5 January 2023
Copyright 2023 by Hershel Parker
CAROLINA KINFOLKS AND THE WAR ON THE CHEROKEES 1759-1783
In the Carolinas, a few British soldiers and many white settlers warred against the Cherokees during the French and Indian War, often after Indians had raided western settlements that pushed into Cherokee land. The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Journal on 28 June 1759 noted the arrival of a paper from “Charles-Town” South-Carolina dated May 12: “According to Letters received Yesterday, from Gentlemen of Repute in Rowan County in North Carolina . . . many horrid Murders have lately been committed, by Indians, on the Yadkin and Catawba River.” The events described here occurred on 30 May 1759:
Yesterday Evening [in June] arrived in Town, Mr. John Cathay, a Settler of good repute upon the Catawba River, and informs us, that on Wednesday the 30th of last Month, two of his Neighbours, John Mills and James Wilson, came to his House, while he was loading his Waggon, and acquainted him, that very early that Morning 8 Catawba Indians had been surprised[,] taken, tide, [tied] and carried off from their Camp at one Martain Dalliger[’]s, between that River and the South Branch, by a Party of 13 Cherokees, who all had Horses, and before they had moved from the Spot, broke all the Catawba[’]s Guns, and cut their Saddles, &c. to Pieces with their Tomahawks; that this whole Transaction was seen by Dalliger, from a Field of Rye where in he had concealed himself and was after further confirmed by one of the Catawba Prisoner[’]s Escape who broke two of his Fingers in disengaging himself, and who positively affirmed that they were Cherokees that had committed this Outrage. Mr. Cathay verily believes this Relation to be true, knowing his Neighbour to be a Man of Veracity, and says this Affair happened within 2 Miles of his own House; He adds, that the People in those Parts were exceedingly alarmed, but that the Catawbas which remained in the Neighbourhood had desired a Meeting with the white People, to concert with them the properest Measures to be pursued.--About 2 Months ago private Letters mentioned 2 Gangs of desperate young Fellows being gone from the Cherokee Nation, with many Tokens of mischievous Intentions, one of them consisting of 15, and the other of 13 Men; and it is more than probable, that those parties are the same that lately murdered the People in Rowan County, and now have carried off the Catawbas.
Letters describing incidents in this early “war” are extremely rare. I found only this document.
And I was exceptionally lucky in this discovery, for the cautious hero of the story is a first cousin of mine, a few times removed. Martin Dellinger (the usual spelling) was a German immigrant who had come down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania. Our modern Cousin David Dellinger, of the Chicago Seven, bragged about his heroic Massachusetts Revolutionary ancestry. On rare visits South in boyhood he found his elderly North Carolina relatives to be kind but uninteresting farmers. His Southern ancestor Martin had behaved strategically in 1759 by hiding in his field of rye and the Central North Carolina patriots had responded with extraordinary sympathy toward their Massachusetts fellows when news came down from April 1775. Two Dellingers heroically signed the Tryon County "Association” in August 1775--which could have been their death warrants. According to Christian Arney's pension application, Captain John Dellinger (uncle and brother-in-law of my Revolutionary Costners) led his company "through Burke County to the Turkey Cove in pursuit of Indians." The modern David was brave too--see John Carroll Lynch’s portrayal of him in the 2020 The Trial of the Chicago 7. Brave, but like most New Englander historians, barely aware that the South had played any role in the Revolution before Yorktown. The North never evinced any empathy or sympathy for their Southern fellows the way the South responded to news from Lexington.
The conflict did not stop in the end of the French and Indian War, 1763. The Colonial Records for Gaston County of March 1771 shows the pay-roll for an expedition against the Cherokees led by Frederick Hambright (hero of King's Mountain and ancestor of many of my kinfolks), along with my uncle John Hoyle and his brother Andrew, my grandfather Peter Costner and his Patriot brother Uncle Jacob Costner, who were Hoyle's brothers-in-law. Details of this raid on the Cherokees have not been located. The expedition may not have been the only one in these years. This early, the band was forming, men who signed the "Association" in 1775 and fought along with the Over-Mountain men at King's Mountain on 7 October 1780. They were locals, neighbors already intermarrying and usually fighting together.
In February 1776, soon after the Revolution started, North Carolina Patriot militias (many from the northwest corner of the state) gathered to oppose the Scottish Highlanders at Cross Creek (later named Fayetteville, for the great Frenchman). These Highlanders were recent arrivals from Scotland, but some of the wealthiest among them, absentee landlords, came directly from London. Some of the oldest were refugees from Culloden, now loyal to George III. Most of the Patriot militia men had been born in the colonies, mainly in Pennsylvania or North Carolina, sons or grandsons of Scottish immigrants from Ireland, where they and their own ancestors had been exiled by James I and kept there by later rulers as an expendable buffer against the Catholic natives. In North Carolina even these Scots from Ireland called the new Cross Creek immigrants “Scotch,” not identifying with them. The Patriot Scots had begun to think of themselves as Irish, they or their ancestors having come from Ireland, most often. Two centuries later a part Choctaw great aunt misled me by saying that her father, John Rogers, was "a full-blooded Irishman." His paternal ancestors were Scottish but his mother (he may not have known) was German, descended from the Pennsylvania Dutch. Families forget. All I say about kinsmen in this chapter is among what I discovered in the last 2 decades.
When the militiamen hurried east early in 1776, my cousins from the northwestern North Carolina mountains marveled at the ground under their feet, for they had never walked on sand. Their victory at Moore’s Creek Bridge at Cross Creek was so decisive that the surviving loyal eastern Highlanders went docile for a long time along with other loyalists in that region. There had been a time, recently, when many of the older eastern colonists had been enraged against the corruption of British officials in the colony. In 1771 one signer of a “Regulator” petition was my Scottish Grandfather Argulus Henderson, whose land has been absorbed by Camp Lejeune. After brutally crushing the rebellion, the British governor had required many petitioners to take oaths to support the king. Oaths were taken solemnly then in contrast the way many politicians take oaths of office today. Respect for their oaths, which were not casual or politic but profoundly religious, kept many older settlers quiescent early in the war, especially after Moore’s Creek Bridge.
The western Patriot Scots shook the sand from their boots and went back to their homes up against southwestern Virginia and what became eastern Tennessee. The older ones or their parents had bought land second-hand at reasonable prices from an aristocratic recipient of the King’s bounty and were still grateful. They were not focused on the long-standing complaints against King George that had roused eastern North Carolinians in 1771. They were not tea drinkers and cared little about any tax on the tea leaves. They rarely had to pay for stamps on legal documents, even if that meant they became careless about strict legalities. Did Presbyterians need to search out an Anglican minister and pay him to marry you? Show me an Anglican in Surry County! The North Carolina militia, you might have thought, having tasted triumph at Cross Creek, could have gone to the defense of New York or New Jersey during the next years. That did not happen. Tory manned and British led actions continued in South Carolina, but North Carolina Patriots were not engaged in another significant battle against the British and Loyalists in 1776, or in 1777, or in 1778, or in 1779. You almost could say that they were opportunists.
During the years before the war the North Carolinians had pushed the Cherokees back toward and at points over the Blue Ridge Mountains. In March 1775 Richard Henderson and Daniel Boone privately negotiated the extra-legal Treaty of Sycamore Shoals which opened much of western Virginia (that is, Kentucky) and North Carolina (that is, Tennessee) to white settlement. This treaty violated a Royal Proclamation as well as edicts of colony authorities, but there was no way for the proper authorities to interfere. Cherokees, especially, resented being pushed back from the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the previous interim boundary. So rather than worrying about tax on tea or stamps for documents, western Carolinians (North and South) were concerned about the Indians who might, every few months, make forays into land they had just been pushed out of and might scalp a few pioneering families as they had done in 1759, in Cousin Martin’s time, and still did.
It was easy, and had been very easy since the French and Indian War, to stir up the western counties against the Cherokees, and recently against representatives of the British, who were not protecting the colony and not regularly negotiating strenuously for more Cherokee land. In South Carolina the colonial government in Charleston as late as 1773 routinely granted parcels of land to Scots fleeing rack-rent Ireland, among them my Copeland cousins, whose ships had arrived late in 1772 but were not immediately allowed to disembark the passengers. Colonial authorities were encouraging Protestant immigrants from Ireland to settle far off, south and west of Charlotte, North Carolina. The Charleston powers were generous but the message was, “Here is land for you. Protect everyone between your plat and Charleston. Defend yourself from raiding Cherokees as best you can. Good luck.” This was pitting the new Scots against heathens all over again, against Catholic heathens in Ireland starting in the time of James I, Cherokee heathens here. As you would expect, my young Cousin Alexander Copeland, who settled out west in 1773, in Spartanburg County, fought the British in the Revolution. He was at Cowpens early in 1781. Even earlier (as his widow, my Gilmore cousin Rebecca remembered in her extreme old age) he “served in what was then called the Rangers engaged in keeping down the Indians and guarding the Frontier of South Carolina.” This duty could have been as early as 1774 or 1775.
In 1776, Moore's Creek Bridge behind them, western North Carolinians joined with South Carolinians to fight the Cherokees. The best story about the war against the Cherokees in 1776 may be invented. The Memoirs (published 1847-1848) of Spartanburg County Joseph McJunkin, one of the basic authorities on the wars against the Cherokees during the Revolution, was prepared by James Hodge Saye (1808-1892), a Presbyterian minister who seems to have doubled the length of the veteran's actual manuscript. Saye despised the Indians. McJunkin’s assignment of scouting the movement of the Indians was dangerous, the Memoir says, “peculiarly hazardous when the enemy to be watched is sagacious, treacherous and cruel as were the Cherokees.” Concerning early 1776, Saye said: "a combination was entered into by the Tories and Indians for a general massacre of the Whigs residing along the frontiers from North Carolina to Georgia.” Saye told how the Indians could tell patriot families from those loyal to Britain: “The Tories set up peeled poles at their houses, around which white cloth was wrapped. These were called passovers. On June 20, in accordance with previous arrangements, the Indians commenced the work of death among the Whigs, but the Tories sat under their passovers in safety. To this, however, there was one exception. Capt. James Ford, who resided on the Enoree River at a place called the Canebrake, was killed while sitting under his passover. His wife was also killed and his two daughters taken captives. It is supposed that the Indians were instigated into the commission of these horrible atrocities by the arts of John Stuart and Richard Parris, agents of the British Government, and that this work of savage butchery along the frontiers constituted a part of a grand scheme for the overthrow of the patriots in the Province.” Oddly, no one to my knowledge has produced an independent account of this dramatic South Carolina passover. Stuart and Parris were real enough, but did Saye invent the passover story?
A major source of history about the war on the Cherokees are the dozens of eye-witness accounts made after a militia pension bill was passed in 1832, in Jackson’s presidency. I have checked against Fold3, but credit is due to the heroic Will Graves and Leon Harris, the transcribers of 20-some thousands of handwritten pension applications for soldiers in the Southern Campaigns. The surviving Continental soldiers got pensions in 1818, and at last the surviving ordinary soldiers were being heard. My cousin John Sample was 14 or 15 when he enlisted as a substitute and "was engaged in guarding the frontiers of Abbeville against the Cherokee Indians." Such boys by 1832 were pushing 70, but their surviving companions were older, sometimes much older. My Grandfather Robert Knox applied at 90. One of several sons-in-law of the Committee of Safety man, Robert Ewart, he was marched to Fort McFadden under Captain James Johnston, the husband of the eldest Ewart daughter. Knox was sure he had been stationed at the fort "to protect the frontiers against the Indians," but could not remember battles, only that, he said, "a party of us were driven from a field where we were reaping, by the firing of some guns, supposed to be by the Indians."
Judging from their pension applications under the law of 1832, the soldiers who fought Cherokees during the Revolution did not call them "sagacious, treacherous and cruel." An exception is Daniel Hill who explains his service under James Wilson and John Sevier over the mountains in what became Tennessee: "So soon as we was mustered into service, we marched directly on to the Cherokee Nation of Indians, who was still massacring and killing the whites on the Frontiers every chance or opportunity they could meet with." This was after Yorktown. Independence was assured and there would be no King or Parliament to hinder western expansion for the whites, nothing to stop the push to take all of Tennessee for whites.
In the early summer of 1776 the Carolinia militias both chose not to march off northward to attack the British who had taken major cities but instead to conduct a joint campaign to the west. Andrew Williamson's South Carolina militia and Griffith Rutherford's North Carolina militia determined to fight the Cherokees, augmented by Virginia forces under William Christian. There survives vivid contemporary testimony. On September 4, 1776 a North Carolinian wrote to a friend in Newark, New Jersey, a letter printed in the 2 November 1776 New York Gazette: “Our militia here are all out on an expedition against the Cherokees. Last Wednesday week three thousand two hundred men were paraded near the head of Catawba by General Rutherford, who are to meet Colonel Williamson of South Carolina, with two thousand men, at the middle Cherokee towns on the ninth of September. Colonel Williamson and the Georgians have already destroyed the lower towns, being in number seven. The Virginians are on their march to the Over Hills. I expect that in less than two months every trace of the savage nation will be erased from the earth.” North Carolina had been looking for reinforcements from the north and South Carolina had been engaged in local battles across the south and west border into Georgia. These "Over Hills" were not the peaks of the Blue Ridge--they were well within what is now the Carolinas, a sting of twenty-four mountains. The forces from the two Carolinas did in fact unite, with somewhat different expectations.
Blood was indeed shed in in the summer of 1776 in Spartanburg and other counties, whether or not some Loyalists were protected by passovers. Levi Mote in his old age recalled the South Carolina General Andrew Williamson marching his troops "into the Indian Country we first went to where the Indians had murdered Col. Hites family in the upper end of Spartanburg District (SC) from there we marched to Parris' the Indian agent." When the fighting had resumed in western South Carolina in late 1775, two British agents, John Stuart, the British Superintendent of the Indian Department since 1761, and Richard Parris (variously spelled), tried to strengthen British relations with the Cherokees so they might unite against the rebels, but they worked without adequate troop support and their efforts did not pay off. Late in 1775 Pearis seized Fort 96 (named for the miles from Charleston) but it was soon retaken (as Jim Piecuch explains in the online Journal of the American Revolution). Levi Mote told how the South Carolina Patriots punished Pearis: "Gen'l Williamson took his [Pearis'] family and Sent them in to Lindly's Fort under a guard that he then burnt All his buildings & saw & grist mill, Cut down his Corn which was then fit for roasting." In 1777 Pearis escaped to Pensacola in West Florida (that wide band stretching to the Mississippi). The senior British agent, Stuart, made him Captain in the West Florida Loyal Refugees.
In 1780 Pearis was back in South Carolina encouraging loyalists but he was undercut by Cornwallis’s jealous junior officers. No longer useful, he was shunted off and died in the Bahamas. John Stuart had used funds from London to pacify the Cherokees even as their lands were nibbled away, but, unable to rouse them against the rebellious Carolinians in 1776, he retreated to West Florida, where he died. There was never any forceful British influence to stir up the Indians. You know John Stuart and Richard Parris made little lasting impression on the ordinary soldiers by how seldom they are mentioned by the soldiers who applied for the 1832 pensions, my source for much of this chapter. If we are lucky we have signatures of the applicants or their marks, attested to. I cherish, for example, a firm if unsteady signature of a grandfather of mine, Robert Knox, at 90.
Many of the boys and young men from Virginia and the Carolinas who went to fight in Indian territory were so old when they became eligible for Revolutionary pensions in 1832 that they confessed to lapses in memory in their pension applications, but they remembered the campaigns against the Cherokees. The journal attributed to Arthur Fairies is the most detailed account of Williamson’s expedition. Williamson and Rutherford destroyed many whole towns of the Cherokees and burned supplies of food. They cut down cornfields (as big as 250 acres, says Fairies) and burned them as well as “cribs of shelled corn & Hollow trees of shelled corn.” They destroyed “potatoes etc,” pumpkins, and beans, and burned all houses. The whites seized what “plunder” they could (“fresh meat, hogs and chicken,” “salt beef,” cattle, horses) and destroyed everything else, including peach trees and apple trees. Henry Jones and his brother David brought home “some specimens of ripe indian Corn as a curiosity.” The white troops were successful in destroying the food supplies for thousands of Cherokees who had to winter on nuts and whatever wild animals they could kill.
The South Carolina leader Andrew Williamson had been living in the west, near 96. He had become prosperous driving cattle herds to the coast, so he needed more slaves than his neighbors, more than he could afford. He used his military power to gain any Indians he could enslave. All along he had been acting as if “every Indian taken” should be “the slave and property of the taker.” He wanted security from large Indian attacks but also wanted to augment his high quota of slaves. In September 1776, Williamson petitioned the South Carolina legislature to allow him to enslave all Cherokee prisoners. Although the legislature did not authorize Williamson to enslave prisoners, some men in his contingent indeed claimed to believe that any man who caught an Indian could make that Indian his slave, to serve him or to be sold.
The bully Williamson demanded some of his men's prisoners for himself. My uncle Thomas Costner from west of Charlotte was on that Cherokee expedition in 1776. He wrote: “while in that service we killed some Indians & took some prisoners & also in the [Cherokee] nation we met with the forces from South Carolina the commander of them claimed the Indian Prisoners & they were given up to them. We also burnt some Indian huts & destroyed some corn – & after scouring the Country we were marched back.” Williamson claimed the prisoners "& they were given up to them"—them or him. This was not a slave-capturing expedition for the leader in North Carolina.
Abraham Forney is a strong witness against Williamson. Sharp of memory in 1844, Abraham Forney mentions, just casually, my Grandfather Robert Ewart, who died at the end of 1781. All too little is known about this Committee of Safety member, but when I was working on something else I came upon Abraham's passing comment. After coolly describing Cornwallis's camping in his father's estate (where he stripped house, animals, lands, and gold and silver), he said: "Previous to the British coming to my father's, Captain Jacob Forney, he sent his negroes over the Catawba River into Mecklenburg to Maj. John Davidson for safe keeping out of the way of the British army. During the war Maj. John Davidson and Robt. Ewart (a good Whig) very frequently come to my father's, Jacob Forney, sen., to consult in favor of the Whig cause—Robert Ewart lived about one and a half miles from Maj. Davidson and five and a half miles from my father." Abraham served under Grandfather Ewart's son-in-law, Cousin James Johnston. Forney became the uncle of James and Jane Ewart Johnston's son William. (Marriage to a Forney daughter made Cousin William a brother-in-law of the great Revolutionary historian Cyrus Hunter.)
In 1832 Abraham declared that "he entered the service about the 25th day of June 1776 as one of the drafted Militia of the State of North Carolina and served as a private in Captain James Johnston's company, Colonel William Graham's Regiment. That he was ordered to reinforce the troops at Fort McFadden near where Rutherford Court House now stands, that he remained there until about the first day of August, when he with others was ordered home to prepare for the expedition against the Cherokee Nation of Indians. The militia of this State was commanded by General Rutherford and the troops that he belonged [to] joined him at the Pleasant Gardens – from thence we marched into the Nation and that he went with a detachment under the command of Colonel William Sharpe as far as the Hiwassee [River], when in meeting with a detachment from Colonel Williamson's Army from South Carolina who claimed the prisoners & other property we had taken as falling in that district of Country as belonging to them, we delivered them up and again joined the main Army under General Rutherford. Having effected all that could be done, we commenced our march home and we were dismissed and that he returned home the 13th day of October 1776." Uncle Thomas Costner said the same thing: Williamson claimed prisoners and the North Carolinians gave them up.
For years Williamson was a great hero to the Patriots because in 1777 at Dewitt's Corner in eastern Abbeville County he forced some of the Cherokees into a gigantic concession of land—all the way to a line at the top of Oconee Mountain--anything west of the Fort 96 area which was later defined as South Carolina. After the fall of Charleston in May 1780 Williamson, having slaves and other property to protect, went east and made personal peace with the British. He was hated for his treachery, although defended by Nathaniel Greene, to whom he had sometimes delivered British information. The Edinburgh Caledonian Mercury on 1 October 1781 had news from "Charlestown,"11 July: "On Thursday se'ennight, a small party of mounted rebel militia surrounded the house of Andrew Williamson, Esq; formerly Brigadier-General of the South Carolina militia, about seven miles from town, and without allowing him time to put on his clothes, carried him off prisoner. On intelligence being received of this, the British determined to free him. "Major Fraser, with 90 of his dragoons, was detached next day in quest of them. Having effected a circuitous march of more than 70 miles through the woods, with the most profound secrecy, on Saturday morning the Major surprised their main body in their camp at the Horseshoe, killed 14 on the spot, wounded several, took Colonel Isaac Hayne, their Commander, prisoner, and released Gen, Williamson from his confinement at a house in the neighbourhood." The British restored him to his new plantation.
Many patriots as well as many friends of the British or outright traitors from the Patriots had seen their slaves confiscated and often shipped to British colonies. Williamson held on to his slaves during 1780 when he placated the new British rulers in Charleston. On 6 February 1786 Andrew Pickens and other Indian Commissioners informed the Governor that Indian negotiators were complaining that Williamson still held some of the children as slaves. After nine and a half years, they wanted them returned to what was left of their families. Williamson died several weeks later. The 1786 tax returns showed him owning 90 slaves, presumably but not certainly all Negro.
The Philadelphia American Daily Advertiser on 13 June 1786 reprinted an ambivalent memorial from a Charleston paper. The story of Williamson's life might offer anyone "useful instruction." Even though uneducated, genius like his might enable one to serve his country with "luster" whether in "field or cabinet." Yet "without any crime of thine"—or any proven crime—fortune might turn against you and render your best services instrumental to your ruin. Anyone might profit from "his example." You never knew. "Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." This was a kinder memorial than Williamson deserved.
North Carolinians marched under no such semi-formal hopes for monetary gain. Griffith Rutherford had fought Indians during the French and Indian War. In the mid 1770s he served on the Salisbury County Committee of Safety which was composed from a wide swath of the state, north and south. These committees were treasonous bands, raising militia in their counties. Serving with him and several others was my Grandfather Robert Ewart, younger than Rutherford, physically declining but father of numerous daughters who married Patriots. In 1776 as the head of the Salisbury, North Carolina militia, Rutherford was not seeking slaves in war, although he owned eight negroes at his death in 1805. In the Revolution he was at war to gain land for the whites of North Carolina, not to take prisoners home with him. It may be telling that where slave owners often advertised for runaway blacks, Rutherford advertised (late in 1773 in the Dunlap Philadelphia Packet) for a prized mare stolen by a notorious thief who daringly rode from colony to colony. Yet even among the North Carolina troops what to do with prisoners proved problematic.
Enslaving Indians had begun in the 1600s, but much history-writing has been inaccurate if not downright dishonest. Prior to 1720, when it ended the Indian slave trade, one source says, South Carolina exported as many or more Indian slaves than it imported Africans. We are told this: “All historians note that nowhere is there more authentic documentation than in South Carolina, also known as the original English colony of Carolina, established in 1670. It is estimated that between 1650 and 1730 at least 50,000 Indians (and likely more due to transactions hidden to avoid paying government tariffs and taxes) were exported by the English alone to their Caribbean outposts.” Another irresponsible source says, “Between 1670 and 1717 far more Indians were exported than Africans were imported.” Negroes seized by British mainly from patriots were in fact exported in large numbers to be re-enslaved in the Caribbean, primarily, but the patriots during the Revolution were in no position to export prisoners. The practice was to kill Indian men whenever possible. Captured women and children were seen as temporary nuisances or bargaining chips for buying back white captives more often than as lifelong property.
Nevertheless, some prisoners were enslaved even by the North Carolinians. Cornelius Clements recalled that John Watson and his men had "taken three young indians prisoners which they brot home with them & two of the same was raised in his County." George Ruminger recollected capturing an Indian and a squaw. In crossing the Cowee the squaw let her “pappoosa” fall into the stream. Believing that she had dropped it on purpose so it would not be enslaved, some of whites shot her. The mother may have chosen death over slavery, for the white troops captured as many women and children possible—rather than men, because men were to be killed and women and children easier to keep as servants or bargain away for white captives. William Snodgrass recalled that “in the year 1778 or 1779, he volunteered “to go a tour against the Chickamauga Indians of the Cherokee Nation and was marched to the Cherokee Nation, burned sixteen Indian towns, killed some Indians, took some prisoners and destroyed and burned the Indians' corn and returned home to Washington County Virginia after having served a tour of four months or upwards.” Yelvaton Neville marched “to the Cherokee nation where the troops cut and destroyed the corn, burned the houses, killed one Indian and took some women & children prisoners then returned towards home.” George Ruminger was confident that his expedition had “humbled the Cherokees & broke their force.”
Captain William Moore wrote to Rutherford on 17 November 1776 a report on the previous month’s marching and fighting. At Pidgeon River this had happened:
Then there arose a Dispute Between me & the whole Body, Officers & all, Concerning Selling off the Prisoners for Slaves. I allowed that it was our Duty to Gard Them to prison, or some place of safe Custody till be got the approbation of the Congress Whether they should be sold Slaves or not, and the Greater part Swore Bloodily that if they were not sold for Slaves upon the spot, they would Kill & Scalp them immediately. Upon which I was obliged to give way. Then the 3 prisoners was sold for £242. The Whole plunder we got including the Prisoners Amounted Above £1,100.”
This was all Williamson's fault because he was out to gain slaves for himself, and incidentally some for his men. Managing large numbers of prisoners in wartime was complicated. In actuality, those enslaved were mainly women and children.
North Carolinians, helped by some Virginians, were more concerned with killing Cherokees than capturing them. On 300 January 1777 the Dublin, Ireland Freeman's Journal printed "Advices from the South West Frontiers": "On Thursday the 26th of September [1776] a soldier belonging to Capt. Gilmore's company was killed and scalped near the main camp of our army. About the same time one of the inhabitants was killed, and another taken prisoner.—On Sunday the 29th our spies came in and informed, that they had discovered the tracks of a large party of the enemy making towards the settlements; upon which, that very same evening, Col. Christian went in quest of them with about 500 men, who after marching part of the night, and most of the next day, found that the enemy had tacked about suddenly, and made off towards their towns.—On Tuesday and Thursday, the 1st and 3d instants, our whole army, consisting of about 2200 men, healthy, well equipped, and in high spirits, crossed the river, together with pack horses and bullocks; and Col. Christian expected to be at Broad river in 8 or 10 days, within forty miles of the enemy's towns, where he had information they intended to fight him.—Advice had been received, that Gen. Rutherford, with the North Carolina troops, had penetrated as far as the Cherokee middle settlements, and that the savages were flying precipitately before him."
Colonel Christian “utterly destroyed” four towns as punishment to the chief Dragging Canoe (Dragon Canoe, said the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Packet, 17 January 1777). He "did no other damage to the Indians, whose perfidious conduct on many occasions might have justified a more rigorous chastisement. It is to be hoped, however, that the Colonels' humane treatment of the savages, when he had it so much in his power to distress them, will render abortive any further machinations from such incendiaries as Stuart and Cameron [British agents] to stir them up to war against the United States.” The Indian women and children who survived the destruction of their towns were not systematically murdered on the spot, once battles were over, but were apparently taken to South Carolina and Virginia. Christian had treated the savages humanely, after utterly destroying their towns. My Cousin William Sparks was unusual if not unique in thinking of the consequences—slow starvation of the survivors.
Christian had been a soldier as early as the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore's War. He was a politician, holding many local and state offices between service in militias. He studied law with Patrick Henry and became his brother-in-law. Back in Charles City County after the Revolution, in 1779 he was wealthy and careless enough to have lost "between the courthouse and Buckland, 584l.18s. wrapped up in a piece of paper" (584l=£584). He offered two hundred dollars to anyone who could help him get it back. After the war he was claimed his vast bounty land far out in Kentucky and bought up other veterans' allotments so that he had thousands of acres around what was becoming Louisville. Some of his forty or so slaves he put in a saltworks, Bullitt's Lick. He was killed in a battle with Wabash Indians in 1786, the great holdings largely undeveloped.
In 1776 and the next years fighting continued in the parts of present South Carolina. Cousin Hannah Tindall Fowler's in-law Samuel Fowler spent three years "employed in various scouts, against the British, Tories and Indians, principally in the upper part of South Carolina, and the Cherokee Nation." He was "taken as a Prisoner by the Indians & Tories, at the fall of Gowen's Fort" in November 1781. He was lucky, for the British Captain Bates, who had promised amnesty, treacherously ordered the Indians and loyalists to kill all those in the fort, even women and children. At Jamieson's Fort Fowler was "occasionally ordered out against the Tories, and Indians, and sometimes employed as an Indian Spy." He had entered the Army as a volunteer, and continued in the service as a Spy and guard to the frontier on the Indian line between 5 and 6 years and until the final close of the War." The war did not end at Yorktown.
Thomas Sample (kin through the Sparkses) was "wounded by the Indians," apparently at the 1 August 1776 battle at Seneca Town in present Oconee County. Benjamin Neighbors (kin through the Hills) at "about fifteen years old" volunteered for six months "and served as a guard on the frontier." On his fifth tour, he "entered as a regular at Hamilton's Ford on Tyger, under Capt. William Smith, Lieut. Absalom Thompson for Ten Months was promised a negro to do so, but has never heard of the negro since."
James Jamieson, father-in-law of Cousin Jean Gilmore Jamieson, should be remembered for giving one of the most inspiring exhortations of the war. He was injured at Hanging Rock and captured by Cornwallis, who somehow recognized his distinction and demanded to know why he had killed the King's troops. He replied, "If ever I killed any of the King's men, it was in battle, in the defense of my country, except on one occasion when I killed an Indian. I know that I killed that King's man, because we were alone, in a personal conflict." Cornwallis dismissed him "without further molestation."
My cousin John Sparks was detailed “to act as a spy.” On the Hiwassee they “killed ten & took three prisoners – without losing any men on their side – After this little skirmish they returned to the main Army, with their prisoners and delivered them up to General Rutherford.” Sparks concluded: “The main body of Indians having fled and abandoned the Country, it was thought unnecessary to pursue them, and after burning their houses, destroying their corn, and committing such other depredations upon them as they could, they returned to North Carolina.”
From a mission my Cousin Joseph Pruitt returned to General Rutherford only to find “the various Indian Towns” all but abandoned, “there being in them but a few straggling men, women & children, who implored for peace and whom they did not molest. After destroying their towns, corn & such other property as they could find, the Army under General Rutherford returned to North Carolina.” In Wilkes County seventeen year old Eli Coffin (kin through the Tuckers but mainly through the Moores] in the fall of 1781 substituted for his brother Ambrose, who was near sighted: "They marched across mountains and rivers, taking the Indian town at the Tuckaseegee River. They went on “through various parts of the Cherokee Nation, and took and burnt down other Indian towns to wit, the Overhill Towns, the Valley towns and the Shoemake Towns and then returned home.”
Sterling Rose, brother-in-law of my cousin Rachel Sparks declared: "In August 1779 he entered service again as a volunteer under Lieutenant William Gray and commanded by Colonel Benjamin Cleveland and General Rutherford and was marched against the Cherokee Indians, and acted as orderly Sergeant and was at the destroying of the middle Towns on the Tennessee River and Valley Towns on Hiwassee River and in the battle at said Towns."
Benjamin Coffee, allied to my Moores of the Globe, at 86 in 1833 remembered that he enrolled under Colonel Joseph McDowell and was marched “against the Cherokee Indians that was making inroads and doing mischief on the frontiers of said State.” At their Fort Crider for months they ”scouted on the frontier from place to place to keep the Indians in awe.”
My Uncle Benjamin Murrell (husband of my Aunt Mary Sims) wrote that in the fall of 1781 he “came out of the County of Washington, now part of the State of Tennessee, then a frontier Country in North Carolina, settled on the Watauga River, a branch of the Holston [River].” In the spring of 1782 he “volunteered, together with many others, to go on a campaign against the settlement of Cherokee Indians, called the Chickamauga Towns.” He explained: "These Indians, it was supposed, were in league with the British, and whenever an opportunity offered, would steal horses and other property from the whites, and massacre our men, women and children.” Not enough men volunteered, so the campaign was called off, but a company of horsemen was formed “to range along the Western frontiers for the purpose of protecting the white settlements.” He joined this company and for three months “ranged from one station to another on the frontier, from 40 to 50 miles apart, down the Rivers Holston and French Broad for three months.” Those are some of the more specific memories some of my surviving kinfolks told in 1832 or the next years.
Cousin William Sparks witnessed the uniting of Rutherford’s and Williamsons’ forces and described the aftermath: “The whole Army then proceeded across another ledge of mountains and then crossed Tuckaseegee River. The night of the day we crossed this River a scouting party of thirty or forty of our men under Maj. McDowell was attacked by a party of Indians of whom they killed two or three, and made prisoners of a woman and child, an old man and one or two boys. The old Indian was shot the next day by a friendly Indian, a servant of Col. Miller, NC, who I think was with us, but in what capacity, I do not recollect. I regret to say that I believe all the prisoners were murdered, except two boys. We then marched on to the Tennessee River a distance of some 20 or 30 miles, here we found several Indian Villages on the South East side of the River, which gave every indication of having been but recently deserted. We remained some two weeks destroying the houses, corn, beans and everything of utility in and about the villages.” They proceeded “to a large town surrounded by villages" where they "spent several days more in destroying the town and Villages and everything in and about them. Rumor afterwards stated, and I believe truly, that the devastation committed by us on this campaign was the cause of the death of many hundreds of Indians from starvation.” My kinfolks fought in the splendid 55 or 60 minutes at King's Mountain on 7 October 1750, the Lincoln County contingent, three dozen or more not listed in the official headcounts, many kin through women so not bearing familiar names. My Aunt Margaret Ewart Adams heard the guns so the next day, a Sunday, she rode an unruly stallion 12 miles through Tory territory. She found her Presbyterian husband and son alive, playing cards and drinking from a jug. She stayed to nurse the wounded. And the next January kinfolks were among those who shamed the butcher Tarleton at Cowpens. But what I describe in this chapter is what the North and South Carolina militias did during most of the war.
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