Thomas and Peter Costner at Ramour’s Mill: Fact or Fiction?

As anyone who studies history will know, history is seldom a linear account of one fact after another. It’s a series of stories that reveal how we see ourselves. Sometimes, intentionally or no, the telling of those stories blurs the lines between truth and fiction. In my region of North Carolina, there is a story surrounding the nearby Battle of Ramsour’s Mill that falls into that category. It’s a story of two brothers who fought on opposite sides with one purported to have slain the other in battle and buried his sibling by his own hand rather than see the body interred in a mass grave.

True or not, the story has become so embedded in the historical account of the battle that many popular sources (the Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Ramsour’s Mill, for example) simply assume that the story is true.

It was on researching the history of my seventh great grandfather, Jacob Costner, that I came across the story of his two younger brothers, Peter and Thomas. Sons of German colonists Hans Adam and Anna Maria Kastner who originally came to Pennsylvania from Germany in the 1740s and later migrated south to the Piedmont of North Carolina in search of farmland, all three of the Costner brothers joined militia during the Revolution. Of the three, the only brother to survive the war was the youngest, Thomas.

On November 2, 1832, Thomas Costner, an elderly gentleman of eighty-five or eighty-six years (he himself was unsure of his exact age), appeared at the Lincoln County courthouse in Lincolnton, North Carolina. He gave his statement before the Justices of the County Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions as part of his application for pension, in recognition of his service in the American Revolution:

Advertisement

In the year 1776, I was drafted in what was then Tryon County now Lincoln County to go in the Cherokee expedition & entered the service under Captain Hardin & marched in his Company to the nation but I am unable to state the name of the Colonel or General while in that service we killed some Indians & took some prisoners & also in the nation we met with the forces from South Carolina the commander of them claimed the Indian Prisoners & they were given up to them. We also burnt some Indian huts & destroyed some corn & after scouring the Country we were marched back to what is now Lincoln then Tryon County & discharged in this tour I served three months.
Afterward I was drafted in Lincoln County North Carolina in the year I cannot recollect for a three months tour & was placed under the command of Captain William Moore but I cannot remember the name of the Colonel or General but was marched to Wilmington North Carolina in Moore’s company & remember having a little skirmish that I am unable to state where it was & after serving a tour of three months & a half I was discharged. ^[1]

Though Thomas’s pension statement is the only primary-source account of their actions during the war, stories persist and abound in secondary texts and oral accounts about the fate of the two younger brothers; over the years the stories have taken on the color of myth, so much so that the objective facts of the Costner brothers’ lives are difficult to filter out from the parable their story has become.

The Germans who settled in North Carolina had initially come in several waves of migration, often, like the Kastners, settling first in Pennsylvania, where they found work in the coal mines, before pushing on to other areas. In the North Carolina Piedmont, a large contingent of German speakers was from the Rheinland Palatinate, a largely agrarian region sandwiched between the Rhine River and the border with France, Luxembourg, and Belgium. Unlike some earlier waves of German settlers (the Moravians of central North Carolina, for example), the Germans of the North Carolina Piedmont often integrated themselves at least somewhat into the largely English and Scots Irish communities around them. Also, unlike the Moravians, the Palatinate settlers often chose not to remain neutral when the Revolution broke out.

That doesn’t mean that they always gravitated to the same side of the conflict.

Many German settlers were conservative by nature and held strong ties to the British crown. It wasn’t lost on them that they owed some allegiance to the government that had given them the opportunity to acquire land and fortune. Many had taken an oath to the crown on arrival in the colonies.

There were also ancestral ties to the crown. The British king, George III, was the third in the line of Hanoverian kings descended from German aristocracy. His grandfather, George I, was born in Hanover, and his mother was Caroline of Ansbach. Many place names in North Carolina’s Piedmont were coined after their Anglo-German royalty. The town (now city) of Charlotte, for example, and the county in which it resides (Mecklenburg), was named for George III’s wife, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

That being said, their burgeoning ties to the communities into which they had been adopted led some German settlers to set aside their natural affinities and join with their more separatist-minded English and Scots-Irish neighbors. This sometimes led to friction between and schisms within families which, in some cases, spilled over onto the battlefield.

Such appears to have been the case with Peter Costner who broke with his family in support of the Tories, going so far as to serve in a Loyalist militia. This decision appears to have cost him his life at a small but savage battle that took place just a few miles from the courthouse in which the Costners’ youngest son, Thomas, would later make his pension affidavit.

If this story is to be believed, it was Thomas who took his brother’s life at what became known as the Battle of Ramsour’s Mill, afterward burying his sibling under a pile of stones to the side of the field so as to spare him from being interred in a mass grave.

As intrigued as I was by the story itself, what struck me most was its persistence. Modern accounts of the battle often cite this story as a key example of the divisiveness of the political state of the North Carolina Piedmont, and to an extent the entire South during this period that some have dubbed America’s first civil war. But in my search for the details of my family’s history I found very little that would authenticate the account.

Thomas’s pension application (the only verifiable first-person account he gave) makes no mention of this battle, or any service during this time. According to Thomas himself, he served during the Cherokee campaign of 1776, and later under the command of Capt. William Moore during his march on Wilmington (likely in 1781). There is no mention of his whereabouts on June 20, 1780, the date of Ramsour’s Mill.

So what did happen to Peter Costner? The historical record does seem to point to his death at Ramsour’s Mill. Though there is no primary account of the battle that references him (not surprising as he was not an officer), multiple early sources give his date of death as June 20, 1780, the date of the battle. Archival records also show the confiscation and sale of his estate afterward, a common punitive action taken against Tories who died as enemy combatants.^[2]

What little we know of him paints a portrait of a man who took his responsibilities seriously, both familial and civic. We know, for example, that when his elder brother Jacob assumed the position of Sheriff of Tryon County, Peter stood as bondsman for his brother.^[3] Jacob would later commit himself to the signing of the Tryon Resolves, a document creating an association committed to opposing the British in the wake of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. Peter’s decision to take a contrary position surely would have driven a wedge between him and his brothers.

But if Peter did die at Ramsour’s Mill, was it really at the hand of Thomas? And if not, where did this story come from? The answer is complicated, and somewhat ambiguous. Many accounts detail battlefield encounters between men on opposite sides who were acquaintances, friends, and even family. Gen. Joseph Graham, who arrived at the scene shortly after the battle ended, gave what is the closest thing we have to a definitive source, including a general observation on the intimate nature of the battle:

In this battle neighbors, near relations and personal friends fought each other; and as the smoke would from time to time blow off they could recognize each other. In the evening and on the next day the relations and friends of the dead and wounded came in, and a scene was witnessed truly afflicting to the feelings of humanity.^[4]

As for Peter Costner, what we have of his story is only a secondhand fragment. The story is simply that he died on the field at the hand of his brother Thomas, and that Thomas, out of grief and to spare his brother’s body from an unmarked grave, claimed it and committed his body to the ground somewhere to the side of that field, marking the spot with a pile of stones. No version tells of how the two met on the field or gives the specific location of the burial site.

Today, there are only four burial markers at the battlefield. The most notable marker belongs to the mass grave at the top of the hill near the Tory camp where unidentified dead were buried next to what is today the site of an elementary school. Additionally, there are a few individual grave markers on the site, but the location of the pile of stones that marked Peter Costner’s final resting place is unknown.

Most older secondary accounts of the battle date from around 1900-1930 (with a few notable and somewhat questionable exceptions), by which time much of the collective memory of the region had passed through multiple generations or been lost completely.

So the question becomes, is this story a local myth picked up by some well-meaning historian or genealogist and propagated alongside verifiable events as though it were true, or is this legitimate oral history dating from the event that simply can’t be verified due to lack of physical or documentary evidence? The evidence for either is frustratingly inconclusive.

Again, the only primary account of Thomas Costner’s service is his pension statement, which says that he served in the Cherokee campaign of 1776 for three months and was called up again to serve in the march on Wilmington in 1781 for three and a half months. There seems to have been a five-year gap between his two periods of service. Several substantial battles were fought in his area during this gap, including Ramsour’s Mill and the more notable Battle of Kings Mountain (some secondary sources put Thomas at that battle as well). It seems odd that a veteran of the Cherokee campaign would not have been called upon during the fiercest fighting of the southern campaign in his area.

If Thomas Costner omitted a period or periods of service from the pension application, why? If the story is true, he had over fifty years to ruminate over the events of June 20, 1780. When he died three years after applying for a pension, he was interred in the Kastner family cemetery alongside his parents and all but one of his siblings (Peter), all of whom had predeceased him. If he was personally responsible for Peter’s death and absence from the family churchyard, that would have been a heavy burden to carry for fifty years. This, at least, creates a plausible motive for an omission.

So, is the story of Peter and Thomas Costner true, or is it, to use the modern vernacular, spin? Maybe the best way to think of it is to gently shift our notion of truth. The “truth” of the story of Peter and Thomas Costner is that it stands as both a reminder of the cost of our partisan rancor and a testament to our aspiration to move beyond it. Regardless of whether or not the story is factual, its persistence in the historical record is important. It speaks to the character of a people who aspire to be better than we are while serving as a kind of allegory for the pain and shame we heap on ourselves as we struggle to become the people we believe we can be.

^[1] Thomas Costner pension application, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

^[2] Stewart Dunaway, Land Confiscation Records of North Carolina Volume 3. 1779-1803 (n.p., 2011).

^[3] Laban Miles Hoffman, Our Kin (Gateway Press, 1915).

^[4] Joseph Graham, Papers on North Carolina Revolutionary History (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton. 1904), 225.