Wikidworld (#133) / Is the United States on the Brink of Civil War? The Battle of King's Mountain, Tennessee's Overmountain Men, and the War for Civilization in the South.
Assessing the savage retribution that characterized the Battle of King’s Mountain, one 19th-century historian observed how “wars between neighbors are apt to be next in bitterness to religious wars."
In my previous newsletter, I concluded with an observation about the demographic complexity of the American South during the Revolution compared with other regions of the young nation. “ Southern experience far more closely resembled a genuine civil war. The concentration within the South of Patriots, Loyalists, black slaves, and indigenous tribes made for a toxic and volatile stew.”
Lord Dunmore's Proclamation illustrates this complexity. The Proclamation was a controversial decree issued in November 1775 by John Murray, the Scottish Earl of Dunmore and the last royal governor of Virginia, at the start of the American Revolution. The proclamation imposed martial law and empowered Dunmore to arm African slaves and servants to suppress the growing Patriot rebellion in Virginia. It offered freedom to any slaves of rebellious Virginia colonists who escaped and joined Dunmore to fight for the British.
Slaveholders tended to support independence, while many slaves gravitated to the British as possible liberators. Thousands of black slaves escaped to the British lines during the war, attracted by British promises of freedom. They served as laborers, spies, guides, and soldiers for the British. The British organized black refugee slaves into units like the Ethiopian Regiment – which wore uniforms emblazoned with the phrase “Liberty to Slaves” – to aid the war effort. Indian nations – including the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Cherokee tribes – also sided with the British against the American rebels, conducting raids on frontier settlements and fighting alongside British forces.
[Again, I’ll mention Turn, the streaming show about American spies in the Revolution that fully captures the tortured braid of relationships between Patriots, Tories, the British, African slaves, and Indians in New York and that misplaces references to Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation and even the “Liberty to Slaves” messaging on uniforms of black soldiers.]
Anti-slavery sentiment was only a murmur in Britain at the time of the Revolution. The major motivation of Dunmore’s proclamation — along with British Army General Henry’s Clinton’s 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation and more informal offers of freedom to slaves escaping to British lines in coastal areas of the Carolinas and Georgia — was to gain tactical advantage. Nonetheless, the British governors and military officers were clearly aware of the contradictions of a rebellion premised on the ideals of liberty and equality that denied these rights to vast portions of its population.
Of course, Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation outraged slaveholders across Virginia and the rest of the South. They feared it would incite widespread slave uprisings, even as, in practice, Dunmore also struggled to manage the influx of slaves and had to renege on fully emancipating most blacks who joined him. Strategically, the proclamation pushed many undecided Virginians into the Patriot camp. Dunmore's Proclamation helped catalyze the revolutionary movement in Virginia by exacerbating fears of freed slaves among white colonists, even as it offered a glimmer of hope for enslaved blacks to escape bondage.
For many in the South, the Battle of King’s Mountain – which took place on October 7, 1780 in present-day South Carolina, near the border with North Carolina – has served as the defining moment of the Revolution. Loyalist regiments organized by British Major Patrick Ferguson had marched into the Carolina backcountry to recruit colonists and suppress Patriot sympathizers. In response, a group of 900-1000 Overmountain Men – frontier militiamen from west of the Appalachians – gathered to confront Ferguson.
The Overmountain Men surrounded and attacked Ferguson's 1,100 Loyalists camped atop King's Mountain. Ferguson was killed along with about 290 Loyalists. Another 640 were captured by the Patriots. After the battle, hundreds of wounded and surrendering Loyalists were killed in what one Patriot called "a frenzy of revenge." Total Loyalist deaths topped 600. The victory helped revive Patriot morale in the region after setbacks earlier in 1780 and marked a turning point in their reconquest of the Carolinas, while evincing the continued brutality of the civil war between factions.
Fiercely independent Appalachian settlers vital to Patriot success in the volatile southern backcountry, the Overmountain Men were frontier militiamen who had traveled from west of the Appalachian Mountains in what is now East Tennessee. Many were veterans of campaigns against the Cherokee and earlier clashes with Loyalists in the Carolinas. John Sevier and Isaac Shelby, the two officers who planned and organized the expedition, were prominent slaveholders.
In an article published in 2009, entitled “Creating Regional Heroes: Traditional Interpretations of the Battle of King’s Mountain,” historian Michael Lynch reviews the literature on King’s Mountain to trace the origins, evolution, and significance of Southern historical memory, specifically in Appalachia. Lynch provides us with a powerful illustration of how the “subduction zones” that develop in the experience of localized civil conflict can endure within narrowing, particularized ethnic identities cratered by resentment and suspicion (we see instances of these subduction zone historically in Iberia, Northern Island, and elsewhere). These “negative identities” forestall identity integration across larger cultural spaces and block construction of more cosmopolitan perspectives on the world.
Earlier chroniclers had framed the story of King’s Mountain from the viewpoint of either the South as a whole or that of a particular state. Looking at the Revolution while in the midst of the secession controversy, they invoked the King’s Mountain expedition to justify resistance against Yankee oppression. Attendees at the 1855 ceremony on the battlefield, for instance, toasted the South, the state of South Carolina, and John C. Calhoun, comparing British tyranny before and during the Revolution to Yankee persecution of the South.
Following the Civil War, however, Unionists subsequently monopolized the memory of the civil war in East Tennessee, muting Confederate voices to spotlight the loyal Mountaineers who fought for the Union in the absence of help from federal armies, fending off secessionist invaders on their own. Lynch emphasizes that since Union partisans from East Tennessee felt neglected and scorned by the entire nation, they held this conviction with particular intensity. In this sense, their Unionism, or patriotic love of country, was reliably self-subverting. How can one love what one resents?
From this perspective, a recursive process of reappropriation and redefinition of identity dating from the years leading up to the Revolution indicates that the “choices” between national and sectional loyalty Lynch highlights may ultimately be less important than regional and local particularism. In the case of eastern Tennessee, an Appalachian “back-country” identity merged with the image of the Tennessee “volunteer” – a direct reference to the state's frontier militia units that formed spontaneously to fight against the British and Native Americans during the American Revolution and in subsequent wars.
By regionalizing the story of King’s Mountain, [chroniclers] succeeded in turning the men who won the battle into heroes, but they became heroes on a smaller stage. By the time this wave of mythmaking was finished, King’s Mountain was less of a national memory than ever before. Over time, the region that owned the story of the battle contracted rather than expanding. In the 1850s the fight over the battle’s memory was between the nationalist [historian George] Bancroft and the partisans of the South. By the turn of the century the memory of King's mountain belonged to Appalachia.
There is (of course) a Natural Law angle here. King’s Mountain chroniclers loved the idea of the mountains as “a sort of primordial refuge where time stood still,” where nature remained fixed in its laws, and therefore a place where natural virtue and a pure form of personal freedom could flourish, one of the few places on earth where men could live free of oversight. From this perspective, any invasion or interference from outsiders — whether they be the British and their Loyalist backers during the Revolution or the federal government and Northern elites in the present day — have represented an intolerable infringement not just upon the liberty but upon the identity of the region.
While the immigrants who settled the colonial backcountry represented a variety of ancestral backgrounds, many of which can be traced back to north Britain, the common label applied to them has been “Scotch-Irish.” According to one chronicler of King’s Mountain, the Overmountain Men were “Scotch Irish with a goodly mixture of English and Huguenot, but clean blooded and of pure and undefiled dissent. Could any people on the face of the earth at that time boast of a nobler lineage?”
Religion was essential to this identity. Scottish covenanters who migrated to Ulster and eventually to the American backcountry were militant Protestants, mostly of the Presbyterian stripe, deeply influenced by revivalism. In his book, The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that “the old Calvinistic spirit left a peculiar stamp on this wild border democracy. More than anything else, it gave the backwoodsman their code of right and wrong, the fundamental virtues of hardihood and manliness.”
For many in the South, the Battle of King’s Mountain was the most critical battle of the American Revolution. As the scope of those involved shrank, the import of the battle seemed to inflate, with some ranking it as one of the greatest military achievements of all time, critical not only for determining the outcome of the Revolution, but the fate of the Anglo-Saxon race and Western Civilization.
For one late-19th century historian, the stakes of the confrontation on that forsaken mountain top, between Whigs and Tories, between Patriots and Loyalists, extended “the destiny, not only of the infant Republic, but with it, that of hundreds of millions of the human race.” But when assessing the savage retribution that characterized the Battle of King’s Mountain, this same historian localized its emotional undertow, observing how “wars between neighbors are apt to be next in bitterness to religious wars.”
To be continued.