South Carolina & Southern Campaign of the Revolution National Heritage Corridors

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These are two obscure heritage areas in the Carolinas, but none of the state or national park employees I spoke with had heard of either. While the South Carolina NHC has historic sites, plantations and gardens, the parks included—like Pinckney, Sumter, and Overmountain Victory—are unrelated. And while the Revolution NHC includes Moores Creek, it excludes many other important battles in the Carolinas and neighboring states. Don’t waste time following these confusing corridors, but instead start with an overview at historic Camden.

Here’s the story of the Revolutionary Campaign in the southeast, focusing on national sites and affiliates. Virginians Henry, Jefferson and Washington led their colony into rebellion, in concert with the north. Virginia colonial governor Lord Dunmore called in troops, organized loyalists and even formed a regiment of liberated slaves. Echoing Bunker Hill, Patriot militia fought well at Great Bridge in 1775, prompting Dunmore to order the shelling of Norfolk Virginia. Echoing Concord, the Patriots cut down a broadsword charge at Moores Creek North Carolina in 1776. And at the end of 1778, the Patriots took Savannah, followed up with a victory at Kettle Creek Georgia in early 1779.

But in May of 1779, the British sacked Portsmouth in Virginia, kicking off their southern campaign in earnest. In late 1779, the British returned to Savannah, capturing it after a siege. In early 1780, they took Charleston SC after another siege. Next, they turned their attention inland, hoping to sway more loyalists, keep their large southern colonies, and then take the fight back to the northeast. In 1780 the British fought over a dozen battles around Charleston and Camden (see Cornwallis’ HQ below) in South Carolina, consolidating their control over the colony.

But the British were ruthless in the south, revoking pardons, burning homes & farms, and imprisoning or hanging those who wouldn’t sign loyalty oaths. The most infamous example happened in May 1780 at Waxhaws—named after a local tribe—, when Banistre Tarleton massacred Patriots, inspiring further rebellion. Popular resentment against the tyrannical British grew, especially among the Scots-Irish settlers. After Gates lost his leadership position after failing at Camden, Nathaniel Greene began a much more effective guerrilla campaign in the back country.

The Patriots didn’t win all their battles, but many of the British victories were Pyrrhic, causing them to cede territory even after eking out technical victories. The back country belonged to the Patriots, especially when reinforcements crossed the Appalachian Mountains on the Overmountain Victory Trail. The Patriots won at Kings Mountain in late 1780, then again at Cowpens in January 1781.

Even though the British subsequently won at Petersburg VA, Ninety-Six in SC, and at Guilford Courthouse NC, clearly, they were not winning the broader campaign. Cornwallis brought his troops north to Virginia. After a close battle near Camden, the remainder of the British forces retreated for Charleston, with the last battle in the southeast fought at Eutaw Springs in September 1781. The denouement was set for Yorktown.

Mid-Atlantic Trails

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5 historic trails link multiple sites in the region, and 3 scenic trails are park units. Here’s a quick summary in case you are interested in exploring the trails in the region.

Historic trails

Scenic trails

Eutaw Springs Battlefield

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This was one of the final battles for inland South Carolina, in September 1781. Nathaniel Greene’s Patriots were battle hardened and his forces included Francis Marion, Andrew Pickens, and William Washington. The British were equally disciplined veterans. What unfolded was a brutal battle between evenly matched sides that descended into hand-to-hand combat. Finally, the British line broke, and the Patriots entered their encampment.

While it seemed that the day was won, the British formed a defensible position between a stout brick house still marked by a garden gate and the Santee River, now Lake Marion behind the trees below. Stymied, Greene was forced to back off and wait. Both sides claimed victory—technically the British held the field at the end—, but clearly it was a strategic loss for the British, who lost more troops, were forced to withdraw to Charleston and never again advanced in the back country.

Virginia in Photos

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Celebrating completing the Old Dominion State!

Appomattox Court House, Arlington House, Assateague Island, Booker T. Washington, Cedar Creek & Belle Grove, Colonial (plus Jamestown affiliate), Fort Monroe, Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania, G. Washington Birthplace, G. W. Memorial Parkway, Great Falls Park, Maggie L. Walker, Manassas, Monticello (world heritage site), Petersburg, Prince William Forest, Richmond, Shenandoah, and Wolf Trap are above.

Virginia has parts of the Appalachian NST, Blue Ridge Parkway, Cumberland Gap, Harpers Ferry, and Potomac Heritage NST units. Five historic trails pass through too: Captain John Smith Chesapeake, Lewis & Clark, Overmountain Victory, Star-Spangled Banner, and Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route. Virginia has 2 unique heritage areas, Northern Neck—birthplace of Washington, Madison & Monroe—and Shenandoah Valley Battlefields—centered around Belle Grove—, and Journey through Hallowed Ground shares Civil War history across 4 states, including several sites above.

Historic Camden

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This privately managed affiliate site is one of the best revolutionary war sites in the Carolinas. On over 100 acres of battlefield and early townsite, they have reconstructed Cornwallis’ HQ, one of the redoubt forts (above), a historic tavern, and many other buildings that bring life to history. While separately managed, there’s also a visitor center next door that explains the whole course of the war in the Carolinas, which I will cover in a separate post next month.

Camden was on the Kings Road from Charleston across the low country into the back country. Here it joined with Native American trading routes and the Great Wagon Road from the northeast to Georgia. The British were determined to manage their colonies inland, and not just occupy coastal cities. They also wanted to control trade, tax the rich, hire Native Americans to fight for them, and raise militias of loyalists. Cornwallis fortified Camden as his supply hub.

General Gates, of Saratoga fame, was tasked with attacking Cornwallis. The Battle of Camden in August 1780 was a disaster for the Patriots. Gates put inexperienced troops on his left, who were wholly unprepared to meet the best British troops Cornwallis put on his right, as usual. The French General Baron de Kalb fought to his death at Camden. Gates withdrew to North Carolina. He was later replaced by Nathaniel Greene.

Many of the losses were due to diseases like dysentery, and there’s a detailed exhibit in Cornwallis’ HQ, where a docent answered my various questions. Captured prisoners from British victories in the area were often initially held in Camden and then marched to Charleston where they were imprisoned on ships in dangerously unsanitary conditions.

In 1781, Nathaniel Greene, having recruited Catawba warriors and run a cross country guerrilla campaign disrupting the British, returned to Hobkirk’s Hill near Cambden in April for a rematch. While the British won the day, they decided they could no longer defend Cambden and retreated to Charleston. Cornwallis had already moved north on his way to establish a new base at Yorktown.

Affiliated Sites in Mid-Atlantic

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All Mid-Atlantic NPS affiliate sites done ✓, including important colonial and civil rights history.

  • Benjamin Franklin National Memorial is inside the lobby of a Philadelphia science museum.
  • Delaware Brown v. Board of Education Civil Rights Sites include several schools.
  • Gloria Dei Church National Historic Site is in Philadelphia and not to be confused with this.
  • Green Springs National Historic Landmark District is a rural area of Virginia.
  • Jamestown National Historic Site is part of a larger park near colonial Williamsburg Virginia.
  • Natural Bridge State Park contains the historically important geologic feature below.
  • Pinelands National Reserve is a large forest biosphere in New Jersey.
  • Red Hill—Patrick Henry National Memorial is a large historic estate and museum in Virginia.
  • Robert Russa Moton is the school site above of a student Civil Rights protest.

Read more about affiliate sites and see those in other regions.

Kettle Creek Battlefield

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This affiliate site memorializes a key Revolutionary War battle in Georgia in mid February 1779. The British had been moving freely through Georgia with some 600 loyal colonial forces, until 350 Patriots came across them west of Augusta at Kettle Creek. The smaller force of Georgians and South Carolinians had the element of surprise and attacked, under the command of Andrew Pickens. The British quickly climbed a hill and sought cover, but their leader was shot and mortally wounded. Fearing they were being surrounded, the British retreated back across the creek in some disorder and most escaped. This battle was a significant defeat for the British who lost 3 times as many men, including their Colonel Boyd. The markers above are cenotaphs, placed about 60 years ago, in memory of American veterans of the battle who are buried elsewhere. There are several hiking loops in the woods to give you a sense of the hilly, difficult terrain, with crosses marking actual graves.

DC in Photos

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Celebrating completing the District!

Above are the Presidential sites, memorials, historic sites and parks:

Sections of six trails also enter the district, and there is one affiliate site.

Speaking Out

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[Good news! I will philosophize less often for the rest of the year. So when I miss a Thursday post, you will have more time to think and act on your own.]

Moral thinking, unlike philosophy, demands action. Figuring out the right thing to do and why, has no purpose if nothing is actually done. While in some cases doing nothing is the best course, moral thinkers benefit from a bias to act. Our focus on solving a moral issue builds a moral case which most frequently contains a moral imperative that compels people to effect change.

Sometimes it is too late to prevent a tragedy, but moral thinking then demands that we learn from what happened, that we speak for the dead and that we act both to prevent any recurrence and to hold those responsible to account. In 1889, the Johnstown Flood killed 2,208 people. For their own convenience, a small group of extremely wealthy industrialists modified a private dam unsafely, without paying to reinstall pressure relief valves & pipes or reconfigure spillways. Due to weak liability laws on negligence, none of the members were ever held accountable. But liability laws were changed after the tragedy, due to public pressure, and they are now more strict. We all benefit when we learn from our mistakes.

There is a new, dangerously foolish and ignorant policy now being applied to our national parks, that asks citizens to report any national park unit that provides information that is “negative about either past or living Americans”. Apparently, those in power view the purpose of national park units to be solely positive propaganda outlets designed to boost patriotic fervor.

If you go to the Oklahoma City National Memorial, you will learn about two Americans, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who committed a heinous act of domestic terror. Must the affiliate park unit now cease saying anything negative about them? Should the 168 bombing victims—including 19 children—memorialized there now be forgotten, because leadership in DC will no longer allow the story of the bombing to be told fully? Must future students lose the opportunity to learn about this tragedy and the anti-Semitic, white supremacist ideology behind it?

On “December 7th, 1941–a date that shall live in infamy—”, 2,403 Americans were killed in a sneak attack on Oahu by the Imperial Japanese Navy. 21 US ships were sunk or damaged in the devastating battle at Pearl Harbor. Are we no longer allowed to remember that critical loss? Is it verboten to study the mistakes made in lining up 8 battleships in a small harbor on the eve of war? If you go to Hawaii and visit the USS Arizona are we no longer permitted to recognize the sacrifice of the 900+ crew members still entombed on the ship underwater? Are they now to be considered “suckers” and “losers”?

On July 17th, 1944, 320 people were killed in a munitions accident at Port Chicago in California. Rather than learn from their mistakes, the US Navy protected the white officers in charge and imprisoned the African American workers. Less than 4 months later, almost 1,000 were killed in an extremely similar accident at a US Navy base in New Guinea. More people die when the lessons of history are ignored.

The US Army lost twice at Manassas during the Civil War, and the first loss could only be described as grossly incompetent. Are the park rangers no longer permitted to criticize the poor military tactics of the Union Army leaders there?

For that matter, are they still allowed to discuss the cause of the Civil War, slavery? Perhaps all the Civil War battlefields and military cemeteries should be paved over and signs put up saying, “nothing bad involving Americans ever happened here”? If current leadership insists that there were “fine people on both sides”, perhaps the Civil War should be renamed the Civil Conversation?

And are Civil Rights and race riot memorials to close? What about the history of equal education? If no Americans ever did anything negative, what was Brown v. Board about? Why did Eisenhower have to send in the 101st Airborne to integrate Little Rock Central High? Why did so many people walk from Selma to Montgomery? Why were four little girls bombed at a church in Birmingham? Who was MLK? The refusal to make any moral judgement against any Americans, past or present, means that we must accept murderers, terrorists, insurrectionists, and racists and not criticize them, even if they are the most evil of criminals. Must the KKK’s violent history be respected, while massacres of Native Americans must be erased?

What greater affront to moral thinking can there be than to deliberately erase our history?

Authoritarian Kings once demanded that they be portrayed in the most flattering light. Then King Charles I of England was executed by a Parliamentarian revolutionary named Oliver Cromwell. A famous portrait artist had drawn a flattering portrait of Cromwell, before inviting him to sit for a more complete portrait. Cromwell saw the other picture and famously demanded that the artist paint him as he really was, “warts and all”.

Whitewashed history is a lie, which is designed to mislead us. Real events must be studied as accurately as possible in order to inform us. Every generation must go back to history to gather the lessons they need to inform their moral thinking for the decisions that must be made tomorrow.

”The past is never dead.
It’s not even past.”

William Faulkner

Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail

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The trail stretches from Virginia, through a corner of Tennessee, south through North Carolina and into South Carolina at Cowpens and Kings Mountain (below). Revolutionary War re-enactors and enthusiasts follow parts of the trail on foot and by car annually, ever since some Boy Scouts walked the whole length in 1975. I’ve crisscrossed the area, and it’s beautiful country with whitewater rivers and some steep mountain slopes. Both the Appalachian Trail and the Blue Ridge Parkway cross and run along near the trail, and the Biltmore Estate is near the middle.

Many of the colonial settlers in the highlands here were descendants of Scots-Irish lowlanders, and their families still held grudges against the British, especially those who fought to extend the Empire by force. The British sent officers to the Carolinas to bribe and intimidate their subjects to remain loyal to the crown. They sent mercenaries, regular soldiers, and raised local militias to threaten settlers, particularly in the foothills. Their heavy-handed tactics provoked the Appalachian settlers. One particularly offensive leader was Major Patrick “Bulldog” Ferguson, who had ordered the bayonet slaughter of sleeping Patriot troops at Little Egg Harbor, NJ. He also designed the Ferguson rifle, a breach-loading rifle, and was wounded in the right arm in the Battle of Brandywine against General Washington, after which the British took Philadelphia.

The trail commemorates the pursuit of Ferguson’s army from north to south, by the citizen militias that rose up from Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia and the Carolinas against the overbearing British threat, culminating at Kings Mountain. Immediately before and after the events of the Overmountain Victory, the Patriots also won decisively at Musgrove Mill and Cowpens, respectively. These Appalachian Patriots turned the course of the Revolutionary War.

Normally, high ground is superior during fighting, but the ridge at Kings Mountain is steep, fairly straight and narrow. Once the patriots managed to get on both sides, the British became easy targets on top. Ferguson was shot off his horse, shot a young soldier asking him to surrender, and was finally shot multiple times and urinated upon before being buried in an unmarked grave where he lay. A headstone was later placed in the woods not far from the large monument at Kings Mountain below.