Rangers William and Adrain are joined by Ranger Rob to learn about the Battle of Kings Mountain in October 1780.

William: Hey everyone and welcome to Southern War, a podcast about the Southern Theater of the American Revolution.

[sounds of musket shots, horses, men shouting]

William: I'm Ranger William from Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail.

Adrian: And I'm Ranger Adrian from Ninety Six National Historic Site. William: Together, we're going to explore some of the well known and not so known stories from the American Revolution here in the American South. Time to make the history.

William: Now, today we are joined by a special guest uh, Rob Holmes, Park Ranger from Kings Mountain National Military Park. Rob, thanks for joining us.

Rob: Yeah, no problem. Happy to be here.

William: So to kind of start things out for people who aren't familiar, maybe with the Battle of Kings Mountain, let's start with a little bit of geography. Where would you say Kings Mountain is located today, but also in this idea of the Southern Theater of the war? What were some landmarks in the Revolution that might help place this on the map?

Rob: Yeah, sure. So today in 21st century, we are right along the border between North and South Carolina about 40 miles, roughly west of Charlotte, not in North Carolina, as people often assume because of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, which is a town, city now, that was founded, founded long after the battle was fought here. So geographically I would call this area the Piedmont. Not quite all the way as far West as the the mountains, definitely not in the low country area. We're in that sort of transitional area geographically where you've got these old rolling hills that were carved by the various streams and rivers over the millennia.

Adrian: Alright. So what are some of the areas or landmarks that were there during the battle that people might recognize today? Is there anything?

Rob: During the battle, it's hard to say. Not a whole lot, quite frankly. This was an area that in the well in the terms of South Carolina's colonial history, had really been acquired fairly recently, at the time of the battle, around a generation or so earlier. There were some small scattered farmsteads and farmhouses, but not a whole lot of other major landmarks. Probably the most important thing that was here at that time was the road that ran through to what was then known as Charlottetown, today, of course, that being the city of Charlotte. Other than that, you had a few fords of the the rivers, but not a whole lot of other landmarks, unless you count the mountain itself.

Adrian: OK. So when was this? When in the war was this battle taking place?

Rob:So the Battle of Kings Mountain is fought in October, it's the 7th of October in 1780, so fairly later on in the war than most people think of. A lot of the times when we're thinking of the American Revolution, of course we know those dates like 1775 or 1776. Of course, being the battles of Lexington and Concord and then later on the Declaration of Independence. But this is a war that goes well beyond that. It doesn't officially end until 1783 so we're, in terms of the overall length of the war, fairly close to the middle but long after the period of time that most of us are familiar with.

Adrian: Awesome. So it was a pretty nice time of year, right?

Rob: Eh, it depends on what your definition of nice time of year is. It had rained the night before the battle, so it was probably fairly soggy and for some of the groups of the Patriot militia men who fought during the battle like the over the mountain men when they were making their way down here to the battle, they had actually crossed over snow covered mountains at the time. So this is a, it's a bit of a trek, the distance that they cover, so they're gonna go through a wide range of different seasonal weather experiences, shall we say. I believe it was also fair to say that it was probably much cooler at that time than it is today.

William: OK, Rob. So we we understand a little bit of kind of where we're talking about with the Battle of Kings Mountain. We're looking at October 7th, 1780. Who are gonna be some of the the the big figures, the big players involved in the story of your battle? Rob: Sure. So you've got the two different sides who are gonna fight. You've got the Loyalists and the Patriots. And for those of you who are not familiar with them, the Loyalists are, of course, or those colonial folks from the colonies who decided they wanted to remain loyal to the king. And then the Patriots, of course, are those from the colonies who wanted to get independence and create their own nation. So on the loyalist side, and probably the most famous participant in the battle, is their commander, and that's a major Patrick Ferguson. Some places you'll see in refer to as Colonel or Lieutenant Colonel. He had been promoted prior to the battle. But the new Commission hadn't received. He hadn't received that yet, so his official rank was still a major at the time. And he was really kind of a famous guy. He was known as the best marksman in the British Army. He had invented his own breechloading flintlock rifle by improving upon some existing technology to create a weapon that was capable of much higher rates of fire and much greater accuracy than your standard infantry weapons of the day. He had a long military career having served in Europe during the Seven Years War, that's the French and Indian War for us over here, he'd also served in the West Indies against a putting down an insurrection that had happened there, and then prior to the Battle of Kings Mountain, he had also taken part in the Battle of Brandywine, outside of Philadelphia in 1778. So he was probably the most famous individual on the field of battle. Amongst the Loyalists, there were a few other officers of note who are not nearly as well known as Ferguson is, but they've left us Diaries and letters and other records, so they're very key witnesses to the battle itself. I'm Speaking of the surgeon, Uzal Johnson, Captain Depeyster, who ended up being Ferguson's second in command, and then another individual named Alexander Chesney, who left a very detailed diary account of his time in the Southern campaign. Again, although not nearly as well known as Ferguson, these are important individuals on the loyalist side. Now, on the other side, you have the Patriots and the Patriots are going to have an army that consists of a number of different militia companies, formations that are all gonna come together. So you have kind of a “who's who” of various frontier militia commanders. Their overall commander is a guy by the name of William Campbell from Virginia. He is going to have a very active career both at Kings Mountain and then later on he will he will die he will succumb to a disease at the Battle of Yorktown. So he's gonna be an important individual. Then you've got a Colonel Sevier, Isaac Shelby, James Williams, Benjamin Cleveland all of these other very important commanders were gonna pay play their own role in the course of the battle, many of whom will have had long careers in the the frontier of the Carolinas as well as what's today, Tennessee, Kentucky, very active for a long time.

Adrian: So I know will and I have talked a little bit about some of the stuff leading up to the battle since he's, you know, representing the Overmountain Victory Trail, but can you tell us about some of the events that led up to this battle?

Robert: Sure, of course. Brief overview from the very beginning, of course. Charleston falls in spring late spring of 1780. There are other attempts. General Gates comes down with an second Continental Army and is decisively defeated at the Battle of Camden in August of 1780. And from that point on, organized resistance in South Carolina has pretty much collapsed. The Continental Army has been badly, badly being driven from the field, what's left of it is regrouping in Hillsborough in North Carolina. And there's not really any organized resistance left in South Carolina. So in response to this, any resistance to the British invasion, the British forces, is that at this point, going to rely on partisans on militiamen. So it becomes this guerilla conflict, and you've got very skilled famed leaders on both sides. You've got of course, for the Patriots Francis Marion, you've got a General Sumter. You've got other famous loyalists like Christian Huck, who's eventually defeated later on. But it's this very fierce, this very brutal partisan warfare. And the British very much have the upper hand because of their professional soldiers. They have to disperse their strength a little bit, but these professional soldiers do give them an edge and while they are able to hold this territory, Patrick Ferguson is made the inspector of militia and he is tasked with organizing the King's friends, the Loyalists, the Loyalists militia in South Carolina so that the professional British Army under Lord Cornwallis can begin marching north into North Carolina and from there into Virginia. And Ferguson is very successful in this, by all accounts. According to the returns, he's got some 4,000 men who are going to sign up under him. He has a forced directly under him that, depending on which source you look at, is gonna range somewhere between 900 to 1,100 men, which is a sizable force for the period. You'd be hard pressed outside of Charleston to find a lot of communities with populations, even that were much greater than 1,000 people. So this is a this is a large body of troops that he's moving along. And with Ferguson in the field with this strong body of loyalist militiamen, Cornwallis feels that he is secure enough to begin his push into North Carolina, and he sets up really a three pronged approach. He's got one wing of his army that's going to march to Wilmington, NC, to open up a line of communication to the sea. The Royal Navy is gonna be able to bring in supplies. Our, I should say our roads and our infrastructure back in 1780 were appalling where they existed so much easier for him to bring supplies into Wilmington rather than to try to bring them cross country from Charleston or from Camden even then. So Cornwallis himself will be marching to Charlottetown, which falls to him with some minor skirmishing, but not really much resistance on the part of the Patriots. And then Patrick Ferguson is sweeping up on his left, along the frontier. And Ferguson, he'd been having a frustrating summer, shall we say, trying to chase around these much smaller bands of Patriot militiamen. One of the things that comes up here that makes the story of the Battle of Kings Mountain so fascinating is that when the battle takes place, a good portion of the Patriot forces are not even really on the radar of the British. They're more focused on General Sumter and his men. He's the one who they see as as the big threat. He's active in the area south of Charlotte, the Waxhaws along that border area there, and he's the one that they're focusing on because he's the one who's the the greater threat to their supply lines and their lines of communication. They were not really expecting to get this huge response from the Backcountry militias and the the folks from the overmountain regions that they end up getting. And this is where the story gets kind of a little bit mythical, legendary, shall we say, depending on the version of events that you wanna get. There's a strong tradition that a frustrated Patrick Ferguson sends a letter to the frontier communities in the Overmountain regions, basically telling them to knock off their support for the rebellion and to get back in line, or he's going to come out to their communities and subject them to fire and the sword and, you know, burn them down and cause all sorts of devastation. And depending on whose accounts you read, it's unclear if that letter was actually sent or not. Uh, you know, it's a great story either way, but, nonetheless, however, they come about it, the folks from the Backcountry, the and the Overmountain regions well, they decide that they don't really like Ferguson and what he's been doing. They feel threatened by him and his presence, so they decide that they're gonna deal with him and a large body of these militiamen are gonna march down from all over the place, assemble a sizable force, and they're coming from everywhere. You've got contingents from Georgia. You've got contingents from Virginia, largest contingents, of course, coming from the Carolinas. And the most famous contingent being the over the mountain men from western North Carolina, western Virginia and what's today, Tennessee. Of course, like I said, the most famous participants, they're gonna account for about half of the Patriot troops that are gonna be involved in the actual battle itself. Some of those over the mountain men, the guys from Virginia, are going to march along a trail that's some 330 miles long. So they're coming from quite a long distance to give you an idea of just how serious they took the threat posed by Ferguson and his troops. Now in the 18th century, the sort of security keeping things secret, you know very hard to do much like today. So Ferguson becomes aware that there is a large rebel force out there somewhere. He doesn't know exactly where they are, but he knows they're out there somewhere.

Adrian: They don’t have GPS.

Rob: Yeah, right. Right. Exactly, exactly. So because of this threat, he begins moving his forces back towards Charlotte, and that's where Cornwallis is with the main British Army. And he's gonna follow the roads, such as they were. And those roads are gonna take him right by Kings Mountain, which was a convenient place for him. It was a high piece of ground. There were a couple of springs of fresh water easily available. He's right on the road. And he's about 40 miles away from Charlotte. Which is a good day or two ride or March, depending on how you're going to get here. So he's got a good line of communication and he is gonna put his troops on top of Kings Mountain there, set up his encampment. He'll send a message to Lord Cornwallis, asking Cornwallis to send him Light Infantry and dragoons. Those are cavalry men because he wants to fight. He wants to fight and win. He doesn't necessarily want to fight at Kings Mountain. And that's something that we deal with a lot of people ask, you know, why was the battle here? Neither side was really planning on fighting a battle at Kings Mountain. They didn't set out to do that, especially not for Patrick Ferguson. For him, this is just a convenient place to encamp and await reinforcements. He wanted to get those Light Infantry and those cavalry men so that he could then march out, face this rebel army, crush them and then use the Light Infantry and the cavalry to run them down to pursue them across hill and dale and utterly destroy this force. Now that's what Patrick Ferguson is doing. The militiamen are gonna have kind of an interesting journey as they are making their way down, eventually towards Kings Mountain. You've got other units and groups of them coming in and linking up. Umm, they make an attempt to get into contact with the Continental Army at Hillsborough. They're looking for somebody to take command. They're looking for a commissioned officer to take command. There was a lot of concern. You've got all of these colonels and other high-ranking officers together from different states. So it wasn't exactly clear cut in the Patriot army who amongst them should have had command. They don't get a Continental Army officer, so eventually they select William Campbell on the grounds that he's coming the furthest, he has the largest single body of troops under his command, and he's in Virginian, so they don't have to deal with any rivalry amongst the various commanders from North and South Carolina, possibly refusing to follow each other's orders out of personal grievance, ego, rivalry and things like that. So this is a very smart decision. They do almost get sidetracked at one point, there's some thought that Ferguson had actually gone down to Ninety Six, so they almost get diverted to go down there, though at the last minute they get actual intelligence that tells them that Ferguson is indeed on Kings Mountain. So they turn themselves around, march out after rather uncomfortable moment or day or so encamped at Cowpens. They get a picked force of around 900 to 1,000, every man who can be mounted, and from there they're going to March over to Kings Mountain where they will fight the battle.

Adrian: So I have a question. Why is it called Kings Mountain? Is it named for the king?

Rob: It's an excellent question, not really named for the king. As best as we can figure, best as anybody's been able to find out, it was a name for a guy whose last name was King, so no connection to any King George or King William, any of those early English monarchs. Just a local sort of landowner, frontiersman whose last name was King and decided that this was his mountain.

Adrian: OK, makes sense.

William: And little did he know the questions he would cause centuries later.

Rob: Indeed, indeed.

William: So talking about the Battle of Kings Mountain, you've got all these frontiersmen these patriot groups coming together pursuing Ferguson. They find him on Kings Mountain. They attack. Is there a good way to lay out how the battle happened? Being such a a brawl? Is there a good way to approach and examine the fighting and also, do we know if the Ferguson rifle saw use at the Battle of Kings Mountain?

Rob: So I'll deal with your second question first about the Ferguson rifle. And that really depends on a whole lot of factors on what you feel qualifies as acceptable evidence. Ferguson’s rifle is gonna be used during the Battle of Brandywine in 1778. Ferguson is himself wounded in that battle. His unit of riflemen, which was a sort of a temporary formation at that time, is broken up. Those men are sent back to their original units, and from that point it's very unclear what actually happens to the Ferguson rifles, whether they were returned into the Ordinance stores, whether the men who went back to their original units kept them or just what exactly happened to them. Uh, Ferguson probably had some of them with him himself as his personal weapons, but he had maybe 100 to 200 manufactured, so it's unclear what exactly happened to all of them. Now, in the after in the aftermath of the battle itself, we don't have any direct sources, no records, no returns of captured arms, anything like that where they list Ferguson rifles, okay. Nonetheless, there have been some folks who have looked at other pieces of evidence. Some bullets recovered from the battlefield, the the cock or the hammer from a flintlock firearm, both of which have been identified as being a bullet fired from a Ferguson and the cock or the hammer of a Ferguson rifle. To me, that evidence personally isn't the smoking gun, no pun intended, to say with any certainty that the Ferguson rifle was both at the battle and used at the battle. And I think that's an important distinction that needs to be made, because it's quite possible, and, I would argue, likely even, that Ferguson would have had some of his rifles amongst his baggage. Whether those rifles were issued and then fired in anger during the battle is a different issue. In terms of why there is no record of them after the battle itself, my feeling is that while the Ferguson rifle was known to some people, it was not as well known amongst the general populace then as perhaps it is today. So it's quite possible that if a Ferguson rifle was recovered by one of these frontiersmen from the back country who didn't know what it was, who didn't know how to operate it because it's not the most intuitive firearm for loading and firing, they might have just looked at it and gone “Ohh this is broken” or this doesn't work and trashed it, used it for different parts or something like that. So I've hedged my answer in as many different ways as possible to avoid committing to any specific answer on this. I'd very much like to think that it was here and that it may have been used, but if it was used, it was certainly not in great enough numbers to have made any significant or had any significant impact on the battle As your second question, uh, how can we think of, how do we approach the battle itself. So Ferguson and his men are gonna be encamped on top of Kings Mountain. They had not made any efforts to fortify their position, not really circling the wagons, digging trenches, creating fences and things like that. They had posted some sentries, but these sentries really didn't do a very good job of letting them know that this force of patriots, of frontiersmen was approaching them. The Patriots are gonna approach Kings Mountain from the West, from the direction roughly of Cowpens National Battlefield today. They're going to arrive at a spot roughly a mile, 3/4 of a mile away from Kings Mountain. They will dismount off their horses. A small number of them will be left behind to watch the horses to make sure they don't get away, and then they're going to split themselves into two columns. And the reason why they're going to do this is because they're looking to encircle Kings Mountain to make sure that Ferguson and his forces have no way of escaping back to Charlotte, back to Cornwallis, to a place where they can be safe. So when they do this, they, of course, they don't have cell phones. They don't have walkie talkies. They don't have digital watches or things like that. So how do you coordinate 1,000 men getting in line, getting in position and arriving at the same place at the same time? So when the fighting begins, there's a 15 minute interval roughly between the point where the fighting begins and when the entire Patriot force is in position to be able to engage Ferguson and his loyalists. So the first thing that happens, they come into contact with the pickets with Ferguson’s sentries. Most of them appear to have been taken out nearly instantaneously without being able to be warned though eventually one is able to give the alarm and alert Ferguson and the loyalists that the Patriots are here. And that's really the first instant that which Ferguson becomes aware that this patriot force is this close to him. You recall what I said before he knew they were somewhere out there, but he didn't know where they were. Communications were very poor, and the Patriots had also, quite frankly, done a very good job of intercepting all of the messengers and all of the scouts who had gone out or had been trying to get into communication with him. So on our battlefield, if you follow our trail at the highest point really on Kings Mountain, you've got sort of a monument that's known as the Centennial Monument. And this is a stepped shaped, shaped monument kind of a rough obelisk shape, and it's on this end of Kings Mountain where the fighting is gonna begin. That's where the Patriots are gonna first come into contact with Ferguson's loyalists. Well, it takes the rest of them who have to go further all the way to get around on the other side of the mountain and then engage Ferguson's troops and they have some difficulties with this. There's one contingent under a Major Winston who actually charges up the wrong hill. Uh, which you can see. It's right behind our visitor center. There's a false rise where it rises up. And if you're standing at our visitor center looking out there, it looks like, oh, yes, that's of course, that's where Kings Mountain goes up. But if you go up on the top of it, it then goes down on the other side before rising once again to Kings Mountain. So Major Winston's patriot militia, they charge up this rise thinking that they're getting up to where the Loyalists are, arrived at the top of it and then realize ohh no we have to go down and up again. So like I said there were some there were some difficulties with getting everybody into position.

William: I have always wondered where that ridge was that I've heard about this false attack, so thank you for laying that out.

Rob: Yeah. And of course, absolutely. That's one of my favorite tidbits from the battlefield. Now, Ferguson does respond with energy and decisiveness into this attack, getting his men together and organizing them to defend Kings Mountain as much as they possibly can. However, the speed of the Patriot attack and the suddenness really puts him on the back foot into what he can actually accomplish. Amongst Fergusons forces is a sort of semi, well, it's fair to call them in elite unit on for this battle. This was 120 provincials. Now one of the things that makes this battle unique is that the only British soldier involved in the battle is Patrick Ferguson. Almost everybody else is an American. They’re somebody from the colonies, either somebody who immigrated here or somebody who was born here. The provincials were colonists who had joined the British Army to serve as professional soldiers, not as militia, but as professional soldiers, and most of them are gonna come from Connecticut and New Jersey, New York. They're from the northeast. One of the disadvantages of being a provincial, a loyalist, is that you served at the pleasure of the king. So whereas the Patriot militiamen get to serve in their local communities, the provincials they go where the king tells them to do. So Ferguson takes these professional soldiers, he has them fix bayonets and charged down the side of Kings Mountain to try and drive off the Patriot militiamen. Now today to us in the 21st century, we would look at this and go wow, that's ridiculous. Of course, that wasn't going to work. However, we have to look back and put ourselves in the shoes of those soldiers in the 18th century. Another thing that makes the Battle of Kings Mountain unique is that the soldiers are using a very large proportion of flintlock rifles along with their flintlock muskets. Now a flintlock rifle is a firearm with spiral grooves inside the barrel. It allows that weapon to fire a projectile that's going to go further, faster and more accurately. Now, the downside of this is that a flintlock rifle is much more expensive to make. The wooden stock is a lot weaker. And it can take up to a full minute to reload. Now your flintlock musket, which is your standard infantry arm, fires a much larger projectile. We're talking 69 to 75 caliber projectiles, so a very big bullet. It's not rifled, it's smooth bore, so it doesn't have the same level of accuracy. It has a range of between 150 to 300 yards, though you're not really ever going to have a distance where you can see 300 yards in the woods to shoot at something very effectively, so even that advantage between the two is kind of negated. And with the flintlock musket you can, well a well-trained soldier is gonna be able to load and fire in approximately 20 seconds. So with the rifle you're talking a well aimed shot with greater range and accuracy being delivered once a minute as opposed to the flintlock musket where you've got three to four rounds with less range, less accuracy, but a much higher rate of fire. The crucial difference between the two is that the musket can be fitted with a bayonet, and the rifle cannot, and that might not seem like a big deal. But if you're taking a full minute to reload your weapon, well, I can cover a lot of ground running at you in a full minute, especially when I've got a 6-foot long spear and I'm running at you downhill. So most people are not going to stand and let somebody come running at them with a 6-foot long spear, so charging at them in this way was actually a very effective tactic to create panic disorder and drive the patriots away down from Kings Mountain. Now, in this instance it didn't work out quite so well. The Patriots were numerous enough, their lines were elastic enough that they ran away when the provincials charged down the hill down Kings Mountain at them, down a gully up a ravine on the other side, and kept going. And in the meantime, the other militias and the other Patriots who weren't running away well, they were taking shots at those provincials and dropping them, and the provincials would charge down Kings Mountain, drive the Patriots away. Then they'd have to struggle back up Kings Mountain reform themselves. Of course, the Patriots are gonna come right back up to where they were. The provincials would then turn around, be ordered to deliver another bayonet charge, and so on and so forth. And they would repeat this three or four times. And each time they repeat this endeavor, more and more of those provincials are going to be disabled. They're going to be killed. They're gonna be wounded, and they're going to be no longer able to participate in the fighting. And as this plays out, of course, the rest of the Patriot units are moving into position. They're completing their ring around Kings Mountain, and they're fighting their way up the side. And eventually the Patriot units under Shelby, Sevier and Campbell are gonna be able to gain the heights of Kings Mountain, which at one end is fairly high and then it slopes down a couple 100 feet towards the other end. And once the Patriots get up to that high point, they're going to be able to deliver not only enfilading fire, but also defilading fire, which means that the Loyalists are taking fire from all sides and from a raised position down onto them. And they're gonna force the loyalists down into the smaller and smaller area on the lower end of Kings Mountain. And as this happening, they’re becoming more disorganized, more and more of these units of Patriot militiamen are coming into the battle. They're able to get involved, get themselves into the fight, and all order begins to break down amongst the loyalists. And many of them at this point are starting to try and surrender, Patrick Ferguson is having none of this. He's knocking down their white flags. He's throwing everything he can to rally his men. Eventually, he sees the things are not going well. He gathers every one of his officers together with him. Everybody who's got a horse, he gets 10 men mounted on their horses and he leads a charge at the patriot lines. And there's some debate here what exactly he was trying to accomplish. And it depends on what type of man you think he was. Some people will tell you that he was trying to break through the patriot lines to escape, to avoid capture. Like I said, he was the most famous individual on the field of battle. He was very well known and it would have been a big blow to the British operations in the Carolinas if he was captured. Others will tell you that he was trying to break through the patriot lines to lead his men out, to cause a breakthrough so that they could escape, which is also plausible. A guy on a horse riding at you with a 3 foot long saber is a very intimidating thing, especially when there’s more than one of them charging at you downhill. Most people are not going to stand, uh, stand still and let a horse run them over. You have to get a lot of training in the 18th century, before you were a soldier who's willing to do that. And you also have to have bayonets, which were kind of an expensive little bit of extra equipment that a lot of these militiamen probably didn't have because, like I said, they were expensive. And if you had a rifle, well, you couldn't use one with your rifle anyway. So why would you bother having that? Regardless of what Ferguson's intentions were, he's unsuccessful. The Patriot forces draw a bead on him and he goes down under a blaze of fire. There's nine men who claim to have shot him. His body is found to have been struck by 7 musket balls, so he is just shot down, as are most of the officers and the other mounted individuals who were with him. And once Ferguson is killed in this way, his second in command, captain DePeyster, realizes that always lost, and he will attempt to surrender. It takes him a couple of tries to get his surrender accepted in the heat of battle. With all of these different Patriot units working together, the command and control becomes a little jumbled, and they do shoot quite a few of the Loyalists who are attempting to surrender before their officers gain control of them, at the end of the battle.

Adrian: Okay. So Rob, what was the landscape like at the time? Like where there was it field, was it trees, what was it?

Rob: Well, when you come and visit the park today, it's kind of interesting. In a lot of ways, the landscape is simultaneously both very much like what you're gonna see and also nothing at all like you're gonna see. And what I mean by that is that it was a forested wilderness area, but not the forest of the type that you're going to see here. In 1780 they had an old growth forest, so we're talking enormous trees, hundreds of years old, very thick. These trees are gonna be very spread apart. There's not going to be much at all in the way of underbrush. And they're going to be tall enough that they create sort of a canopy over the terrain. If you think of like a rainforest canopy. Same sort of idea, though of course not with all of the the jungle animals and things like that. The forest that you're gonna see today is a new growth forest. So there are a lot of trees. They’re much younger, they're much smaller and there's a lot of underbrush that wouldn't have been there at the time of the battle. And then, of course, you also have to get rid of the very nice, well-maintained roads. Nothing like that would have been here at the time of the battle.

William: And I understanding as well is that when you're looking at the... after the war history of the park, you saw attempted farming and logging? I mean, what kind of changes has the park undergone to result in this new forest?

Rob: Sure. Yeah. Like you said, there was logging, there was farming. It's an area that's very close to Charlotte, but an area that's not going to be developed in quite the same way. And part of that has to do with the battle itself and its aftermath. Those who were killed are not buried particularly well, and the local animals, the wolves, the hogs, the dogs, foxes get in amongst those dead bodies and as a result the area develops a reputation as someplace that you don't necessarily want to be for a while. So it's not until some 30 years later really that there's somebody who comes back to try and do something on the battle field. In the meantime, there are some other attempts. We have the Howser House, which is a stone farm house built in the mid 1790s to try and do some farming in the area, and there's a few other farms that were established after that. But mostly farming and I'm going to say smaller scale agriculture for the area, not the large, enormous plantations that you'd see in the low countries, the low country rather, much smaller agriculture than that.

William: So bringing us back to the Revolution, I'm talking about the the after-effects. What do you see happen because of this battle? When you're looking at the Southern Theater of the war, how does Kings Mountain, how does this death of Ferguson, how does this Patriot victory change anything?

Rob: Well, it's a turning point, to be sure, because it creates a threat to Cornwallis's rear in South Carolina, to his control over the region, to his lines of communication and to his supplies. And this forces him to turn back his attention to South Carolina when he had been hoping to march further north across North Carolina and to Virginia. The tide the momentum has turned and he has to deal with this. And a few months after the Battle of Kings Mountain, you of course have the Battle of Cowpens with Daniel Morgan and Tarleton after their march, which is really not too far away from Kings Mountain, both in terms of time it being in January and Kings Mountain being in October and in geography. It's probably only 40 or so miles apart from each other. I think as the crow flies. So it's another large battle that happens in the same area. In the aftermath of Kings Mountain, the Patriot forces the Patriot cause in South Carolina has caused has a renewed optimism. You know, maybe we can win. Maybe it's not over. We can still win these impressive battles. So there's a shift in peoples perception of how viable victory is, how viable resistance can be. How viable this idea of creating this new country is possibly gonna be. There are those who were maybe sympathetic to the loyalists who are now gonna rethink their position. There are those who are sympathetic to the Patriots, who are now gonna say, hey, no more fence sitting. Let's get involved. Let's get in there. Let's fight. Let's resist. So it turns the tide. In terms of the military strength of British forces and patriot forces, it probably doesn't change that calculus too much. But what it does change is people's perception, and that's going to be key. We all probably heard that tired phrase, perception is reality. So by changing the way in which people perceive the campaign and how it's going, it changes the whole nature of the conflict.

Adrian: So, I know you mentioned one thing, but what are some of your favorite details about the battle and what do you think people should really see when they visit the park today?

Rob: So I'm a big military history person, especially 18th century military history. So the things of the battle that I find that are most interesting is that it's an infantryman’s fight. There's no cavalry, there's no artillery involved. You're seeing bayonets. You're seeing a flintlock rifles. You're seeing flintlock muskets and all of that together in this way is kind of unusual. I also enjoy uh I think that the the way this battle goes down, it's sort of this classic 18th century frontier warfare style in which one force is surprised and surrounded, and then has to fight it out. And this is gonna happen time and time and time again, all throughout the colonial period and the period of the early Republic before the Civil War as well. And you'll see it in Ohio, in Pennsylvania at places like Saint Clair's defeat on the Wabash, the largest proportional defeat ever suffered by the US Army in the 1790s. You'll see the same thing at the Battle of Bushy Run in Pennsylvania, where a group of British Highlanders get surrounded by Pontiac’s Native Americans. And actually, in that instance, managed to successfully fight their way out with their bayonets. So the similarities between all of these other battles, I think, is really fascinating along with the military technology that's involved. As for what people should see, well, first and foremost, let me let me push our visitor center because it is fantastic. We have a wonderful movie with a great theater where you can go and you can sit down, some amazing exhibits in our museum. We actually have one of those Ferguson rifles on display. Uh, unclear if this was in any way associated with the Battle of Kings Mountain, but it is an officer style or N C O style Ferguson rifle, and there's only about six or seven of those in the United States that I'm aware of. There might be a couple over in the U K, but there's only a handful of them anywhere, and we have one right here, so that's super special and you definitely don't want to miss that. Then of course, there's the battlefield, and we have so many monuments and memorials out there for all of the various commanders of the militia units who fought. We have our Centennial marker that I mentioned earlier. In the site where the British soldiers, the British, the Loyalists surrender we have the US Monument, which is really kind of a scale replica of the Washington Monument in DC. And that's really cool to me because I used to work in Washington, DC, and the actual Washington Monument in DC, the capstone at the very top of it is this aluminum pyramid, because when they made it, aluminum was a precious metal. And if you look at the top of our monument, you can actually see where they put a little bit of bronze up there to simulate that aluminum cap on the actual Washington Monument, which is just fascinating to me, it's those attention to details. And then notably, back in 2016, we added an African American Patriots memorial on the battlefield to the three known African Americans who fought in the battle. There were five total, though the other two, we've not been able to successfully track down the the the sources to say with the level of certainty that we wish we were able to say, and then there were possibly as many as 12, so it's nice that we were finally able to give them the recognition they deserve. However, the one monument that you absolutely don't want to miss is Patrick Ferguson's grave. When Patrick Ferguson was killed at the end of the battle, the Loyalists his men buried him at the foot of Kings Mountain. And he was really the only individual killed in the battle who was given a proper burial. Everybody else is buried in a very rushed manner. So for all of the others, the Patriots and the Loyalists, we don't really know where their remains ended up. Patrick Ferguson's we do. And there is a nice stone marker on it that was put in place in 1930 and it also has a large pile of stones and this is known as a cairn and it's a Scottish tradition where you would honor an important individual by creating a large pile of rocks on top of their burial place. Course here in the Carolinas we have a slightly different tradition about that pile of rocks, which is that those rocks are there to make sure that Patrick Ferguson stays in place right down there where he's supposed to be.

William: Gotta love those stories. Umm, so if someone was wanting to kind of follow up, learn a little bit more information about the Battle of Kings Mountain, what are kind of your top, top three recommended sources?

Rob: My top three recommended sources, that's an excellent question. So most of them are ones that you're gonna be able to find in the bookstore, in the visitor center. We have one called “Before they were Heroes,” which is very long book, but it tells the story of the men who fought at Kings Mountain from before the war, before the war began, to the immediate aftermath of the war. And that's probably your standard, your best source. There's the classic Buchanan’s “Road to Guilford Courthouse.” Buchanan, of course, being the big eminent historian of the Southern campaign. Umm. So that's one of the standard ones that I'd highly recommend as well. There's also one that was put out by Rutledge, the publishing company, I think in 2019, but it covers both the Battle of Kings Mountain and Cowpens. So it's “The battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens.” But if you are a big into the military history aspect of it, as I am, you can just go to the US Army and they have put out a staff ride booklet that's only about 150 pages and will take you through the battle as it developed tactically from the perspective of somebody in the modern US armed forces. That one can, interesting, because you can purchase a copy of it and the US Army does also make it available in PDF format for free online.

William: Fantastic. Always good to know where we can get some more info. Thank you.

Rob: You're welcome.

[sound effects of muskets, drums, horses, and men shouting]

Adrian: Thanks Rob, for joining us today. That's going to conclude another episode of Southern War, a podcast about the Southern Theater of the American Revolution. To learn more about the American Revolution and our home National Park sites, check out www.nps.gov/N I S I for Ranger Adrian at Ninety Six National Historic Site, www.nps.gov/O V V I for Ranger William at Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail, and www.nps.gov/K I M O, for Ranger Rob at Kings Mountain National Military Park. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed it and that we will see you next time we revisit the Southern Theater of the American Revolution.

William: Thanks everyone. Bye.

Adrian: Bye.