KINGS MOUNTAIN
American Patriots and Loyalists face off in the rugged terrain of South Carolina
It had been a bleak and unhappy 1779 for General Sir Henry Clinton, commanderin-chief of the British forces in North America, who wanted desperately to turn this troublesome conflict over to someone else and go home to England. Clinton insisted he needed two strong armies in America, not the one "pathetically small army" he actually had, but London had not heeded him, and his frustrations had swelled. But now he would strike a powerful blow against the colonial American rebels, or 'Patriots', as they called themselves. Sailing from New York harbour on 26 December 1779 with 8,500 troops in 90 transports, he headed south – his destination was rebel-held Charleston, South Carolina.
In transit, his fleet was hit by an improbable succession of wild storms. Regathering his scattered ships, Clinton made for the port city of Savannah, Georgia, which had fallen to British forces back in 1778. He did not reach it until 1 February. On 11 February he began landing troops some 48 kilometres (30 miles) to the south of Charleston, and then advanced on the city. The ensuing siege was carried out slowly but methodically, and eventually Charleston was brought within range of British artillery. On 9 May the bombardment began, and the city capitulated only three days later.
The fall of Charleston on 12 May was an unmitigated disaster for the Patriot cause and a glorious triumph for Clinton. In addition to the 5,000 prisoners taken, the capture also yielded 391 cannon, 6,000 muskets and a gargantuan supply of munitions and other military supplies. With Charleston safely in British hands, Clinton returned to New York in early June. He left behind Lord Charles Cornwallis as the commander of British forces in the American South.
The war in the South
The increased British attention on the South was part of the new strategy to break the stalemate that had settled over the American War of Independence to the north. With France and Spain now in the war on the side of the American rebels, London felt it necessary to safeguard other, perhaps more important, British interests in the Caribbean. So British strategic attention largely shifted southward, as did much of its army in the Thirteen Colonies.
Loyalists in the Carolinas were heartened by the dramatic royal success at Charleston. Coming out of the oppressive Patriot shadow they had long lived under, they encouraged the British to mount a full-scale conquest of the region. They also took the opportunity to exact revenge on the Patriots who had made their lives miserable prior to Clinton’s descent. The war in the Carolinas, especially in the Back Country region, far inland of the Atlantic coast, took on the character of a civil war, filled with cruelties that only those who had once lived as neighbours can inflict on people – people from whom they had been suddenly sundered by taking opposing sides.
Cornwallis’s primary task was to secure
South Carolina and Georgia for the Crown.
How he did this was left to his own discretion. Cornwallis chose not to remain on the defensive but took an active approach. He set up several outposts – at Savannah, Augusta, Cross Creek, Ninety-six, Camden, Cheraw, Hanging Rock, Georgetown and Rocky Mount. Each outpost was intended to anchor the region more firmly under royal control.
For the time being there was little to stop him. The American presence in South Carolina after the fall of Charleston was meagre: just a single regiment, the Third Virginia
Continentals under Colonel Abraham Buford. This was retreating northwards when it was overhauled by pursuing British forces. At the Battle of Waxhaws on 29 May, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the 25-year-old British commander of the British Legion, an American Loyalist regiment, ran down and slaughtered the Third Virginia Continentals as they attempted to surrender. Many of the Continentals who were killed and wounded had already laid down their arms, though Buford himself escaped.
Though Tarleton had won the day, the event was marked out as an unforgivable atrocity, and the battle cries of "Remember Buford" and "Tarleton’s Quarter" echoed among the Patriots who gathered in increasing numbers to fight on. Tarleton himself would become infamous as ‘Bloody Ban’.
“IN ADDITION TO HIS ROLE AS FLANK GUARD, HE WAS TO CLEAR THE UPLAND REGIONS OF PATRIOTS, A TASK THAT WOULD BE MORE EASILY ASSIGNED THAN FULFILLED”
Back Country
If the Thirteen Colonies taken together were filled with recalcitrant, liberty-minded rebels bent on separating from Britain, then the Back Country of the Carolinas was one of the red-hot centres of such Patriotic feeling. The intractable nature of the region was due in large part to the kind of people who had made their home there. The place had been settled by people from England, Scotland and Germany, but most prominent were the immigrants and their descendants from northern Ireland, known in America as the ‘Scotch-irish’.
Their forefathers had been Presbyterians from the Scottish Lowlands who had been settled in the Plantation of Ulster starting in the 17th century. They brought with them to the Back Country a martial spirit that had been forged in the fires of constant fighting along the Anglo-scottish border, and then honed further in battles with the Catholic Irish in Ireland. On the American frontier, they then became expert ‘Indian fighters’ and waged incessant war against the native peoples they encountered there. They were self-reliant, independent and had scant affection for the king or his officials. Most would side with the Patriot cause during the War of Independence.
The partisan civil war shifted into a higher gear. A fierce fight took place at Ramsour’s
Mill on 20 June, and this was followed by the smashing of a Loyalist camp by Patriots at Williamson Plantation on 12 July. Patriot leader Thomas Sumter next led a force of Patriots against Loyalist-held Rocky Mount on 1 August, where he was repulsed. He then attacked another Loyalist post at Hanging Rock on 6 August, and inflicted stinging losses on its garrison. None of these actions were large by European standards, being more akin to skirmishes than battles. But the ferocity of the encounters highlights the bloody nature of the civil war that had engulfed the Carolinas.
The regular Continental Army was not so successful as these Patriot warbands. It had a new commander, General Horatio Gates, the hero of the war-changing American victory at Saratoga in 1777. In the South he would not live up to his reputation. On 16 August 1780 his Continentals clashed with Cornwallis’s troops at Camden in South Carolina. Suffering from
a collective bout of diarrhoea brought on by partially cooked food and a dose of molasses, his troops were handily routed by Cornwallis, with heavy losses.
Major Patrick Ferguson
With the Continental Army dispersed, Cornwallis moved northwards for North Carolina, intending to sweep the region clear of Patriot resistance. One British officer who had been seconded to Cornwallis by Clinton was 36-year-old Major Patrick Ferguson of the 71st Regiment of Foot. Ferguson had lost the use of his arm to a rebel bullet taken at the Battle of the Brandywine in 1777, and had been made inspector of militia by the commander-in-chief before he went back to New York.
The son of a Scottish attorney, Ferguson, like Tarleton, also supported a harder line against Patriot resistance in the Colonies. Unlike Tarleton, he earned a reputation for fair-mindedness and showed a willingness to listen to anyone, though he firmly insisted on the rightness of the Crown's cause. Ferguson was tasked with guarding Cornwallis’s left, or western, flank as the main British army marched towards North Carolina. In addition to his role as flank guard, he was to clear the upland regions of Patriots, a task that would be more easily assigned than fulfilled.
To accomplish his mission, Ferguson raised militia bands from among the Loyalists in the Carolinas. He also had with him his own personal command, the American Volunteers, composed of soldiers recruited from other Loyalist regiments in New York and New Jersey.