The Overmountain Men
"An Event which was immediately productive of the worst Consequences to the King's affairs in South Carolina, and unhappily proved the first Link of a Chain of Evils that followed each other in regular Succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America."
-Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of British forces during the American Revolution
In September of 1780, a super hardcore Scottish officer named Patrick Ferguson put together an angry mob of pissed-off American loyalists, rampaged across the countryside in a swatch of flaming destruction, and then very publicly informed the colonists of the Southern colonies that if they dared to resist the might of the British Crown, he would "march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword."
The colonists responded with one of the most bizarre, mysterious, and badass military actions ever taken in the history of warfare – by organizing into the world's most heavily-armed Neighborhood Watch out of pissed-off bear-hunting frontiersmen, marching across the Appalachians, destroying Ferguson and his entire force in a single battle, and then marching back across the mountains and vanishing, never to be heard from again. Though the details are a little better now than they were at the time, to this day we still don’t really know who most of these guys were, how many of them were present at the battle, or what happend to them after the fighting ended. And because none of the soldiers involved in this conflict belonged to any organized army, combat regiment, or militia, we know them today only as The Overmountain Men. And their story is just as weird as you might imagine.
The story of the Overmountain Men begins with Major Patrick Ferguson of the 71st Highland Regiment of Foot. The son of a Scottish judge, "Bulldog" Ferguson was a battle-hardened veteran who had been forged in the fires of the Seven Years' War and the wars of British India and who generally got impatient any time he wasn't shooting dudes in the face or banging his sword against another man's skull. In 1777 he was transferred to the colonies and ordered to smash everyone's balls apart, and on his way out to the battlefield Ferguson spent his free time inventing a badass breech-loading rifle capable of firing about twice as fast as a normal Brown Bess flintlock musket. The British commander in the colonies, the Right Honorable Sir General Lord Sir Henry Clinton, Esquire, MP, KB, Etc., appointed Ferguson to lead a Special Forces sniper platoon armed with these new weapons, but unfortunately Fergie got his arm blown off at the Battle of Brandywine and only having one functioning humerus makes it kind of difficult to be a world-class rifle marksman. Ferguson got the arm amputated, spent his rehab time teaching himself to swordfight and fire pistols with his off-hand, and as soon as his wounds were healed he was right back out there grinding rebel brains into pudding under the hooves of his war horse.
Ferguson earned a pretty hardcore reputation at "the Incident at Little Egg Bottom", which is an admittedly-kind-of-adorable name for this one time when he bayonetted fifty of Casimir Pulaski's colonial hussars to death in their sleep and then set fire to an entire village on the New Jersey coast, and, throughout the war, Ferguson was known for being brave, ultra-daring, fearless, and completely ruthless to his enemies.
Maj. Patrick Ferguson, badass dude.
This reputation brought Bulldog Ferguson to the attention of Lord Cornwallis, the commander of British operations in the South, and in 1780 Ferguson was transferred south to join the war against the rebels down there. Cornwallis had secured Georgia and South Carolina, defeated the last major Colonial American army in the region in open combat, and was now moving up into North Carolina to try and break the back of the rebellion.
Well, one big problem for the Brits at this time was that you had a bunch of rebel patriots running around doing guerilla shit like Francis Marion and Mel Gibson in The Patriot, and the British not only had to face Colonial armies on the battlefield but they also had to quell the populace as well. Ferguson, the one-armed Scotsman with a reputation for headbutting his enemies into pulp, was exactly the kind of guy Cornwallis needed for the job. He appointed Ferguson in charge of quelling the population of South Carolina, and sent him on his way.
Maj. Patrick Ferguson immediately recruited a huge angry mob of American loyalists and began laying waste to the countryside.
Now, whenever you see pictures of Ferguson's forces, they're all wearing the British redcoats that we know and love, but in reality Ferguson himself was the only British soldier present at the Battle of King's Mountain – the rest of his men were all American Colonials who decided they'd rather fight for their King than join the rebellion. As a result, you end up with a LOT of real heinous shit going down – because the men in his command weren't professional soldiers, they were colonial provincials, and while I'm sure a lot of them really wanted to give their lives for King and Country there were also a lot of dudes who signed up just because they wanted to burn their asshole neighbor's house down and steal his TV. Ferguson by most accounts was a "total war" kind of guy who believed in burning the enemy's crops and means of production to keep them from maintaining their war effort, but he wasn't a murderous psychopathic fuck – though, unfortunately, his army ended up becoming more or less just an angry mob of dipshits who would pillage a town, hang everyone they didn't like, plunder the abandoned homes, and then burn the place to the ground. Awesome.
Ferguson, to his credit, initially attempted to discipline his men for hanging a bunch of civilians. But, of course, any time he tried to implement order his militia dudes would just desert him, and Ferguson needed the manpower so he couldn't afford to piss off his guys too much. Eventually he quit trying and just decided to lean in to it, using his new reputation as a terrifying Scottish Genghis Khan to issue a decree to all patriots in the southern colonies, as well as those across the Appalachians – If you defy me, I will murder you and your entire family and torch your cities into ash.
This… didn't go over well.
Even today, we don't know much about The Overmountain Men. We do know that they came from towns in the western parts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the present-day states of Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky (which didn't exist as colonies in the time).
We also know that they really didn't like what Patrick Ferguson was spinning.
When word got out about his actions, and his declaration, a call went out across the western towns and homesteads – any man willing to fight should grab his rifle and meet up at a place called Sycamore Shoals. We don't know how many men responded to the call, who they were, or where they came from, but we do know that a pretty large group of pissed-off frontiersmen, homesteaders, Indian fighters, and mountain men met up in western Tennessee, crossed 90 miles of mountain, rivers, and wildlands in 5 days (The walk looks pretty crazy in Google maps), and ended up outside King's Mountain, North Carolina on October 7, 1780.
Major Ferguson heard rumblings that these militias were organizing against him, and he wanted to lure them in to a big-ass fight where he could crush them all at once like a steamroller plowing over a painstakingly set up Axis and Allies board. So, he took his loyalist forces, about a thousand troops, and marched them to the top of a big forested hill called King's Mountain. He built some real shitty half-assed fortifications, set up his camp, and waited for the colonials to drop by and inform him that they were ready to be mutilated by bayonets.
On October 7, 1780, the colonials arrived. But they didn't form up and fight Real War the way Ferguson was hoping.
"Shout like hell and fight like devils!"
- William Campbell, Colonial militia
Ferguson had been expecting a reverse Bunker Hill – the rebels would form up into their shitty disorganized militia companies, charge uphill like morons, disintegrate the moment the first British volley hit them, and then they'd break and run and he'd get to practice his left-handed swordfighting by using Davy Crockett's spine and hamstrings as target practice.
But… this isn't what happened.
You see, the Colonials here weren't pro military, and they didn't even try to be. These were hardcore bearded buckskin-wearing, raccoon-skin-hat wilderness people who had spend their entire lives hunting bears with a flintlock and getting into gunfights with the Cherokee, and their style of battle wasn't going to translate well to fighting the King's Infantry. I mean, I made that Davy Crockett joke a couple sentences ago, but there's a non-zero chance that Davy Crockett was present at this battle for real. These guys were tough hunters, used to forest wilderness combat, and they weren't going to give Ferguson the satisfaction of a face-to-face battle. They ducked behind rocks, fired, used trees as cover, and sniped the Brits with deadly accuracy from their rifled muskets.
Ferguson not only couldn't figure out how many guys he was facing, but he also couldn't figure out WHERE they even were in the first place. He formed his armies up into rank-and-file, charged down hill with bayonets a half-dozen times, and then had to walk back up hill again when the frontiersmen slipped away into the forest. While bravely leading the final of these futile charges, Ferguson caught a bullet to the heart and died on the field.
The battle was over in a few hours. The British suffered 157 dead, 163 wounded, and 700 captured. The Overmountain Men claimed less than 30 KIA in the battle.
The Overmountain Men treated the wounded Brits, paroled the captives, hung nine of the Loyalists for various crimes they'd committed during their rampage, and then disbanded, never to be seen again.
There’s something just really awesome, weird, and poetic about the whole thing. This was just a group of ordinary guys — people with homes, and families, and farms or whatever, and when they heard that this army was going to come in and start fucking shit up, they formed just long up to deal with this Ferguson guy, fought him on their own terms, and then, once their job was done, they went home, content that the threat to patriot guerillas and the overmountain towns had been appropriately dealt with.
The battle, while a weird little one-off in the course of the American Revolution, actually ended up having long-reaching impact on the war, and the American Independence movement in general. It destroyed a unit of around a thousand men, and it convinced Cornwallis that the rebels weren’t done fighting yet. He pulled back on his raiding operations, consolidated, moved north to NC, and was defeated there. The British would lose control of South Carolina soon after, and would surrender at Yorktown less than a year later, ending the American Revolution.
Side note: One of the Overmountain Men commanders was a guy named John Sevier. After the Revolution, Sevier declared the Overmountain Towns a separate state, which he named the State of Franklin. He was tried and convicted of Treason for this, but instead of going to jail he ran for State Legislature, won, and then passed a law pardoning himself of Treason. He went on to become the first governor of Tennessee, a 3-time U.S. congressman, and once very nearly fought a duel with Andrew Jackson.
Links:
Journal of the American Revolution
Sources:
Alderman, Pat. The Overmountain Men. United States: Overmountain Press, 1986.
Draper, Lyman Copeland. King's Mountain and Its Heroes. United States: P. G. Thomson, 1881.
Dykeman, Wilma. The battle of Kings Mountain, 1780, with fire and sword. National Park Service, 1978.