The Revolutionary War battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina proved to be a stinging defeat in the British attempt to secure control of the Southern colonies.
How it ended
American victory. The fierce firefight at Kings Mountain pitted Loyalist militia elements under the command of British major Patrick Ferguson against 900 patriots. The British effort to secure Loyalist support in the South was a failure. Thomas Jefferson called the battle "The turn of the tide of success."
In context
The siege of Charleston in May 1780 was one of the worst American defeats of the Revolutionary War. Another British victory, in the Battle of Camden, followed in August 1780. British general Charles Lord Cornwallis dispatched Major Patrick Ferguson to North Carolina in early September 1780. Ferguson had two tasks: recruit members to fight for the Loyalist militia and protect the Cornwallis’s left flank as he attempted to move through the Carolinas.
Nicknamed Bull Dog by his men, Ferguson soon came up against the Overmountain men, residents of the Carolina Backcountry and the Appalachian mountain range, and from places that would later become the states of Tennessee and Kentucky. American cavalry commander “Light Horse” Harry Lee called them, “A race of hardy men who were familiar with the use of the horse and the rifle, stout, active, patient under privation, and brave.” To the British, however, they were “more savage than the Indians.” From the start Ferguson miscalculated his potential foes, brazenly issuing a proclamation for the local patriots to “desist from their opposition to British arms” or he would “march over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country to waste with fire and sword.” His scare tactics backfired.
On October 7, 1780, Ferguson and the Overmountain men met in a small but significant battle in the War for Independence. It took place on a rocky hilltop in Western South Carolina called Kings Mountain. The rout of the Loyalists there was the first major setback for Britain's southern strategy and started a chain of events that culminated in Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown.
