1775 (59 page)

Dunmore also had more than his share of critics. In any event, news or
letters dated October, November, or early December came too late to affect London’s autumnal selection of North Carolina as the initial destination. Here, as in so many other circumstances, slow communications would complicate matters.

North Carolina governor Josiah Martin, until 1769 a serving lieutenant colonel in the British Army, particularly emphasized two groups of potential Loyalists. First were the 15,000 to 20,000 or so Scottish Highlanders concentrated in the upper Cape Fear Valley, 4,000 of whom had just arrived in 1774. He was equally optimistic about the ex-Regulators of the Piedmont area, bloodily suppressed in 1771 by previous governor William Tryon at the Battle of Alamance. A considerable number of ex-Regulators continued to equally blame and dislike the tidewater gentry, many of whom now led North Carolina’s Patriot movement. Martin had courted the ex-Regulators, expressing sympathy for some of their earlier complaints. He spent three months in the summer of 1772 touring the backcountry, which “hath opened my eyes exceedingly.”
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In 1774, his seeming allies in the Piedmont had responded with petitions against the Continental Congress and its Association.

Governor Campbell of South Carolina, albeit newly arrived, had close ties to that colony’s Loyalist community. Being the son of the Duke of Argyll helped with Charleston’s considerable Scottish population, and Campbell’s wife, the former Sarah Izard, was a South Carolinian from that wealthy conservative family. The governor also counted on the distrust of Charleston’s Patriot leaders widespread across the backcountry, especially the restive region between the Broad and Saluda rivers. By mid-1775, a militia regiment there was openly disaffected and leaning toward the king, as Campbell pointed out in a July letter to Lord Dartmouth. Several historians have argued that if the governor had journeyed to the interior and joined Colonel Thomas Fletchall and his men, he might have thwarted the Revolution in South Carolina.
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Georgia was less important. Nevertheless, in early 1775 only a few areas were zealous in supporting the Revolution—New England–settled St. John’s Parish, and its militant Presbyterian neighbor, St. Andrew’s. Several other parishes petitioned against the violent actions in New England, and Georgia’s inattention to the Association provoked South Carolina to cut off relations. When the Second Continental Congress convened on May 10, it, too, cut off trade with Georgia.
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By the autumn of 1775, Governor Martin probably had more counterrevolutionary
irons in the fire than any southern royal governor save the controversial Dunmore. In close touch with the Loyalist Highlanders of the upper Cape Fear, Martin had already tapped into London’s well-advanced plans to raise a Royal Highland Emigrants Regiment in North Carolina and New York. Indeed, he had already been allowed to name its principal organizer, Lieutenant Colonel Donald MacDonald, as brigadier general of the North Carolina militia.
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In November, when another boatload of Scottish immigrants arrived, Martin pointedly had them renew their oaths of allegiance to the Crown before they were granted land.
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Many other Scottish settlers had already taken such oaths in the old country, some after participating in Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s ill-fated 1745 rebellion. Such pledges were taken seriously.

The estimate Martin had conveyed to Lord Dartmouth during the summer was that if a force of 3,000 Highlanders could be embodied and armed by Britain, then under that protective umbrella, close to 20,000 of the province’s fighting men—including 5,000 or so ex-Regulators—would rally to the royal standard. The military balance in the southern colonies would shift. Both Carolinas could be retaken, and Virginia would tremble.
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And he didn’t ask for men, just weapons.

Underpinning ministerial optimism was the assumption, shared by the four governors, that majorities in their provinces were either loyal to the Crown or amenable to being pushed in that direction.
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Although exaggerated, the notion was not silly. But the planning and implementation by the Cabinet and the Admiralty turned out to be inept. When Britain, between 1778 and 1780, shifted a substantial portion of her resources and soldiery southward, this second, better-implemented effort managed to throw the Carolinas and Georgia into bitter civil war, achieving some of what had been contemplated in 1775.

But let us return to the weak first effort. Overt planning began on September 5, not long after the king’s Proclamation of Rebellion. Dartmouth instructed William Howe in Boston—the general was about to take over from a departing Gage—that he was to weigh employing some of his forces in a “sudden and unexpected enterprise,” which would scare the South and also help to secure provisions for the beleaguered army in Boston.
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At this stage, the expedition was only proposed, not assured. Within weeks, however, it was pointing just where Martin hoped: toward a landing on North Carolina’s Cape Fear, near Wilmington, the colony’s leading port.

Cape Fear: The Fatal Lure

While hardly ranking alongside the Potomac, the Ohio, or the Mississippi, the Cape Fear is nevertheless North Carolina’s longest river, descending 500 miles from its source in the foothills near Winston-Salem to an Atlantic mouth in a very different clime: the pitch pine, rice, and alligator country close to the South Carolina line.

The Cape Fear watershed in 1775 was home to a cultural and political kaleidoscope of recently settled populations, some with little sense of province or community. Quakers and German-speaking Moravians put an otherworldly and pacifist stamp on the hilly north. Former Regulators, in particular Baptists, abounded around the fork—itself close to the Alamance battlefield—where three tributaries, the New Hope, Haw, and Deep rivers, joined to become the Cape Fear. Thousands of Loyalist Scottish Highlanders, largely Gaelic-speaking, predominated within a 30-mile radius of the head of navigation at Cross Creek (present-day Fayetteville). Farther downstream a smaller group of Scotch-Irish imparted a Patriot coloration. The subtropical plantation lowlands, in turn, centered on the ports of Brunswick and Wilmington. These were dominated by Patriots of English descent, akin to their fire-eating cousins in the South Carolina low country. This Brunswick-Wilmingtion axis, scholars seem to agree, constituted the center of the early Revolutionary movement in North Carolina.
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One suspects the far-off British Cabinet had no inkling of that.

The ministry’s initial belief, encouraged by Martin, was that former Regulators in Piedmont counties like Guilford, Anson, Chatham, and Orange would assemble by the thousands and join up with a fearsome Celtic army of clansmen embodied for “King George and broadswords.” Together, an unstoppable force of 6,000 or 8,000 men would march to the coast to rendezvous with a British fleet and several regiments of redcoats. Loyalists would restore “lawful government.”

If timing went somewhat awry, there was leeway. Late-summer hopes that General Howe would move his army from Boston to New York in October 1775 were falling through. Too few transports were available. In consequence, the general would not be able to leave Boston until March or April. Furthermore, the regiments originally intended to sail from Ireland and England to bolster Howe for the decisive Hudson River campaign in 1776 were also far behind schedule.

As conceived, some of the force from Ireland was to arrive in the Carolinas in March, ideal soldiers’ weather for that part of the world. They could perform militarily and then sail north, still in time to meet Howe in New York for a May campaign there. That was the kind of loose Cabinet thinking that sometimes confronted workaday logisticians at the Treasury or Navy Board. On top of which there was also a navigational problem.

Lord Dartmouth and Lord North probably knew little more about the Cape Fear River than John Adams did about the stable favorites British Cabinet members looked forward to racing at Newmarket that spring. Even so, the very label
Cape Fear
—from “the Cape of Feare,” named by Sir Richard Grenville in 1585—together with the promontory’s wicked hooked shape, visible on any good map, should have stirred caution in Whitehall. It did at the Admiralty. One nineteenth-century North Carolinian has left an apt portrait: “A naked bleak elbow of sand jutting far out into the ocean. Immediately in its front are the Frying Pan shoals pushing out still farther twenty miles to the south. Together they stand for warning and woe.”
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The Cabinet’s initial expectation of enjoying a deepwater port was soon dispelled. Sloops could go up the river, like the eight-gun
Cruizer,
in which Martin had close quarters, but not heavy ships. In early November, Dartmouth had been thrown off stride by word that the fleet’s larger vessels—28-gun frigates and up—would be unable to cross the bar at the river’s mouth. This would deny the supporting guns of the fleet to any upriver amphibious operation.
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But no change of plans was made.

On January 10, Martin proclaimed the royal standard raised in North Carolina, sending Loyalist leaders in eight counties authorizations to raise troops, commission officers, and impress necessary provisions and means of transportation. By February 15, the contingents were to meet in Brunswick and rendezvous with the fleet.
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Their fate will be discussed later, but ultimately only 900 Loyalists, mostly Scots, did battle on February 27, some 25 miles from Brunswick, at Moore’s Creek Bridge. In less than an hour, they were cut to pieces by North Carolina Patriot militia.

In Britain, the schedule had fallen apart. The first group of ships, with some 500 soldiers under Henry Clinton, who would command the expedition, arrived from Boston on March 12. However, the main body coming from Ireland—41 transports and warships with 2,500 hundred men from seven regiments—did not make landfall until May 3. They had not even left Cork until February 13.
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Better they had never sailed, because the
expeditions achieved almost nothing during the four weeks the major force spent in the lower Cape Fear region.

Martin, more than any of the other southern governors, exaggerated with his bravado about 20,000 fighting men who would “awe” Virginia and retake the Carolinas. Still, it is fair to say that London’s neglect of local geography and navigation, coupled with its inability to transport men in the promised time frame, contributed just as much to the failure. The various components of the 1775–1776 movement southward—several vessels and companies of the Fourteenth Regiment sent to Dunmore in Virginia; May’s seven-regiment embarrassment on the Cape Fear; and June’s ill-fated joint attack on Charleston Harbor by the army and navy—rarely get comprehensive as opposed to piecemeal attention in Revolutionary accounts. Yet it is the enterprise in its entirety that reflected so poorly on British planning and coordination.

Whitehall 1775: Cabinet-Level Mismanagement

The British government’s southern misadventures helped to delay the all-important main attack on New York and to give the Revolution time to consolidate at the grass roots. Far from being inadvertent or accidental, the southern expeditions took form during October as high policy, discussed and approved by King George himself. These were months in which war psychologies notably escalated on both sides of the Atlantic, and impatience might have tempted leaders to dispel boredom with action. George Washington explained his naval ventures in Massachusetts that way in several letters. Perhaps a similar psychology was at work in London.

Although Lord Dartmouth was principally concerned with bolstering the region’s Loyalists, he had also been given other arguments. One idea was to open up areas of the southern colonies to supply provisions to British forces; a second was to use southeastern North Carolina as a rear door to nearby South Carolina. In September, Dartmouth ordered the Ordnance Board to begin readying the military supplies Governor Martin had requested. The board began but quickly expressed doubt about sending so much matériel without accompanying British troops. This added dimension obliged senior officials to confer. On October 15, Lord North endorsed the change, advising the king that such an expedition could be mounted quickly and accomplished in time for the soldiers—now four to five regiments—to go north and join Howe in New York by spring. Bolstering
Martin in North Carolina was still the priority, but the prime minister also mentioned the requests for support by Dunmore and Lord William Campbell.
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King George replied the next day, approving four regiments and giving priority to North Carolina, with Virginia and South Carolina next. High-level instructions for ships to sail from Ireland followed, along with orders for disembarkation in America.
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On October 22, with approvals moving rapidly, Dartmouth wrote to General Howe, stating the premise: the expedition should restore order and government in North and South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia (the latter mentioned for the first time). The main body of troops, to be convoyed by the navy from Ireland, would proceed to the Cape Fear River, “at which place there is good ground to hope they will be immediately joined by the Highland emigrants settled in that area.” Inhabitants from four or five back counties were also expected, and “it is these circumstances which have induced the resolution of sending troops to North Carolina.” Carolina pilots were to be found to conduct the fleet arriving from Cork into the Cape Fear River.
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The transports were still expected to leave Ireland at the beginning of December.
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