Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution

Though sometimes underestimated in standard histories, the American South was of critical importance as a theater of battle in the Revolutionary War. When the revolution broke out, historian Walter Edgar writes, South Carolina was far and away the richest of the American colonies. Charleston's wealth was more than six times that of Philadelphia, and its sparsely settled interior was a seemingly inexhaustible source of timber, cotton, and other prized goods. The war came early to this valuable terrain, first in the form of open combat between Whigs and Tories, then with the arrival of a large British task force that seized Charleston and other ports. As Edgar writes, the British and their loyalist allies then set about trying to tame the rebellious backcountry through a campaign of terror and atrocity so severe that, he maintains, leaders such as Lord Cornwallis and Banastre Tarleton deserve to be considered war criminals in the modern sense. Under their orders, civilians were assassinated and military prisoners summarily executed, farms and villages put to the torch, crops destroyed, and livestock slaughtered.

That campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, for instead of terrorizing the Scots- Irish settlers into submission, it galvanized resistance against British rule. That resistance, Walter Edgar concludes in this useful study, helped assure colonial independence. --Gregory McNamee