Women of Revolutionary War Georgia

The September 3, 2020 issue of the Journal of the American Revolution published “Margaret Eustace and Her Family Pass Through the American Revolution.” Margaret Eustace, the suspected female spy with a colorful colonial past, showed up in Georgia in 1779 and apparently misrepresented her considerable real family connections in the American and British armies. Eustace survived the war and even prospered. Her friend Catherine Moore left her home near Savannah to Eustace and her son Col. John Skey Eustace. Why Moore made such a gift is unknown, but she surely found in her a similar life of challenges as a wife made worse by war.^[1]

Records of women during the American Revolution, even of the higher social status like Eustace and Moore, are scarce. Often a wife’s birth surname has not survived or even her given name.^[2] Sometimes they only appear in records of probate or in the legal formality of renouncing their dower when husbands sold land.^[3] Married women suffered because of being legally bound to their husbands and, as with all civilians, of being targets of violence when war was waged. Many women were left with nothing, such as those who lost brothers, husbands, and sons killed or executed among the Quakers and friendly neighbors in Georgia’s Wrighstborough community when rebel raiders destroyed the largely-Loyalist settlement.^[4] While Georgia became a battlefield for the American, British, and French armies, even more men died from Americans killing Americans—patriots versus Loyalists—to the extent that murdering prisoners came to cynically be called granting a “Georgia parole.”^[5]

The extraordinary adventures of a few Georgia women have been remembered. Nancy Hart represented the women of the era who defended their homes and or actively worked for or against the Revolution out of love country. For whatever she did or did not do, the Georgia legislature named a county for Hart in 1853, the only one of the state’s 163 counties named for a woman.^[6] African American Mammy Kate reportedly staged an escape for her patriot enslaver, Georgia Governor Stephen Heard, and worked as a patriot spy.^[7]

Elizabeth Lichtenstein wrote a rare memoir of her experiences in Revolutionary War Georgia. Her mother, Catherine Delegal Lightenstone, died in 1774, and in 1776 at age twelve, Elizabeth successfully petitioned patriot officials not to confiscate her grandfather’s property because of her father’s actions. The latter, John Lightenstone, a Russian in the Georgia colonial bureaucracy, had fled Georgia with a bounty on his head for being a Loyalist. After harrowing adventures, he reached British-occupied New York.

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During the American and French siege of Savannah in 1779, Elizabeth Lichtenstein hid in cellars with other refugees. They were not allowed by either side to leave for safety outside of the town. To escape the bombardment, they finally moved to Hutchinson Island where they were protected by Cherokee warriors and armed slaves.^[8]

Later that year, Lichtenstein married Capt. William Martin Johnston. This Scottish medical student had gone to Boston to join the King’s forces and became a captain of the Loyalist New York Volunteers before joining Thomas Brown’s King’s Rangers in Georgia, as did her father, also as a captain.

The Johnstons knew loss in the war. Elizabeth’s brother-in-law Capt. Andrew Johnston of the Kings Rangers died in the attack by Elijah Clark and his patriot militia against the Loyalist garrison in Augusta in September 1780. His brother John served as a private in the Rangers until captured and executed on May 3, 1781.

Elizabeth Lichstenstein’s extended family would leave Georgia on a long odyssey across and around the North Atlantic as exiles until finding a home in Nova Scotia. Over time, they became connected to some of Canada’s most prominent families.^[9]

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Most of Georgia’s women of the American Revolution found neither fame nor glory, only a legacy that survives, if at all, in fragments of records that illustrate the dangers faced by all.^[10] For example, Fenda Lawrence was the African partner and mother of the children of Stephen Deane, an Irish sea captain in the African slave trade. During the war she moved with their children to Georgia, but after Stephen died, leaving debts, she lost everything because the law did not recognize her as his wife.^[11]

Women could be abandoned. Scotsman William Manson founded Friendsborough, a settlement of indentured servants from Northern England, near Augusta, Georgia in 1775. He and his wife reportedly treated the servants badly before the war, and once the war began, it gave the servants an opportunity to flee. The Mansons then separated, reconciled, and finally were parted by 1780 when William Manson took their children. He did not even know if his wife was still alive in 1782. Manson’s two sisters had to find families in Augusta to take them in as charity.^[12] Loyalist William Lee, fearing for his life, stayed with his wife only long enough for her to give birth to their daughter Charlotte on August 7, 1781, before he fled and had a harrowing trip back to England.^[13]

Many women found themselves alone and destitute. One of them, the widow Catherine Eirick had to plead for government assistance in 1780. In 1778, British soldiers had evicted her from her home in Savannah in order to use her house as a hospital. They tore down her farm buildings for firewood. With her children grown and gone, she had no support.^[14]

Margaret Strozier of Wilkes County had a similar experience that ended more favorably. Starting in 1780, she was abandoned by her husband Peter for two years while he served under patriot partisan Elijah Clark. Driven from their home, she and their seven children crossed through South Carolina “half begging and starving” to rejoin Peter in North Carolina.^[15]

Some women chose their politics. In 1781, John McDaniel, living near Augusta, gave his wife Mary the choice of bringing their three children with him to the British lines in Savannah or not. An acquaintance remembered that Mary McDaniel “would not go with the King’s people, but would stay with the liberty.” John McDaniel subsequently died from smallpox behind British lines. The state of Georgia seized what little property that Mary had and left her and her children to starve.^[16]

Women seldom received legal redress for their losses and sufferings. After the war, Mrs. Anne Gray of Burke County charged Loyalist bandit leader Daniel McGirt with her rape in 1779. He escaped prosecution.^[17] In 1791, the governor of Georgia considered a petition for clemency for an enslaved man named Billy, the “property” of Thomas Stone. His mother Patty, a free African American woman in St. Augustine, Florida, had helped American soldiers held prisoner by the British during the war. She negotiated for the purchase of Billy’s emancipation and hoped that his repentance would allow him to join her in Florida.^[18] Sibbiah Blair lived in Burke County. She later received military bounty land from the post-war state government, not for her deceased husband William, but for her own service, the details of which are no longer known—a rare, possibly unique, situation for a woman in Georgia.^[19]

Catherine Mullryne Moore left not an anecdotal history but a long chronology of her struggles as a married woman in the deadly politics of Revolutionary War Georgia. Her father, Col. John Mullryne, married Claudia Cattell on October 23, 1735 in his native Windward Islands of Montserrat. The couple came to Beaufort, South Carolina, before the Revolution, where he established himself as a wealthy merchant and became a colonel in the colonial militia. The Mullrynes moved to Savannah where they became extensive land owners, including tracts held in trust for their daughters Catherine and Mary.^[20]

Catherine Mullryne married Andrew Moore, a planter of Great Kiokee Creek just north of Augusta, in early 1776.^[21] Moore had come to Georgia from Ireland as part of the Queensborough settlement of Scots-Irish in 1773. He associated with Robert Rae, a wealthy frontier Georgia entrepreneur whose Irish-born father John had created the Queensborough settlement.

Andrew Moore served in Georgia’s Revolutionary Provincial Council which met in Tondee’s Tavern in Savannah in 1775. He never caught up with his considerable debts, even with the property of his new wife Catherine. By April 22, 1777, they were living rent-free on the Great Kiokee Creek land Moore had just sold to the partnership of Robert Rae, Thomas Rae, John Rae, Samuel Elbert, and Thomas Graham, a syndicate that traded with the Indians for furs and pelts.^[22] On November 10, Moore transferred £4,000 (state currency) worth of slaves to the state of Georgia that Catherine had in her possession but which belonged to her father—John Mullryne was “a convicted Loyalist” who had left Georgia to resettle in the Bahamas.^[23]

In January 1779, British Lt. Col. Archibald Campbell had the Moores under house arrest at their Great Kiokee Creek home. A British sergeant named McAllister, guarding the family from thieves, mistook a passing patrol for Loyalists and, realizing his mistake, charged the South Carolina militiamen with his bayonet. The sergeant was shot dead. McAllister’s death became an atrocity when one of the Americans chopped up the body, reportedly in revenge for similar treatment done to his son.^[24]

In the summer of 1780, Georgia’s restored colonial assembly placed Andrew Moore on a list of disloyal persons never to hold public office again and to have his property confiscated. The Royal Governor’s Council turned down Col. James Grierson’s request that Moore be made a major in the restored colonial militia near Augusta.

Moore nonetheless led his Tory neighbors in helping to devastate the Patriot settlements in Wilkes County following the unsuccessful attack on the Loyalist garrison in Augusta by Elijah Clark’s Wilkes County Patriot militia in September 1780. As a consequence, more than 400 men, women, and children, black and white, had to flee Wilkes County in a snow storm, with little food, to safety in today’s Tennessee. They were pursued by Loyalists and Indians. When Maj. Patrick Ferguson and his corps failed to intercept the desperate Georgians, he and his Loyalists suffered defeat at the Battle of Kings Mountain from a multi-state force of patriot militia.^[25]

Georgia’s restored colonial government then commissioned Moore as major of the 2nd Regiment of Loyalist militia. (Catherine Moore’s brother-in-law Josiah Tattnall was colonel of the 1st Regiment Loyalist militia near Savannah and her nephew John Mullryne Tattnall served in Thomas Brown’s Tory King’s Rangers.)^[26] Moore was slightly wounded in March 1781 by a band of seven rebels sent to assassinate Augusta’s eleven most prominent Loyalists. Andrew and Catherine Moore were likely among the people who took refuge in British Fort Cornwallis in Augusta during the Patriot campaign that successfully retook Augusta from the Loyalists in the spring and summer of 1781. Andrew Moore died at his home in November of that year, circumstances unknown.^[27]

The Banishment and Confiscation Act passed by Georgia’s restored Patriot assembly ordered the seizure of the property of Andrew Moore, including that of his heirs. Catherine Moore claimed on January 1, 1782 that her husband had left her only two slaves. Their home on Great Kiokee Creek, however, was confiscated and sold by the state on September 10, 1782.^[28]

Catherine Moore’s deceased father’s Bonaventure plantation near Savannah was also confiscated and sold because he and its new owner, his grandson John Mullryne Tattnall, were Loyalists. Catherine Moore sued—her grandmother Claudia Cattell Mullyrne had willed her a life interest in that plantation. Moore received £300 in state currency from the state assembly as compensation. Today the plantation is a world-famous Savannah cemetery. Catherine Moore lived on the Cattell Plantation near Savannah, formerly belonging to her mother’s family, until her death in January 1790.^[29]

Catherine Moore and so many other Georgia women, Loyalist, Patriot, or neither, proved to be survivors in the worst of times and have left us that heritage. It remains for us to uncover and tell their stories.