The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens

The American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry

Melissa A. Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136176098
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The American South is so identified with the Civil War that people often forget that the key battles from the final years of the American Revolution were fought in Southern states. The Southern backcountry was the center of the fight for independence, but backcountry devotion to the Patriot cause was slow in coming. Decades of animosity between coastal elites and backcountry settlers who did not enjoy accurate representation in the assemblies meant a complex political and social milieu throughout this turbulent time.

The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens brings to light the world of the Southern backcountry that engendered its role in the Revolutionary War. With careful attention to political, social, and military history, Walker concentrates on the communities and events not typically covered in books on the Revolutionary War. Through government documents, autobiographies, correspondence, and diaries, The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens gives students of the Revolution an important new perspective on the role of the South in the resolution of the fighting.

Chapter 1
The Southern Backcountry Before the American Revolution

The settlers who swarmed into the backcountry before and after the Cherokee War created a distinct society in South Carolina, a society out of touch with Charleston …

Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution

We are Free-Men—British Subjects—Not Born Slaves—We contribute our Proportion in all Public Taxations, and discharge our Duty to the Public, equally with our Fellow Provincials Ye[t] We do not participate with them in the Rights and Benefits which they Enjoy, tho’ equally entitled to them.

Rev. Charles Woodmason, South Carolina “Regulator’s Remonstrance”

In May 1780, after a long siege, British troops under the command of General Henry Clinton captured Charles Town and roughly 5,000 Continental soldiers. A month later, Clinton’s successor as commander of the southern army, General Charles Cornwallis, wrote that the British had put “an end to all resistance in South Carolina.” It seemed that British victory, at least over the Southern colonies, was imminent. Scarcely more than a year later, Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown ending the last large-scale confrontation of regular troops in the long war for American independence. The surprising reversal in British fortunes was largely the result of bitter warfare in the Carolina backcountry and two turning point battles—at Kings Mountain and Cowpens. This book is the story of that backcountry conflict and those turning point battles.¹

The American South is so identified with the Civil War that people often forget that the key battles from the final years of the American Revolution were fought in Southern states. Nearly 20 percent of total combat deaths from the entire Revolutionary War occurred in South Carolina. The Southern backcountry may have been at the center of the fight for independence, but backcountry devotion to the Patriot cause was slow in coming. For decades before the American Revolution, social, political, and religious animosities had smoldered between coastal elites who controlled the colonial governments in North and South Carolina and backcountry settlers who did not enjoy adequate representation in their colonial assemblies or legal systems sufficient for maintaining law and order. Seething conflicts between lowcountry and backcountry citizens would help shape the character of the Revolutionary War in the South. The backcountry war was more like a civil war than a war between nations; it was a fight between Americans and Americans. For example, only one soldier at the Battle of Kings Mountain was British: the Scotsman Patrick Ferguson. All the rest of the combatants—on both sides—were Americans. Throughout the war, the numbers of “redcoats” on the Southern battlefields remained relatively small. To understand this war between Americans and Americans, it is necessary to understand something about Southern colonial life before the Revolution.²

The Southern Backcountry

Eighteenth-century Southerners referred to the area more than fifty miles inland from the coast as the backcountry. The distinction between lowcountry and backcountry was rooted in geography. Lowcountry terrain was just that: close to sea level. Tidewater streams and swamps traversed the lowcountry’s coastal plain. By contrast, the backcountry included sand hills, piedmont, and large expanses of hardwood and pine forests. The far western reaches of the backcountry stretched into the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.³

The Southern backcountry of South Carolina and North Carolina was colonized beginning in the 1740s by Scots-Irish, English, German, Swiss, Welsh, Moravian, and Huguenot settlers. The vast majority of backcountry settlers entered by the “back door,” arriving not from the coast, but via the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road or the Great Indian Trading Path from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Georgia’s frontier was settled a bit later, and many of its newcomers were North and South Carolinians fleeing the violence of the Cherokee War and the Regulator Movements. Between 1763 and 1773, the provincial governments gained millions of acres from the Indians, and royal officials in Georgia and South Carolina used generous land grants to lure new settlers to the backcountry. South Carolina was also known for its relative religious tolerance. Most of the determined backcountry settlers in that colony rejected Anglican worship for one of the several dissenting Protestant sects: Presbyterian, Baptist, or Methodist. By the 1760s, about 35,000 white people lived in the South Carolina backcountry alone. Some backcountry settlers were squatters, eking out a living on land to which they did not hold title. A few engaged in lively and profitable trade with the Indians, but most were yeoman farmers and artisans who earned a living through subsistence and market-oriented production of wheat, tobacco, hemp, butter, and livestock that they sold in Charles Town, Wilmington, or Savannah. Many of these backcountry farmers had ambitions of becoming slave-owning planters. By the time of the Revolutionary War, slaves made up about one-fifth of the backcountry population.⁴

The distances that separated backcountry settlers from the lowcountry founders of the far Southern colonies generated tensions. Few roads connected the backcountry settlements to the coastal towns, and overland travel was arduous and time-consuming. It took at least a week to travel from the backcountry settlement of Ninety Six, South Carolina, to Charles Town, and two weeks from the frontier settlements at Long Canes, further west. Backcountry settlers had some contact with Charles Town where they traveled to trade, and backcountry news was sometimes featured in the Charles Town newspapers. Nonetheless, many backcountry folk lived an isolated existence in territory where most homesteads were primitive and widely scattered with few of the legal or social controls found in the more densely populated coastal regions.⁵

Anxiety in the Backcountry—The 1750s

In the backcountry, settlers lived in an uneasy truce with native Americans. In the mid-eighteenth century, the Cherokee and Catawba Indian nations resided in the Carolina backcountry while the Creeks occupied Georgia’s frontiers. All three groups had early forged a trading partnership with the British, but tensions between white settlers and Indians persisted. A small nation, numbering only about 1,700 in the mid-eighteenth century, the Catawba subsisted through a combination of hunting, fishing, and farming. After the arrival of the Europeans, they also engaged in a vigorous trade. A few decades of conflict with white settlers nevertheless took its toll on the small nation, and their numbers dwindled. In 1763 South Carolina’s

The Cherokee Indians in the Southern Backcountry

By the time Europeans began to explore the southeastern part of North America, the Cherokee were the most powerful of the Indian tribes residing in the region. At one time, the Cherokee nation controlled at least 140,000 acres in the southeast. They combined hunting and gathering with agriculture to supply their needs. Men hunted and fished while women cultivated the land and gathered wild food. They lived in settled villages that governed themselves democratically; political power was decentralized, and villages were largely autonomous, but the nation acted in a united way for most military actions.

The Cherokees first came into contact with Europeans in 1540 when an expedition led by Spaniard Hernando de Soto passed through their territory. A second Spanish expedition led by Juan Pardo in 1567 established six forts in Cherokee country, but the Indians rose against the Spanish, killing the soldiers stationed there and burning all the forts forcing the Spanish to retreat to the coast. Only with the arrival of English settlers in the seventeenth century did the Cherokee come to have sustained contact with Europeans. First they developed trade relationships with Virginians, and after the establishment of Carolina (later divided into North and South Carolina), European trade became an integral part of the Cherokee economy.

Throughout the eighteenth century, European disease and intermittent warfare with other tribes, often on behalf of the British, took a toll on the Cherokee nation, but they remained the most powerful tribe in the southeast. The incursion of increasing numbers of white settlers chipped away at Cherokee territorial integrity as well as they were pressured to cede increasing amounts of land to whites. In 1738 and 1739, nearly half the Cherokee population died in a smallpox epidemic. With blessings from the Cherokee, the British built forts in Cherokee country to defend against other tribes and the French, including Fort Loudoun in present-day Tennessee and Fort Prince George in modern-day South Carolina. These forts would be at the epicenter of Cherokee involvement in the revolutionary ferment.

Indian agent, John Stuart, negotiated the Treaty of Augusta. Ratified by the South Carolina Assembly, the treaty granted the Catawba a reservation in the north central part of the colony. The fact that colonial officials allowed the Catawba to remain permanently in the colony indicates that whites did not see the few Catawba as a significant threat to their security or their land-hungry ambitions.⁶

The Cherokee were far more numerous than the Catawba, and they had a long history of interdependent relations with the British. In 1693, a group of Cherokee journeyed to Charles Town to sign a treaty of friendship and ask for firearms to protect themselves against other Indian nations, an event that marked the beginning of the nation’s sustained contact with the British. Over time, the desire for guns and iron tools led the Cherokee to develop a vigorous trade in deerskins with the Europeans. By 1710, 50,000 deerskins a year were being exported from Charles Town, most of them the product of Cherokee hunting. The possession of firearms and iron tools enabled the Cherokee to become more productive hunters and farmers, but their increasing thirst for deerskins also caused them to encroach on other tribes’ hunting territories. In the 1710s and 1720s, the Cherokee fought wars with all of the neighboring Indian nations: the Shawnee, Creeks, and Catawba. Trade continued to grow throughout the mid-eighteenth century; by 1747, the value of deerskin shipments from Charles Town equaled the combined total of shipments of indigo, beef, pork, lumber, and naval stores. A looming deer shortage escalated the friction between natives and whites and between the Cherokee and other nations.⁷

For their part, the British not only enjoyed the fruits of the deerskin trade, but they also valued the buffer that the Cherokee provided between British settlers and Indians further west. For this reason official royal policy was to maintain good relations with the powerful southeastern nation, a policy not particularly popular with backcountry settlers. John Stuart, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, saw whites as the chief threat to peace, and he pursued measures to protect the welfare of Indians and maintain their landholdings. To prevent abuse by traders, he successfully lobbied the British government to license traders, restrict the sale of rum, and fix prices for trade goods, putting him at odds with backcountry settlers.⁸

By the mid-eighteenth century, backcountry distrust of the Crown’s management of Indian relations escalated even as the Cherokee suffered a precipitous population decline due to disease and inter-tribal warfare. Roughly 8,000 Cherokee warriors lived in towns scattered in the Southern mountains, where they faced increasing pressure from the hordes of white settlers moving in around them. In 1755, the secretary to the royal governor of South Carolina toured the backcountry. He reported in the previous year alone, 300 families from Pennsylvania had arrived in the area around the Saluda River. The encroachment of white settlers on backcountry land was a source of frustration for the Indians, but in the near term, the Cherokee believed the Creeks on their Western frontier posed a bigger threat than white colonists. They prevailed upon their British trading partners for protection, and the British built and staffed two forts, Fort Prince George near Keowee and Fort Loudoun in East Tennessee. The Cherokee would come to regret inviting British troops into the heart of their tribal territory.⁹

The Cherokee War—1759–62

In the 1750s, French officials and traders made a concerted effort to undermine the Anglo–Cherokee relationship, and tensions mounted between the great European power and the strongest native nation in the southeast. When the French and Indian War broke out, the British expected the Cherokee to fight enemies of the Crown, and officially the tribe remained an ally of the British. Some warriors, however, joined the French cause. Yet fighting between the British and their native allies and the French and their native allies was only one facet of the backcountry hostilities during the French and Indian War. In this period, tensions on the edge of white civilization led to trouble. For example, in 1758, a group of Virginia frontiersmen killed some thirty Cherokee warriors who were returning home after fighting with British forces attacking Fort Dusquesne. Then in 1759, English soldiers garrisoned in the Lower Towns (the South Carolina towns of the Cherokee) raped some Cherokee women. In his study of British–Cherokee relations, historian Tom Hatley said that “Cherokee discontent built slowly like a thundercloud at the foot of the mountain.” The Cherokee took revenge by attacking isolated Carolina settlements, an action that in turn led to reprisals from the colonists. Isolated backcountry fighting in 1759 prompted South Carolina’s Royal Governor, William Henry Lyttleton, to launch an expedition to Fort Prince George, the British garrison at Keowee in the Lower Towns. He seized a number of tribal leaders and held them as hostages, using them as leverage to negotiate a peace treaty. The treaty did not hold. Early in 1760, Cherokee warriors surrounded Fort Prince George, lured an officer outside the walls and killed him. The English troops inside the fort retaliated by killing the Cherokee hostages. The resulting conflict became known as the Cherokee War.¹⁰

Attacks and counter-attacks escalated throughout 1760 and 1761, marked by barbarous assaults on both sides. In one attack in early 1760, Cherokees ambushed a wagon train of about 250 settlers trying to flee to safety in Augusta. Forty people were killed or captured, most of them women and children. The victims included the grandmother of John C. Calhoun (a future South Carolina political leader and vice president of the United States). Eyewitness accounts reported that bodies left at the scene were “inhumanely butchered.” The colonists met brutality with brutality. After a large number of Indians were killed during a 1760 siege near Ninety Six, Governor Lyttleton said, “We have now the Pleasure Sir to fatten our Dogs with their Carcasses, and to Display their Scalps, neatly ornamented on the Top of our Bastions.” Two Indians killed in an attack on Rebb’s Fort had their bodies “cut to Pieces and given to the Dogs, so much [were] the Back-Settlers exasperated at their Perfidy and Barbarity.”¹¹

As the war dragged on, the South Carolina Assembly offered a bounty on Indian scalps encouraging an escalation of violence. Many white settlers moved into crowded makeshift forts where disease was rampant, and they appealed to Charles Town for help. Other backcountry settlers abandoned their homes for safer settlements closer to the coast. A former missionary to the Cherokee, William Richardson, wrote, “If some speedy assistance is not afforded the frontiers will, we are afraid, be immediately deserted …” The South Carolina Assembly appropriated relief funds for the refugees, but some of the owners of private forts embezzled the funds. The winter of 1760–1761 proved particularly hard for both sides; the Cherokee people suffered from hunger while about 1,500 whites spent the winter crowded into backcountry garrisons where their ranks were ravaged by food shortages and smallpox. The homes and farms abandoned by refugees were looted and seized by both thieves and militiamen. The fighting finally ended in summer 176...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• 1 The Southern Backcountry Before the American Revolution
• 2 Imperial Crisis in the South
• 3 Revolutionary War and the Challenge of Winning Hearts and Minds
• 4 The South’s First Civil War: The Fall of Charles Town and its Aftermath
• 5 Kings Mountain: “First Link in a Chain”
• 6 The Battle of Cowpens: Victory for “The Flying Army”
• 7 Denouement
• Documents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index