Forgotten freedom fighters

The approach of our nation’s semiquincentennial (250-year anniversary) will bring well-known images to mind: the Spirit of 1776, Washington crossing the Delaware, Valley Forge, embattled farmers at Lexington and Concord. Amateur historians may lecture about famous battles, but they aren’t likely to name King’s Mountain, Cowpens, or Guildford Courthouse, and that’s an oversight Alan Crawford aims to correct with This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South (Knopf, 382 pp.).

To judge by the extensive bibliography, the story isn’t exactly untold, but it’s often overlooked. By 1780 the conflict that began in New England had come to a stalemate in the mid-Atlantic states, where Gen. George Washington was wrangling the Continental Congress and ­facing down challenges to his leadership. Meanwhile the British high command, unsatisfied with its occupation of Philadelphia and New York, made another try for Charles Town (Charleston). They had failed to ­capture the city in 1776, but after a six-week siege in the spring of 1780, Charles Town collapsed, along with the American army defending it. Alarm raced through the Carolinas and Georgia. Washington put Horatio Gates (the “Hero of Saratoga”) in charge of a new southern army, which was ignominiously routed near Camden, S.C.

The Revolutionary War was in some respects a civil war, and that was especially true in the South where loyalists were on par with patriots. At King’s Mountain, the first major patriot victory in the South, all participants in the battle except the British commander were Americans. Bloody skirmishes at crossroads, farms, and mills characterized the southern theater, with a handful of set battles altering the calculations. It’s less a story of military strategy than of “fierce people” rising to the occasion. Even the British recognized that “it is by such skirmishes that the fate of America must necessarily be decided,” as London’s Annual Register reported during the campaign. “Such skirmishes” blazed a path to Yorktown and Cornwallis’ surrender on Oct. 19, 1781.

Nathanael Greene, who assumed command of the southern army after Gates failed, was probably the war’s greatest tactician and deserves to be better known. So do Daniel Morgan, Francis Marion, and Otho Holland Williams. The book charts the course of the campaign in almost overwhelming detail; more maps and a timeline would have been helpful. But readers should come to the end of this account with greater appreciation for these fierce, stubborn, determined Americans.