Biographical Sketches of Royal Militia Commanders in the South Carolina Mid- and Lowcountry, North Carolina, and Georgia, 1780–82

Introduction

This article supplements one relating to royal militia commanders in the South Carolina Backcountry that appeared in the Journal of the American Revolution on November 30, 2020.

SOUTH CAROLINA MID- AND LOWCOUNTRY

Commanding Officers

Elias Ball Sr.
A brother-in-law of Thomas Gaillard (see below), Elias Ball Sr. was of a prominent local family owning rice plantations and numerous slaves in St. James Santee Parish. Soon after the capitulation of Charlestown he accepted the colonelcy of a militia regiment in the lower division on the west side of the Santee, and both his and John Wigfall’s regiments were mainly charged with securing the ferries from Murray’s downwards on that river. In return for his loyalty his estates were confiscated by act of the revolutionary assembly in 1782, and after retiring with 200 slaves to East Florida, which had remained loyal to the Crown, he sailed for England when the province was ceded to Spain. His son, Elias Ball Jr. of Comingtee, was lieutenant colonel in his regiment, and although the son’s estates were likewise confiscated, he—unlike his father—later obtained relief.[1]

Richard Ballingall
A Scottish immigrant, Ballingall had become a substantial planter in South Carolina by 1780. In the summer of that year he was commissioned colonel of the Colleton County Regiment of the royal militia, a regiment whose catchment area lay south-west of Charlestown in the coastal parishes bounded by Charlestown, Orangeburg District and the Salkehatchie River. In the coming months he and his regiment would be principally deployed in Georgetown District, but as the year advanced, Lt. General Earl Cornwallis, the British general officer commanding in the south, and Lt. Colonel Nisbet Balfour, the Commandant of Charlestown, began to suspect that the men were disaffected and no great reliance could be placed on them. In mid November Balfour reported that they were so totally disaffected that “very few assembled and those very soon deserted.” During the winter of 1781-82, by which time all but the environs of Charlestown had fallen under revolutionary control, Ballingall was appointed one of the Commissioners of Claims for Slave Property. In January 1782 he was banished and saw his estates confiscated by act of the revolutionary assembly at Jacksonborough.[2]

James Cassells
Cassells was a Scot who in 1758 had migrated to South Carolina, where he soon established himself as an indigo planter on the Waccamaw. Despite taking the test oath in 1778, he was a covert loyalist and in late autumn 1780 would become colonel of the Georgetown Regiment of the royal militia. He had intended to assume command much sooner, but having been captured by revolutionaries while on his way from a plantation to accept the commission, he was imprisoned in North Carolina before making his escape by September. Two months later Balfour, who like Cornwallis had a high opinion of him, remarked, “Cassells’s character and his whole behaviour are much more manly and worthy of credit than any other colonel of militia I have yet seen, and as far as I have had connection with him, realy seems by no means a man of chimera or capable of undertaking any plan without a rational and well founded reason.” Nevertheless, Cassells’ regiment, like the rest of the royal militia, did not perform well. Upon confinement of the British to the Charlestown area, Cassells was appointed one of the inspectors of refugees in charge of administering relief, and he himself received pay both as an inspector and as a refugee. Banished and with his property confiscated by act of the revolutionary assembly at Jacksonborough, he sailed in mid October 1782 to East Florida, accompanied by more than twenty slaves, and began planting along the St. John’s River in partnership with Gabriel Capers, a protectioner from Christ Church Parish. On the cession of the province to Spain he indicated his intention to move to the Bahamas, but to his surprise his slaves refused to go, declaring that they would take to the woods if he did not arrange for their return to South Carolina. Making arrangements accordingly, he sold them there, not being allowed himself to remain or to obtain relief from the Banishment and Confiscation Act.[3]

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John Fisher
Fisher was commissioned colonel of the Orangeburg Regiment of the royal militia in the summer of 1780. It was in 1760 that he had migrated from Scotland to South Carolina. He later acquired over 3,000 acres in the District of Orangeburg, together with lots in the town, and was chosen as one of the commissioners to build the courthouse and jail there. In 1773 he had become the first sheriff of the district.[4]
On the formation of Fisher’s regiment George McMichael was commissioned as major, but he has left no record of military service and may have soon resigned his commission. One of three brothers who came to America from Scotland, he had settled in Orangeburg District in 1759, marrying Ursula, a sister of the Reverend John Giessendanner. When a federal census was taken in 1790, he was still residing in what was then Orangeburg County.[5]

Theodore Gaillard
A descendent of Huguenots who migrated to South Carolina in 1685, Gaillard owned an estate near Murray’s Ferry on the Santee. On the one hand he is described as a planter and on the other as a Charlestown merchant. For a few years immediately before the Revolution he sat in the Commons House of Assembly before being elected to the Provincial Congress. A man of influence, he was assiduously courted by Cornwallis and soon persuaded to accept a lieutenant colonelcy in the royal militia, though no record exists of his ever commanding a regiment. As the tide of events turned in 1781, he fled his estate and sought refuge in Charlestown, where he received pay as a refugee militia officer. In 1782 his property was confiscated by act of the revolutionary assembly, but two years later it was restored subject to an amercement of 12 percent. His brother John, who served as a captain in Elias Ball Sr.’s regiment, also saw his property confiscated, but it too was restored on the same basis.[6]

Robert Gray and James Gordon
Gray had acquired land on the Pee Dee in 1774. Apart from references in The Cornwallis Papers little else is known about him other than that in March 1782 he wrote a thought-provoking commentary on the war in the Carolinas that was published in the North Carolina University Magazine in 1858 and the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine in 1910. When in September 1780 William Henry Mills (see below) gave up hope of raising a regiment of royal militia on the Pee Dee, Gray was appointed colonel in his place. He fared no better. Nevertheless, according to Cornwallis, he appeared “a very sensible, spirited man,” a view echoed by Balfour, to whom he seemed “by much the best militia man I have seen.” In 1781 and 1782 he acted as paymaster to the royal militia, at which time he was subjected to banishment and confiscation by act of the revolutionary assembly.[7]
Gray’s lieutenant colonel was James Gordon, probably a Scot and one of the earliest settlers in Georgetown, where in 1736 he had contributed £50 to the building costs of the parish church. A prominent merchant there by the onset of the Revolution, he had taken little part in public affairs. He would resign his commission in August 1781 as the tide of the war turned and remain in Charlestown as a private citizen. His volte-face was not sufficient to save him from banishment and confiscation by the revolutionary assembly five months later, but in 1784 he was forgiven and his property was restored to him subject to an amercement of 12 percent.[8]

Nicholas Lechmere
Lechmere (?–1782) had been a collector of customs at Beaufort before the war and had married into the prominent Deveaux family of that place. In the summer of 1780 he was commissioned colonel of the Granville County Regiment of the royal militia, a regiment whose catchment area lay in part in Beaufort District. Besides acting there, it would also see service in Georgetown District, but the same charge of disaffection levelled at Richard Ballingall’s regiment (see above) applied equally to his. In April 1781, while separated from his command, he would be captured at Pocotaligo by Lt. Colonel William Harden. Presumably paroled, he was by 1782 residing as a paid refugee in Charlestown, but sometime between March 1 and May 31 he died.[9]

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William Henry Mills
Coming to North America in 1754 as surgeon to the 46th Regiment, Dr. Mills retired ten years later to South Carolina, where he became a substantial planter, owning 2,000 acres and a number of slaves on or near the Pee Dee. A popular figure, he was appointed sheriff of the newly formed Cheraw District in 1773, stood in a by-election to the Provincial Congress in January 1776, and, when a new revolutionary constitution was adopted in 1778, was returned to the legislature as a representative for St. David’s Parish, besides serving as foreman of the Grand Jury of Cheraw District. Then, with the arrival of the British, he accepted in June 1780 the colonelcy of the Pee Dee Regiment of the royal militia, but soon resigned after the regiment mutinied and no reliable men could later be embodied—events set out in The Cornwallis Papers, together with his subsequent path of pillage and the reasons for it. In January 1782 he was banished by the revolutionary assembly and his property, which had been burnt to the ground, was confiscated. Shortly afterwards he is said to have migrated to New Providence in the Bahamas to resume planting, but other accounts say that he moved to Jamaica and became involved in the production of sugar. He was later compensated by the royal commission for his losses.[10]

Robert William Powell
Powell was a prominent and highly respected merchant who had initially gone along with the revolutionaries, but when a permanent revolutionary constitution for South Carolina was adopted in 1778, he had a change of heart, refused to take the test oath, and was banished. With the reduction of South Carolina in 1780, he came back to Charlestown, where he became an intendant of police, representing “the trading part of the community,” and colonel of the town’s regiment of royal militia. He additionally presided over the Court of Ordinary with Alexander Wright, a son of Sir James Wright, the royal Governor of Georgia, besides serving as a member of the vestry of St. Philip’s Church and as an officer in the St. Andrew’s Society, a stronghold of loyalty to the Crown. Although he was not included in the Banishment and Confiscation Act passed by the revolutionary legislature, his loyalism is said to have cost him more than £40,000.[11]

Henry Richbourg
Henry was the grandson of the Reverend Claude Philippe de Richbourg, a French Huguenot who had migrated to Virginia in 1700 and moved on to South Carolina. Living on or towards the High Hills of Santee, Henry, though vacillating at first, was eventually minded to support the Crown and in March 1781 would serve as a lieutenant colonel under Lt. Colonel John Watson Tadwell Watson and command royal militia in the action at Wiboo Swamp. His brother William, a captain in Brig. General Francis Marion’s brigade, defected to the British, but both would be forgiven by the revolutionaries and continue to reside in South Carolina after the war, dying at Sumter. Three other brothers, James, John and Nathaniel, saw service on the revolutionary side.[12]

Samuel Tynes
Of Tynes little is known except that militarily he and his men were an accident waiting to happen. A man of some prominence on the High Hills of Santee, he had enlisted in autumn 1775 in the troop of revolutionary light horse commanded by Captain Matthew Singleton, but perhaps being a covert loyalist, he has otherwise left no record of revolutionary military service. Although he was, according to Cornwallis, “a weak, well intentioned man,” he was on June 14, 1780 commissioned major of the royal militia on the High Hills, but when part of his regiment was inspected on September 4 by Captain Lieutenant Frederick De Peyster of Ferguson’s corps, not one third of his men had arms, the rest having been disarmed by Cornwallis in May on his march to occupy Camden. Nonetheless, according to their officers, those assembled were to be trusted, and indeed they did subscribe to the resolutions agreed to by other militia regiments at Brandon’s and Mobley’s settlements. Promoted to colonel, Tynes was soon to be involved in the accident that awaited him. Encamped at Tarcote in the fork of the Black River, he took no precautions against attack, was surprised by Marion on October 26, and was totally routed, losing all his arms. He himself was captured, a few of his men were slain, and many were taken prisoner. Of them and those that fled, a considerable number soon joined Marion, who in the action had not lost a single man. Some three weeks later Tynes would escape and be placed in command at his fortified house, but when all but twenty of the garrison deserted, he resigned his commission on December 8. By 1782 he had fled to Charlestown, where he received pay as a refugee militia officer till its evacuation.[13]

John Wigfall
Of Wigfall little is known. Upon the adoption of a temporary revolutionary constitution for South Carolina in March 1776 he was appointed a justice of the peace for Charlestown District. Then, when the British arrived four years later, he accepted a commission of colonel of a royal militia regiment in the Lowcountry and became mainly involved in securing the ferries on the lower Santee, though his operations at times extended to Georgetown and the ferries on Black River. When in the spring of 1781 the tide in South Carolina turned in favor of the revolutionaries, he would resign his commission but nevertheless fail to save himself from being subjected to banishment and confiscation by the revolutionary assembly. After the war he petitioned the assembly for relief and was supported by a parade of witnesses testifying to their humane treatment at his hands. Little though we know of him, it is sufficient to suggest that he may have been a fair-weather friend to whichever side was in the ascendancy.[14]

NORTH CAROLINA

Introduction

Despite the approach of the British towards North Carolina in the summer of 1780, the loyalists there began to suffer worse than ever. Comprising a half to two-thirds of the province’s population, they had sat idly by, relying on the Crown to act, while nascent revolutionaries had organized themselves and put in place a framework of control which eventually usurped the royal government. Too late, the Scots Highlanders rose, but were defeated at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge in February 1776. Repression had by then become the order of the day and was so successful that loyalists were cowed into submission for the next four and a half years. Unwilling to forego their allegiance to the Crown, many were imprisoned, brought to the whipping post, banished, subjected to confiscation, and executed for treason, particularly under an Act of 1777. However, it was not so much the revolutionary authorities whom the loyalists came to fear as mobs of revolutionary irregulars who, unrestrained by concepts of civilized behavior, took advantage of the disordered times and practiced all sorts of enormities ranging from plundering and destruction of property to severe chastisement, murder, and rape. Lawlessness was rife, and nothing could be done by the revolutionary authorities to suppress it. Indeed, matters were so bad that many loyalists took to lying out in the woods or swamps for safety.[15]
With repression so marked, and with no British authority ever established either centrally or locally other than at Wilmington, it is not entirely surprising that instances were sparse of loyalists embodying into royal militia.

Commanding Officers

 Samuel Bryan
A committed loyalist, Bryan (1721–1800) had in January 1776 been authorized by Josiah Martin, the last royal Governor of North Carolina, to raise men in Rowan County in what proved to be a failed attempt to support the Crown. Remaining loyal, he saw his property confiscated three years later by act of the revolutionary legislature. Then, in 1780, having been drafted to serve in the North Carolina revolutionary militia, he—with the nominal rank of colonel—and near 800 of his followers refused to be so. Professing to have no option but to join Cornwallis or go to jail, they rode south to join him. Posted to Hanging Rock some twenty miles north of Camden, they performed poorly there in the action on August 6 but suffered no considerable loss. Ten days later 170 of them supported the extremity of the British left wing at the Battle of Camden. In September the whole body was intended to accompany Wemyss on his punitive expedition to the Cheraw Hill, but only fifty did so and the rest formed part of Cornwallis’s force that in the same month marched to Charlotte. After the capitulation of Yorktown Bryan returned to the Forks of the Yadkin in the northern end of Rowan County but was soon arrested for high treason. Convicted in March 1782, he was pardoned, exchanged, and by the summer was receiving pay in Charlestown as a refugee colonel of militia. At the close of the war, by then forgiven for his loyalism, he again returned to the Forks of the Yadkin, where he spent his remaining years, becoming a valued member of the community.[16]

David Fanning
Fanning (c. 1755–1825) had been living in the Backcountry of South Carolina when the Revolutionary War began. A sergeant in a militia company, he remained loyal to the Crown and for the next five years was in and out of jail for his loyalism. By 1781 he had moved to North Carolina, where on July 5 he was commissioned colonel of the loyal militia in Randolph and Chatham Counties by Major James Henry Craig, commanding at Wilmington. He now embarked on a remarkable ten months’ campaign that began with the surprise of the court at Petersborough and continued in September with the capture of Governor Burke and many others at Hillsborough. One-sidedly accused by revolutionaries of cruelty and murder, whose views were long followed by American historians, he has come to receive a more balanced assessment as later years rolled by. Robert O. DeMond, for example, makes the point that his killings were, in the savage internecine war then being waged, no more than retaliation for like offenses committed by the revolutionaries, whereas A. W. Savary, in his introduction to Fanning’s Narrative, concludes, “Fanning had been grievously maligned by American writers who have been unable to view his career with other than the jaundiced eyes of the partisan. If he had done just what he had done in the American cause instead of the loyal cause, he would have been acclaimed as one of the bravest and best of their leaders.” In June 1782 Fanning fled to Charlestown, from where he migrated by way of East Florida to Canada. From 1791 to 1801 he served in the New Brunswick legislature but was expelled for some unknown offense for which he was sentenced to death and pardoned. Moving on to Digby, Nova Scotia, he became a colonel of militia.[17]

John Gordon and Robert Gillies
In the spring of 1781 Gordon and his men were formed at Wilmington into the North Carolina Independent Dragoons. Captained by Gordon, they became a highly disciplined troop of sixty horse but before long Gordon was to be killed in a skirmish, being replaced by Gillies. When Wilmington was evacuated in November 1781, the troop removed to Charlestown. On August 29, 1782 Gillies was killed in a skirmish with Marion, the troop was soon after broken up, and the effective men were drafted into the South Carolina Royalist Regiment.[18]

Vezey Husband
In the autumn of 1780 Husband held the nominal rank of captain and commanded loyal militia in Burke County, North Carolina, where he lived near the Lower Creek of the Catawba. When all was lost at the Battle of King’s Mountain, he attempted to break out with Ferguson through the surrounding revolutionaries, but both were shot dead. Historian Lyman C. Draper, who had no knowledge of Husband, mistakenly refers to him as a colonel.[19]

Shadrack Inman
About 1766 Shadrack (1747–1831) migrated from England to Limestone, Virginia, accompanied by his brothers Meshack and Abednego. All three moved on to Rowan County, North Carolina, but Meshack was soon to be killed by native Americans while on a transmontane expedition. In 1777 the others found themselves in hot water with the revolutionary authorities for allegedly making disloyal statements, but made their peace by taking the test oath. Then, in the autumn of 1780, Shadrack had become a self-styled captain in the Burke County loyal militia whereas Abednego would take part in the Battle of King’s Mountain on the revolutionary side. Shadrack died at Dandridge, Tennessee, and is not to be confused with his namesake who was killed in the action at Musgrove’s Mill on August 19, 1780.[20]

Ambrose Mills
Mills (c. 1722–1780) was born in England and taken while young to Maryland. On marrying he settled on the James River, Virginia, before moving to the frontier of South Carolina, where his wife was killed by native Americans, probably in 1760 during the Cherokee War. Marrying the sister of the wife of Colonel Thomas Fletchall, who was to become a leading figure in Backcountry loyalism, he settled about 1765 on the Green River in North Carolina. After taking part in the 1776 campaign against the Cherokees, he and David Fanning (see above) raised a corps of 500 men to join the British at St. Augustine. He was discovered and jailed for a time at Salisbury. As colonel commanding a North Carolina battalion of loyal militia, he was put under the command of Ferguson in 1780 and joined with him in attempting to pacify the South Carolina Backcountry and frontier region. Present with some 300 of his men at the Battle of King’s Mountain, he was taken prisoner, subjected with others to a mock trial, and summarily hanged by torchlight at Bickerstaff’s Old Fields in the evening of October 14.[21]

John Pyle
Born in Concord, Pennsylvania, Pyle (1723–1804) was sent as a young man to study medicine in Oxfordshire, England. In 1767 he migrated to Chatham County, North Carolina, where he continued in medical practice and became a leading regulator. In February 1776 he accepted from the royal Governor, Josiah Martin, a commission as a captain on the British American establishment but later swore an oath of allegiance to the revolutionary state. He nevertheless remained a covert loyalist and responded to Cornwallis’s proclamation of February 20, 1781 at Hillsborough by assembling a band of loyal militia from between the Haw and the Deep Rivers. While marching to join Cornwallis, he and his unresisting men were inhumanly butchered by Lt. Colonel “Light Horse Harry” Lee’s Legion and Pickens’ militia, an event which came to be known as “Pyle’s massacre.” According to tradition, Pyle lost three fingers and the use of an eye and only escaped by concealing himself in a nearby pond. Of the surviving wounded, thirty-two were treated at the British military hospital, Wilmington. After the war he continued to reside in Chatham County till his death.[22]

GEORGIA

Introduction

Although nominally commanding the royal militia in Georgia, Major Patrick Ferguson had little, if anything, to do with it. Nor had Cornwallis. Comprising only two effective regiments, both in the Up Country, it came under the superintendence of Thomas Brown, lieutenant colonel of the King’s Rangers, a British American regiment, who commanded at Augusta. He in turn, though responsible to Cornwallis, had to take into account the Governor’s, Sir James Wright’s, views on matters appertaining to the militia, given that it was formed under the royal constitution of Georgia as re-established in 1779.

James Grierson
A planter, Grierson had been a resident of Georgia since 1762, owning six slaves and a landed estate of 1,350 acres, mostly (if not all) in St. Paul’s Parish. Between 1768 and 1773 he occupied the office of a collector and assessor under the Tax Acts besides acting as surveyor of the local roads. In 1772 he was commissioned a justice of the peace and two years later became colonel of the Augusta Regiment of the royal militia. With the coming of the Revolution he supported the Crown but was allowed by the revolutionary authorities to continue as a justice of the peace and in 1778 was appointed a tax assessor. Then, in 1780, he was recommissioned colonel of the Augusta Regiment of the royal militia and would continue actively supporting Thomas Brown throughout the British occupation of Augusta. After the garrison there had capitulated to Pickens and Lee on June 6, 1781, he was promptly granted a Georgia parole, that is to say, he was murdered in a dastardly way by Captain James Alexander, one of Pickens’ men. Entering the room where Grierson was held captive, Alexander shot him fatally before the eyes of his three children. According to Thomas Brown, neither the sentinel at the door nor the main guard attempted to interfere with the murder, after which Grierson’s body was mutilated and thrown into a ditch. In 1782 the Georgia revolutionary assembly confiscated Grierson’s estate.[23]

Thomas Waters
A wealthy settler on the Ceded Lands,[24] Waters was a committed loyalist who in 1775, while commanding Fort Dartmouth some sixty miles above Augusta, had nevertheless surrendered it to the nascent revolutionaries without firing a shot. Some four years later his loyalism led him to fall foul of the Grand Jury of Wilkes County (created by the revolutionaries out of the Ceded Lands), which recommended that he be prosecuted for aiding “the British troops and the avowed enemies of the United States of America.” Then, in 1780, he was commissioned colonel of 255 royal militia in his locality and is chiefly remembered for a disastrous foray into the South Carolina Backcountry during which he and his men were routed by Lt. Colonel William Washington at Hammond’s Store on December 30. 150 were killed or wounded and about 40 taken prisoner, whereas Washington lost not a man. In May and June 1781 he would be among the Augusta garrison besieged by Pickens and Lee. Presumably captured and exchanged, he next surfaced in 1782 as Thomas Brown’s deputy in the Indian Department, going on to lead the Cherokees against the Ceded Lands. The Cherokees were soon beaten, losing all their lands south of the Savannah and east of the Chattahoochee, and Waters had to flee to St. Augustine. For his sins he was banished from Georgia, and his property confiscated, by act of the Georgia revolutionary assembly. He was later pardoned.[25]

[1]Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), passim; Murtie June Clark, Loyalists in the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War, (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co. Inc., 2003), 1: 183-4; Ian Saberton ed., The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War (“CP”), 6 vols (Uckfield, UK: The Naval & Military Press Ltd, 2010).

[2]Lambert, SC Loyalists, passim; CP; the SC Banishment and Confiscation Act 1782.

[3]Lambert, SC Loyalists, passim; CP.

[4]Lambert, SC Loyalists, 104-5; CP.

[5]Daniel Culler, Orangeburgh District, 1768-1868 (Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1995), 322; Information from Joanne B. Stowe.

[6]George C. Rogers Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 1970), passim; Lambert, SC Loyalists, 113-5, 291-2; Clark, Loyalists, 1: 183-4, 491; CP.

[7]CP; Lambert, SC Loyalists, 116; Clark, Loyalists, 1: passim; Alexander Gregg, History of the Old Cheraws (Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1975), 380.

[8]Rogers Jr., Georgetown County, passim; Clark, Loyalists, 1: 187.

[9]Lambert, SC Loyalists, 120, 175; CP; McCrady, SC in the Rev 1780-1783, 135; Clark, Loyalists, 1: 491-2.

[10]Lambert, SC Loyalists, 115, 267; Gregg, The Old Cheraws, 254, 288-9,380-1; CP; Draper, King’s Mountain, 373; Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 2: 84.

[11]McCrady, SC in the Rev 1775-1780, 80; George Smith McCowen Jr., The British Occupation of Charleston, 1780-1782 (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 18, 82, 124.

[12]Lucian F. Fosdick, The French Blood in America (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co. Inc., 1973), 345-357; CP; Hugh F. Rankin, Francis Marion: The Swamp Fox (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1973), 163; Robert D. Bass, Swamp Fox: The Life and Campaigns of General Francis Marion (Orangeburg, SC: The Sandlapper Store Inc., 1976), 235.

[13]Lambert, SC Loyalists,117; SCHGM, 1 (1901), 184, 262; Clark, Loyalists, 1: 151, 493 et seq; CP; William Gilmore Simms, The Life of Francis Marion (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing Co. reprint, 2004), ch. 9.

[14]A. S. Salley Jr., Journal of the General Assembly of South Carolina, March 26, 1776—April 11, 1776 (Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1906); CP; Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 2: 595-6; Lambert, SC Loyalists, 287, 292-3.

[15]Ian Saberton, “Midsummer 1780 in the Carolinas and Georgia—Events predating the Battle of Camden,” Journal of the American Revolution, July 15, 2019.

[16]Sabine, Biographical Sketches, 1: 272; CP; Banastre Tarleton, A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North America (London, 1787), 95, 105, 138; Blackwell P. Robinson, William R. Davie (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 157-8; Clark, Loyalists, 1: 361-2; Information from John Robertson.

[17]Robert O. DeMond, The Loyalists in North Carolina during the Revolution (Durham, NC: The Duke University Press, 1940), 140-152; David Fanning, Colonel Fanning’s Narrative of His Exploits (Toronto, 1906; Dictionary of American Biography(New York, 1928-1958).

[18]Nan Cole and Todd Braisted, “An Introduction to North Carolina Loyalist Units,” The On-Line Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies, June 6, 2006; Clark, Loyalists, 1: 405-6.

[19]CP; Draper, King’s Mountain, 276, 294, 482.

[20]William Oliver Inman Jr., “Some Notes on the Inman Family,” Internet, May 29, 2005; CP.

[21]Draper, King’s Mountain, passim.

[22]“Ratcliff-Smith Genealogy,” Internet, December 24, 2005; Clark, Loyalists, 1: 347, 537; “Joseph Graham’s Narrative,” The Papers of Archibald D. Murphey (Raleigh: Publications of the NC Historical Commission, 1914), 2: 273-6.

[23]Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), passim; Kenneth Coleman and Charles Stephen Gurr eds, Dictionary of Georgia Biography (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983).

[24]The Ceded Lands was an expression commonly used to refer to part of the territory ceded to Georgia by the Cherokees and Creeks in 1773. It was located in the Up Country above Augusta, extending from the headwaters of the Oconee downwards and between that river and the Savannah (Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 14 (map 2) and 142 (map 3); CP).

[25]Cashin, The King’s Ranger, 44, 122, 133, 155, 164, 191; Edward J. Cashin Jr. and Heard Robertson, Augusta and the American Revolution in the Georgia Back Country 1773-1783 (Georgia: Richmond County Historical Society, 1975), 13, 61, 74; Grace Davidson, The Early Records of Georgia: The Earliest Records of Wilkes County (Greenville, SC: Southern Historical Press, 1967), 2: 10, 11; CP.