Michael Cecere - March to Independence

The Southern Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution

IT IS UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD THAT THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR in America began in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775, when the shot heard around the world triggered a bloody engagement between Massachusetts minutemen and British redcoats. The bloodshed at Lexington and Concordgoes the thinkingprompted the other American colonies to join Massachusetts in a long war for independence that initially centered in New England in 1775, then in the mid-Atlantic states from 1776 to 1779, and finally in the southern states from 1780-1781.

Setting aside the complex political issues of 1775, the progression of the Revolutionary War did, as far as large military engagements go, seem to unfold in a sort of regional pattern from the north to the south (with frequent conflict in the western frontier after 1775). However, by compartmentalizing the war into separate theaters of action during distinct periods of time, we tend to overlook the events that occurred in each region outside of their prescribed time period.

For instance, a search of scholarship on the Revolutionary War in the South will produce a number of fine works on the war in that region from 1778 (when the British captured Savannah) through 1781 (ending with Yorktown). Some focus on particular battles like Cowpensor Yorktown while others look at the war in general in the South or in a particular southern state for that time period (or a portion of that time period).

The consequence of placing so much attention on the war in the South from 1778 onward is that people assume that nothing happened in the southern states before 1778. There is a dearth of writing on the Revolutionary War in the South prior to 1778.

At the time of its occurrence, the American Revolution was not the singular movement coordinated by the Continental Congress, as it is often viewed, but rather thirteen separate revolutions within each rebellious colony. Circumstances, necessity, and choice ultimately brought the colonies closer together, but the realities of the age also meant that each colony was often isolated from the other at important times and in important ways. To better understand and appreciate the American Revolution, it is essential to understand what occurred in each individual American colony.

This work attempts to address the lack of attention on the southern colonies in the early part of the Revolutionary War by focusing on the significant events that occurred in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida during the sixteen months from the outbreak of war in April 1775 through the summer of 1776 when independence was declared. Readers will discover that the story of the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War in the southern colonies was a bit more eventful and complex than they realized.

VIRGINIA

In 1775 the population of Virginia, the largest of Britains North American colonies, numbered over half a million people, approximately 40 percent of whom were enslaved.

Virginias reliance on the production of tobacco influenced its development and settlement. Large tracts of cultivated land were necessary Within Williamsburg, however, assembled some of Americas greatest Revolutionary leaders: Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Peyton Randolph, George Mason, and Richard Henry Lee, just to name a few. It is impossible to overstate the contribution these Virginians made to the formation of the United States.

NORTH CAROLINA

North Carolinas population in 1775 was approximately 240,000, with about a quarter of the population enslaved. A large number of North Carolinians were settled in the interior counties of the colony by 1775 where cash crops were more difficult to grow and get to market. As a result, North Carolina was significantly less affluent than either Virginia or South Carolina, which was the chief exporter of the third most valuable colonial commodity, rice.

Like Virginia, there were no large settlements to speak of in North Carolina, although Wilmington was a busy port on the Cape Fear River and New Bern was the capital. A significant rift existed between those colonists who lived in the eastern part of the colony, some of whom were large land and slave owners, and those who lived a more subsistence lifestyle in the interior of the colony. In fact, in 1771, bloodshed erupted between North Carolinians when disgruntled colonists from the backcountry, dubbed regulators, rose up in opposition against corrupt local authorities. Governor William Tryon led militia from the eastern counties to confront the defiant regulators and crushed their ill-planned uprising.

Tryon moved on to govern New York, and most of the regulators were pardoned after pledging loyalty to the crown, but the animosity between eastern and western colonists in North Carolina remained just under the surface.

SOUTH CAROLINA

Over 150,000 people lived in South Carolina in 1775, well over half of whom were enslaved. South Carolina broke the pattern of most cash croporiented colonies by having the fourth largest city in the American colonies, Charlestown. It was through Charlestown that the very valuable commodities of South Carolina plantations and farms in the lowcountry, rice and indigo, were exported. The production of these exports was the result of the hard work of the colonys large and growing slave population, which easily surpassed the White population of South Carolina.

Reliance on the forced labor of over half the population made free, White South Carolinians vulnerable to, and hypervigilant toward, any possibility of a slave insurrection. This constant concern, and their economic dependence on trade with Great Britain, did not dampen South Carolinas determination to resist Parliaments unconstitutional policies toward the American colonies. This determination, however, was not shared by all free South Carolinians. Many of those who lived in the backcountry of South Carolina strongly resented the gentlemen planters of the lowcountry, who profited immensely from the cultivation of rice and indigo raised largely by slave labor and who held all of the political power in the colony. A regulator movement similar to that in North Carolina had also developed in South Carolina in the 1760s, and on the eve of the Revolutionary War the resentment and distrust of the lowcountry gentlemen that spawned this movement lingered among many colonists in the backcountry.