Did the South Win the Revolutionary War?

This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South, by Alan Pell Crawford (Alfred A. Knopf, 315 pp., $29.25)

I ndependence Day is a good day to consider how our independence was won. If you’re looking for a fresh read on that, I’ve just finished reading Alan Pell Crawford’s new book, This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South. The subtitle is a major exaggeration: Little in this book is new or untold, as is evident from Crawford’s nine-page bibliography. But if the story of how the events of 1780–81 in the Carolinas were crucial to the American victory in the Revolution is far from untold, it remains underappreciated. Crawford provides a vivid, page-turning account of those events, rich in memorable characters and dramatic scenes.

In the standard schoolboy narrative of the Revolution, the North takes the starring role. Things began in Boston, with the Massacre, the Tea Party, the Intolerable Acts, Lexington and Concord, and Bunker Hill. The war was then largely prosecuted in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania from 1776 to 1779, with famous battles at Long Island, Trenton, Saratoga, Brandywine, and Monmouth. The Declaration of Independence and the hard winter at Valley Forge came in Pennsylvania. Then, miraculously, the opportunity presented itself to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown, Va., and the war was decided in a fell swoop.

Virginia gets its supporting place in this narrative. By far the largest colony, and the second-largest in free white population, it provided crucial sectional solidarity with Massachusetts, lending Patrick Henry’s voice, Thomas Jefferson’s pen, and George Washington’s sword. It was the site of the grand finale in Yorktown.

All of this is true so far as it goes. But the South was in the fight before 1779, and in the two-year interval between Monmouth in mid 1779 and Yorktown in the fall of 1781, with the Revolution’s outcome very much in doubt, the balance turned on campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas, especially South Carolina. Waxhaws, Huck’s Defeat, Camden, Black Mingo, Kings Mountain, Blackstock’s Farm, Cowpens, the Race to the Dan, Pyle’s Massacre, Guilford Court House: These names should be familiar to every American student of the Revolution.

The great cinematic depiction of the Southern campaign, drawn from the real-life experiences of militia leaders such as Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion, was Mel Gibson’s 2000 film The Patriot. It’s a fine movie that captures the spirit of this part of the war, which often devolved into partisan savagery among neighbors. Its fictionalized portrayal of Banastre Tarleton is vividly embodied by Jason Isaacs. But The Patriot is still fiction, and no substitute for knowing what actually happened.

Crawford, the author of books such as the aging-Jefferson study Twilight at Monticello, aims to revive the story of the war in the South. As he notes in his introduction, the Civil War and the role of slavery in the South had a good deal to do with why commemoration of these battles and campaigns did not keep pace with those in the North. Most Americans outside of South Carolina today know Sumter, “the Gamecock,” more for the fort that was named in his honor and just completed in 1861.

There were other factors as well. Many of them were tiny engagements even by the standards of the war in the North — let alone compared with European wars of the day or battles in the 19th century. Washington was absent until Yorktown. Few of the figures of the Southern war went on to careers in politics (an exception being the teenage North Carolina errand-runner Andrew Jackson), and the commanders varied from one battle to the next. Some, like the militia leaders at Huck’s Defeat and King’s Mountain, played no great role before or after the battle. Nathanael Greene, the most prominent figure in the army in the campaign, died young of heat stroke before the Constitution was written. Johann de Kalb and Casimir Pulaski died in battle. Horatio Gates, the victor of Saratoga, had his career all but ended by the fiasco at Camden.

Crawford begins the book with de Kalb, an officer of German extraction and French loyalty, and offers portraits of many others on both sides as well, such as “Light Horse” Harry Lee (father of Robert E.), Tarleton, Greene, Gates, Marion, Sumter, Daniel Morgan, Henry and John Laurens, Jackson, Benjamin Lincoln, and Patrick Ferguson. Not until late in the book do Washington and Lafayette take center stage.

We meet Thomas Jefferson not as president, diplomat, or wordsmith, but as governor of Virginia in the midst of a war that tore back and forth through his state and threatened to capture Jefferson himself. In a foreshadowing of the relationship between Robert E. Lee’s army and the rest of the Confederate war effort, Jefferson had to tell Greene and Baron von Steuben that he could spare few of Virginia’s men to fight outside its borders.

The Southern campaign was a joint project of often-minuscule detachments of the Continental Army with the militia. Crawford vividly recounts the difficulty of making war with such heavy reliance upon militia, and the tactics and ruses necessary to accomplish that — including Greene’s Fabian tactics and Morgan’s innovative system of having militia fight in lines that fell back to draw in the British at Cowpens. We travel with Greene, who like Ulysses S. Grant would come to value his experience as a quartermaster in managing the challenges of supply. We witness the breathtaking bravery and endurance of hardship that characterized amateur soldiers and self-taught officers surviving bayonet charges, forced marches in the snow and blazing heat, wounds dressed without modern medicine, and all manner of untreatable diseases.

For all of the attention paid in histories of the region to the fighting spirit of the Scots-Irish, Crawford emphasizes the number of key patriots of French Huguenot descent. He also defends Gates, often an easy target for the disaster at Camden, but without acquitting the failures of strategy and intelligence that led to that catastrophe.

Crawford’s account of 1780–81 isn’t complete — and doesn’t pretend to be. With a focus on the war in the Carolinas and Virginia, he gives only a thumbnail summary of the global context that strained British capacity, and still less to the war in the West or the Spanish campaigns of Bernardo de Galvez. But he has plenty of ground to cover in 315 pages.

The Deep South didn’t win our independence alone. But neither did New England, the Middle States, or Virginia. It took an army that was continental and local militias that fought from Maine to Georgia to make America a nation.