The Backcountry Militia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rod Andrew
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The South ◽  
Royal Authority

This chapter covers the beginning of the American Revolution in the South Carolina backcountry and explains why many frontier people, especially Presbyterians, saw the rejection of royal authority not so much as rebellion, but rather as a bid to establish order and protect themselves from a corrupt royal government that allegedly was encouraging Cherokee attacks on white settlements. In this chapter, Pickens emerges as an important local militia leader and participates in several early campaigns and battles, including the first siege of Ninety Six and the Cherokee campaign of 1776, and narrowly escapes death and emerges as a hero in the “Ring Fight.”

“The rising glory of this continent”

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-248
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
New England ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
New South ◽  
The State ◽  
British Army ◽  
The South ◽  
State Constitution

While most Baptists ultimately supported the American Revolution, many approached the conflict with a certain ambivalence, especially in New England and Virginia, where many of the Patriot leaders had actively suppressed their religious freedoms. Oliver Hart enthusiastically backed the cause of liberty from the beginning. At age fifty-two he accepted an assignment from the South Carolina Council of Safety to join the Patriot leader William Henry Drayton and the Presbyterian William Tennent III on a recruiting mission into the Tory-infested Carolina backcountry. While Hart found this to be rugged and distressing work, the mission was successful overall. Hart used the occasion of the new South Carolina state constitution to broker something of a merger between the formerly estranged Regular and Separate Baptists of the state, believing that they could gain greater concessions for religious freedom if they displayed a unified front to the state. When the British Army invaded Charleston in 1780, Hart’s conspicuous patriotism marked him for reparations from the Crown, and he fled northward in the company of Edmund Botsford. He would never return to the South.

The Limitations of Enlightened Despotism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Joseph Ii

The forces of aristocracy, which in some countries in the 1780s prevailed over democratic movements, prevailed in others over monarchy itself. This chapter takes up a thread left hanging at the close of Chapter IV. It was shown there that, by the middle 1770s, or just before the American Revolution, the kings of France and of Sweden, and the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, had asserted royal authority and put the constituted bodies of their several realms under restraint. The following fifteen years made clear the limits beyond which enlightened despotism could not go. However held down, the constituted bodies—estates, diets, parlements, and the like—had strong powers of survival and resurgence. This chapter deals mainly with the Hapsburg monarchy under Joseph II and Leopold II, with observations, since not everything can be told, on Prussia, Sweden, and Russia.

The South Carolina Regulators. Richard Maxwell Brown

1964 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-454
Author(s):  
James Morton Smith
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
The South
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