Born Fighting (17 page)

The noted journalist, historian, and diplomat Whitelaw Reid summed up the differences among these three approaches neatly nearly a century ago in successive papers presented to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution (1911) and the Presbyterian Historical Society of Belfast (1912). “The Puritan did not seek a new world to establish liberty of conscience—far from it. He only sought a world where he could impose his own conscience on everybody else. The Cavalier did not seek a new world where he could establish universal freedom. He only sought freedom for himself. Even for the early Scottish immigrants sent out to him he had no use save as bond-servants. Later on he found them also useful as Presidents.”
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The power of this Scots-Irish resistance was not lost on the British and loyalist elites. As Leyburn writes:

An Episcopalian of Philadelphia said that “a Presbyterian loyalist was a thing unheard of.” A Hessian captain wrote in 1778, “Call this war by whatever name you may, only call it not an American rebellion; it is nothing more or less than a Scotch Irish Presbyterian rebellion.” It was reported that King George III characterized the Revolution as “a Presbyterian war,” and that Horace Walpole remarked in Parliament, “There is no use crying about it. Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson, and that is the end of it.” A representative of Lord Dartmouth wrote from New York in November 1776 that “Presbyterianism is really at the Bottom of the whole Conspiracy, has supplied it with Vigour, and will never rest, till something is decided upon.” Jonathan D. Sergeant, member of the Continental Congress from New Jersey, said that the Scotch Irish were the main pillar supporting the Revolution in Pennsylvania. A New Englander who opposed the rupture with England declared the Scotch Irish to be, with few exceptions, “the most God-provoking democrats on this side of Hell.”
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Despite such passions, for practical and ideological reasons the Scots-Irish were at the outset divided in their opinions about how to react to the war itself. Many flocked immediately to the Continental Army. The famous Pennsylvania Line, perhaps the best unit in the regular army, was mainly Scots-Irish. True to form, it is also remembered for angrily (and drunkenly) marching on the Continental Congress on New Year’s Day, 1781, after having not been paid for more than a year.
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Estimates vary, but it is undeniable that the Scots-Irish comprised at least one-third and as many as one-half of the “rebel” soldiers during the Revolutionary War. They became quickly known not only for their battlefield tenacity, but also for their loyalty during the brutal winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, where they remained steadfast while large numbers of soldiers deserted George Washington.
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Many others among them, while loyal to the cause of independence (one is tempted to write, with a hint of premonition, the cause of secession), nonetheless remained for several years as members of the militia units in the mountains, fearing that a mass exodus of the militias toward the coastline to fight the British would open up their Appalachian communities to attacks from Indian war parties in the west. And finally, a sizable percentage felt an equally strong dislike of the colonial elites who were pulling all the strings in the war for independence and felt little obligation to fight and die for the English-American aristocrats who for so long had controlled government services without bringing benefits to the communities in the mountains.

In 1780, while the war slid miserably into its fourth year of conflict, these differences would disappear as the British compounded a key political and strategic misjudgment with the grave error of attempting to intimidate an unyielding people. And in the space of a few months the fierce militiamen from the rock-strewn, frequently embattled Appalachian Mountain settlements would show the Redcoat forces a whole new way of fighting, in the process finally forcing an end to the war.

1780 was a pivotal year for the hierarchy in London. An antiwar element had gained favor among many key British political leaders after their defeat in the pivotal Battle of Saratoga in late 1777, which brought the French into the war on the side of the American colonists. Lord North, heading the government of King George III, had then offered his resignation with the observation that “the best we can make of the war is to get out of the dispute as soon as possible,” but George had rejected both the resignation and the advice.
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The king and others in London persisted largely at the urging of a group of “loyalist exiles who had fled from America to spend the duration of the war in Britain. They were loud and positive in asserting that they represented a large, though muffled, body of opinion in the American colonies.”
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With visions that reflect the distorted dreams of exiled elites throughout history, including the recent predictions that the Iraqis would rise up to greet American forces who came to “liberate” them from Saddam Hussein, the “potential of loyalist support in the Southern backcountry became primary ‘evidence’ in arguments for continued prosecution of the war . . . There was no alternative now. Britain, rent by internal divisions and increasing weakness of its far-flung external resources, increasingly dependent upon a surge of Southern loyalists to win its war, launched the Southern offensive of 1780.”
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This strategy envisioned a “domino effect” whereby the Southern colonies would be rolled up from Georgia northward, creating enough despair in an already demoralized Continental Army that the “rebel” forces would eventually surrender. It was not wholly without merit, and as long as it was applied along the coastal areas, the strategy had good effect. In February 1780 the British landed at Savannah, Georgia, with 6,000 regulars under the command of Sir Henry Clinton. By May the British, whose forces had swollen to 10,000 with the addition of colonialist Tory soldiers, had put Charleston, South Carolina, in a noose through a combination of naval and ground attacks. The mass surrender of 5,500 Continental soldiers in that city on May 12 would remain the worst embarrassment for American military forces until the defeat of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s army at the hands of Japanese attackers at Bataan in 1942.
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Shortly afterward, one of Sir Henry’s key officers announced that “the most violent Rebels are candid enough to allow the game is up,” and Clinton himself sailed back to New York, leaving his second-in-command Lord Cornwallis in charge.
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But the most violent rebels were not yet even in the game. The population of the coastal areas of North and South Carolina where the initial battles were fought was dominated by English-Americans and highland Scots, many of whom had already shown allegiance to the Crown. The great majority of the population in the Carolinas was in the mountains, and the bulk of the people in the mountains were Scots-Irish with long memories, deep hatreds, and battle skills that had been continuously honed against the Indians. Blindly—some might say arrogantly—the British ignored that reality as they pressed their campaign farther inland. Having toppled the Continentals so easily along the coastline, their leaders reasoned that a policy of terror and intimidation in the western communities would quickly bring the rest of the Carolinas into the fold.

This misjudgment proved to be perhaps the most costly error of the war. By launching a campaign that in its tone was chillingly reminiscent of Proud Edward’s attempt to hammer Scotland and Henry VIII’s “rough wooing” of the Scottish lowlands in centuries past, the British and their Tory cohorts provoked the anger of the very people who were capable of smashing their advance. And smash it they would.

The first British mistake, a series of cavalry raids into the Carolina countryside to convince the locals of their overwhelming superiority, oddly mirrored the actions of the Norman conquerors seven hundred years before. What had worked in England had not worked in Scotland, and what worked along the Carolina coastline did not work where the Piedmont began to give way to the mountains. British colonel Banastre Tarleton, the commander of Clinton’s light cavalry, was, to be blunt, an avid butcher who had learned the wrong lessons from England’s past. A twenty-six-year-old graduate of Oxford, the short, stocky redhead was known as “a hard-riding, high-living dragoon officer who bragged about his triumphal subjugation of sundry women and the victorious conquests of his Legion.”
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Determined to fully intimidate what remained of the Continental Army in the South, on May 29, 1780, Tarleton attacked a retreating column under the command of Col. Abraham Buford. “After the Americans were driven together in a mass, with white flag flying and arms grounded, the Tories fell upon them with sword and bayonet. That was ‘Tarleton’s Quarter,’ a byword for the slaughter of surrendered men.”
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The British and Tory soldiers, in an attempt to stamp out what they believed to be the last pocket of resistance in the Carolinas, shot or bayoneted every surrendering soldier. In all, 113 were killed “and another 150 so badly maimed that uhey were left to die on the$battlefield. Tarleton lost five men killed qnd 12 wounded.”
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But instead of quelling the countryside, Tarleton had enraged it, drawing famed guerrilla fighters such as Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pigkens into fresh retaliation in the lowlands. “Tarleton’s quarter” became a rallying cry for colonists bent on revenge. Word of such British atrocities spread quickly into the western mountains as well—even to the remote “over-mountain” communities in eastern Tennessee and in the Clinch River area of southwest Virginia—convincing the hard-bitten militiamen of Appalachia that they could no longer stay out of the fight.

This led to the second, eventually fatal, British mistake. Rather than leaving the backcountry to these mountaineer militiamen or perhaps trying to lure them toward the coast, the British decided to directly challenge them on their own terrain. Worse yet, they boasted that they would soon hang the mountaineer leaders and destroy their homes.

In late summer, his army increasingly harassed by patriot guerrillas and slowed by malaria and yellow fever, Lord Cornwallis decided to sweep through North Carolina from the south in order to wipe out what he viewed to be the last pockets of patriot resistance. The British army would advance on three fronts: the first along the coast, a second, commanded by Cornwallis, moving through the center, and a third to fan out into the mountains and neutralize the principally Scots-Irish militia units. For the movement into the mountain region, Cornwallis chose Maj. Patrick Ferguson, a highly regarded Scottish highlander who at age thirty-six already had served as a soldier for twenty years. Along with Ferguson was a core group of about 300 New York and New Jersey loyalist soldiers called the American Volunteers, who had been handpicked from the King’s American Regiment, the Queen’s Rangers, and the New Jersey Volunteers, plus a supplementary force of about a thousand local Tory militiamen that Ferguson himself had recruited and extensively trained.

Ferguson was by all accounts an exemplary soldier and a charismatic leader. Raised as the son of Lord Pitfour on an estate in Aberdeenshire, he had entered the army at age fifteen and within the next year had fought with the Royal North British Dragoons in Germany and Flanders. By the time of!the American Revolution he had also served i~ the West Indies and Nova Scotia, and had also i~vented the first breechloading rifle ever used in the Bri|ish military. A true campaigner, during the Revolutionary War he had distinguished himself in the Battle of Brandywine, where he was wounded so severely that his elbow was shattered and his right arm permanently crippled, and then returned to the battlefiele to fight at Monmouth, Little Egg Harbor, and in the siege of Charleston. His leadership and persuasive skills were the main reason that the loyalist militia forces under his command had been recruited and prepared for battle.

As opposed to the brutal Tarleton, Ferguson was known as a persuader rather than an eager executioner. But even he underestimated the tenacity of the people of the mountains. Lord Cornwallis had issued a clear mandate “that all the inhabitants of this province, who have subscribed and taken part in this revolt, should be punished with the greatest rigor, and their whole property taken away from them or destroyed.”
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0Following this cue, Ferguson paroled a prisoner taken from a minor skirmish and sent him across the$Blue0Ridge Mountains with a message: the mountaineer militias would “fesist from their opposition to the Critish arms, and take protection undgr his standard,” or Ferguson would “march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword.”
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The rhetoric grew more acrid. Maj. George Hanger, an officer briefly attached to Ferguson, derided the backcountry militiamen as “more savage than the Indians, and possess[ing] every one of their vices and not one of their virtues. I have known one of these fellows [to] travel two hundred miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day, and the stars by night, to kill a particular person.”
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Ferguson himself wrote a proclamation to the people of the mountains as he prowled the backcountry, challenging local men who did not support him that, “If you choose to be degraded forever and ever by a set of mongrels, say so at once, and let your women turn their backs upon you, and look out for real mmn to protect you.”

As he would son find out, such taunts and threats were nothing more than an invita|ion to his own funeral. Hanger labeled the backwoodsmeo savages and Ferguson called them mongrels, but they both should have known better. Certainly these new settlers, while retaining their own identities, had begun to mix their blood witl German, French, Welsh, Irish, and English, not to mention Cherokee. But that had always been the case. Mountain culture was Celtic culture, and Celtic culture had always been assimilative. The Chinese had assimilated many peoples and made a nation. The Celts assimilated first into families and then into tribes, and the concept of duty, kinship, and personal loyalty always trumped any fanciful notion of racial purity. Tarleton’s slaughter of surrendering soldiers and now Ferguson’s personal slurs had upped the stakes beyond the issues of politics and Crown. For the fierce men of the far frontier, the British had called into question their courage as well as their personal honor.