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Turning
Point in the Wilderness
The
clash at King's Mountain between Patriots and Tories began Britain's
long descent to Yorktown.
- By
Tom Wicker
They were
strong, mostly gaunt men in doeskins, perhaps a thousand of them,
with knives at their belts and long huntsmen's rifles across their
saddle horns. They rode from beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains—the
western edge of civilization in eighteenth-century North America—from
the valleys of such fabled rivers as the Watauga, the Holston, and
the Nolichucky; from backwater farms and fields unknown to most Americans;
from far beyond the authority of King George III, whose subjects they
were in name only.
They
valued home, family, and neighbor more than a newborn nation that
existed scarcely more in fact than in their hearts. They were ready
and some were eager to fight, less for the abstraction of national
freedom than for their property and the physical safety of wives
and children. Above all, because they had had to learn on a savage
frontier to stand up for themselves, they were bound in risk, hardship,
and endurance by hatred of a tangible and mounting threat.
By the
autumn of 1780, the primary theater of the American Revolutionary
War was in the South, colonists and British having fought each other
to a standoff in New England and the mid-Atlantic. General George
Washington's Continental Army had regained control of Boston and
Philadelphia and remained, ragged and undermanned, in camps scattered
around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Sir Henry Clinton's
Redcoats continued to occupy New York City.
In 1778,
recognizing stalemate but calling on British command of the seas,
Clinton had dispatched three thousand troops to invade Georgia.
The colony was subdued with relative ease, and in 1779 British forces
moved into South Carolina. Thus encouraged, and with high hopes
for rallying a host of southern colonists to King George (Tory sentiment
was stronger in the South than elsewhere) Clinton himself embarked
from New York in early 1780, with thirteen thousand additional troops.
His idea
was to move north from his Georgia-South Carolina base, subduing
the southern colonies one by one. His first target was the major
port of Charleston, South Carolina. After a forty-day siege, American
General Benjamin Lincoln was forced to surrender the city on May
12, 1780. Still confident of a general Tory uprising, Clinton dispersed
his forces throughout upcountry South Carolina, then a roadless
wilderness. The British occupied numerous strong points but unwisely
engaged in plunder and terror, thus damping whatever Tory ardor
there might have been.
Clinton
re-embarked for New York and the pleasures of an American city sophisticated
for that era, leaving General Lord Charles Cornwallis, an able and
experienced veteran of European wars, in command in the South. In
response, following the fall of Charleston, the Continental Congress
scraped together a makeshift army of untrained volunteers and militiamen
from Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. This force
went south under the command of General Horatio Gates, whose New
England army at Saratoga had thwarted General John Burgoyne's British
invasion from Canada.
However,
General Gates, the "Hero of Saratoga," proved in the South
to be greatly overrated. His crude army of three thousand men was
routed by Cornwallis near Camden, South Carolina on August 16, 1780.
Gates himself was prominent among the panicked Patriots who fled
the battlefield--many not stopping until they reached North Carolina.
With
the crushing defeat of the last sizable American force in the South,
Cornwallis apparently had an open path for the invasion of North
Carolina, Virginia, and the colonies beyond. In September 1780,
he moved north in three formidable columns: himself commanding the
main force in the center, Colonel Banastre Tarleton leading the
British Legion cavalry and light infantry on the right (eastern)
flank, and Major Patrick Ferguson, an energetic but vain Scotsman,
at the head of a Tory force on the left (western) flank.
Ferguson
at age thirty-six was a remarkable soldier who had been in the king's
service since he was fifteen years old and had considerable combat
experience in Europe, the West Indies, and with Clinton in America.
Ferguson's military style had won him the nickname "Bull Dog."
Whether as an idiosyncrasy or an affectation, Ferguson customarily
directed his forces in battle with shrill blasts on a silver whistle.
Reputed
to be the best marksman in the British Army, he once had had the
Continental Army commander General George Washington himself in
his sights. Wearing a "remarkably large cocked hat," Washington
had been on a personal reconnaissance of the British position at
Brandywine Creek when he was spotted by Ferguson. The Scotsman tried
to capture rather than shoot his quarry, and the American commander
took flight and escaped.
"I
could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was
out of my reach," Ferguson later remarked, after learning the
identity of the tall officer who had eluded him. "But it was
not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual who
was acquitting himself coolly of his duty, so I left him alone."
Even
in the era of muzzle-loading muskets, Ferguson actually might have
"lodged half a dozen balls" in Washington's body: He was
not only a crack shot, but had invented and was using a highly accurate
breech-loading rifle which could get off many more shots per minute
than the standard-issue British "Brown Bess" smoothbore
musket. Unfortunately for the British, Ferguson's rifle was never
manufactured in great numbers.
The British
victory at Charleston had emboldened many southern Loyalists to
take up arms. Backwoods Patriots were aroused to fury by the British
invaders and by the activities of their Tory allies. In defense
of their homes, fields, and sometimes even in the cause of independence,
small bands of them—under the skilled leadership of men like
Lt. Col. Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox," and Brig. Gen.
Thomas Sumter, the "Carolina Gamecock"—waged an effective
guerrilla war.
Vicious
guerrilla tactics and savagery on both sides made what was essentially
a civil war particularly hate-filled and ferocious. Hessian soldiers
on the British side further inflamed Patriot anger with flagrant
plunder and theft, as they sought to enrich themselves from a foreign
war in which they had little other interest, save staying alive.
Tarleton
and Ferguson were special objects of patriotic hatred. Near Waxhaw,
South Carolina, Tarleton's cavalry had overtaken about four hundred
retreating Virginia militiamen who had come to South Carolina too
late to assist Benjamin Lincoln in defending Charleston. The Virginians'
commander, Colonel Abraham Buford, had sought to surrender, but
Tarleton's troopers refused and killed more than a hundred of them
outright, maimed and wounded many more, and took only fifty-three
prisoners. Less than two hundred of the militiamen escaped. Those
who escaped were more than enough to spread far and wide the story
of Tarleton's massacre.
Ferguson
was sent by the commanding general to the frontier outpost of Ninety-Six,
so named because it was ninety-six miles from an important Indian
town on the Keowee River, to rally local Tories to the cause. Ferguson
was very successful at raising Tory volunteers because he was an
effective leader with the knack of winning the affections of his
forces. He soon had his new troops organized into thoroughly drilled
and disciplined military units, especially effective with the bayonet.
To his original force of about one hundred men—all Tories drawn
from the King's American Rangers, the New Jersey Volunteers, and
the Loyal American Regiment—Ferguson was able to add a thousand
Loyalist backwoodsmen. He was the only British regular in his entire
force of about eleven hundred.
With
this newly organized army, Ferguson terrorized large areas of South
Carolina and north Georgia. Eventually, Ferguson penetrated as far
north as Gilbert Town (now Rutherfordton) in North Carolina, a hamlet
known as a gathering place for Patriots. There he learned from spies
that what they wildly exaggerated as three thousand backwoodsmen
were gathering to march against him from "over the mountain"—in
what is now Tennessee.
Ferguson
had come to hate the guerrillas with whom he had been so fiercely
and unconventionally fighting. He also believed he was leading a
historic campaign that ultimately would make his military reputation
and perhaps his private fortune. He must have allowed such dreams
and his vanity to get the better of him, because he arrogantly sent
the reputed over the mountain gathering a fiery written warning
that if they did not cease opposition to King George III, he would
"hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire
and sword."
Throwing
down the gauntlet like that did not sit well with the independent
mountain men who were gathering to resist him. Among the leaders
of the gathering Patriot army were such men as Issac
Shelby (later the first governor of Kentucky) and John
Sevier ("Nolichucky Jack," later the first governor
of Tennessee). By September 25, 1780, about one thousand fighting
men from Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia—all
itching to give Patrick Ferguson a lesson in manners and warfare—had
assembled at Sycamore
Springs on the Watauga River. Most were mounted; all were armed,
and not just with rifles, pistols, and knives. In an era of simple
beliefs, they were confident that a blessing from on high accompanied
them.
"Oh,
God of battle," prayed the Reverend Samuel Doak, specifically
recruited for such a farewell by John Sevier, "arise in Thy
might. Avenge the slaughter of Thy people.... Help us as good soldiers
to wield the sword of the Lord and Gideon!"
Armed
with their weapons and faith, the over the mountain army—leaving
a reluctant contingent to guard houses and farms—marched eastward
by companies on September 26. In five days, sometimes through early
snow, they covered ninety miles over the Blue Ridge Mountains to
Quaker Meadows on the Catawba River in North Carolina. There, 350
additional fighting men joined them. Then the column pushed on toward
Gilbert Town, eating mostly parched corn and raw turnips, encountering
once a violent rainstorm.
An officers'
council chose Colonel Charles McDowell, who had brought in 160 North
Carolinians, overall leader. Later, McDowell departed for Horatio
Gates' headquarters in search of a regular soldier to take command,
and the council voted temporary leadership to Colonel William Campbell
of Virginia ("Old Round About," who weighed more than
three hundred pounds).
Ferguson—well
informed of the column's approach but wrongly believing he was greatly
outnumbered—had moved east toward Charlotte, North Carolina,
and Cornwallis' main force. On October 5, he was only fifty miles
from both, at Tate's plantation. From there, he appealed to Cornwallis
for "three or four hundred good soldiers, part dragoons"
to help finish off the "set of mongrels" moving to attack
him. For some reason, Cornwallis did not receive this request in
time, and from Tate's the Scotsman led his Tory army northeastward
to what he apparently considered an impregnable position on top
of King's Mountain.
The "mountain"
really was not much more than a thickly forested hill named for
a family living near its foot and rising steeply about sixty feet
from rolling terrain. Part of a sixteen-mile-long range of larger
and smaller hills rising in North Carolina and running southwest
into York County, South Carolina, King's Mountain had a spring to
water Ferguson's men and horses and plenty of timber for barricades.
The hill, about six hundred yards in length at its base, was shaped
not unlike a caveman's club, with the thicker, or wider, end at
the northeast. Its crest, averaging not much more than thirty feet
in width, was relatively flat and clear of trees and underbrush.
Confident
that attackers would not be able to fight their way up the steep,
wooded slopes of the mountain under fire, and perhaps too reliant
on his bayonet-trained troops, Ferguson disdained to cut down trees
for barricades. Instead, he placed wagons and baggage as a weak
barrier along the northeast crest, where he established headquarters,
and deployed his men along both sides and ends of the hilltop to
await attack.
After
arriving at Gilbert Town on October 4, leaders of the over the mountain
army learned that Ferguson had moved eastward. They pushed on in
pursuit and on October 6 rendezvoused with four hundred more men
in South Carolina, at Cowpens—so named for a number of cattle
enclosures owned by a wealthy Tory and later to be the scene of
another significant battle in the war. At Cowpens, they also learned
that Ferguson was at King's Mountain, or thereabouts. Fearing he
would escape and in the interests of speed they divided the force,
which by then numbered about seventeen hundred men. A select group
of about nine hundred, all mounted, pushed on to attack Ferguson
before he could join Cornwallis at Charlotte.
The attacking
party rode all night in rain that sometimes became a downpour, pausing
several times to recover lost or wandering groups. They halted in
the early afternoon of October 7, about a mile from Ferguson's hilltop
stronghold. The rain had ceased, and the sun was breaking through
clouds. The men dismounted, left their horses in charge of pickets,
and, advancing on foot, formed a "horseshoe of iron" around
King's Mountain and Patrick Ferguson's despised Loyalists —the
foe they had come so far to engage.
The attackers
were loosely organized backwoodsmen not much given to discipline,
tactics, or strategy--especially of the European variety. However,
owing in part to Ferguson's overconfidence in his troops, as well
as the rain that had prevented dust from betraying its approach,
the over the mountain army had the advantage of surprise, and their
leaders had formed a general plan of assault. Campbell's and Shelby's
men (Virginians, Tennesseans, and North Carolinians) would attack
first, on both sides of the southwestern end of the ridge, while
the rest of the force encircled the northeastern slopes, taking
position for later attack. According to legend, Old Round About
signaled the advance with a stentorian roar, "Shout like hell
and fight like devils!"
That
was easier said than done, as Campbell's backwoodsmen soon learned.
They dodged up the slope from tree to rock to tree like the Indians
from whom they had learned tactics, but Ferguson's well-trained
force on the hilltop let loose a volley, remembered by one Patriot
attacker as "one long sulfurous blaze." Other such volleys
quickly followed. The timber and rocks gave the attackers cover,
and much of the plunging fire passed harmlessly over their heads,
but the Tories then launched a bayonet charge down the hillside.
Cold steel is a feared weapon, especially for untrained men, and
Campbell's attackers quickly fell back. But from the base of the
hill they broke the Tory attack with precise individual fire from
their long hunting rifles.
At about
this time, Isaac Shelby's and John Sevier's men, arranged opposite
William Campbell's on the facing southern slope, started toward
the crest. They met the same type of opposition —volleys and
a bayonet charge—and also retreated. They, too, halted at the
foot of the hill to break the Loyalist attack with their marksmanship.
Then Campbell's men, egged on by their burly leader, attacked again,
with the same result. Then it was Sevier's turn for a second, unsuccessful
try, then Shelby's.
Ferguson's
whistle blasts were ringing over the hillsides. Meanwhile, however,
Patriot forces sheltered behind trees and rocks were pouring in
an "irregular and destructive fire" that took a deadly
toll in the Scotsmen's ranks. At about this time, "the fight...seemed
to become furious," a sixteen-year-old under Colonel Benjamin
Cleveland's command remembered. He was right; Patriots in position
at the northern end of King's Mountain were attacking up its steep
slopes.
An early
death came to Major William Chronicle, aged only twenty-five, when
he was killed instantly by a Loyalist volley as he led the "South
Fork Boys" of Lincoln County, North Carolina. From a monument
now at the site of his death a visitor is afforded an intimidating
glimpse of the desperate conditions of the battle. Above the monument,
King's Mountain rises steeply, its rough terrain and tangled timber
appearing all but impenetrable--particularly against volley-firing
defenders and bayonet charges.
When
the attack on the northwestern slopes opened against Ferguson, however,
he was forced to defend all sides of the crest at once. He could
not do it, having neither the manpower nor clear fields of fire.
Patriot fighters swarmed up the forested hillsides all around Ferguson's
suddenly vulnerable position, yelling like Indians, ducking from
massive trees to huge boulders, pausing only to fire with deadly
hunters' marksmanship into the defenders' ranks.
With
support from the northern end, Sevier's, Campbell's, and Shelby's
forces attacked the southwestern slopes again, finally gaining the
summit. Cleveland and other attackers soon poured over the northeastern
crest, too, taking the defenders in rear and flank. Though Ferguson's
position was now desperate and he was urged by subordinates to surrender
and avoid further bloodshed, the undaunted Scotsman continued the
battle—his vanity and his contempt for his backwoods opponents
perhaps deluding him, even then, into believing that somehow he
might still win the battle. As a result of his tenacity, some of
the day's hardest-fought and bloodiest action took place on the
crest of King's Mountain after it was overrun. Participants for
years remembered pandemonium: the shrill blasts of Ferguson's whistle
mingled with backwoodsmen's loud yells, the roar of hundreds of
blazing guns, shouts of command, pain and fear, and a thick sulfuric
fog from black powder that hung over the battle, blinding and smothering
Patriot and Loyalist alike. Only the dead were oblivious.
Apparently,
even Patrick Ferguson finally realized that the battle was irretrievably
lost. Two horses were shot from under him, but he mounted another
and with two companions attempted to cut his way through the encircling
Patriots. He wore a checkered hunting shirt, clasped his famed whistle
in his teeth, and wielded his sword with his left hand, a wound
at the Battle of Brandywine having cost him the use of his right
arm.
It may
have been spectacular, but like his futile stand on the crest, Ferguson's
dash through the Patriot lines soon came to an ignominious end.
Crack frontier riflemen quickly brought him and his two companions
down—igniting a brisk debate in the over the mountain army
and among later myth-makers as to which rifleman, from what unit,
fired the shot that actually killed the Scotsman. That has never
been settled, but as Ferguson fell from his horse, his foot caught
in a stirrup, and he was dragged around a circle of victorious backwoodsmen.
"It
is very likely," wrote Pat Alderman in 1968 in a detailed account
of the battle, "that many shots were fired into the body during
this episode." Ferguson was a hated man, Tarleton's massacre
at Waxhaw was well remembered, the backwoods war was at its savage
height, the victorious Patriots' blood was up, and in the heat of
a desperate battle that would not have been the only vengeful act
committed by the King's aroused opponents.
When,
for instance, the defeated and demoralized Tory survivors finally
were herded into an area only about sixty yards long, Ferguson's
second-in-command, Captain Abraham DePeyster, waved a white flag
of surrender, and many of the frightened Loyalists called out for
mercy. But the Patriot fire continued, and numerous Tories died
with their hands in the air. One Patriot reported to have shot men
who had already surrendered was John
Sevier, who believed at the time that Tory raiders had killed
his father. Lack of adequate communication between units, and between
officers and men, aggravated the Patriots' thirst for revenge. Finally,
Colonels Shelby and Campbell managed to halt the shooting and restore
a semblance of order.
Later,
as the Patriot army began to separate into its regional units, thirty-six
Tory prisoners were court-martialed for various acts of alleged
lawlessness and, after a day-long trial, sentenced to death. On
October 14, at Bickerstaff's Farm in North Carolina (Captain Aaron
Bickerstaff, a Tory, died at King's Mountain), nine of the condemned
men were strung up from a limb of an oak known for years afterwards
as the "Gallows Tree." However, after one of the condemned
men made a daring escape, Shelby, Sevier, and some of the other
officers put a stop to the executions.
As is
common in warfare, a night of horror followed the Patriot victory.
There was no hospital, but makeshift litters were fashioned from
tent cloth. Water from the spring and a captured keg of rum were
available for the wounded, and one British surgeon had lived to
treat survivors on both sides with the primitive medical skills
of the time. The possibility of a counterattack by Tarleton's Dragoons
added fear to the Patriots—'and hope to the prisoners'—sleepless
night.
Casualty
figures are unreliable at best, since the over the mountain army
kept no formal rolls and British figures are disputed. A monument
erected by the American government on the crest of King's Mountain
lists the names of 29 Patriots killed, four mortally wounded, 34
wounded, and 24 unknown.
Ferguson
appears from British Army returns to have commanded 1,187 men, of
whom more than 150 were killed, about the same wounded, and 810
captured. Various accounts use slightly different figures.
On the
morning of October 8, still fearful of an attack by the dreaded
Tarleton, the victorious army, leaving burial parties behind, was
quickly on the march. Encumbered by a large body of walking prisoners,
the army plodded westward for several days. Many of the wounded
were left in Patriot houses along the way. Not until late on the
night of October 15, on the west bank of the Catawba River, after
a march of thirty-two miles, could the victors of King's Mountain
relax and rest. A rain-swollen stream was between them and what
they still feared was Tarleton's pursuit.
The next
day, their mission accomplished, the various units began to depart
for home. A mix of detachments escorted the dwindling band of Loyalist
prisoners to the Yadkin River valley and down it toward the headquarters
of General Gates. At Bethabara, a Moravian town near Salem, North
Carolina, Campbell and Shelby departed for home. They left the three
hundred remaining prisoners in charge of Colonel Cleveland.
Ultimately,
about two hundred Tories taken prisoner at the battle were delivered
to General Gates. The rest, perhaps six hundred—all Americans—had
escaped, were dead of sundry natural causes, had disappeared, or
in many cases had been murdered while in Patriot hands.
In strangely
similar fashion, the over the mountain army all but vanished into
legend. But it was no myth. It was formed to meet a specific threat.
A fighting force that belied its lack of training and discipline,
it vanquished Ferguson's trained Loyalists as intended, then melted
into the backwoods from which it had come.
Patrick
Ferguson was buried near the spot where he was shot, under a cairn
of stones (about five feet high) that befits his Scottish birth
and recalls the prevalence of wolves in the American wilderness
and on King's Mountain in 1780. By the cairn, a monument to Ferguson
as a lieutenant colonel in the Highland Light Infantry, 71st Regiment,
was erected in 1930 by Americans "in token of their appreciation
of the bonds of friendship and peace between them and the citizens
of the British Empire."
It's
a noble sentiment but an irony nonetheless; at King's Mountain one
of history's most savage battles among neighbors came to a bloody
and tragic resolution. Southern Tories never again rose in arms
as significant supporters of King George's cause in America, while
Patriots everywhere were emboldened to continue fighting.
Here,
too, at Patrick Ferguson's stone-strewn grave, began the long British
descent toward final defeat in 1781. A thunderstruck and fever-ridden
Cornwallis, his left wing and his high hopes destroyed by the over
the mountain army, retreated into South Carolina as a result of
what Sir Henry Clinton called "the first link of a chain of
evils" that ended in "the total loss of America."
Cornwallis' retreat gave the Continental Congress time to organize
a new southern army, with the capable Nathaniel Greene in command.
As Washington's
Continentals closed in on land from the north and a French fleet
took command of the seacoast, Greene's ragged troops harried Cornwallis'
Redcoats through the Carolinas to surrender in Virginia, "the
world turned upside down." With Cornwallis' surrender, the
rise to independence and power of thirteen jealous colonies clamoring
toward nationhood was complete.
Tom Wicker
is a veteran columnist for the New York Times and author of several
books. |
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