Battle of Kings Mountain

Battle of Kings Mountain, battle in the American Revolution, fought on October 17, 1780, that saw an American victory over a larger loyalist detachment in South Carolina during the British campaign in the South. It was one of few battles of the Revolution fought solely between Americans.

In 1780, Sir Henry Clinton, the chief commander of British forces in North America, lay siege to Charleston, South Carolina, which surrendered to him on May 12. Clinton turned over command of his forces in the South to Major General Charles Cornwallis, who, on August 16, delivered a crushing defeat to General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden. Confident that he had neutralized his enemy, Cornwallis then decided to move his army against the Americans in North Carolina. He assigned Major Patrick Ferguson and his force of Loyalists to secure the region to the west of the mountains.

Ferguson was a competent British officer, familiar with the frontier style of warfare. At first Ferguson was successful in dispersing the numerous but uncoordinated rebel militia bands east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. However, when he threatened to cross west of the mountains and lay waste to the countryside of the "over-mountain men" living there who did not swear allegiance to the king, he reignited their resistance.

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A large number of American militia groups gathered under Colonel William Campbell and began searching for Ferguson and his 1,000 Loyalists. Concerned, Ferguson requested reinforcements from Cornwallis, writing, “Three or four hundred good soldiers, part dragoons, would finish the business.” He then set up camp on "Kings Mountain," a long, narrow, rocky ridge with wooded, boulder-strewn slopes, to await those reinforcements. He did not prepare anything more than rudimentary defensive positions, and he concentrated his men at either end of the hilltop. Campbell selected 900 of the best of the militia contingents then assembling at Cowpens, 35 miles distant, and marched them to Kings Mountain. There he divided his force into eight smaller groups, each under the command of its own colonel, to surround and attack the ridge. At about 3:00 in the afternoon, Campbell’s militiamen advanced up the ridge on all sides, firing their rifles.

When the Loyalists made bayonet counterattacks, the Americans withdrew in the rugged terrain, then returned to the attack, seizing the southwestern summit. Gradually the ring closed around Ferguson’s Loyalists until they were squeezed into a small area at the northeastern end of the ridge. Ferguson, the only British soldier present at the battle, was shot dead off his horse by at least eight musket balls as he tried to break out. A senior Loyalist officer then raised a surrender flag.

The American victory devastated Loyalist support in the South and stalled Cornwallis. Suffering from yellow fever, he withdrew his forces from Charlotte, North Carolina, to his winter camp at Winnsboro, South Carolina, not far from the site of his earlier victory at Camden. In December 1780 General Nathanael Greene arrived at Charlotte, which Cornwallis had called “a hornet’s nest of rebellion,” and assumed leadership of the Southern Department of the Continental Army, which he then led into South Carolina in pursuit of Cornwallis’s forces.

The Battle of Kings Mountain was the first of a series of setbacks that ended in the eventual collapse of the British campaign in the South, followed by the Battle of Cowpens and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Those losses marked the beginning of the end of Britain’s efforts to subdue and retain its American colonies. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson declared that Kings Mountain was “the turn of the tide of success.”

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The site of the battle is now the 4,000-acre Kings Mountain National Military Park, one of two devoted to the Revolutionary War.

Losses: American, 29 dead, 58 wounded; Loyalists, 250 dead, 163 wounded, 668 captured.