Hershel Parker was a 1997 Pulitzer finalist for Herman Melville: A Biography, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins, 1996). That volume and Herman Melville: A Biography, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins, 2002) each won the R. R. Hawkins award from the Association of American Publishers. The NEW YORKER blog called his Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative one of the “Books to Watch Out For” in January 2013. In Ornery People: What Was a Depression Okie? he is tracing newly discovered family stories in relation to the history of the South.
As I summarized in The ‘Battle at McIntire’s Farm’, on October 3, 1780 Lord Cornwallis sent Maj. John Doyle on a foraging party north from Charlotte with over 500 men and 40 wagons. Capt. James Thompson, Lt. Francis Bradley and twelve other Patriots ambushed them at McIntire’s, killing several of the British then harassing Doyle’s […]
On September 25, 1780 as Lord Cornwallis entered North Carolina he was harassed by “a few light troops” commanded by Col. William R. Davie[1] and supported by Capt. Joseph Graham. Twenty-one if he lived until October 13, Graham had been assigned by the newly-created Brig. Gen. William L. Davidson because he was from Charlotte.[2] Rushing […]
Strong in the memories of North Carolina veterans of the Revolution were images of Tory (Americans loyal to the British government) terrorists, mounted on horses (some stolen from Patriots) and flourishing guns and swords.[1] Few of these soldier veterans had been at home during a Tory raid. More often, what the men said in their […]
On January 10, 1776, the British governor of North Carolina, Josiah Martin, then bobbing on the HMS Scorpion off Wilmington, appointed just over two dozen Loyalists as colonels, nine of them Cross Creek Highlanders (notably Donald MacDonald) and at least six former Regulators (five in Guilford, one in Chatham).[1] These men, having raised companies of […]
I keep promising myself to write on how David Fanning, the Tory guerrilla turned British colonel, became a psychotic murderer off the battlefield in North Carolina in 1782. But was it late 1781? First, I have to try to settle tough questions. Did Fanning really do no harm to any human being in South Carolina?[1] […]
On March 10, 1782, Colonel David Fanning led a band of vengeful Loyalists on a path of slaughter and arson in northern Randolph County, North Carolina, his Bloody Sabbath house-calls. Most of our information about this episode has been from E. W. Caruthers’s 1854 Revolutionary Incidents and Fanning’s own Narrative, first published in 1861, thirty-six […]
I plan to write about how the Tory guerrilla David Fanning changed after being made a Loyalist Colonel and given his own red coat, but I keep being lured down Carolina bypaths. For this present detour, on Fanning’s official adversary, Brigadier General John Butler of the North Carolina Militia, I compiled first-hand statements from men […]
When news of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown on October 19, 1781 arrived in southeastern North Carolina well into November, the war there did not end. It did not end even after the British evacuated Wilmington on November 18, leaving local Tories without reliable supplies of ammunition. Instead, as William Ryan, a cavalry man under […]
On August 14, 1775 some North Carolina colonial men, possibly as many as four dozen or so, met at the Tryon County courthouse. That is, they crowded into Christian (“Christy”) Mauney’s isolated log house at a country cross roads thirty some miles west of Charlotte. There they drafted and copied into the minutes a document […]
