When We Were Greers, Part XV-B

by Glenn N. Holliman

The Battle of Kings Mountain, 
a Major Turning Point in the American Revolution

The Carolinas were in an uproar in 1780 as the British rolled up patriot militias in South Carolina and destroyed a Continental Army and it's commander General Gates at Camden. Irregular patriots - Francis Marion and Thomas Sumpter - led guerrilla bands to challenge the resupply trains of the Crown.  British Lt. General Earl Cornwallis's subordinates Tarelton and Fergueson were heavy handed in suppressing the rebellion - taking few prisoners. Major Ferguson enraged the frontier settlers, especially the "Watauga" mountain men when he threatened to burn all homes and farms if they gave opposition to the British forces.

The American "Over the Mountain Men" took the threats personally and mobilized their militia at Sycamore Shoals (now Elizabethton, Tennessee) and under Colonels Isaac Shelby and John Sevier poured through the gaps in the Appalachian mountains. In Wilkes County, nestled against the Tennessee line, one Colonel Ben Cleveland, a rotund and tough leader, called out the local militia yet again that summer. Captain Benjamin Greer, serving under Cleveland, and his soldiers mustered quickly and joined in the march that was to become on October 7, 1780 - the Battle of Kings Mountain!




On September 30, 1780, Greer and the North Carolinians  rendezvoused with Shelby and Sevier at Quaker Meadows in what is now Morganton, North Carolina .  These combined forces, joined by other militia including at least one Osborne relative of my family, began marching south where waited Major Patrick Ferguson and some 1,000 or so Tories and Americans who served in the British Army.  


If Ferguson could destroy the militia army, Georgia and the Carolinas would remain in British hands.  If not Cornwallis and his regulars would be isolated, surrounded by an increasing hostile population.  The Crown would be lost to the South, and quite possibly, finally, the multi-year attempt to quash the American rebellion. Much depended on the coming fight.


By October 3, 1780, the combined militia forces had advanced to Bedford Town, North Carolina where the patriot colonels believed Ferguson might be in waiting.  It was time to call the men to order and confront them with the reality of the coming fight.