Southern Historical Association Journal Explores the South's Role in the American Revolution

Southern Historical Association
Some Reflections on the South in the American Revolution

Author(s): Don Higginbotham
Source: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Aug., 2007), pp. 659-670
Published by: Southern Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27649487
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Some Reflections on the South in the
American Revolution
By Don Higginbotham
1 HE SUBJECT OF THE SOUTH IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS ONCE

freighted with emotion and controversy. Professional historians were
hardly guilty of such partisanship, though relatively few of them have
examined the Revolution in comprehensive regional terms?a notable
exception being John R. Alden, who authored two volumes on the land
below the Mason-Dixon Line.1 Rather, the fireworks came before the
Civil War when southerners complained that northern writers had ne
glected the South's role in the victory over Britain. "It was a strange
spectacle," declared John Hope Franklin, "two sections that were vir
tually at war with each other in the 1850s, not merely over the current
problems that beset them but also over their comparative strengths and
weaknesses during the War for Independence."2 In 1988 Jack P.
Greene's stimulating and somewhat controversial book Pursuits of
Happiness might have warmed the hearts of antebellum southerners.
Greene, hardly sharing their biases, partly agreed with them about their
region's history. "Until relatively recently," he wrote, serious histori
ans "have devoted far more attention to the northern colonies, specifi
cally to New England," than to the South.3
Were northerners and southerners of the Revolutionary era also very
sensitive to sectional matters and to their respective contributions to the
war's outcome? For the most part, they were not, although Alden's The
First South notes that some Americans were. In fact, Greene has ar
gued that the two sections had become more alike by 1776 than they
1 John Richard Alden, The South in the Revolution, 1763-1789 (Baton Rouge, 1957); Alden,
The First South (Baton Rouge, 1961).
2 John Hope Franklin, "The North, the South, and the American Revolution," Journal of
American History, 62 (June 1975), 5-23 (quotations on p. 17).
3 Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British
Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988), 4.
Mr. Higginbotham is the Dowd Professor of History at the University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Journal of Southern History
Volume LXXIII, No. 3, August 2007
660 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
had been earlier and than they would ever be in the years before the
Civil War.4 There were regional characteristics, especially related to
slavery and plantation agriculture. But it is the theme of this essay that
Greene is essentially correct and that the South between the Seven
Years' War and the conclusion of the War of Independence remained
in the American mainstream. What Americans had in common was for
most white people a common language, a Protestant religion, a British
political heritage, and an Anglophone culture that made the colonists
more rather than less like the mother country because of growing trade
and commerce in the Atlantic world. American unity also increased
after 1763 because of the London government's new colonial policy,
which seemed threatening with its parliamentary taxes and burdensome
administrative regulations.5
Provincial jealousies and rivalries, rarely North-South divisions, oc
curred between more immediate neighbors. New York and New
Hampshire clashed over Vermont. Pennsylvania had boundary disputes
with Virginia. But in one way New England perceived the southern
colonies in unflattering terms: the South was less experienced in war.
As Colonel George Washington admitted in the French and Indian
War, "Virginia is a Country young in War." Blessed with "Tranquil
Peace" after 1700, Virginians had not studied "War or Warfare."6 The
French and Indian War was not universally popular in Virginia. One
historian has drawn implicit analogies to American internal divisions
during the Vietnam War, for many of the poorer sort in the Old
Dominion saw the conflict as one to benefit wealthy planters' lust for
western lands.7 New Englanders shouldered a disproportionate share of
the burden compared with the middle colonies as well as the South.
The irony here is that immediately prior to the Civil War southerners
boasted of a martial South, of Dixie having a stronger military tradi
tion. The assertion is suspect, for the North had a better military record
than the South before the Revolution.8
4 Ibid., 207-9.
5 Both British unity at home and colonial unity in North America had increased prior to 1763
because of fear of "the Other": that is, France and Catholicism. As Linda Colley indicates, after
the Seven Years' War Britain replaced the Bourbon kingdom as "the Other" for the colonies.
Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, 1992), 6 (quotation), 17, 24-25,
33-35, 88-90, 251-52; Colley, "Britishness and Otherness: An Argument," Journal of British
Studies, 31 (October 1992), 309-29.
6 R. Don Higginbotham, "The Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South: Some Further
Speculations in a National Context," Journal of Southern History, 58 (February 1992), 9.
7 James Titus, The Old Dominion at War: Society, Politics, and Warfare in Late Colonial
Virginia (Columbia, S.C., 1991).
8 Higginbotham, "Martial Spirit in the Antebellum South," 6-12.
REASSESSING THE COLONIAL SOUTH 661
In any case, southern colonials matched New Englanders in mount

ing a vigorous defense of American rights after 1763, and both sections
outdistanced the middle colonies. North Carolina was one of only two
provinces to brand the Sugar Act of 1764 as a tax and a violation of the
British constitution. A year later Patrick Henry's Virginia Resolves
issued the most stinging rebuke of any colony to Parliament's Stamp
Act. In 1774 Peyton Randolph of Virginia became the first president of
the Continental Congress, a fair reward since the Old Dominion had
played a key part in bringing about that assemblage. Southern political
pamphleteers, like those elsewhere, stressed constitutional arguments
throughout the more than a decade before the decision for indepen
dence. For example, by 1774 both Virginia's Thomas Jefferson and
North Carolina's James Iredell had developed a commonwealth con
ception of the British empire by proclaiming that Parliament's author
ity did not extend beyond Britain itself and that the thirteen colonies
and the mother country were equal spokes in the wheel of empire.
Indeed, the South, not fiery New England, initiated the concrete
steps leading to the imperial separation. On April 12, 1776, North
Carolina became the first American polity explicitly to authorize its
delegates in the Continental Congress to support such a measure. The
following month Virginia instructed its congressional members to in
troduce a resolution for independence. On June 7 Virginia's Richard
Henry Lee did just that. Another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, became
the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. Maryland and
South Carolina were slower to follow suit. But when South Carolina
committed, so did Georgia, a flanker settlement founded late and weak
by comparison, fearful of danger from British East Florida. W. W.
Abbot states that had the Savannah River been fifty miles wide,
Georgia would have remained in the British empire.9
To what extent did large slave populations and resentful Indian
tribes in the southern colonies drive political leaders to favor indepen
dence? Some scholars have pointed to restlessness of black populations
during the last phases of the imperial crisis. They contend that some
Whig leaders felt that within independent states southerners could
better control slave discontent and push back Indian tribes that resisted
white advances in the West. Unquestionably, Virginia's Governor
Dunmore frightened whites in 1775 with his partially successful call
9 Merrill Jensen, The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763?
1776 (New York, 1968), 678-81; W. W. Abbot, The Royal Governors of Georgia, 1754-1775
(Chapel Hill, 1959), 182.
for slaves to rally to his side and with his unsuccessful appeal to Native
Americans to do the same.10 Patriots in all the southern colonies ex
pressed these apprehensions, but only in Virginia were numerous
bondmen actually encouraged to flee to the royal standard prior to July
1776. More convincing evidence is required before we can accept the
view that the slavery issue was paramount or even a somewhat lesser
motive for independence. To be sure, every colony had its own special
grievances against the London government and its own peculiar inter
nal tensions, sometimes involving east-west differences or class
resentments.11 And yet, at the same time everywhere, colonial
elites advanced constitutional explanations for separating from the
homeland.
The revolutionary stalwarts engaged in great risks in participating in
a war against the world's foremost superpower and in being unaware
how much of the white, slave, and Indian elements might support the
imperial side. An excessive emphasis on the racial motive could lead
to the erroneous notion that the southern parts of America would not
have joined their northern neighbors had the southern peoples been as
predominantly white as were those in the middle and New England
provinces. If South Carolinians and Georgians believed that the pres
ervation of slavery could best be accomplished by cutting the bonds
with Britain, they would later discover that independence actually
posed a graver threat than remaining British, for thousands of blacks
fled to the British lines between 1779 and 1782, and the vast majority
of those who departed seem to have been evacuated or carried off to
East Florida, Canada, the West Indies, and Sierra Leone.12
An examination of North Carolina's comparatively early support for
secession provides an interpretation seemingly at odds with the slavery
motive just discussed. That province's dominant planter element's
10 Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the
American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999); Robert A. Olwell, "'Domestick Enemies':
Slavery and Political Independence in South Carolina, May 1775-March 1776," Journal of
Southern History, 55 (February 1989), 21-^48; Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture
of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, 1998); Sylvia R. Frey, Water
from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991).
1 ' The progressive school of history in the early twentieth century saw party activity, often
finding aristocratic and democratic forces contending for control of the Revolution. Some recent
scholarship emphasizes instead the multiethnic character of the South as a determining charac
teristic of internal divisions. See, in addition to the works in the previous note, Michael A.
McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel
Hill, 2007). The standard comprehensive approach to the war years in that state is John E. Selby,
The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 (Williamsburg, 1988).
12 Frey, Water from the Rock, chap. 6; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves,
and the American Revolution (London, 2005).
commitment to Whiggish constitutional principles and to the other

North American Anglophone colonies flew in the face of a more secure
anchor found within the old empire. The unity of the colony remained
problematic, despite eastern political hegemony. A population explo
sion, much of it in the backcountry settled substantially by Germans
and Scotch-Irish, resulted in 250,000 inhabitants in 1776 as opposed to
only 36,000 whites forty years earlier. The numerous Quaker enclaves
in the northeastern counties and on the frontiers would retain their
pacifism. So would the Moravians, another peaceable sect, who had
crafted thriving communities near present-day Winston-Salem. The
War of the Regulation, an uprising in several Piedmont counties
against high taxes and corrupt lawyers and local court officials in 1771,
led to bloodshed in the Battle of Alamance, which saw the insurgents
routed and several of their leaders put to death. The behavior of the
large slave cohort and of the Cherokees, long unhappy with their white
neighbors, during a war with England would be problematic at best.
Rumors after Lexington and Concord had it that the Regulators and the
Highland Scots along the Cape Fear River would unite and fight in
defense of the Crown. If New England stood most solidly for inde
pendence in 1776, the South, led by North Carolina and Virginia,
ranked well ahead of the middle colonies.13
Politics was scarcely adjourned during the war. In the Continental
Congress old concerns about the South's martial ardor lingered. John
Adams asserted that there were few military leaders in the southern
colonies, which had little experience in war. Congress acted astutely in
nonetheless unanimously appointing a Virginian, George Washington,
as commander of its Continental Army. Along with Washington's
experience and visibility, he owed his selection to geopolitical consid
erations. Congress engineered the first sectional compromise in
American history. The consensus for Washington reflects another po
litical truism: recent studies detect an absence of deep sectional divi
sions among the Philadelphia lawmakers. Four presidents of that body
were from the South and a fifth southerner declined that opportunity.
The most noticeable factionalism concerned the French alliance. Con
flict occurred between those suspicious of America's Gallic ally and
13 Don Higginbotham, "Decision for Revolution," in Lindley S. Butler and Alan D. Watson,
eds., The North Carolina Experience: An Interpretive and Documentary History (Chapel Hill,
1984), chap. 6. Recent studies of North Carolina are Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together:
The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 2002); and Wayne
E. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot
and War (Gainesville, 2001), a monograph that also devotes extensive coverage to aspects of the
Revolution in South Carolina.
those trusting of the new connection, but factions were fluid and shift
ing, not modern parties.14 The lack of firm legislative parties held true
at the state level as well. North Carolina, for example, saw an outburst
of spirited electioneering because of the creation of new counties in the
interior and the increased number of elective offices. But there were no
consistent blocks of east versus west voting in the legislature; two
westerners were elected governor.15
If the southern states failed to bring about far-reaching social change
in the Revolution, neither did the governments elsewhere. Wars are not
normally times for social experimentation. Still, the region had several
noteworthy accomplishments, two led by Virginia. First, the state's
Declaration of Rights became a model for most of the other states
throughout America. And second, Virginia's internal political fight
over religion resulted in the Statute of Religious Liberty, the most
comprehensive law of its kind enacted during that era. For that matter,
all the southern states stripped the Anglican church of its preferred
status. By contrast, disestablishment was not finalized in New England
until the 1830s. The South also was out in front of the rest of America
in the creation of state universities. Beginning with the constitutional
provision in the North Carolina constitution of 1776, every state in the
region took steps for the founding of such an institution within a
generation or so. Southern states joined states elsewhere in erasing
primogeniture and entail, feudalistic land provisions.16
In dissecting the war itself, some generalizations are in order. Fight
ing between British and American armies moved from north to south.
When Washington pressured Sir William Howe into evacuating
Boston, New Englanders hailed the Virginian as a hero, and so it would
14 See particularly Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive

History of the Continental Congress (New York, 1979).
15 Don Higginbotham, "The Politics of Revolutionary North Carolina: A Preliminary
Assessment," in Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider
Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia, S.C., 1988), 65-83. The complexity of South Carolina sec
tional politics is a theme of Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter
Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808 (Chapel Hill, 1990). For the development
of some measure of party activity in the states of the upper South?Maryland, Virginia, and North
Carolina?at the end of the war, consult Norman K. Risjord, Chesapeake Politics, 1781-1800
(New York, 1978).
16 It is hard to generalize about what the Revolution did for the status of the lower and
middling orders of white male southerners, for their prospects had been expanding, especially in
landowning in the Piedmont and backcountry. But artisans in Charleston played an important role
in opposing British measures after 1763 and consequently gained permanent opportunities for
holding political offices. Rosemary Niner Estes, "Charles Town's Sons of Liberty: A Closer
Look" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005). South Carolina's
generous headright policy drew hordes of settlers from the upper South and Pennsylvania before
the Revolution. Klein, Unification of a Slave State.
be wherever he went during the lengthy struggle. His universal popu

larity must have helped significantly to moderate potential sectional
tensions. He never showed favoritism to men from Virginia. Phase two
of the struggle took place in the middle states from 1776 to 1778.
Troops from the South?Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina?
increased Washington's ranks. Virginia's General Hugh Mercer fell at
Princeton, New Jersey, and North Carolina's General Francis Nash
died from a wound received at Germantown, Pennsylvania. During this
period royal forces failed to achieve victory in the North, and France
entered the war on the American side. Washington and most of the
Continental army continued to operate in the middle states after the
British began a thrust southward in late 1778, for the enemy retained
substantial garrisons in New York City and Rhode Island. Moreover,
the Crown's Indian allies still threatened the northern frontiers.
The London ministry then focused on the long-standing contentions
of southern royal governors and exile loyalists that a considerable
majority of the white population below the Potomac were British ad
herents. The local inhabitants allegedly remained silent only because
they were tyrannized by rebel militias who controlled the states' in
frastructures. The ?migr? loyalists did not have sound firsthand infor
mation. They were no more accurate than were Ahmed Chalibi and the
Iraqi National Congress (INC) with their optimistic predictions about
attitudes in their homeland before the Iraq War in 2003. The INC
members, like loyalist leaders, dreamed of returning to become the
chief political operatives of a new government put in place by the
world's reigning superpower?Britain in the eighteenth century,
America in the twenty-first century. Lord George Germain, the British
ministry's war manager, knew of storm warnings that could have
brought a more sober assessment. At the onset of the contest there was
Dunmore's setback in eastern Virginia. An uprising in North Carolina
brought a decisive loyalist defeat at Moore's Creek near Wilmington in
February 1776. A British expeditionary squadron under General Henry
Clinton attacked Charleston, South Carolina, to establish a beachhead
where loyalists could assemble in the future for security. South
Carolina forces drove them off in late June 1776, but the mirage of
ubiquitous loyalism persisted.17
It is necessary to conceptualize the war in the South between the
17 Paul H. Smith, Loyalists and Redcoats: A Study in British Revolutionary Policy (Chapel
Hill, 1964), chap. 6; Ira D. Gruber, "Britain's Southern Strategy," in W. Robert Higgins, ed., The
Revolutionary War in the South: Power, Conflict, and Leadership (Durham, N.C, 1979), 205-38;
John Shy, "British Strategy for Pacifying the Southern Colonies, 1778-1781," in Shy, A People
British overrunning of Georgia in the winter of 1778-1779 and their

evacuating of Charleston and Savannah late in 1782. British and
American armies, far from being comparable in size to those of Howe
and Washington in the middle Atlantic region, operated over a vast
expanse. A map of the South pinpoints the considerable distance be
tween Savannah and Yorktown, the principal engagements on the far
ends of the southern theater. Europe at that time saw just the opposite,
with huge armies fighting across small land spaces. In 1778, during the
Bavarian War, Prussian and Austrian armies, each composed of about
160,000 men, contested an area of approximately 220 miles by 60
miles. In the South, by contrast, British and especially American
armies?except for the numbers at Charleston and Yorktown?
were minuscule. General Nathanael Greene fought brilliantly in the
Carolinas with a Continental Army that never exceeded 2,000 men.18
Both sides were desperate to increase their ranks. Loyalism contin
ued to be the cornerstone of British thinking, which still assumed
that Crown supporters constituted most of the population and that, as
the revolting colonies fell like dominoes, the king's friends would
serve as a police force or constabulary. They would maintain law and
order, while the redcoats would be freed to fight elsewhere. This
Americanization of the Revolutionary War bears a strong likeness to
U.S. thinking in the Vietnam War. President Lyndon B. Johnson, fa
voring the Vietnamization of the conflict, believed that American
forces would give way to the South Vietnamese in the pacification of
the countryside. Similar assumptions became the cornerstone of
President George W. Bush's goals in Iraq after 2003: American-trained
Iraqi forces would gradually replace U.S. military units.
For Britain there were other manpower possibilities, especially the
use of blacks. The military contributions of the multitude of slaves who
fled to the British lines have been underestimated. Although most of
the runaways worked for the royal army as laborers, a minority re
ceived arms and sometimes performed impressively in fighting units
Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (1976;
revised ed., Ann Arbor, 1990), 193-212.
18 There is no first-rate comprehensive study of the entire conflict in the South, but there are
several sound accounts that cover much of the story, particularly for the lower South. See Alden,
South in the Revolution, chaps. 10-16; John S. Pancake, This Destructive War: The British
Campaign in the Carolinas, 1780-1782 (University, Ala., 1985); John Buchanan, The Road to
Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas (New York, 1997); and Jim
Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, Slaves and the American Revolution in the
Deep South (Columbia, S.C., forthcoming 2008).
while others became valuable spies.19 A thoughtful new study main

tains that most blacks as well as more Native Americans should have
been employed in combat and that loyalists, blacks, and Indians could
have been made to cooperate, even serving together in combat. Yet the
evidence for the success of such likely combinations is murky at best.
Racial prejudices on the part of all these groups possibly stood in the
way of such enterprises.20
In any event, Britain's employment of the loyalists never received a
careful test, mainly because the redcoat army did not remain in suffi
cient strength to stabilize any given area. There were more loyalists in
the lower South than in the upper South, and many fought fiercely and
tenaciously in Georgia and South Carolina between 1780 and 1782.
Moreover, recent research suggests that substantial numbers of men in
the lower South were not thoroughly committed to either side.
Americans taken prisoner at Charleston and Camden enlisted in
Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton's Tory Legion. At least a frac
tion of these same soldiers, captured later by General Daniel Morgan's
troops at Cowpens, returned to American service! Irregulars?
militiamen and partisans?appear often to have changed the colors of
their coats when taken prisoner or when the war surged from one side
to the other in their own neighborhoods. Nathanael Greene is alleged
to have said that by late in the war the Americans and British were
fighting with each other's former soldiers. Although the statement may
be apocryphal, it is not wholly untrue.21
Historians have understandably focused great attention on the
atrocities committed by both sides in the lower South. Supposedly the
most serious large-scale breaches of the rules of ethical warfare were
committed in South Carolina in 1780 by Tarleton's Legion in the
19 Frey, Water from the Rock, chaps. 4-5; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, chaps. 5, 7.
20 Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, chap. 5.
21 For significant ongoing research on the loyalties of American soldiers captured at
Charleston and Camden, see Lawrence E. Babits and Joshua B. Howard, "Continentals in
Tarleton's British Legion" (unpublished paper), and Babits, A Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of
Cowpens (Chapel Hill, 1998). See also Carl P. Borick, A Gallant Defense: The Siege of
Charleston, 1780 (Charleston, S.C., 2003), chaps 13-14, appendix A; and Lee, Crowds and
Soldiers, 191, 204-5, 324^173. The claim for Greene's statement is in William Johnson, Sketches
of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene ... (2 vols.; Charleston, S.C., 1822), II, 220.
A most useful, richly detailed monograph is Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists
in the American Revolution (Columbia, S.C., 1987). Lambert believes that perhaps one-fifth of the
approximately seventy thousand white inhabitants were loyalists, most of them in the back
settlements. Ibid., 319-21. Such estimates may be thoughtful, but they can hardly be based on
solid information. Their numbers certainly fluctuated throughout the war, particularly after the
British invasion of the South. In the months between the American loss of Charleston in May
1780 and the British defeat at King's Mountain in October of that year, loyalist strength quite
likely exceeded Lambert's estimate.
Waxhaws region and by Whig partisans in the backcountry at King's

Mountain. There is reason to modify these conclusions. In both cases
the commanders of the victorious side lost control of their men, who
were not regular troops. This explanation works for certain other se
vere bloodlettings in the Carolinas and Georgia. The charge of delib
erate inhumanity on the part of "Bloody" Tarleton more often than not
is difficult to substantiate. Indeed, on other occasions, even when fierce
partisans squared off, there were flags of truce and exchanges of pris
oners that were honored. If the backcountry war had its grizzly dimen
sions, it was hardly an unmitigated hangman's harvest.22 Nathanael
Greene admitted to being sickened by the atrocities that assuredly did
occur. He was less culpable than British general Clinton, who switched
from a program of leniency, paroling American prisoners on condition
they would not take up arms again, to a proclamation on June 3, 1780,
declaring that previously paroled men now had to take an oath of
allegiance and to serve against their former comrades if called. These
released Whigs, feeling betrayed by Clinton and angered by insolent
loyalists, often returned to arms. Pacification never had a chance of
working even if Clinton and General Charles Cornwallis, his successor,
had retained a sizable military presence without reaching out in a
constructive manner to the entire population.
Greene himself, in turning to an unorthodox war, pursued a hit-and
run strategy that no previous American commander in the South had
tried. A less bold and daring general would have attempted conven
tional warfare in what had become an unconventional theater. Greene
wore Cornwallis to a frazzle, left him bloodied at Guilford Courthouse
in North Carolina, and returned to South Carolina. Supported by par
tisan chieftains?Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew
Pickens?Greene and his allies picked off, one by one, enemy posts in
the lower South until the British army presence was confined to
Charleston and Savannah, although some loyalist partisan-style mili
tias remained in the field.
Washington's strategic achievement in the South resulted not in the
guerrilla approach of Greene but in the most conventional European
warfare: a siege, conducted at Yorktown. Events leading up to those
22 Thomas A. Rider, "Musket and Sword, Rape and Torch: The Question of Brutality in the
American Revolution in North and South Carolina, May 1780-December 1782" (unpublished
seminar paper, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001); Rider, "Massacre or Myth: No
Quarter at the Waxhaws, 29 May 1780" (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
2002); Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 191, 313?44; Anthony J. Scotti Jr., Brutal Virtue: The Myth and
Reality of Banastre Tarleton (Bowie, Md., 2002), chaps. 5-7.
developments on the Virginia peninsula, however, called for boldness

and daring not unlike Greene's?for Washington's stealing away from
his lines outside New York before Sir Henry Clinton knew what hap
pened. It then called for racing to Virginia to coordinate his army with
the fleet of French admiral Fran?ois Comte de Grasse crowding sail
from the West Indies and with still other French army and naval forces.
Such converging simultaneously in an age lacking instantaneous com
munication and mechanized movement appears miraculous. Finally, it
is a myth that the British band at Yorktown played a tune called "The
World Turned Upside Down" as the redcoats surrendered on October
19, 1781. The two most exciting and decisive campaigns of the war
unfolded in the South. The outcome there put the seal on American
independence.
Although the South suffered more severely than the northern states
in the last years of the war, it experienced a rapid post-1783 boom in
economic growth and population. Between 1779 and 1788 four of the
five states of the region moved their capitals to interior cities, which
reflected a desire to more adequately meet the political needs of a
greater number of their citizens. And the political wounds of former
loyalists were largely healed by integrating these onetime enemies into
the fabric of national life. It seemed to some Americans as though the
region would leap ahead of the rest of the country in overall wealth and
population increase, particularly as southerners streamed into
Kentucky and Tennessee and the Old Southwest. With slavery pro
tected by the Constitution, Georgia and South Carolina enthusiastically
ratified that document, although North Carolina and Virginia did so
more slowly and with less enthusiasm prior to Federalists' making a
commitment to a bill of rights. Whatever historians may think of the
South and the character of its people in the 1780s, southerners believed
that they continued to be in the mainstream of American life and
values. They were not wildly wrong, for the region?that is, Virginia?
contributed four of the first five American presidents, all popular and
all serving two terms.
It is perhaps ironic that a South Carolinian, Charleston blue blood
Charles Pinckney, offered at the Constitutional Convention what is
likely the most positive statement about what the American people had
in common made by anyone prior to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Americans, declared the aristocratic Pinckney, were in all respects
"more equal in their circumstances than the people of any other Coun
try." The Revolution had even increased this remarkable condition
with the abolition of primogeniture and entail. Alexis de Tocqueville's
Democracy in America might well have been entitled "Equality in

America," which is the real theme of his examination of the new
nation. He surely would have agreed with Pinckney that "equality is as
I contend the leading feature of the U. States." Perhaps Pinckney was
close to the truth about free white males in the late eighteenth century.
If so, it was a condition worth preserving and enlarging.23
23 James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (Athens, Ohio, 1966),
183 (first quotation), 184 (second quotation).

Southern Historical Association Journal Explores the South's Role in the American Revolution

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Southern Historical Association Journal Explores the South's Role in the American Revolution

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Southern Historical Association

Some Reflections on the South in the American Revolution

1 HE SUBJECT OF THE SOUTH IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS ONCE

Mr. Higginbotham is the Dowd Professor of History at the University of

In any case, southern colonials matched New Englanders in mount

commitment to Whiggish constitutional principles and to the other

14 See particularly Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive

be wherever he went during the lengthy struggle. His universal popu

British overrunning of Georgia in the winter of 1778-1779 and their

while others became valuable spies.19 A thoughtful new study main

Waxhaws region and by Whig partisans in the backcountry at King's

developments on the Virginia peninsula, however, called for boldness

Democracy in America might well have been entitled "Equality in

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