Atlantis Online
March 28, 2024, 06:52:48 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Site provides evidence for ancient comet explosion
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/story/173177.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

Indian Settlement Saved With Land Trust Purchase - HISTORY

Pages: [1] 2   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Indian Settlement Saved With Land Trust Purchase - HISTORY  (Read 1415 times)
0 Members and 110 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« on: October 22, 2008, 11:54:46 am »









The Cherokee War, 1760-1762



By the end of January 1760, the threat of Indian attack had prompted many settlers and their families to gather at Fort Ninety Six for safety. On February 2, a patrol from the fort took two Cherokee warriors prisoner, and the following day approximately 40 Cherokees attacked the fort, ultimately suffering 2 casualties and burning all the buildings on the Gouedy plantation except the successfully defended fort before withdrawing. The fort was besieged again briefly one month later when about 250 Cherokee attacked the fort at Gouedy’s on March 3. Under near-constant gunfire for roughly 36 hours, the garrison inside the fort suffered only two wounded, while the Cherokee reportedly suffered six dead. Before they withdrew, the Cherokee destroyed as much as they could within two miles of Ninety Six, setting fire to buildings, ruining grain supplies, and killing livestock (Cann 1974:11, 1996:5).

Asking for assistance in the war against the Cherokee, the provincial government’s requests were answered with the arrival of over 1300 British regulars under the command of Colonel Archibald Montgomery in Charleston on April 5, 1760. Proceeding to Fort Prince George where he intended to launch his military campaign against the Overhill Cherokee, Montgomery and his regulars rested at Fort Ninety Six for four days in late May before completing the journey to Fort Prince George, leaving 50 men behind at Fort Ninety Six to protect his supply route. Montgomery’s dreams of a quick and decisive military campaign were short lived, however, as the Cherokee avoided any confrontations until June 24th, when they ambushed Montgomery and his men while enroute to attack Echoe. Seventeen British were killed and another 66 were wounded in the fracas, while the Cherokee reportedly lost 50 men (Cann 1974:12). Stinging over the loss of his men, and having destroyed the Cherokee towns of Echoe and Estatoe but without exacting any severe blows to the Cherokee, Montgomery considered the Indian campaign concluded and returned to New York.

Montgomery’s failure to engage the Cherokee further soon led to the fall of Fort Loudoun, which surrendered its forces on August 8, 1760, after a siege of several months reduced the garrison to near starvation. Allowed to withdraw from the fort under the terms of the surrender, the retreating British garrison was attacked less than 15 miles from the fort. Twenty-seven men and three women were killed (Ferris 1968:379), and Captain John Stuart and 26 men were captured and marched off to the Cherokee towns where some were tortured and killed while others were later ransomed to South Carolina and Virginia.

Montgomery’s failure to subdue the Cherokee necessitated a second British campaign against the Cherokee in 1761, this time led by Lt. Colonel James Grant. While Grant drilled and prepared his forces for the impending campaign at Charleston, Major William Moultrie and 220 soldiers were sent to Fort Ninety Six to establish an advance supply base for the army. Moultrie’s first order of business was to erect a new fort near old Fort Ninety Six for the use of Grant’s army. Rodeffer (1985:54-55) has suggested that the site of this new stockade, named Fort Middleton (Greene 1979:38), may have been at the juncture of the Keowee/Whitehall, Island Ford, and Charleston Roads, which was later chosen as the place to build Ninety Six Village. Moultrie then made some major structural modifications to the original 1759 fort, including enlarging the stockade by tearing down one side and extending it outward by 30 feet (to accommodate at least two new storehouses for provisions for Grant’s army).

Grant and his troops arrived at Ninety Six in mid-May and made final preparations for his campaign against the Cherokee. History repeated itself with only one minor engagement occurring early in the campaign near Cowhowee, when the Cherokee ambushed the British and inflicted a loss of 19 dead and 52 wounded upon Grant’s army before fleeing the scene of the battle. For the remainder of the campaign, Grant met virtually no opposition as he marched his troops from one abandoned village to the next, burning the houses and fields as they went. Deprived of their homes and crops, the Cherokee soon capitulated and sued for peace. The Cherokee were required to return all prisoners and property seized during the war, to allow the British to build forts on their territory, and were prohibited from journeying below Keowee without permission.

The victorious Carolinians were also able to force additional land concessions from the defeated Cherokee, who surrendered to the English all lands south of a straight line drawn between the Reedy and Savannah Rivers, a line which today serves as the boundary between nearby Abbeville and Anderson Counties (The Historic Group 1981:72). Now open to white settlement, the South Carolina frontier was flooded by immigrants, mostly of Scotch-Irish and German descent, who traveled overland along the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road from Pennsylvania and North Carolina as well as by sea through Charleston and thence inland by road.

Although the end of the Cherokee War and the subsequent land concessions made South Carolina’s high country safer for white settlement, there were still social and political problems facing those who settled the Carolina Piedmont. With no constabulary, local residents who were easy prey for outlaws, resorted to vigilante groups to mete out frontier justice until the South Carolina General Assembly finally provided the backcountry with law enforcement authority in 1769. This took the physical form of courthouses and jails to be built in each of seven judicial districts. The law authorizing these structures in the Ninety Six District specified that the buildings be made of wood (Cann 1974:18). The structures were finished in 1772 (Cann 1974:19) on two of several lots that had been set aside in 1769 by John Savage for the purpose of establishing a town to be named Ninety Six along the Charleston Road just north of the Great Survey Line that separated his 400 acres from Gouedy’s plantation (South 1971:53).

The remoteness and relatively low economic status of the majority of high country settlers also left most of the settlers in the Ninety Six area in the early 1770s feeling disenfranchised from the system of colonial government, whose control rested primarily in the hands of the wealthier low land bureaucrats. Unaffected by many of the economic and political concerns that confronted the low country inhabitants, such as the recent taxes levied on luxury goods (e.g., Townshend Duty Act of 1767 and Tea Act of 1773), the high country was far less receptive to the calls for independence from British rule that were now being circulated in Charleston and the colonies to the north. The dumping of tea into the harbor at Boston by the Sons of Liberty in defiance of the Tea Act, and Britain’s reprisals against the Bostonians as punishment, prompted the meeting of the First Continental Congress to solidify colonial opposition against Parliament’s actions, and direct the formation of a provincial congress in each of the colonies. When news of the skirmishes at Concord and Lexington reached South Carolina in June of 1775, the members of the South Carolina provincial congress met to form a provisional separatist government and began recruiting South Carolinians to the patriotic cause.
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.


Pages: [1] 2   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy