Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

CORNWALLIS ’ S INVASION OF NORTH CAROLINA , 1780

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immediately created a firestorm of American Militia activity. By 7 July, Colonel Lord Francis Rawdon, 25-year-old commander of the Volunteers of Ireland Provincial Regiment then in the Waxhaws region, ‘complained that rigid British measures regarding parole and neutrality had alienated inhabitants all along the frontier’. 15 Considering that a sizable minority or even a majority of the population wanted to remain neutral, the proclamation made everyone either a friend or foe of the Crown. Cornwallis’s commissary, Philadelphia Loyalist Charles Stedman, wrote that neutrals and the paroled were ‘very early disgusted by the proclamation of Clinton, which, without their consent, abrogated the paroles that had been granted, and, in one instant converted them into either loyal subjects or rebels’. 16 A study of Waxhaws residents during the war concluded that ‘two out of three declined to serve (the American cause) until Cornwallis marched into the backcountry in the Summer of 1780, when enlistments soared’. 17 Previously, most were ‘either neutral or Whig sympathizers who nonetheless hesitated to take up arms against the British’. 18 The proclamation pushed men like William Husbands of Anson County, North Carolina to violate his parole. Captured at Charles Town in May 1780, he was unsuccessfully recruited by ‘British officers who endeavoured to obtain recruits from amongst them for their own army’. 19 Shortly after being paroled, he re-joined the American Militia and was wounded in a skirmish at Polk’s Mill near Charlotte in October 1780. Cornwallis, in his correspondence and actions, believed military success would, for the most part, restore Crown political authority in the former colonies. There was some precedent for an aggressive military strategy. In 1776, after British tactical victories in New York, the newly-formed New Jersey state government collapsed, and the American Militia fled. Three thousand then took the British oath of allegiance and an improvised Loyalist militia was formed. 20 Whilst British battlefield success may have swayed or pressured some Northerners into acquiescence, for many Southerners it proved to have little, if not the opposite, effect. After the Battle of Camden (South Carolina) on 16 August 1780, Cornwallis bitterly complained of the failure of that victory to ‘penetrate into’ eastern South Carolina where American Militia under Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Marion had attacked Loyalists. 21 Within a few days, Cornwallis despatched Major James Wemyss of the 63rd Regiment to pursue Marion and punish those who 15 P.N. Moore, “The Local Origins of Allegiance in Revolutionary South Carolina: The Waxhaws as a Case Study,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine , vol. 107, no. 1, (January, 2006), p. 33. 16 C. Stedman, The History of the Origin, Progress, and Termination of the American War (2 vols, London: Printed for the Author), I, pp. 198-199. 17 Moore, “The Local Origins of Allegiance,” p. 32. 18 Ibid., p. 33. 19 US National Archives & Records Administration, Revolutionary War Pension Statements – See application of William Husbands, S31768 at https://revwarapps.org/ 20 Shy, A People Numerous and Armed, p. 225 . 21 Cornwallis to Clinton, 29 Aug. 1780, in I. Saberton (ed. and arr.), The Cornwallis Papers: The Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in The Southern Theatre of the American Revolutionary War , (6 vols, Uckfield, East Sussex: Naval & Military Press, 2010), hereinafter Cornwallis Papers , vol. II, p. 41.