The site of the October 7, 1780 battle carries faint echoes of a fateful day in the quest for American independence.
The 83-foot obelisk was erected in 1909.
It is quiet on the trail on this late afternoon. The only sounds are the rustle of the leaves in the trees, a few bird calls now and then and the cheerful chatter of a group of elementary school children. Their teachers, a few yards ahead of us, are leading the boys and girls up a gently sloping asphalt walkway at Kings Mountain National Military Park, which is just off Interstate 85 south of the North Carolina/South Carolina border.
There’s a visitor center with an informative video, a good stock of books and souvenirs and a pleasant and helpful staff. The visitor center also features an exhibit showing how this was once an old-growth forest with trees far thicker than anything you will see as you make the climb today.
You can find more imposing mountains but Kings Mountain—rising little more than 1,000 feet above sea level and prominent only compared to the rolling hills of the surrounding countryside—has its own special grandeur, owing to its importance in the founding of this nation.
Writer Alan Crawford stands beside the Col. Patrick Ferguson Monument.
It might be quiet on the mountain today, but it was noisy enough on the afternoon of October 7, 1780. That’s when a makeshift army of 1,000 or so supporters of independence attacked 1,200 loyalists who had staked out a position at the top of the mountain, in an unlikely but consequential battle that would, in significant ways, change the course of the American Revolution.
The 900 supporters of independence were, for the most part, “Overmountain Men,” who had marched from their small farms on the far side of the Blue Ridge, joined by maybe 100 Virginians and Carolinians from east of the Appalachians; the loyalists, of course, were Americans, too.
The only Brit in the battle was Major Patrick Ferguson, a Scotsman. This capable officer, after joining the army at 15, had risen through the ranks and distinguished himself for, among other accomplishments, inventing an impressively accurate rifle that, unfortunately for the redcoats, proved too expensive to be of much use in the war. Well-born and well-educated—the philosopher David Hume was a family friend—Ferguson was one of the most promising young men in the British army.
After the Revolutionary War had stalled in the North—the last major battle there was at Monmouth in June of 1778—the British high command had decided to take the war to the southern colonies where they believed great numbers of loyalists would fight the war for them. After raising his own troops, Ferguson had moved them to the western edges of the colonies to put down pockets of resistance. These troublesome colonists must “desist from their opposition to the British arms,” he announced. Should they refuse, he vowed to “march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword.”
The tough settlers on the far side of the Appalachians, who did not take kindly to such talk, included Isaac Shelby of Kentucky, later its first governor. Shelby and other local leaders raised their own troops, marched them over the Blue Ridge and decided to force the issue. Ferguson, however, was not worried.
“I arrived today at King’s Mountain,” he told Lord Cornwallis, “and have taken a post where I do not think I can be [defeated even by an enemy larger] than that against us.” He had established his position at the top of the mountain, with commanding views of the entire countryside around it. As the visitor today will see, the way to the top is rugged and forbidding, were it not for the asphalt walkway that exists today. There are boulders up and down the slopes.
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The plaque commemorates separatist victory.
Ferguson established his position on the flat and even mountaintop, his 17 wagons in an arc facing northeast, with his men around the perimeter, their muskets loaded and bayonets fixed. Informed of the loyalists’ whereabouts, Shelby and the other Overmountain Men had made their approach through the rain the night before, and at about a mile from the foot of Kings Mountain, hitched their horses. In the early afternoon of October 7, having encircled the mountain, they awaited the order to begin their ascent. Some had not slept in 36 hours.
“My brave fellows,” Benjamin Cleveland, one of the North Carolinians leading troops that day, told his men, “we have beat the Tories, and we can beat them again. They are all cowards; if they had the spirit of men they would join their fellow citizens in supporting the independence of their country.” They were to “fire as quick as you can,” Cleveland said. “…When you are engaged, you are not to wait for the command from me. I will show you by example how to fight: I can undertake no more. Every man must consider himself an officer, and act from his own judgment.”
Individual judgment was everything, since even determining who was friend or foe would not be easy. Except for Ferguson, of course, all the men in the fight were Americans, and none of them had uniforms. There were no “redcoats” to be seen and shot at. The loyalists were said to put evergreen sprigs in their hats, so some of the Overmountain Men put pieces of cloth or paper in theirs.
At about 2 p.m., they got the order to move and, with “Indian war-whoops” echoing through the woods, they picked their way up the slippery, rain-soaked ground. Shelby’s troops got to the top first, in part because the loyalists’ shots, fired downhill, often flew over the heads of their attackers.
The Hambright marker celebrates a colonel who commanded North Carolina troops.
Smoke soon settled over the entire scene, and, at the summit, gun butts, knives and tomahawks served as readily as muskets for weapons. Finding themselves surrounded, and running low on ammunition, Ferguson’s loyalists were driven back toward their wagons. Some, trying to surrender, were shot to death anyway. Ferguson himself was shot out of his saddle and died in the action.
It was all over in about an hour. When darkness fell, the survivors got such sleep as they could, “amid the dead and the groans of the dying,” as James Potter Collins, a North Carolina boy serving with the rebels, would recall. The only surgeon on the mountaintop that day, a loyalist from New Jersey, worked throughout the night, treating wounds and amputating arms and legs by candlelight.
The next day, Collins recalled, the “wives and children of the poor Tories came in, in great numbers. Their husbands, fathers, and brothers lay dead in heaps, while others lay wounded or dying.”
Burial of the dead “was badly done,” Collins said. “They were thrown into convenient piles and covered with old logs, the bark of old trees and rocks, [which did not prevent] them from becoming a prey to the beasts of the forest or the vultures of the air; and the wolves [later] became so plenty, that it was dangerous for anyone to be out at night for several miles around.”
Historians are always recalculating these numbers, but of the 1,100 loyalists in the fight, about 160 were killed and the same number so badly wounded that they could not be carried off the mountain. Almost 700 were taken prisoner. Of the 1,000 or so rebels who fought there, only about 30 were killed and some 65 wounded.
Mission accomplished, the Overmountain Men recrossed the mountains, returning to their farms and their families, leaving the rest of the war in the sure hands of men like George Washington, Nathanael Greene, Francis Marion and Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Marquis de Lafayette.
“No sooner had news of [Ferguson’s defeat] spread through the country,” Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in chief, would recall, “than multitudes of disaffected flew to arms from all parts and menaced every British post on both frontiers.”
Something the redcoats’ brain trust had not imagined had happened. Outnumbered and untrained volunteers—a “swarm of backwoodsmen,” as Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton of the British Legion called them—had soundly beaten well-disciplined, well-supplied Tories under one of Clinton and Cornwallis’ most experienced officers. In one afternoon, with momentum in the war shifting from the British to the rebellious colonists, a new chapter the American Revolution had opened.
October 5-6 is the next encampment weekend.
Ferguson was buried on the mountaintop, and a handsome monument—one of several as you approach the ridgetop—was erected in 1931 to mark the spot; a traditional Scottish stone burial mound, called a cairn, also commemorates his gravesite. Nearby is a Centennial Monument, dedicated when the park first opened in 1880, listing officers and some of the Virginians who died in the fighting. A U.S. Monument, designed by the New York firm of McKim, Mead and White, was erected by the federal government in 1909 at the site of Ferguson’s camp, where most of the loyalists surrendered.
A modest marker honors by name “three known African-American patriots and others who participated in the Battle of Kings Mountain.” Placed on October 7, 2016, it is the only marker installed in the park since 1949. Our understanding of our nation’s complicated past deepens as the years go by, and each time we visit these places, we should see them differently, as with fresh eyes.
The stillness of Kings Mountain, after all that happened here so long ago, elicits a special reverence. The “beasts of the forest,” as Collins called them—the wolves and the vultures—no longer menace the visitor, and except for the birds (and school children), there is not much in the way of wildlife to break the silence. But there are black butterflies—a species of swallowtail, apparently. They don’t make any noise, at least not audible to humans. They flit about in the Kings Mountain underbrush, which is almost too conveniently symbolic: Black butterflies, Wikipedia tells us, “represent the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.” That sounds about right. Look for them when you make your visit.
If You Go
The roots of the park reach back to 1815, when the first small marker was placed to commemorate the 1780 battle.
Kings Mountain National Military Park is in Upstate South Carolina, near Blacksburg.
The 1.5-mile self-guiding Battlefield Trail walking trail starts below the northern slope of the ridge, where a portion of the supporters of independence assaulted the ridge top. The trail then turns back and runs along the ridge where the Loyalist forces surrendered. The Centennial Monument, U.S. Monument and Ferguson’s Grave are key features along the trail.
The trail is foot travel only, but accommodates motorized wheelchairs.
The story above first appeared in our September / October 2024 issue. For more like it subscribe today or log in with your active BRC+ Membership. Thank you for your support!