In the 1760s and through 1775 John J. Zubly was the leading Whig in Georgia. He wrote a number of sermons and political tracts strongly opposing any right of the British Parliament to tax Americans and especially objecting to its declared right to legislate for America “in all cases whatsoever.” In spite of that stance, […]
Georgia did not send a delegation to the first Continental Congress in 1774. The least populous colony of the thirteen British colonies in North America, Georgia was originally settled in 1663 by a group of men on land given to them by Charles I, King of England. They settled the land with the poorer people […]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), a French philosopher, once said that the definition of a traitor was “a patriot whose cause was lost.” In the time of the American Revolution, it could well be said of those who were considered Loyalists, that a “Loyalist was a patriot whose cause was lost.” Born in Switzerland in 1724, Hans […]
BOOK REVIEW: March to Independence: The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 1775-1776 by Michael Cecere (Yardley, Pa.: Westholme Publishing for Journal of the American Revolution Books, 2021) Historian Michael Cecere has written an overview of the coming of the Revolutionary War in the South, from the months immediately leading up to the outbreak of fighting to […]
What inspired you to start researching and writing about the Revolution? In 1974, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia began a state internship program. I was the state’s first history intern. Because I was at that time a cadet at North Georgia College, I chose the battle of Kettle Creek, a military topic of which I knew […]
On the morning of October 9, 1779, one of the bloodiest and most forgotten battles of the American Revolution took place during the Siege of Savannah, Georgia. Two columns of American and three of French troops stormed British entrenchments that defended the town. The attacking allies suffered bayonet charges and a rain of bullets and […]
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 […]
On this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews historian, author, and JAR contributor Robert Scott Davis on Georgian socialite and possible British spy, Margaret Eustace, and how she and her family navigated the American Revolution. Thousands of readers like you enjoy the articles published by the Journal of the American Revolution. Dispatches is a free podcast […]
John L. Smith, Jr. introduced readers of the Journal of the American Revolution to Margaret Eustace in his article, “The Scandalous Divorce Case that Influenced the Declaration of Independence.” She had a second act in the American Revolution. In Georgia, late in the war, she made a name for herself. In November 1772, Thomas Jefferson represented Eustace’s […]
Lord Dunmore, John Murray, the 4th Earl of Dunmore (1730-1809) and Royal Governor of Virginia (1771-1776),[1] was an important political and military figure during the early stages of the American Revolution. One of Dunmore’s most controversial actions involved issuing a proclamation to free all slaves and indentured servants of rebels who would rally to the […]
Georgia’s fragile independence within the new American republic was shattered on December 29, 1778, when British troops attacked Savannah. Despite clear signs that the British were coming, the capital of the state on that December morning was caught by surprise. Panic set in as the redcoats approached the city. State officials and soldiers fled for […]
This article is a companion piece to one of mine that appeared in this journal on July 18, 2017. Beginning with the start of the autumn campaign on September 7, 1780, it went on to describe Cornwallis’s advance from Camden to Charlotte, together with events elsewhere. Leaving what transpired next and its knock-on effect to a […]
Besides dealing with events elsewhere, this article relates in particular the plight of the Carolina loyalists and the way in which British ascendancy in South Carolina—achieved only by June 1780—began so soon to unravel in the face of internal uprisings and an external threat. By mid July Major Gen. Johann Kalb had advanced from the […]
With the Revolutionary War in full swing by August 1776, George Galphin penned a letter to his nephew, Timothy Barnard. Galphin started his letter with a report of the expeditions against the Cherokee Indians in the spring and summer, followed by the news of armed confrontations between settlers in Georgia and Creek (Muscogee) Indians, although […]
The Road to Charleston, Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution by John Buchanan (University Press of Virginia, 2019) John Buchanan’s latest account of the southern theater in the American Revolution is appropriately titled, The Road to Charleston: Nathanael Greene and the American Revolution (2019). This work is a companion to his first work on the southern campaign, The Road […]
In this week’s Dispatches host Brady Crytzer interviews distinguished historian Robert “Bob” Davis about Georgia’s unique role in the American Revolution as the colony that bordered Spanish territory and, after independence was declared, British East Florida. Georgia came slowly to the Patriot cause, remaining loyal to the King longer than any other colony, until they finally […]
When reading the excellent JAR article “The Dark and Heroic Histories of Georgia’s Signers,” I happened to recall another Georgia delegate to the Second Continental Congress who I came across in trying to understand why it took so long for Congress to create the Continental Navy. Johan Joachim Zubly also had a “dark history.” Georgia […]
Revolutions are complex multi-sided economic, political, social, and technological events. They begin as conservative movements. As each side fears losing, all of these different interests radicalize but when the struggle is over, as historian Robert Calhoon points out, each side will adopt constructive compromise to find a way to govern together.[1] In the American Revolution […]
Hidden in the Nineteenth Century histories of Georgia is a likely answer to a question that has puzzled students of the American Revolution in the South for decades; why was General Andrew Williamson, acting in the same manner as so many around him, singled out as a traitor, loathed by so many as the “Arnold […]
Georgia historian Otis Ashmore wrote that “of the many heroic men who illustrated that stormy period of the Revolution in Georgia that ‘tried men’s souls’ none deserves a more grateful remembrance by posterity than Col. John Dooly.”[1] The colonel was Georgia’s first folk hero. His life is an epic heroic tale of how he lost […]
Due to the work done by many people since 1976 in uncovering the lost history of the American Revolution, for the first time in more than two centuries the people who risked and sacrificed so much in that conflict are no longer just names but human beings. An excellent example of how far the historiography […]
By the end of the war, James McKay had earned quite a reputation for severity against the Loyalists. So much so that, even in Georgia, site of the most vicious private fighting, McKay was sanctioned for brutality. Even with the sanction, many of the people defended his actions as appropriate while others agreed the vengeful […]
The story repeated itself time and again across the southern districts of Georgia. Alarms raised loudly across a broad area with tales of imminent Indian raids and McGirth’s banditti coming from every direction against every plantation. The men would arm themselves and hunker down to protect home and family from these raiders. However, while the […]
Known primarily through a mix of fact and legend as the most notorious Patriot of the southern campaigns, Paddy Carr was also claimed to have an “amiable and benevolent” nature. As if that contradiction were not enough to create complexity of character, Carr, a stone cold killer of Tories, never swore or uttered blasphemy. Instead, […]
In the minds of many people the surrender at Yorktown in the fall of 1781 brought the Revolutionary War to a close. However, the war in the South was not over. Charleston and Savannah were occupied by the enemy. Physical possession and control of territory would be important in any peace negotiations. In consequence, Major […]
Smallpox raged across the backcountry in the late spring of 1781 and both of the Refugee commanders, Elijah Clarke and James McCall, caught the disease. Clarke was out of action for a month while McCall never returned at all, having died from the disease in March. During his time in bed, Colonel Clarke put plans […]
Busy with the Siege of Augusta and subsequent exodus from Georgia, Elijah Clarke and most of the Refugees missed the battle of King’s Mountain. Instead, they spent time in Watauga with the Overmountain Men helping guard against raids from the Cherokee while the local militia traveled to South Carolina and dealt Cornwallis a serious blow […]
With the fall of Charleston, British columns spread into the southern backcountry. All of Georgia was occupied and the state government simply melted into the frontier along with most of the Whig population. In late June the prominent militia leaders of the Ninety-Six district in South Carolina took parole along with most of their men. […]
On the chilly evening of January 18, 1776, Georgia’s royal governor, Sir James Wright, summoned Rebel leaders Joseph Clay and Noble Wimberly Jones to his home – on the corner of modern-day Telfair Square in Savannah – to discuss the recent arrival of a British fleet off the coast near Tybee Island. He informed them […]
Almost lost to history, but not quite, the memory of General James Screven lives on a monument in the middle of the Midway Cemetery and in a sketch available for viewing in the Midway Museum of Liberty County, Georgia. At best, General Screven is a shadowy figure about whom little is known. In fact, history […]
By 1773, Creek Indians in Georgia had run up debts with traders far larger than any amount they could pay. The colony pressed the issue on behalf of its traders and worked out a land deal whereby the Creeks made a large tract of land west of Augusta available for settlement. In return, the colony […]
In the autumn of 1776 loyalists from East Florida under Thomas “Burntfoot” Brown and Daniel McGirth frequently raided the southern parishes of Georgia keeping its citizens in constant disarray and disrupting rice and cattle production. The very thin population in the area made defense a difficult proposition. Trying to stop the raids and protect the […]
George Rockingham Gilmer wrote a heroic saga of the life, service, and sacrifices of Austin Dabney, an African American Georgia Revolutionary War hero. He first published it anonymously in 1849 and reprinted it under his name in a pamphlet in 1851 and in George White’s Historical Collections of Georgia in 1854. Gilmer included it in […]
Named as the British Indian Agent to the Cherokee after the First Cherokee War, Alexander Cameron cultivated a very close relationship with the tribe. He married a prominent Cherokee woman and purchased plantations near Long Cane just outside the Cherokee lands in South Carolina. The couple raised 3 children and furnished their home in the […]
The battles of and between English born merchant Loyalist partisan Thomas Brown and illiterate native North Carolina American guerilla Elijah Clarke lacks for nothing, including drama. These two men fought each other more than once in a clash of their very different respective cultures/politics in Georgia and Florida. They fought many other battles at the […]
Our spring break road trip concludes the same way as the major fighting of the Revolutionary War did — in the south. The first stop is New Bern, North Carolina, to stroll the garden paths and grounds of Tryon Palace, “the place where governors ruled, legislators debated, patriots gathered and George Washington danced.” Ninety minutes […]
Transportation in the eighteenth century was a major factor in the growth of economic activity in the colonial period. The most common transportation of the day, and the fastest, was by horseback. As reported in 1779, a Whitmel Hill rode from Philadelphia to his home in Martin County, North Carolina in seven and one-half days. […]
Read Part 1 The economic life of the Southern colonists was also most positive as the colonial period continued. Up until the end of French and Indian War, when strict supervision began, the British had allowed the colonists a fair degree of freedom in all their economic endeavors. While the mother country had attempted to […]
As the mid-eighteenth century arrived, life for the Southern colonists was the best that the British colonial experience could ever have yielded. In almost every aspect of their lives, these peoples had achieved a standard of life not equaled even in the mature societies and economies of Western Europe. The evidence of details of the […]
