A Brief Look at North Carolina in the American Revolution

On the eve of the American Revolution, North Carolina was the fourth most populous American colony with 250,000 residents — 80,000 of whom were slaves — but was also one of the most geographically and culturally isolated. It was formally governed by royal governor Josiah Martin (1771-1776), but North Carolina patriots had begun to assume control over the colony’s daily affairs as early as 1774. Spurred by the outbreak of hostilities in Massachusetts in the spring of 1775 and the North Carolina Provincial Congress’s desire for independence, North Carolina’s delegates to the Continental Congress ― Joseph Hewes, William Hooper and John Penn ― joined their fellow delegates in voting for independence on July 2, 1776. North Carolina’s sizeable loyalist population, led by Scottish settlers, vehemently opposed the colony’s march toward independence, sometimes violently, as at the battles of Moores Creek Bridge and Ramsour’s Mill.

Clashes between local patriots and loyalists, as well as campaigns against the pro-British Cherokee Indians to the west, defined the war in North Carolina before British general Charles Cornwallis’ invasion of 1780-1781. Begun in the early summer of 1780, Cornwallis’ march north from Charleston, S.C., was intended to subdue the southern colonies and return them to royal control. The British campaign culminated in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse (March 15, 1781) in central North Carolina, where the American forces under Gen. Nathanael Greene inflicted heavy casualties. Cornwallis’ army staggered into Virginia, where it was ultimately defeated at Yorktown that fall. North Carolina’s Continental soldiers, some of whom did not return home until the fall of 1783, commemorated the achievement of independence by establishing the North Carolina Society of the Cincinnati — the 11th branch of the Society of the Cincinnati to be formed — in October 1783.

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