Volume 4, Chapter 18, Battling Tories in the South
North Carolina confronted concentrations of Tories among Highland Scots in the Wilmington-Fayetteville
area, who owed their land to the Crown's largesse and who included a number of retired British
Army officers. There were also strong but not dominant clusters of Tories in the back
Perhaps fully half of the North Carolina population was Tory or at least lukewarm to the rebel cause. Furthermore, fear of Negro uprisings aiding the British led the North Carolina Provincial Congress in the spring of 1776 to urge all slave owners on the south side of the Cape Fear River to remove far into the interior all slaves capable of bearing arms for the British.
In Wilmington, Negroes began to escape in droves into the woods, and whites enforced a nine o'clock curfew on them.
In January 1776, Josiah Martin, the royal governor of North Carolina who had fled to a British warship, decided to mobilize the Tories of the province.
Over-optimistically expecting 9,000 Tories to rise in arms, Martin urged the Highlanders
and all other Tories to rally in arms for the King and marched to the sea to join him
and expected reinforcements from Great Britain.
Soon 1,600 Tories gathered under the veteran British General Donald MacDonald at Cross Creek,
now Fayetteville.
The Tory response was weakened, however, by the failure of Governor Martin to sail his
ship past enemy fire to arrive at the Cross Creek rendezvous. Reaching Moore's Creek Bridge
near Wilmington on February 27, the Tories encountered a smaller force of 1,000 militiamen
under Colonels Richard Caswell and John Lillington. The Americans held strongly entrenched positions,
But in the absence of the ailing MacDonald, the new commander, the young and reckless
Colonel Donald MacLeod, was able to override the advice of older officers. Once again,
as in Virginia, the Tories hurled themselves heedlessly, but in orthodox fashion, against
entrenched rebel positions and were crushed even more effectively than at Great Bridge.
The Tories suffered 30 casualties, whereas the revolutionaries enjoyed the incredible
casualty rate of none killed and only two slightly wounded. The surviving Tories fled
inland, pursued by relentless bands of American rebels who captured no fewer than 850 of the
enemy. Among the killed were Colonel MacLeod and among the captured General MacDonald and
The political leader of the Highland Scots, Major Alan MacDonald, armed to Toryism in
North Carolina, had suffered a crippling blow. After commiserating with their families and
pledging them its protection, the North Carolina Provincial Congress decided to disperse the
hundreds of captured Tories to all the provinces, so as to guard against their pernicious influence.
The rank-and-file prisoners were shipped to Maryland and Virginia, the leaders to remote
Philadelphia. The people of North Carolina were solemnly warned that the treatment meted
out to the prisoners would largely depend on the good behavior of the remaining Tories
of the province.
The year before, during the summer and fall of 1775, the English government had worked
British troops were to embark from Ireland to be led by General Clinton, who would join
the expedition at Boston.
However, bureaucratic bumbling and adverse weather delayed the expedition until April 1776, by which time Dunmore had been routed off the continent, and Martin's premature Tory uprising crushed.
When Clinton arrived near the Cape Fear River in mid-April, he was forced to abandon his projected invasion of the South.
Contrary disaffection was even stronger in South Carolina than in its northern neighbor,
for there both British support and neutralism abounded among low-country merchants and planters
as well as the back-country frontiersmen.
The revolutionist low-country planters were in constant fear of pro-British insurrections
by the numerous Negro slaves, and a Negro named Jerry was executed in the summer of
of 1775 for saying he would help pilot British warships into Charleston. Furthermore, John
Stuart, the British Indian agent in the South, was plotting to raise the powerful Cherokee
tribe in attack against the frontier settlements. This buildup was originally part of General
Gage's plan for concerted Indian attack on the entire American frontier, but the arrest
of Connolly in Virginia and McKee in Pittsburgh in October 1775 and the disarming of Johnson
in New York in January 1776 wrecked that plan.
Even so, Stuart and the Cherokees were still all too dangerous.
Despite the great potential of Tory strength in South Carolina, lack of intelligent organization
crippled its impact.
In particular, the royal governor, Lord Campbell, instead of going to the back country to rouse
his supporters, chose to conduct operations from British warships in Charleston harbor.
Seizing the opportunity presented by Campbell's caution, the rebels of Charleston sent their
leader, William Henry Drayton, and the Reverend William Tennant, Charleston's leading Presbyterian
and Minister to the Backcountry in August 1775 to organize the rebel forces there.
By September, two large contending backcountry forces had gathered at 96, 1,000 rebel militiamen
under Drayton confronting a larger Tory force under Colonel Thomas Fletchell. Remarkably,
Grayton and Tennant managed to sweet-talk Fletchel into signing a Treaty of Neutrality
and to disband. The treaty pledged the neutrality of Fletchel and his men and even partially
acknowledged the authority of the South Carolina Provincial Congress. Soon, however, the Tories
rose again, led this time by Robert Cunningham. Over 1,800 of them gathered at 96, wherein
In mid-November they unsuccessfully attacked a fort manned by one-third of their number.
In the meanwhile, the South Carolina Council of Safety, the arm of the Provincial Congress
entrusted with executive powers, decided to crush the Tories posthaste and sent Colonel
Richard Richardson to do the job. Richardson sped westward, collecting revolutionary militia
from both North and South Carolina as he went. By late November he had amassed over 4,000
men. Richardson's force crushed all-Tory resistance before it, and hundreds of Tories were disarmed
and compelled to pledge peaceful behavior in the future. An amnesty the following March
completed the rout of the South Carolina loyalist. South Carolina, any more than its sister province
to the North could not now lend Tory assistance to an invasion by General Clinton.
In Georgia, which had been the colony least enthusiastic for the opposition to Great Britain,
armed Tory resistance was at first avoided by the very mildness of the Whig response
to the revolution.
Indeed, only the rebel enclave of St. John's sent a delegate to the Second Continental
Congress.
The opening of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, however, coupled with the angry boycott
of Georgia by the other colonies, could only push Georgian opinion into a more active course.
The development also advanced the fortunes of the Liberty Boys, who, on hearing the news,
broke into the public powder magazine.
Realizing that Governor James Wright's power could only be nullified and eliminated by
The Liberty Boys organized an effective Savannah Mob headed by young Joseph Habersham, son
of the president of the Georgia Council.
This spearhead of the Liberty militants in the province consisted of a cross section
of the town's activists, aristocrats, laborers and town rowdies alike.
The blows of the mob soon wrecked the authority and morale of the royal government.
And Governor Wright soon saw that his cause was lost. This was no longer his snug Tory
Georgia. This campaign was capped in early July 1775 by Haversham and others openly and
boldly carrying off the government's store of munitions. On June 13, several hundred
Liberty boys assembled at Savannah, put up a Liberty tree, established a Savannah committee
to enforce the Continental Association, which Georgia had never joined, and called a Provincial
Congress for the following month. This Congress, meeting on July 4, ratified the program and
circulated a defense association around Savannah. The Congress became the de facto legislature
of the colony and a council of safety its chosen executive. The joining of the other
and other American colonies in revolt was particularly symbolized by Georgia's finally choosing a full slate of delegates to the Continental Congress.
Soon the Provincial Congress took over rule of the militia and the courts in Georgia.
Thus, the Georgia rebels were fully occupied during 1775 with catching up to the other American colonies.
In mid-January, British warships appeared at the mouth of the Savannah River to aid Governor Wright, who had been shorn of all authority by the rebel Provincial Congress.
The Council of Safety promptly decided to seize Wright and other officials to prevent them from rallying the Georgia Tories.
He was arrested by Habersham, but a few weeks later he escaped to flee to a British warship.
and British Warship. Georgia-Tourism, like its counterparts in the other southern provinces, had been outmaneuvered and effectively suppressed.