Maj. Patrick Ferguson, British commander at the Battle of Kings Mountain, and inventor of the breechloading rifle bearing his name; from a marble bust.
Kings Mountain
A Hunting Rifle Victory[1]
By Roger W. Young, Historian
Branch of History
Kings Mountain, the fierce attack of American frontiersmen on October 7, 1780, against Cornwallis’ scouting force under Ferguson, was an unexpected onslaught carried out in the foothills of South Carolina. This sudden uprising of the stalwart Alleghany mountaineers, for the protection of their homes and people from the threat of Tory invasion under British leadership, was relatively isolated in conception and execution from the main course of the Revolutionary War in the South.
Clearly uncontemplated in the grand British design to subjugate the South in a final effort to end the Revolution, this accidental encounter in the Southern Piedmont delayed incidentally, but did not alter materially, the movement of Britain’s Southern Campaign. Kings Mountain is notable chiefly perhaps as supplying the first definite forewarning of the impending British military disasters of 1781. It was decisive to the extent that it contributed the earliest distinct element of defeat to the final major British campaign of the Revolution.
The extraordinary action occurred during one of the bleakest periods of the Revolution. A major change in British military strategy had again shifted the scene of action to the South in 1778. Faced by a discouraging campaign in the North and assuming that the reputed Loyalist sympathies of the South would be more conducive to a victory there, the British war ministry had dictated the immediate subjugation of the South. With the conquered Southern provinces as a base of operations, the war office planned to crush Washington’s armies in the North and East between offensives from North and South, and thus bring the defeat of the more stubborn Revolutionary Northern colonies.
Unimpeded by effective resistance, this Southern Campaign swept unchecked through Georgia and part of South Carolina during 1778-79. The surrender of Gen. Benjamin Lincoln’s American army at Charleston, in May 1780, greatly strengthened the British hold on South Carolina. Encouraged by the British successes, the Royalist and Tory elements of the Georgia and South Carolina lowlands rose in increasingly large numbers to the support of the Royal cause. Soon most of South Carolina, except a few districts in the Piedmont, were overrun by British and Royalist forces directed by Cornwallis, and he was maturing plans for the invasion of North Carolina. His designs were upset temporarily by the advance of a new American Army under Gates. Meeting Cornwallis near Camden, August 16, 1780, Gates suffered a disastrous defeat, again leaving South Carolina and the route northward open to the British. By September, Cornwallis again had undertaken the invasion of North Carolina, gaining a foothold at Charlotte, a center of Whig power, after a skirmish there late that month.
The sole Southern region in the path of Cornwallis’ northward march which had remained undisturbed by the course of the war lay in the foothills and ranges of the Alleghanies stretching through northwestern South Carolina, western North Carolina, and into the present eastern Tennessee. Only here, among the frontier settlements of the independent mountain yeoman, could the patriotic Whigs find refuge, late in the summer of 1780, from their despised enemies, the propertied Royalist and Tory forces aroused by Cornwallis. Occupied with establishing a new frontier and protecting their rude homes from the nearer threat of the border Indians, the mountain men had been little concerned with the war on the seaboard. The influx of partisan Whig forces seeking sanctuary first brought the effects of war vividly before them. But from the free and comparatively peaceful existence, the backwoodsmen were soon to be aroused to the protection of their homes and possessions by a threat of direct aggression.