Touring North Carolina's Revolutionary War Sites by Daniel W. Barefoot

Author:Daniel W. Barefoot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Travel
ISBN: 9780895874788
Publisher: John F. Blair, Publisher
Published: 1998-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

After his overwhelming victory at Camden, South Carolina, on August 16, 1780, Cornwallis began to formulate plans to invade North Carolina, the one state that stood in the path of his total conquest of the South. To pave the way, he dispatched his trusted lieutenant, Major Patrick Ferguson, to northwestern South Carolina and the Piedmont of North Carolina. The thirty-six-year-old career officer from Scotland was to punish insurgents, recruit Loyalist soldiers to assist in the invasion, and protect the left flank of the British army as it poured into North Carolina.

Ferguson was fearful of the frontier Patriots of North Carolina, with whom he had skirmished throughout the summer in the South Carolina upcountry. In late September, he was at his encampment at Gilbert Town when he learned that the Overmountain Men had mustered near their homes across the mountains in what is now Tennessee. In a vain attempt to dissuade the frontiersmen from doing battle with him again, Ferguson sent forth a courier with a threat to “the backwater men,” as he called them. If they did not “desist from their opposition to the British arms,” he would “march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword.”

On the other side of the mountains, the fiercely independent frontiersmen of Scots-Irish descent did not wait for Ferguson to make good his threat. Instead, they came after him. They poured over the mountains to join ranks with Patriots from the foothills of the Carolinas and Virginia.

When they reached Gilbert Town in early October, the frontiersmen—attired in hunting shirts and leggings—were disappointed that their opponents had fled. Undaunted, they continued south to Cowpens, South Carolina (where just three months later Americans under Daniel Morgan would inflict a severe defeat on Banastre Tarleton).

At Cowpens on Friday, October 6, the Patriots received intelligence that Ferguson and his 1,100-man army were in the vicinity of Kings Mountain, 30 miles distant. There was no time to be lost. A mounted force of 910 soldiers—approximately half the American army—galloped off in pursuit of Ferguson at nine o’clock that evening. The remainder of the men would follow on foot in the dark, rainy night. As Colonel Isaac Shelby put it, “It was determined … to pursue him [Ferguson] with as many of our troops as could be well armed and well mounted, leaving the work horses and footmen to follow as fast as they could.”

Throughout the miserable night, the men rode and walked in a torrential downpour. When fatigue and exposure threatened both soldiers and horses, Colonels William Campbell, John Sevier, and Benjamin Cleveland conferred with Shelby about the need for rest. Voicing his grim determination, Shelby said, “I will not stop until night if I follow Ferguson into Cornwallis’s lines.” His fellow commanders gave no argument, and the march continued.

Meanwhile, Ferguson had positioned his army on a promontory located within walking distance of where the visitor center stands today. The mountain—a rocky, forested spur of the Blue Ridge—has a six-hundred-yard-long plateau that rises sixty feet above the surrounding plains.

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