Ragged Heroes
The Overmountain Victory Celebration honors the march and the American victory at the Battle of King’s Mountain each year. Festivities take place in mid-September with volunteers and re-enactors sharing the story of the Overmountain Men, their families, and their crucial victory.
In the late summer of 1780, the fifth year of fighting between the Americans seeking independence and the British Empire, the American South seemed doomed to fall to British control.
Believing that rebellion had been crushed in the Carolinas, British general Sir Henry Clinton gave command of the region to General Cornwallis and returned north with the idea of crushing the Americans between his soldiers and those he had left with Cornwallis.
In response, the Continental Congress placed General Horatio Gates, the hero of Saratoga, in command of the American forces in the Carolinas.
This appointment proved disastrous: the British so badly crushed Gates and his army at Camden, South Carolina, that Gates fled ahead of his men at a breakneck pace to Charlotte, winning the opprobrium of his contemporaries.
Never had American prospects in the South seemed so low.
The British had destroyed Gates’ army. Cornwallis controlled most of South Carolina. North Carolina and Virginia seemed certain to be the next dominos to fall to the British troops.
Preparing to march north toward Maryland, Cornwallis appointed Major Patrick Ferguson to the command of 1,000 combatants, most of them Tory militia, to protect his left flank, the mountain counties of North Carolina and Virginia, and to sweep these places clean of American patriots
Ferguson was a competent soldier respected by his men and commanding officers. On this assignment, however, he made a fatal mistake.
He sent a written message to those in Western North Carolina and the settlers in Watauga, which would eventually become Tennessee, stating that unless they “desist from their opposition to the British arms and take protection under his standard, he would march his army over the mountains and hang their leader, and lay their country waste with fire and sword.”
His letter to Colonel Isaac Shelby had a less than desirable effect.
Rather than being cowed, Shelby and “Nolichucky Jack” Sevier, who would become the first governor of Tennessee, decided to put Ferguson out of commission before he could carry out his threat.
They raised a volunteer force of several hundred men, a scraggly, hardscrabble militia responsible for their own horses, weapons, and provisions.
The “Overmountain Men” crossed the Appalachians, joined other comrades from Western North Carolina and the hills of Virginia, and caught up with Ferguson and his Tories encamped at King’s Mountain.
Though Ferguson had trained his men to fight like British soldiers, forming in square and firing off their Brown Bess muskets in volleys, their tactics and their weapons proved inferior when the battle came on October 7.
The frontiersmen were using their long rifles, which had a greater range and in the hands of experts, as these men were. They proved accurate and deadly.
Several times the Americans charged up the heavily wooded slopes, shooting at the Tories stationed at the bare crest of the hill. Several times in turn the Tories repulsed them with bayonets, driving back their opponents, a tactic that cost them dearly when they themselves had to scramble back up the hill, peppered by the shots of the long rifles.
The battle lasted just over an hour.
The Overmountain Men and their comrades gained the top of the hill, shot down Ferguson, who refused to surrender, and won the field.
Nearly all of Ferguson’s forces were killed, wounded, or captured. In the aftermath of the conflict, the undisciplined Americans shot many Tories out of hand, overly excited by the fighting or taking deliberate revenge for earlier British atrocities under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton.
Though not as well known as some other engagements of the American Revolution, the Battle of King’s Mountain had enormous ramifications both for the American South and the war.
The win over the Tories greatly restored American confidence, just as an earlier American victory, Washington’s Christmas Eve attack on the Hessians at Trenton in 1776, had boosted morale.
Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt both pointed to the victory at King’s mountain as the turning point in the War for Independence.
Many writers and historians, including Wilma Dykeman and Sharyn McCrumb, have touted the achievements of these frontiersmen.
For the past twenty-five years the Overmountain Victory Celebration has also honored these heroes of the Revolution. During the festivities, which takes place this year in mid-September, volunteers and re-enactors share the story of the Overmountain Men, their families, and their crucial victory.
Learn more: facebook.com/OvermountainVictoryCelebration/