History is full of cases in which people subverted their own just causes by acting impulsively rather than carefully considering the costs and benefits. As the ancient poet Horace put it, “The one who cannot restrain their anger will wish undone, what their temper and irritation prompted them to do.”
A case in point happened 236 years ago this month here in North Carolina. While popular depictions of the American Revolution tend to focus on set-piece battles between British redcoats and Continental armies, in much of the country the war consisted primarily of raids and counter-raids by bands of Patriots, Tories, and British-allied Indians, including some of the Cherokees of the Carolinas and Georgia.
Cherokee leaders had good reason to be frustrated with the colonials. White settlement had trickled into the Southern foothills and mountains for decades, sometimes in violation of treaty. During the later years of the French and Indian War, the Cherokees had sided with the French and launched raids against frontier settlements in the Carolinas. They lost, and paid a price. Still, a series of new treaties came afterwards. Indian leaders hoped they would stick, despite occasional violations by both sides. By the 1770s, however, some Cherokee communities had become convinced – by both experience and the promises of skillful British agents – that only the King, acting through royal governors, could protect their treaty rights.
So beginning in June 1776, Cherokee raiding parties struck settlements across the frontier. Several early raids occurred near a place that would soon be called Hoodsville, in present-day Burke County. Terrified settlers streamed into a nearby fort garrisoned by a few militiamen under the command of Charles McDowell.
The timing of the Indian raids was no accident. It was part of a larger British plan.
An early British war aim had been to capture the key southern port of Charleston, South Carolina. From there, they hoped to rouse the many Southern Loyalists to reclaim their respective colonial governments. By early 1776, they had a plan. Gen. Henry Clinton was to sail from Boston with a detachment of British regulars to Wilmington, where he would meet up with reinforcements from England and a column of Loyalist militia organized by North Carolina Gov. Josiah Martin. The combined force would then move south to subdue Charleston and the rest of the Carolina coast.
As the 1,600 Tories began their march from present-day Fayetteville towards the sea in early February 1776, however, they met with resistance. The Patriots had formed the 1st North Carolina Regiment at Wilmington, which would later serve as a regular unit in Gen. George Washington’s army. Patriot militias had also formed in Wilmington, New Bern, and other communities. As the 1st North Carolina blocked one of the Tory routes to Wilmington, the Patriot militia blocked others. After some maneuvering, the Tories attacked the Patriots across the Moore’s Creek Bridge on February 27. The attack was a disaster, with nearly all of the Tories killed, wounded, or captured.
When British Gen. Henry Clinton arrived off the North Carolina coast, he found no Tory reinforcements. After landing a few foraging parties and skirmishing with the local militia, Clinton decided to take the British regulars south to attack Charleston, anyway. To even the odds a bit, the British added a new twist: diversionary attacks by Cherokees and other Indians to force Carolina and Georgia militiamen to march westward to the frontier rather than to the defense of Charleston.
But the Patriots were perfectly capable of walking and chewing tobacco at the same time. Some units marched south and east to Charleston. Other units marched north and west to form an army under Gen. Griffith Rutherford, including 19 companies of Mecklenburg County militia under the command of Col. Adam Alexander, one of the signers of the (disputed) Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence the previous year. On July 3, 1776, Gen. Rutherford and some of his forces reached McDowell’s Station and rescued the trapped settlers. As militia units continued to arrive in the area, the Cherokees decided to retreat westward to defend their villages.
By September 1, Rutherford had assembled about 2,500 men at what is now Old Fort, in McDowell County. Over the next few weeks they marched west, capturing Indians and Tories, destroying dozens of villages, and fighting at least two engagements against the Cherokees at Middle Town and Laurel Hill in present-day Jackson County. By September 26, the North Carolinians met up with a column of South Carolinians in what is now Cherokee County, at the extreme tip of the state. After briefly considering additional campaigns, the two Carolina generals decided they had accomplished enough and returned to their respective homes.
Both the British and Cherokees had gambled and lost. The Indian raids had been too little and too late to weaken the Patriots at Charleston, where the attempted British invasion was rebuffed. As for the Cherokees, they had sustained significant human and material losses, while hardening the hearts of some Patriot leaders who, like my 5th great-grandfather Adam Alexander, had previously been sympathetic to Indian concerns.
It’s not enough to fight courageously for a worthy cause. Prudence and wisdom matter, too, if your goal is to win.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and author of Our Best Foot Forward: An Investment Plan for North Carolina’s Economic Recovery.