The Battle of Burke County Jail, Georgia

A British writer wrote in 1781 that it was through individual obscure events that the conduct of the American Revolution was demonstrated across the whole continent.[1] The Battle of the Burke County Jail, fought in Georgia on January 26, 1779, was such an incident. This small but brutal gunfight brought to a head the political divide that Americans everywhere faced, not only through that event but also through the representative men who were there.

Lord George Germain, the British Secretary of the Colonies, directed the war. He had ambitious, impractical goals, such as seizing Spanish territories and winning the Revolution by recruiting an army of Loyal Americans. On March 8, 1778, he directed that the 30,000 British troops in America be further divided for his new campaign plans.

Among these ideas, Germain wanted an expedition to be sent from British-held New York to seize Georgia, which was presumed to be the most loyal and militarily weakest of the thirteen United States in rebellion. He believed this could be the beginning of a campaign that could recover all the lost colonies, at least as far north as Maryland.[2]

Sir James Wright, the colony’s former colonial governor, advocated for recovering Georgia for the Crown. In his letters to Germain, until he escaped from the colony, he admitted, that, despite his successes, the support for the rebellion had defeated all his efforts, going back to the Stamp Act in 1765.[3]

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The British commander in America, Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, had serious reservations about invading the South after such failures at populist uprising campaigns from Charlestown, South Carolina, to Bennington, Vermont. Nonetheless, a British expeditionary force led by Lt. Col. Archibald Campbell overcame numerous obstacles and captured Savannah, Georgia, on December 29, 1778. He was reinforced by British regulars and Loyalist provincials from neighboring East Florida under the command of Brig. Gen. Augustin Prévost.[4]

Many Georgians wanted what remained of the American Army to make a stand at Ebenezer, Georgia, from which access through the swamps to the backcountry of Georgia could have been blocked. The survivors instead withdrew across the Savannah River, leaving remnants of the state militia to impede any British advance into the interior.[5]

Campbell led a fast-moving column of his 71st Regiment and Loyalists totaling 1,044 men from Ebenezer into the northern interior on January 24, 1779. This Scottish officer intended to seize Augusta and to receive the submission of the province’s frontier to become, he boasted, the first officer to tear a star and stripe from the United States flag. He was told that he would rendezvous at Augusta with 6,000 Loyal Americans from North and South Carolina, willing to fight for the King’s cause, as well as Cherokee and Creek warriors.[6]

What remained of Georgia’s state government was twenty-three members of the one-house assembly. Meeting in Augusta, they did not have enough members present to form a quorum. Their Executive Council received a letter of January 9, 1779, from the commissioner to the Indigenous peoples, Col. Daniel McMurphy, and other leaders in Burke County, between Augusta and the British in Ebenezer and Savannah. He wrote that the local militia was ordered to muster, but few men had arrived at the courthouse-jail.

Two hundred men, however, had gathered in support of the British, and a proclamation from Campbell calling for support of the King’s cause was being circulated through the countryside. McMurphy pleaded for immediate help, “lest the friends of the state fall a sacrifice to the vengeance of the diabolical enemy.” The Council called on the state militia to muster at the Burke County Jail. A reply was sent to McMurphy only after George Phelps, the messenger, was promised he would be well compensated.[7]

Lt. Col. James Ingram of the Upper Battalion of Richmond County militia, today’s Columbia County, answered the call. On January 15, from Burke County Jail, he convened a council of war and issued a stirring proclamation calling upon Georgians to rally to the American standard.[8]

The rump state government ordered the remaining troops to join Ingram, and sent $1,000 borrowed from Col. Leonard Marbury to the Burke County Jail to pay the troops. Twenty-eight men, each given a pound of lead and a quarter pound of gunpowder, were also sent out. Ingram was reinforced by members of the Burke County militia regiment under Col. Francis Pugh and Maj. John Twiggs.

Ingram’s superior, Col. Benjamin Few, and his brother Maj. William Few arrived with more men. This Richmond County regiment was described in the Loyalist press as vicious plunderers. A kinsmen of Benjamin Few remembered:

Benjamin the eldest was bred to the farm, he was in person about 5 feet 10 inches in height, stout, & a muscular and powerful man, bold, bluff, kind-hearted, and magnanimous tempered . . . but Uncle Ben (our family appellation) fell into the Soldier’s habits, was frolicsome & bolstering and often drank too much inebriating liquor—Still he was one of the most popular men who ever bore the name—his Soldiers almost idolized him.[9]

Baptist ministers Silas Mercer and Daniel Marshall came to preach to the gathering troops, and additional men under Leonard Marbury and Leroy Hammond, respectively, set out to join Ingram. Samuel Elbert, colonel commandant of the state’s remaining Continentals and brigadier general of the state militia, wrote that they would altogether form “a pretty little army” of 500 to 600 men.[10] He and his remaining troops, coming within five miles of the jail withdrew to prevent being cut off by the advancing British troops marching along the Savannah River road.

Campbell received orders from General Prévost to dispatch Loyalist horsemen to disperse the troops gathering at Burke County Jail. He would later claim that he only reluctantly authorized this movement as the Loyalists were undisciplined and, in his view, bandits. His column was marching northwest along the Savannah River to Augusta, from where he believed he would cut off the enemy gathering at the Burke County jail.[11]

All together 230 Loyalists now rode against Burke County Jail, including some of Georgia’s most noted Loyalist leaders. They included Englishman Thomas Brown, commander of the King’s Rangers, a provincial battalion; Daniel McGirt, reportedly an American soldier until abused by a superior officer; and John Thomas, restored as commander of the area’s reconstructed colonial militia.[12]

Thomas had resigned his colonial commissions in 1775 when he learned of British soldiers killing Americans at Lexington and Concord. He told his men that America was to be “hard rode, and drove like slaves.” Thomas served as a colonel in Burke County’s state militia until he was arrested for attempting to join a band of Loyalists fleeing South Carolina for British East Florida.[13]

Henry Sharp likely served with Thomas as his major. He had come to Georgia from Virginia and proved to be a colonial malcontent, punished for breaking civil laws and never receiving any land grants in the province. Sharp did not do better under the new state government. On August 24, 1776, the Council of Safety ordered him arrested for reasons not stated except “for being dangerous to the peace and good government of the province.” The reason for Sharp’s incarceration could have been because he, a deacon at the Big Buckhead Baptist Church, had been persuaded by its reverend, Mathew Moore, and the congregation to allow his slave, George Liele, to preach, contrary to Georgia law. Moore, likely from the nearby Queensborough Irish township, was Sharp’s brother-in-law.[14] Some members of this Sharp family served in the patriot cause.

Loyalist Americans had no love for Burke County’s jail. Rev. William Tennett passed the building’s predecessor in 1775, which he described as a “laughable” log pen covered with clapboard, with a tattered flag on a liberty pole. John Sharp (maybe Henry’s Patriot brother) built new buildings in 1778 but was dissuaded from taking apart the local Anglican church for materials. This log building became a prison for many supporters of the King’s cause, including members of Brown’s King’s Rangers.[15]

On the night of January 25, Loyalist Col. Thomas Brown positioned his men to storm the jail from three sides upon the firing of the morning gun in Few’s camp at 6 AM. Detachments had been sent out by the patriot militia, reducing it to only 120 men. When the Loyalists attacked, half of the patriot militia immediately fled or were captured. The remaining defenders held out in the jail building. William Few would remember that the “consternation was terrible and unexpected.” Militiaman Benjamin McCormick remembered finding seven bullet holes in his blanket after the battle.

After the initial assault, the Loyalists regrouped and attacked again. After forty-five minutes of battle, they finally withdrew, leaving three men dead on the ground and seven more taken prisoner. Brown received wounds in the shoulder and side, while Colonel Thomas reportedly had his upper lip shot away. Three young brothers among Brown’s rangers fell captive in the battle. Their neighbors threatened them with execution, but British threats of retaliation earned them safe exchange.

The same day, January 26, Brown and his men joined Campbell’s British column; Benjamin Few and the Georgia militiamen also withdrew. They joined the troops under Colonels LeRoy Hammond and Leonard Marbury before crossing Briar Creek at New Bridge and joining Elbert at Telfair’s Mills. Patriot losses were five men killed and seven wounded. Thomas Fussell was paid for boarding thirteen wounded, including captured Loyalists.[16]

With their detachments, Few’s and Pugh’s combined commands had 200 to 250 men, but only 90 of that number remained. They captured Loyalist John Henderson’s stockade fort on Spirit Creek, as part of Elbert’s command that overall numbered 200 to 300 men. The approaching British column, having artillery, drove them from that position on January 31 and subsequently to South Carolina. The King’s troops then entered Augusta.[17]

Campbell’s troops occupied Augusta until early on the morning of February 14 and then withdrew to avoid being cut off from Ebenezer and Savannah. The thousands of Carolina Loyalists he was told to expect proved to be only 600 men, and what remained of that number suffered defeat at the Battle of Kettle Creek later that morning. Only 270 to 300 men of dubious military value joined the British Army soon after. Many of them likely only sought British protection, not the opportunity to die as a martyr in anyone’s cause. Campbell did not see even one Native American warrior.[18]

During the march to Augusta in January 1779, as acting civil governor of Royal Georgia, Campbell had administered oaths of allegiance to the King to 1,800 Georgians, some 10 percent of the state’s population. He later wrote that these men then largely disappeared, and some were likely spies. Many returned to the patriot forces, some even having their oaths still in their pockets at the Battle of Briar Creek on March 3, 1779.

Men who fought at the Burke County Jail would be better remembered than this small military engagement. James Ingram, for example, already with a checkered past, made critical comments about the American cause and then joined the British. He became the Loyalist commander of the Volunteers of Augusta, celebrated with a Tory song.[19]

The story of Loyalist Thomas Brown was so dramatic that more has been written about him than anyone else in Revolutionary War Georgia, Loyalist or Patriot. Nearly tortured to death by a mob in Augusta in 1775, he would be seriously wounded again in 1780 as the commandant of the Loyalist garrison at Augusta. He would survive to have a controversial post-war career as a British planter.[20]

Col. John Thomas remained a Loyalist. Later in 1779, he was captured and held in a Charlestown dungeon. After the war, the Georgia Assembly would allow him to return to the state from exile.[21]

Thomas’s Maj. Henry Sharp died in battle on March 31 while leading a Loyalist guerrilla campaign against South Carolina militia fighting in Georgia. He was killed by forgotten patriot Joshua Inman, hero of many engagements, including the Battle of Cowpens and likely the Burke County Jail.[22]

George Liele, the enslaved man Sharp freed to preach as the first Black Baptist minister in 1777, would keep his emancipator’s bloodied glove as a memento. He would remove to Jamaica at the end of the war and work for Archibald Campbell, who had invaded Georgia in December 1778. Liele’s followers would start the Baptist War in 1832, which helped bring down slavery across the British Empire. His disciple, Rev. David George, would minister in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.[23]

Daniel McGirt would remain in Georgia, but as a notorious bandit there and in neighboring Spanish East Florida. He and his mixed-race gang robbed families without regard to politics, even for years after the war. McGirt was one of the pioneers of American organized crime.[24]

By contrast, Daniel Marshall and Silas Mercer helped to found the Separatist Baptists, today’s Southern Baptists, which became the largest religion founded in America. Mercer contributed to the Patriot “victory” at Burke County Jail, “animating and exciting the troops to keep their post.”[25] His son Jesse would become the great leader of the early Georgia Baptists, for whom Mercer University was named.

John Twiggs was promoted to colonel of the Burke County militia regiment, from the date of the battle of Burke County Jail. He would have a successful career as a partisan fighter for the rest of the Revolution. After the war, he would achieve the rank of major general. Twiggs County is named after him.[26]

As a partisan leader, Benjamin Few had several successes but would later suffer defeat in South Carolina, for which he would be worse than forgotten in his own time. Historians confuse him with his brother, another Burke County Jail veteran, William Few. The latter became a prominent political leader in Georgia and New York, who signed the United States Constitution and served in the first United States Senate.[27]

The log buildings that included the Burke County jail would change hands many times during the American Revolution as a symbol of local political dominance. Thomas Brown had the jail burned down, the first Georgia courthouse destroyed.[28] Today, the city of Waynesboro, named for Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne, who led the final campaign from Ebenezer to drive the British from the state, includes the site of the battle of Burke County Jail.

Georgia would become the only American state reduced to colony status with a restored colonial government and militia. The Patriot resistance at Burke County Jail nonetheless proved to be the first successful resistance to the British invasion and the beginning of a bloody civil war. Campbell’s secretary wrote that even then, “most of the Settlements (along both the Roads) from Ebenezer to Augusta are in a ruinous, neglected State, two-thirds of them deserted,” that some of their owners followed the King’s troops while others joined the rebels. He saw both sides “revengefully destroying the property of the other.”[29] The British finally withdrew from Georgia on July 11, 1782.

[1] The Annual Register or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature for the Year 1781 (London, 1782), 83. Also see Pier Mackesy, The War for America, 1775-1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

[2] Robert S. Davis, “The British Southern Strategy in the American Revolution, 1775-1782,” British Journal for Military History 11 (August 2025): 2-24, bjmh.gold.ac.uk/index.php/bjmh/article/view/1889/1994.

[3] Greg Brooking, From Empire to Revolution: Sir James Wright and the Price of Loyalty in Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2024), 141, 146, 159.

[4] Davis, “The British Southern Strategy,” 2-24.

[5] Robert S. Davis, “The Salzburgers War: The American Revolution in Ebenezer, Georgia,” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 33 (2017): 70.

[6] Archibald Campbell, Journal of An Expedition against The Rebels of Georgia in North America, ed. Colin Campbell (Augusta, GA: Richmond County Historical Society, 1981), 6, 43-48, 76, 99; “By the ship Molly,” New York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, March 29, 1779.

[7] Daniel McMurphy to Dear Sir, January 9, 1779, in Allen D. Candler, comp., The Revolutionary Records of Georgia, 3 vols. (Atlanta: Franklin-Turner, 1908), 2:68, 131, 132; John Walton to Benjamin Lincoln, January 11, 1779, Jared Sparks Collection, Ms 12, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[8] James Ingram to Benjamin Lincoln, January 13, 1779, Benjamin Lincoln Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; James Ingram, Proceedings of a Council of War held at Burke Jail, Georgia, January 14th, 1779, with a Narrative of the Subsequent Proceedings, and the Proclamation Issued, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (Brooklyn, NY: Historical Printing Club, 1890). This publication was apparently from a copy of documents sent from the Georgia government in Augusta to American commander Benjamin Lincoln.

[9] “By the ship Molly”; I. A. Few to Mary Few, May 25, 1837, quoted in Florence Knight Fruth, Some Descendants of Richard Few of Chester County, Pennsylvania and Allied Lines, 1682-1976 (Parsons, WV: The author, 1977), 49.

[10] Candler, The Revolutionary Records of Georgia, 2:134-135; Ingram to Lincoln, January 9, 1779, Benjamin Lincoln Papers; Robert S. Davis, comp., Georgians in the Revolution (Easley, SC: Southern Historical Press, 1986), 102-103, 141-143, 145-147; Samuel Elbert to Lincoln, January 17, 1779, Charles Robert Autograph Collection, Archives & Manuscripts, Haverford College Quaker & Special Collections, Haverford, Pennsylvania; Elbert to Lincoln, January 28, 1779, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

[11] Campbell, Journal, 82-83; Augustin Prévost to Henry Clinton, January 19, 1779, Colonial Office Papers, CO 5/97/227-229, National Archives of the United Kingdom, Kew, London, UK.

[12] Davis, Georgians, 103-104, 159.

[13] Robert S. Davis, “1778: Loyalism and the Failure of the British Military in the Southern Colonies,” Proceedings of The South Carolina Historical Association (2018): 65-78.

[14] “Proceedings of the Georgia Council of Safety, 1775 to 1777,” in Georgia Historical Society, Collections, 5 (1901), part i: 99; Robert S. Davis, “The Other Side of the Coin: Georgia Baptists Who Fought for the King,” Viewpoints Georgia Baptist History 7 (1980): 47-58.

[15] Davis, Georgians, 104-105; Carolina Price Wilson, comp., Annals of Georgia: Important Early Records of the State, 3 vols. (New York: Grafton Press, 1928-1933), 1: 130.

[16] Campbell, Journal, 50; Elbert to Lincoln, January 28, 1779, Henry E. Huntington Library; Lincoln to Andrew Williamson, January 19, 1779, Andrew Williamson Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; Davis, Georgians, 105-108, 145-146.

[17] Clay Ouzts, Samuel Elbert and the Age of Revolution in Georgia, 1740-1788 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2022), 269-271; Gordon B. Smith, Morningstars of Liberty: The Revolutionary War in Georgia, 1775-1783, 2 vols. (Milledgeville, GA: Boyd Publishing, 2006, 2011), 1: 137-139.

[18] Robert S. Davis, “Loyalism and Patriotism at Askance: Community, Conspiracy, and Conflict on the Southern Frontier,” in Robert M. Calhoon, et al, Tory Insurgents: The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 229-283.

[19] Dorothy Jeter Barnum and George Ely Russell, “James Johnson alias Ingram: A Southern Odyssey,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 76 (March 1988): 5-16; Smith, Morningstars, 1: 303-304.

[20] For Thomas “burnt foot” Brown, “the little tory they tarred and feathered in Augusta,” see Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989).

[21] Candler, Revolutionary Records of Georgia, 2: 48; Loyalist claim of John Thomas, Audit Office Papers AO 13/37/2009, National Archives of the United Kingdom; John Thomas to Lincoln, December 31, 1779, Thomas Addis Collection; “Journal of the House, 1785-1786,” typescript (Atlanta: Georgia Department of Archives and History, 1940), 145, 149, 234.

[22] Robert S. Davis, “Augusta in the Center: The Revolutionary War Battles of Kettle Creek and Shell Bluff,” Augusta Richmond County History 49 (1) (Spring 2018): 17-29; Smith, Morningstars, 1: 149, 157, 182-183, 231, 233.

[23] Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 50, 190-198; Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists after the American Revolution (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 17.

[24] Wilbur Herbert Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774-1784, 2 vols. (Deland, FL: Florida State Historical Society. 1929), 2: 328-329; Gordon B. Smith, History of the Georgia Militia, 1783-1861, 4 vols., (Milledgeville, GA: Boyd Publishing, 2000-2001), 3: 84-89.

[25] Deposition of Samuel Beckaem, June 1, 1812, Joseph Vallence Bevan Papers, GHS0071, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah; J. R. Huddleston and Charles O. Walker, From Heretics to Heroes: A Study of Religious Groups in Georgia with a Special Emphasis on the Baptists (Jasper, GA: Pickens Tech Press, 1976), 30-35.

[26] Robert S. Davis, “John Twiggs and the American Revolution,” Journal of the American Revolution, September 16, 2025, allthingsliberty.com/2025/09/general-john-twiggs-and-the-american-revolution/

[27] Hugh McCall, History of Georgia Containing Brief Sketches Up To the Present Day, (1816; reprint ed. Marietta, GA: Cherokee Publishing, 1969), 501-503; Davis, Georgians, 113 fn. 24-26; Charles C. Jones, Jr., ed., “The Autobiography of Col. William Few,” The Magazine of American History 7 (November 1881): 348; Fruth, Some Descendants of Richard Few, 48-57.

[28] Thomas Hutchins, “Some Remarks on Georgia,” Box 1, folder 8, Thomas Hutchins Papers, 1759-1807, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

[29] John Wilson, Encounters on a March Through Georgia in 1779: The Maps and Memorandums of Lt. John Wilson, 71st Highlanders, ed. Robert S. Davis (Sylvania, GA: Partridge Pond Press, 1986), 43.