57 The Battle of King’s Mountain and the End of the 1780 Campaign

Historians, however, have greatly overinflated the importance of the routs at Camden and Fishing Creek; for the way that had been opened was quickly closed, and the British invasion of North Carolina decisively blocked. This blocking came not from the Continental troops, but from the really decisive forces of the American Revolution—the American public, the local militia, the people in arms.

Within two weeks after Camden, it was clear to Cornwallis that, instead of the Carolina back country flocking to his cause as the British had believed would happen once the Continentals were routed, the opposite was occurring. In South Carolina, guerrilla bands under Marion, Sumter, Pickens, and Col. William Davie were harassing Cornwallis’ rear as he advanced northward. In North Carolina, the Tories had never recovered from the defeat at Ramsour’s Mill, and the local militia and public sentiment mobilized against the British. In desperation, Cornwallis began to take drastic measures, hanging several men who had enrolled in the Tory militia and then had deserted to the rebels. By the end of August, he was insistently reminding Clinton of the need for a diversionary attack on the Chesapeake area of Virginia. The battles of Camden and Fishing Creek sank into insignificance in the face of the rising rebel voice of the people of the back country.

By the time Cornwallis began to march northward from Camden, the advance, harassed by guerrillas and with particular brilliance by Colonel William Davie, was far from triumphal, and proceeded rather in hopes that Charlotte would provide a happier and healthier base for the ailing British army. Charlotte, North Carolina, was finally reached on September 25; here Cornwallis called upon the people to deliver their arms and flock to accept the protection of the British army. But nobody flocked to the invaders here, in the heart of rebel sentiment; instead, Cornwallis could find little information about rebel movements, and British foraging parties were incessantly attacked. Cornwallis was therefore forced to pause once more to await supplies from Camden.

As Cornwallis marched northward to Charlotte, he ordered Major Patrick Ferguson, head of Tory recruiting, who had gathered and sent out over the countryside a formidable force of thousands of Tories at Ninety-Six, to march northward as well. Ferguson was to gather Tories and punish rebels to the west, and finally to join Cornwallis at Charlotte. Reaching Gilbert Town at the edge of the mountains in western North Carolina by late September, Ferguson, with 1100 men, began to turn south to help relieve Augusta, which had been besieged by rebels under Colonel Elijah Clark, and to help capture the rebels.

Ferguson had warned the “overmountain men” on the Watauga River in what would later be northeastern Tennessee that if they did not cease opposing the king, he would march over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay waste to their country. Not taking kindly to this threat and tired of his depredations and plundering, the Watauga men decided to end the Ferguson menace once and for all, and became the center of a new rising. To them came Colonels Isaac Shelby, John Sevier, and William Campbell of Virginia, and Colonels Benjamin Cleveland and Charles Macdowell of North Carolina. By September 15 over 1,400 frontier riflemen knowledgeable of the terrain and eminently suited for guerrilla action gathered at the Watauga. This large force began to pursue Ferguson’s troops, who turned eastward to take up fortified positions on top of King’s Mountain, on the North Carolina-South Carolina border. Nine hundred of the best mounted riflemen were then detached to catch up to Ferguson and these arrived at the mountain on October 7.

Ferguson, with superior numbers, had assumed a well-fortified position on the mountain; but what he failed to realize was that the dense woods on all sides of the low mountain provided excellent cover for the deadly guerrilla force. Surrounding the mountain and climbing its sides, the riflemen climbed to the trees surrounding the plateau on the open mountaintop and cut down the bayonet-wielding troops with deadly individual rifle fire. As Ward puts it: “Everywhere the Tories were surrounded by men, not in solid bodies to be attacked with a bayonet and driven back, but fighting each man on his own behind the trees fringing the open plateau. From every side came a hail of bullets.”*

The Tory force was hopelessly beaten, but the frenzied Ferguson declared that he would “never surrender to such banditti”; his reward for this was to be killed in the battle. The surrounded and helpless Tories were slaughtered by the vengeful rebels, who shouted, “Tarleton’s quarter!” until their officers finally brought them under control. The battle had been a glorious one for the Americans. The entire Tory force of 1,000 men was either killed or captured, while rebel casualties totalled only 90. Great stores of arms and ammunition also fell to the Americans. The Tory prisoners were marched to Gilbert Town, and nine were convicted of aiding the British in raiding and hanged.

The Battle of King’s Mountain was one of the turning points of the Revolutionary War. A people’s victory, a guerrilla victory without any semblance of a Continental force or even of an overall commander, King’s Mountain showed that so long as its spirit was high, the United States could absorb such devastating defeats of its regulars as at Camden and yet come back to crush the British and Tory forces.

Beaten at King’s Mountain and increasingly worried about growing guerrilla bands throughout the Carolina back country, Cornwallis was forced to beat a hasty retreat from North Carolina. His troops, ill, exhausted, and increasingly short of provisions, were hammered every step of the way by American militia bands. They finally encamped for the winter at Winnsboro, between Camden and Ninety-Six in northern South Carolina. At Winnsboro, continually harassed by American bands, Cornwallis was properly chastened. The end of the 1780 campaign saw the British, despite the massive victories at Charleston and Camden, thoroughly beaten back from their attempt to invade North Carolina. Cornwallis realized that the failure of the North Carolina Tories to materialize spelled the collapse of the whole southern strategy. The end of the projected northern offensive seemed at hand.

Of the American guerrilla bands, the most active and successful were those of Sumter and Marion. Marion did yeoman work between the Pee Dee and the Santee rivers in northeastern South Carolina, arousing revolt, cutting supplies, and threatening key British communication lines between Charleston and Camden. Cornwallis sent Tarleton after Marion, but the Swamp Fox proved too elusive in the best guerrilla manner. In the meantime, north of Winnsboro, Sumter was beginning to display great improvement as a guerrilla leader. The British sent out Maj. James Wemyss to catch him; but at Fishdam Ford on December 9, Sumter was ready for the supposed surprise. Wemyss was captured and his unit repulsed with heavy losses.

Moving westward and escalating his operations, Sumter threatened the key British post at Ninety-Six. Alarmed, Cornwallis sent Tarleton with a formidable force in pursuit. Sumter turned northward and, on November 20, took up a strong position at Blackstock’s on the south side of the Tiger River. Sumter’s 420 men now faced Tarleton’s feared cavalry of 250. While Tarleton waited for his infantry to arrive, Sumter moved to cut them off; Tarleton’s answering charges met concentrated guerrilla rifle fire from buildings nearby, forcing this British retreat. The widely feared and seemingly invincible Tarleton had been beaten, his force losing about a hundred men, while the Americans suffered virtually no casualties. This was a decisive blow to British prestige in the Carolinas. A piquant footnote to the battle is that Tarleton had the gall to claim “victory” because Sumter’s force, in the classic manner of guerrilla fighters, later withdrew in the face of British reinforcements.

Cornwallis’ natural optimism soon returned in December, when he found that Clinton had at last sent a diversionary force of 2,500 under Gen. Alexander Leslie to Portsmouth, Virginia. The harassed Cornwallis, however, now ordered Leslie to join him at Winnsboro; when Leslie complied in early January 1781, Cornwallis unwisely thought that his 4,000 men could now carry out the original British plan of the year before. He was further emboldened by the news that Benedict Arnold had been sent in December with 1,500 troops to raid Virginia in force.

* Ward, The War of the Revolution, 11:742.