since forming a Committee of Safety in November 1774. Besides regulating local commerce and shipping, they undertook defense and loyalty measures. They surveyed the amount of gunpowder in the city and then forbade any sales. In March 1775, the Committee had endorsed the Test provision of the Continental Association, and as the year progressed, the Test oaths were escalated to impose ever greater standards of adherence. Concerned about Loyalist activity among the Scots upriver, in July the Wilmington Committee sent a letter to that area’s Committee of Safety recommending loyalty oaths, but Whigs there were outnumbered.

On July 18, 800 Patriot militiamen burned Fort Johnston, near the entrance to the Cape Fear River, after its small garrison had fled. By early autumn, apprehensive Patriots had partially fortified the lower river. In November, the Wilmington Committee of Safety, after leaving each white man with one musket, collected the rest for the 300 men of the North Carolina First Regiment camped just outside the town. On November 16 all white male residents of the area were told to assemble at the courthouse in four days to form militia companies, and several vessels were chained and sunk in the harbor to reduce hostile access.
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Royal Governor Martin, still a refugee aboard HMS
Cruzier,
wrote to his principal agent in the Scottish settlements, telling him to begin assembling men. However, although in touch with Loyalist leaders, ex-Regulators, and Scottish recruiting officers, Martin could not raise the king’s standard without orders.

Patriot leaders, by contrast, heard on a regular basis from the Provincial Congress or authorities in Wilmington. Besides the preparation to defend Wilmington and Brunswick, firm measures were taken between December and February to suppress Loyalists in the districts where the governor expected assistance. Settlers in the Yadkin Valley who expressed support for George III were forced from their homes, fleeing into the forest and gaining the name “outlyers.” Tories in Surry County were easily dispersed. Larger numbers attempted to muster in Guilford County, parts of which had been
Regulator strongholds, but in February, seven local Loyalist leaders were arrested and jailed, and their followers lost heart.
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Presbyterian ministers sent in November to woo the Highlanders to the Revolutionary cause had gotten nowhere—partly, one assumes, because they did not speak Gaelic. But outside the Scottish settlements, Patriot countermeasures appear to have been generally successful.

Back in the autumn, Martin had ventured that 20,000 men might rise. But prospects shrank daily in late January and early February, as the time came for Highlanders and onetime Regulators to assemble at Cross Creek, the future Fayetteville. The 2,000 or 3,000 Loyalists once predicted just from Brunswick and Wilmington became a pipe dream. Patriot musters there were ongoing; martial law had been imposed, and 20 known Tories were jailed. Weeks earlier the governor’s advisers had thought the Scottish Highlander army could reach 6,000 men, but in mid-February only 1,000 or so mustered. Leaders of the ex-Regulators had talked as late as February 5 of marshaling 3,000 or even 5,000 men, but eventually only a few hundred showed up. As in the Forty Five, the Highlanders, with their kilts and claymores, were the romantic figures. The North Carolina Whigs, like the Hanoverians, won the day with methodical suppression.