Flora Macdonald by Flora Fraser

Author:Flora Fraser [Fraser, Flora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

14

“All Killed or Taken”

July 1775–February 1776

lora was not, after all, to play hostess to the gregarious governor at the Kingsborough plantation in Anson County in the summer of 1775. Days after Allan struck out for home, Martin was forced to flee Fort Johnston. Wilmington patriots made good a threat to destroy that flimsy government outpost, and the governor retreated on board the Cruizer. Moreover, learning of his project to go into the backcountry, his opponents issued orders on July 31 for his arrest should he be discovered on any such journey: “It is in all probability he intends kindling the flames of a Civil war.” A month later Martin wrote to Dartmouth from the British sloop, “I am reduced to the deplorable and disgraceful state of being a tame Spectator of Rebellion spreading over this Country.”

A wiser man than Kingsburgh might have considered it now inopportune to pursue the plan that he had settled with Martin of “rising the Highlanders in arms.” Still exhilarated, however, by the cordial reception afforded him at Fort Johnston, he was energetic in recruiting officers and men that summer and autumn. Various Scots wives were to inform Flora later that they held her spouse responsible for enticing their husbands to rise for the crown. Lochbay, Cuidreach, and their fellow “leading men” in the Scots country were later to document their own efforts to engage others. Two officers, arrived in August from Boston to recruit for a Highland regiment in the north, were pressed into service as commander and senior officer of the corps. These emigrant Scots’ enthusiasm for the House of Hanover and their faith in Martin were soon to prove as fatal as once had been the adherence of those in the ’Forty-five to the cause of Charles Edward Stuart.

The Lochbays’ home served the Highland army as an informal headquarters, and Major Donald Macdonald, one of the officers from Boston, later commented that he was “a great part of his time there” when in North Carolina. How did Flora view the military ambitions of her husband, who received the rank of colonel in this as yet untried and unorthodox provincial regiment? No rash romantic, she was a woman of quiet good sense. All her married life, in the wake of her great adventure with the prince, she had endeavored to turn events to her advantage and to that of her sons, when they required places in the world. Now it was unclear where the advantage lay.

There were those, hoping to survive the troubles unmolested, who held back from declaring themselves for either the crown or the patriots. Armadale, ever the careful politician, was conspicuously absent from the various meetings in late 1775 that Highlanders held with Americans in the western counties on whom Martin believed he could count. Had Flora lived longer in the colony, in the interest of escaping reprisals from patriots she might have made efforts to deter her husband from blazoning forth his loyalism when the troubles flared. In time, she was to consider that he and her sons had a poor return for their service to the crown.

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