Who won the Battle of Kings Mountain?
The Patriots. At Kings Mountain in South Carolina on 7 October 1780, about 900 frontier militiamen, many of them the Overmountain Men from beyond the Appalachians, surrounded a wooded ridge held by some 1,000 Loyalists under Major Patrick Ferguson, the only British soldier on the field. In about an hour Ferguson was killed and almost his whole command was killed, wounded or captured. The victory stalled Lord Cornwallis's invasion of North Carolina, and Thomas Jefferson called it "the turn of the tide of success."5
In the autumn of 1780 the British seemed to be winning the war in the South. Then a British major leading Loyalist militia sent a threat over the mountains to the frontier settlements, promising to hang their leaders and burn their homes. The men beyond the mountains came for him instead. They rode for twelve days through snow and rain, found him on a rocky ridge called Kings Mountain, and destroyed his command in an hour.6
Part of The greatest battles of the American Revolution · Before: The Battle of Monmouth · Next: Battle of Cowpens
The war moves south
After years of stalemate in the North, Britain turned its strategy toward the South, where it hoped Loyalists would rise and help hold the country. On 12 May 1780 Charleston, South Carolina, surrendered to Sir Henry Clinton with a large American army, and Lord Cornwallis, left in command in the South, overran the state. On 16 August he crushed a second American army under Horatio Gates at Camden.7
Across the Carolina backcountry the war became a vicious civil war of raids and reprisals between neighbors. Partisan bands such as Francis Marion's struck back from the swamps, and over the summer militia from the western valleys crossed the mountains to fight small, fierce actions against the Loyalists at places like Musgrove's Mill and Cedar Spring before going home after Camden.8 › Francis Marion
Patrick Ferguson
To raise and lead the Loyalist militia Cornwallis chose Major Patrick Ferguson, the son of a Scottish judge and a professional soldier. The National Park Service's history of the park describes him as a renowned marksman and the inventor of an improved breech-loading rifle; NCpedia adds that his right arm had been shattered at Brandywine, after which he taught himself to use a sword with his left. Slight and gentle-looking, he was nonetheless known to his men as "Bull Dog", and he directed them in action with a silver whistle.9
Through the summer Ferguson recruited Loyalists by the thousand and hunted down those who still resisted. When Cornwallis began his invasion of North Carolina in September, marching for Charlotte, he sent Ferguson west toward the mountains to guard the army's left flank and enlist still more men.10
A threat over the mountains
From his camp at Gilbert Town, North Carolina, Ferguson sent a paroled prisoner across the mountains to Colonel Isaac Shelby with a message for the settlers there. According to the park brochure, he warned that "if they did not desist from their opposition to the British arms, he would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword."11
The men of the Watauga, Holston and Nolichucky valleys, west of the Appalachians, had so far been left largely alone by the war. Most were Scotch-Irish farmers, hunters and herdsmen in small, nearly independent settlements. The threat did not frighten them. It brought them out.12
The Overmountain Men ride
Shelby and John Sevier agreed to strike first. On 25 September 1780 the frontier militia gathered at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River, near present-day Elizabethton, Tennessee, under Colonels Shelby, Sevier, Charles McDowell and William Campbell. NCpedia counts 240 men each with Sevier and Shelby, McDowell's 160 North Carolina riflemen and Campbell's 400 Virginians.13
The next day they started over the mountains, through snow "shoe mouth deep" on the heights, as the park brochure puts it, with the long rifles of the frontier across their saddles. On 30 September they reached Quaker Meadows on the Catawba, where some 350 more men under Benjamin Cleveland and Joseph Winston joined them. Two of Sevier's men slipped away on the march, and fearing they would warn Ferguson, the colonels changed their route.14
Ferguson learned they were coming and fell back toward Cornwallis. On 1 October he issued a broadside calling on loyal North Carolinians to "run to camp" before the "back water men" arrived, whom he called "a set of mongrels." He asked Cornwallis for reinforcements, writing, as Britannica quotes him, "Three or four hundred good soldiers, part dragoons, would finish the business." Then he camped on Kings Mountain to wait for them.15
The Patriot colonels chose Campbell as their commander. At the Cowpens on 6 October about 400 South Carolinians under James Williams, William Hill and Edward Lacey joined them, and there they learned that Ferguson was some 30 miles ahead. Picking about 900 of their best-mounted men, they rode on through a night of pouring rain.16 › Battle of Cowpens, 1781
The ridge
Kings Mountain is a rocky, wooded spur of the Blue Ridge just south of the North Carolina border, rising about 60 feet above the country around it. Its narrow summit plateau, some 600 yards long by the park's measure, looked like a strong camp, and Ferguson boasted that he could not be driven off it. But he built only rudimentary defenses and kept his men on the bare top, while the slopes below were thick with trees and boulders.17
The name, incidentally, does not honor George III: NCpedia notes that the mountain was supposedly named after a farmer who lived at its foot.18
The fight on the slopes
The Patriots arrived after noon on Saturday, 7 October, in a misty rain. They dismounted, tied their horses and spread out in columns around the base of the ridge. At about three in the afternoon they began to climb from all sides at once, Campbell's and Sevier's men on one flank and Shelby's and Cleveland's on the other. The American Battlefield Trust reports that Campbell told his men to "shout like Hell and fight like devils."19
The Loyalists on the crest fired volleys down the slope and then charged with the bayonet. Twice Campbell's and Shelby's men were driven down the hill, and each time they slipped back through the trees and came up again while other columns pressed in elsewhere. One of the attackers later recalled that he "took right up the side of the mountain and fought from tree to tree ... to the summit." The frontier riflemen picked their targets from cover; the Loyalists, standing in ranks against the sky, made easy ones.20
Ferguson falls
Slowly the ring closed until the Loyalists were crowded onto the northeastern end of the ridge. Through the noise the shrill call of Ferguson's silver whistle kept sounding as he rode from point to point in a checked hunting shirt. Then he tried to cut his way out. He was shot from the saddle, struck, according to Britannica, by at least eight balls, and died propped against a tree.21
His second in command, Captain Abraham DePeyster, raised a white flag. Even then the killing did not stop at once. Many of the frontiersmen kept firing, and NCpedia notes that some were repaying Banastre Tarleton's men, who had kept firing on surrendering Americans at Buford's defeat earlier that year. The fight had lasted about an hour, and as the park brochure observes, Ferguson was the only British soldier on either side.22
The toll is recorded differently in every account. American losses are given as 28 or 29 killed and about 60 wounded. For the Loyalists, NCpedia gives 119 killed, 123 wounded and 664 captured; the American Battlefield Trust 157 killed, 163 wounded and 698 captured or missing; the park brochure 225 killed, 163 wounded and 716 captured; and Britannica 250 killed, 163 wounded and 668 captured.23
A cruel aftermath
Night fell fast, and the victors camped among the dead and wounded. The next morning, fearing pursuit from Cornwallis, they buried the dead in haste, divided the plunder and marched north with the prisoners to hand them over to the Continental Army. On the way, prisoners were beaten and some were killed, until Campbell ordered the officers to stop it.24
About a week after the battle, at the Bickerstaff settlement some 50 miles from the field, the Patriot colonels held an all-day trial in the rain. Thirty-six Loyalists were convicted of "breaking open houses, killing the men, turning the women and children out of doors and burning the houses," in Shelby's words, and nine of them were hanged. Then the army from beyond the mountains dispersed as quickly as it had gathered.25
The turn of the tide
The effect was immediate. Patriot militia began to turn out again in North Carolina and Virginia, and the Loyalists on whom the whole British plan depended lost heart. Cornwallis, at Charlotte, feared for his posts in South Carolina and fell back to winter quarters at Winnsboro, putting off his invasion of North Carolina for three months. In December 1780 Nathanael Greene arrived at Charlotte to take command of the Continental Army in the South.26 › Nathanael Greene
Kings Mountain was the first in a chain of setbacks that led through Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse to Yorktown. Thomas Jefferson called it "the turn of the tide of success." Even the British commander in chief, Sir Henry Clinton, wrote that it "proved the first Link of a Chain of Evils that followed each other in regular succession."27 › Siege of Yorktown, 1781
The battlefield today
The ridge is preserved as Kings Mountain National Military Park in South Carolina, which Britannica describes as some 4,000 acres and one of two national military parks devoted to the Revolutionary War.28
The route of the march is marked too. The Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail follows the 1780 campaign for some 330 miles through Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina, from the muster ground at Sycamore Shoals to the ridge.29
