The Battle of New Orleans / including the Previous Engagements between the Americans / and the British, the Indians and the Spanish which led to / the Final Conflict on the 8th of January, 1815

by Z. F. Smith

Isaac Shelby, Governor of Kentucky.

Fortunate was it for Kentucky and for the nation that Isaac Shelby directed the military affairs of the Commonwealth during the period of the second war with England. This famous pioneer of the famous pioneers of Kentucky was born in Maryland, on the 11th of December, 1750, near Hagerstown. Early in life he was employed as a land surveyor. On the threatened invasion of Virginia by the federated army of the Northwest tribes under the celebrated chief, Cornstalk, he was lieutenant of a company in the command of his father, General Evan Shelby, and gained distinction for gallant services in the great victory won at Point Pleasant on the 10th of October, 1774, which forced the Indians to sue for peace. He visited Kentucky in 1775, with the vanguard of pioneer explorers, and marked the lands which afterward, in 1780, he returned and secured by entry and upon which he settled with his family after the Revolutionary War.

When he removed from Maryland, he settled near the borderline of Virginia and North Carolina, then not well defined. Believing his residence on Virginia soil, he was elected to the Virginia Legislature in 1779. But the survey of the boundary line determined him a citizen of North Carolina, and as such he was officially known after until his final removal to Kentucky. In the gloomiest period of the War for Independence, in the southern colonies, after the defeat at Camden and the surrender of Charleston, Shelby became famous as a border leader of what seemed the forlorn hope of the colonists, and for his frequent victories over the enemy. With Colonels Sevier and Clarke, he led his command to the attack and capture of a strong fort in the Cherokee country, which had, garrisoned by British, Tories, and Indians, greatly harassed the settlers in west North Carolina. Soon after, in August, 1780, he inflicted a loss of several hundred by an attack on the British at Musgrove's Mill, South Carolina, and escaped with little loss of his own men. But his greatest victory, and one of the most decisive of the war, was won at King's Mountain. Joining forces with Colonels Sevier and Campbell, a bold attack was planned and made on the notorious General Ferguson, encamped on King's Mountain. Without artillery, these frontiersmen, with their flint-lock rifles, boldly attacked Ferguson's veterans, advancing on the enemy up the mountain side, and keeping up the fight until Ferguson and nearly four hundred of his men were slain, and over seven hundred made prisoners.

ISAAC SHELBY.
First and Sixth Governor of Kentucky.

After the close of the war, in the winter of 1782-3, General Shelby removed to Kentucky and settled in Lincoln County, where he remained through life at his elegant home and upon his ample estate, the model citizen and patriot. His civic and military fame preceded him, for many of his soldiers of the Revolution were his emigrant neighbors. When Kentucky took the initial steps toward Statehood in the Union, Shelby was a member of the convention of 1787-8, and also of the convention to frame the first constitution, of 1792. By unanimous consent, he became the first Governor of the Commonwealth, in 1792, and was inaugurated as Governor at Lexington on the first of June. On the sixth of June, in courtly style, the Governor appeared in person in presence of the legislators, in joint assembly, and read to the august body his first message, formally delivering to the Speakers of each House a copy in manuscript, and then retired in dignified state, when the Speakers each adjourned the members to their respective halls. This was in imitation of the custom of the British monarchs, followed by the colonial governors in America, and by Washington himself in his first inaugural ceremonies.

So much had Governor Shelby established himself in the esteem and confidence of the people, that with unanimity he was elected a second time to serve as Governor in the critical period of 1812, when a second war with England became a certainty. His indomitable and patriotic zeal counted no costs and reckoned at no sacrifice to punish the invaders and drive them from our soil during the three years of hostilities. In this time, under his several calls, over twenty thousand volunteers were sent to the Army of the Northwest under Harrison, from Kentucky. By these mainly, the shameful surrender of Hull, at Detroit, was retrieved, the victory of the Thames won, and the British and their Indian allies driven from the borders, from Detroit to Buffalo, for the remainder of the war. At the battle of the Thames, won by Kentuckians, Governor Shelby led the three thousand volunteers whom he had called out for this campaign, in person, though in his sixty-fourth year of age. On his return to the capital of his State, when a last requisition was made by the Secretary of War, in 1814, thousands of volunteers answered his call for troops to reinforce the army of General Jackson in the Southwest, of whom three regiments, of twenty-two hundred men, were accepted and sent to New Orleans. Governor Shelby notified the Government at Washington that, if ten thousand soldiers were needed to repel the enemy and drive him from our soil in the Southwest, Kentucky was ready to supply them on brief notice.

Peace once again reigned when his second term as Governor ended. He retired to his country home, where he spent the evening of his life, honored and esteemed by a grateful and devoted constituency of citizenship as few men were. He died at his home on the 26th of July, 1826, in the ripeness of years and of honors.