Tortora, Daniel J.. Carolina in Crisis (pp. 129-130). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
77th Reg. of Foot Montgomerie's Highlanders
Royal Scots Regiment of Foot
Generally, Indians took male captives and tortured them when avenging a clansman’s death that was particularly heinous. Indians tied their enemies to a tall pole. The entire community contributed by poking, burning, beating, and eventually scalping and dismembering the captive. Cherokees believed that through torture, they drew power from an enemy and transferred it to themselves. The community-based nature of ritual torture shocked British observers, though they too used torture. [BULLSHIT]
MID-Feb. 1760 SITUATION
Along the entirety of the South Carolina border with the Cherokee, colonists were under attack and driven to abandon their lands and take refuge in the many communal forts that dotted the back-country.
The initial success of the Cherokee offensive and the continued Cherokee presence on the frontier triggered a massive refugee crisis. When the attacks abated, fear, destitution, and despair remained. Nowhere was the crisis worse than in South Carolina.
Settlers entrenched themselves in hastily constructed stockades “all filled with most wretched people, destitute of every thing.” At least thirty scattered backcountry fortifications accommodated more than 1,500 people.52 But when they fell ill of smallpox and measles and began to starve, the evacuees fled for communities closer to the coast. Hundreds of Scots-Irish crowded into the Presbyterian enclaves throughout the colony—Williamsburg, Stoney Creek, Jacksonboro, and the Waxhaws. Hundreds more Germans and Swiss from Saxe-Gotha and the Congarees fled to Ebenezer, Savannah, and Purrysburg. Others retreated, ironically, to Virginia, from where they had come just a few years earlier.
The Cherokees had pushed the frontier more than one hundred miles southeast. Reports placed Cherokee warriors near Orangeburg—173 miles from the Lower Towns, and just 76 miles from Charles Town.
Tortora, Daniel J.. Carolina in Crisis (p. 113). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
LYTTELTON
The public confidence that Lyttelton had once enjoyed turned to disdain. Lyttelton had unwisely “brought upon us a war,” Dr. Milligen, a surgeon in the Independents, recalled. The province, saddled with the costs of that campaign and plagued by smallpox, “was unable of itself to manage [that] War,” he continued. Lyttelton checked out of public life altogether by March 1760. He was, according to Alexander Garden, “embarrassed and taken up in settling his private affairs” before departing the province.60
But the governor’s departure did not quell the public critique. Lyttelton had, Garden lamented, “laid a design to conquer [the Cherokees] very ill, and executed it without judgment or discernment.” The doctor continued: “Never was there a man more outwitted; never was there a province more abused. We have lost our money, our friends, and our character. All a sacrifice to ambition and undiscerning pride.” Lyttelton’s mismanagement, Milligen and Garden noted, also triggered a financial crisis. To make matters worse, the province felt neglected by the metropole. “You will laugh at me for spending so much paper on politics,” Garden wrote to his friend John Ellis across the Atlantic. But “I wish they could be seriously thought of at home. War is at our door, and when I consider the general ignorance of our people of the country, where the seat of the war must be, I tremble,” he said.61
South Carolina needed British help. But for the Cherokee Indians, the spring campaigns brought optimism and relief. By following “Governor Lyttelton at the heels, with fire, sword, and devastation,” as Garden put it, the Cherokees returned home with scalps and adoptees.62 They regained their hunting grounds and drove back the South Carolina frontier. They began to restore their world and lifted spirits in the villages. And they did so in time for the spring planting to begin. Soldiers remained among them at Fort Loudoun and Fort Prince George. Grievances were still unresolved. But the time seemed right for a peaceful settlement. Unfortunately for the Indians it did not come. South Carolina authorities sought British troops instead of negotiations.
Tortora, Daniel J.. Carolina in Crisis (pp. 115-116). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
AMHERST ORDERS
Amherst promptly responded to Lyttelton’s panicked letters. The general dispatched 1,312 battle-tested British troops, flush with recent victories over the French in New York at Ticonderoga and Crown Point, to South Carolina. The troops included the 2nd Battalion of Royal Scots (the 1st Regiment), and Scottish Highlanders of the 77th Regiment, under Colonel Archibald Montgomery. The thirty-four-year-old Montgomery was charismatic and wildly popular with his troops.
Though a Lowland Scot, he “mixed much with the people,” spoke Gaelic, and had “a considerable dash of romantic enthusiasm in his composition,” one contemporary observer wrote. Suffering from rheumatism, Montgomery rarely wrote letters. He delegated much of the campaign’s logistics and correspondence to his opinionated and highhanded second, James Grant (now a lieutenant colonel).
Amherst ordered Montgomery to take to the offensive against the Cherokees, “by Destroying their Towns, and cutting up their Settlements.” Amherst granted Montgomery leeway to proceed in whatever manner “shall occurr best to You for the future Protection of the Colony, the Lives and properties of the Subjects, and the present punishment of those barbarian savages.” He instructed him not to remain in South Carolina unless absolutely necessary. With the British conquest of Canada planned, Montgomery’s troops would be needed to the north.6
Montgomery was skeptical of the South Carolina legislature’s expectations. The assemblymen “are for putting all the Cherokees to Death, or making Slaves of them,” he wrote. “Those Indians are Rogues, as they all are,” he continued. “But I fancy they have sometimes been hardly dealt by and if they would tell their own story I doubt Much if they are so much to blame as has been Represented by the People of this Province.” The colonel sympathized with the Cherokees, as Grant had at Shippensburg in 1758. Foreshadowing British sentiments in future years, Montgomery blamed the province for creating and exacerbating the crisis on the frontier. Moreover, he resented that that the province was diverting Crown resources to clean up a mess of its own making.7
To colonists, Cherokee resistance emboldened slaves and drew off militiamen from the province. It also disturbed the colony’s economy by halting the deerskin trade. By driving off backcountry settlers, it disrupted farming and ranching on the frontier. The settlers were becoming an increasingly indispensable cog in the provincial economy. They also buffered coastal elites against Indian attack and deterred runaway slaves and maroons. South Carolina’s lowcountry merchants and planters—who made up the provincial assembly—depended on British protection for safety and prosperity. . . .
CHARLESTON UNPREPARED WITH SUPPLIES FOR THE OFFENSIVE
Montgomery and Grant arrived in a tense environment. According to attorney and plantation manager Robert Raper, Montgomery vowed “that if the Governmt here don’t send them waggons immediately, he will reimbark for N. York so there is no hopes from the Ships of Rice Rising.” He not only would withdraw the troops, but he would hurt the planters and merchants, too. Only through threats and coercion did Montgomery and Grant secure the carriages, wagons, and supplies they needed for the campaign.
CAMPAIGN
They marched on April 24 from Moncks Corner, “not very well satisfied on account of Government assistance being very tardy,” Raper reported. Montgomery’s army did not reach the Congarees until May 1. From May 1 to May 9, peace-seeking Indian emissaries daily arrived near Fort Prince George from the Overhills. . . .
-- AT 96
Montgomery rendezvoused at the Congarees with a meager detachment of provincial soldiers and rangers. On May 17, after a soggy weeklong journey his army spotted the stockade at Ninety Six “and a great number of miserable people, chiefly women and children, cooped up in it,” one soldier wrote.12
. . . The ragtag [provincial] army was now under Captain John Morrison of Amelia Township and his second, Lieutenant Patrick Calhoun of Long Canes. Montgomery grumbled that Morrison and Calhoun had “about eighty [provincials], the half of those good for nothing.” In fact, he decided, “We have not a single man with us that is of any consequence in the Provincials.”13
On May 28, the troops left Fort Ninety Six. The army now consisted of over 1,700 men, including the provincials, 300 provincial rangers, 40 Catawbas, and packhorsemen and guides. Montgomery intended “to burn a few Indian Towns and Punish some of the Most guilty, and make A treaty with them.”
-- AT THE LOWER TOWNS
On June 1, they reached the Lower Towns. The colonel left a small detachment to guard the cattle and carriages. Then he led his men on a thirty-six-hour rampage.14 The army stormed through Little Keowee, bayoneting Cherokee men, seizing Indian women and children, and liberating captives. Cherokee defenders, caught by surprise, managed to kill three privates and wounded four.15 The troops pressed on, burning “every house and town in the Lower nation,” Grant reported. The next stop was Estatoe. Those “who had not time to escape, were killed,” Grant added. “I know for certain,” he continued, that some Cherokees “perished in the flames.”
Indeed, “The surprise was compleat,” a soldier wrote, “and the Indians so terrified” that they offered but “trifling” resistance. Cherokees killed just three; most of the Indians watched helplessly from the mountaintops as flames consumed ammunition and “astonishing” storehouses of corn and enveloped Cherokee homes full of wampum, clothes, skins, and other items. Toxaway, Quaratchee, and the newly fortified village of Conasatchee were razed. Then, the army returned to Fort Prince George, its mission accomplished.16
More than fifty Cherokees lost their lives in thirty-six hours. Thirty to thirty-five were British prisoners. The Cherokees “are in our power,” Grant wrote, and “we are ready to give them peace.” The British officers released Tistoe and the Old Warrior of Estatoe with letters to the Middle and Overhill Towns, pledging to destroy them “if they did not acquiesce.” They also sent an express to Captain Demere urging him to send Attakullakulla and John Stuart to negotiate. Edmond Atkin prepared for parleys at the fort. Soldier morale ran high. Many observers in Charles Town, however, thought that Montgomery should push further and take more vengeance.17
By the time the troops returned to Fort Prince George, Lieutenant Governor Bull had already forwarded Montgomery the peace terms proposed by the South Carolina Council. They called for the execution of “the principal incendiaries” of the Cherokees, among them Seroweh. They required the Cherokees to deliver at least five “of the sons of the principal headmen of the Cherokee nation not under 20 years of age” to be held as hostages in Charles Town for “one year at least,” until they had fully proven “their Loyalty and Subjection to His Majesty.” The Cherokees were to deliver “All Prisoners” and “all the Frenchmen.” Only then could negotiations begin in Charles Town between the governor and forty or fifty headmen “chosen & regularly Deputed by the whole Nation.” Then Bull and the council would restore the trade on the same footing as before the war started.18
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cherokee villagers refused to treat for peace. The terms were far too harsh. The idea of hostages was as incomprehensible to them in 1760 as it was the year before. As Montgomery wrote, “The unlucky affair of Hostages … not only prolongs the war, but in some measures makes a Peace impracticable.” As Grant put it, “those savages cannot be convinced that a white man is honest.” Fort Loudoun’s fall seemed imminent. Only Tomotley, Attakullakulla’s hometown, stood for peace.19
The families of the dead Lower Townsmen demanded revenge. Warriors attacked rangers, packhorsemen, and soldiers. They killed four, wounded five, and captured one. As a sign of good faith, Montgomery released four more of the Cherokee hostages at the fort, including the Raven of Estatoe. The Cherokees rebuffed Montgomery’s overtures and prepared to repulse Montgomery’s likely invasion.20 Peace looked unlikely, so Montgomery planned to invade the Middle Towns. From Mount Vernon, Virginia, the retired colonel George Washington expressed doubts about the prospects of the enterprise. Montgomery should “be wary,” he said; “he has a crafty, Subtil Enemy to deal with that may give him most trouble when he least expects it.”21
Short on guides and scouts and low on provisions, Montgomery had little chance of reaching Fort Loudoun. But the soldiers at Fort Loudoun and the white observers in coastal South Carolina expected him to do so. Vexed by an uncooperative assembly, a meager South Carolina provincial regiment, and numerous delays, Montgomery wished to return to the North. “I long much to get out of this Indian War and to Return to the Army,” he wrote to Amherst.22
VIRGINIA & NC
Amherst expected Virginia and North Carolina troops to invade the Overhills from the northeast and lift the siege of Fort Loudoun. But both failed to mobilize quickly enough. Fauquier called on a reluctant Colonel William Byrd III to lead the enterprise. Byrd called the plan “ill-concerted.” It took the entire month of June for the Virginia Burgesses to recruit, clothe, arm, and supply soldiers for the expedition. And no one expected much from cash-poor and politically contentious North Carolina.
CREEKS
On May 14, warriors in several Lower Creek towns killed fifteen white traders. Word reached Charles Town on May 30, sparking fear that the Creeks would join the Cherokees in an offensive against the southeastern British frontier. Bull prepared to lead an army against the Creeks. He placed half of the militia on marching orders. He ordered Major Lachlan Shaw to abandon Fort Moore and to reinforce Fort Augusta. The Cherokee offensive had made South Carolina’s military situation desperate.25 Though no Anglo-Creek rift actually took place, the specter of a war with Creek Indians still loomed in the minds of lowcountry elites. A strong show of force by Montgomery and Grant could “ma[k]e an impression on the Creeks.” . . .
As Montgomery marched toward the frontier, news of a massive slave uprising in Jamaica reached Charles Town. The rebellion became known as Tackey’s War. Could something similar also happen in South Carolina? Black colonists surely hearkened to the possibility. If the Cherokees were “exterminated,” a vast, mountainous territory beckoned anyone who dared slip the bonds of slavery. “Those fertile Vallies, surrounded by Mountains,” Lieutenant Governor Bull opined, “afford a secure and plentiful Refuge to the run away Negroes from this Province and Virginia, who might be more troublesome and more difficult to be reduced than the Negroes in the Mountains of Jamaica.” The construction of remote communities by runaways, or so-called maroons, had done much to fuel the Jamaican Jamaican rebellion. And it was a recurring dream for South Carolina slaves. [REALLY?? AUTHORITY??]
Bull hoped merely to “chastise” the Cherokees, believing that they “should be received into our favour again.” He hoped that if he accomplished his goals, marronage, and African American resistance in general, would wane. Meanwhile, to avoid heightening white fear and black resolve, the Gazette omitted “any Accounts of Insurrections” from Jamaica.27
Back in the Overhills at Fort Loudoun, Cherokee women continued to procure food and intelligence to protect their white husbands. Attakullakulla still faced frequent death threats. He occasionally ventured out to find provisions and collect intelligence. But “the Indians hide every thing from me, & say that I am the white people’s Friend.” Women swayed public opinion in Toqua and Tomotley, but the other Overhill Towns supported the ongoing siege.28 To seek revenge for the new hostage crisis at Fort Prince George, a party of Overhills came to Fort Loudoun on June 3. Some Cherokee women informed the soldiers of a possible attempt “to surprise our horse-Guard.” The warriors then hid in the bushes. When Lieutenant Maurice Anderson of the Independent Companies and packhorseman Thomas Smith “walked not about 50 yards,” Stuart recalled, “they killed them both Dead, Scalped and mangled them.” Fifty soldiers “Sallied out” but retreated hastily when they found the Cherokees “very numerous.” The only casualty was a soldier “shot thro’ the arm.”
Attakullakulla left the fort and followed the warriors back to Tomotley. In that village’s townhouse, risking his life, he begged them to cease hostilities, reported Captain John Stuart. But “they Insulted” and taunted the peace-minded Cherokee, asking “where the Army was he had sent for.” And they “wanted to see how he would cry for his Friend,” the now- dead Maurice Anderson. Attakullakulla “boldly” shouted back, Stuart noted, that the warriors were cowards for killing “a man who had allways been good and kind to them.” The headman returned to Fort Loudoun, where he informed Stuart of what happened and confessed that he longed “anxiously” for Montgomery’s arrival.
-- FORT PRINCE GEORGE TO BATTLE
. . . Early on June 24, Montgomery’s army departed Fort Prince George. Over the next two days, it traversed dangerous mountain passes. On June 26 the army crossed what is today called Rabun Gap and reached the Dividings and camped for the night where the trail forked. One treacherous road led west to the Valley Towns; the other followed the Little Tennessee River north to the Middle Towns. At 4:00 A.M. on June 27, the troops marched again. Echoe, the southernmost village in the Middle Towns, lay eighteen miles north.
Echoe was a mother town, one of the original seven Cherokee settlements in the Southeast. As such, it was also place of refuge and of peace. That was about to change.
Six miles south of Echoe, the river takes a sharp, horseshoe turn to the right. The trail follows it. Here, at a narrow pinch point, on the outskirts of Tessentee Old Town, 630 Cherokee warriors awaited the invaders. Some of the warriors lay in a brushy area to the east, “so thick that one could scarce see three yards distance in some places.” To the west was a steep mountain. The trail was mucky. Lower and Middle Townsmen made up most of the force. According to Montgomery’s guides, a handful of Creeks and Choctaws were there as well.
It was a remarkable moment: a bold statement of Cherokee unity and resolve against an invading force. Seroweh, the Raven of Estatoe, and Tistoe of Keowee led the army. Each had already figured prominently in the events of 1760. It would not be, as people might expect, an unorganized free-for-all.33
At 9:00 or 10:00 A.M., Cherokees ambushed Montgomery’s army. From the cover of the brushy thicket, Cherokees opened fire on an advanced guard of two dozen South Carolina troops. Provincial commander Captain John Morrison fell instantly, and his men retreated to the main body. Then, they and the British troops charged forward into a shower of Cherokee bullets. Several redcoats fell dead or wounded. Heavy firing and hand-to-hand combat ensued.
From the steep cliff to the west, Indians fired down on the invaders who tried to push north through the narrow pass. Montgomery’s men carried makeshift carbines, “Brown Bess” muskets cut down to reduce their length and weight. The Cherokees’ rifles shot farther than the redcoats’ muskets, so they inflicted heavy casualties. While British troops flanked the Cherokees and gained the hilly ground, some of the Indians escaped. They would merely regroup later. In fact, a few miles north, the Indians reappeared and fired across the river from a hilly savannah. Both armies then faced each other and fired repeatedly as Montgomery drove his drawn-out column toward Echoe.
Montgomery’s men, in moving rapidly, attempted to prevent the Cherokees from flanking them. The army was soon spread out over several miles.34 The fighting lasted four or five hours. Seroweh directed the Cherokee assault, giving commands in his distinctive voice. He urged his men to “fight strong.”
. . . When the first of Montgomery’s men reached Echoe village at dusk, Cherokees began to fire at the baggage train, cattle, and packhorsemen at the place where the river first begins to turn—six miles south.36 Cherokee veterans of the British campaigns to the north knew how dependent European armies were on cattle and supplies. As unarmed packhorsemen and slaves scattered, Cherokees attacked “from all quarters.”
In constant motion, the Indians ran through the woods. They fired from the cover of bushes and trees, “in their usual way,” attempting to envelop the soldiers. The British, meanwhile, lined up in squares and fought in platoons. The Cherokees later informed a white trader that the troops held rank “with uncommon steadiness and resolution.” But “instead of being intimidated,” he continued, the Indians “were encouraged, and shot down the men (as they express it) like turkies.” The Cherokees killed dozens of horses. They shot through bags of flour. Redcoat reinforcements relieved the beleaguered rear guard, forcing the Cherokees to withdraw. British troops buried the dead under a full moon. Back at Echoe, the soldiers feared that if they entered the Cherokee huts, they would catch smallpox. So they stripped wood off Cherokee houses and made shelters. They nursed the dead.
The last of Montgomery’s Montgomery’s army limped into Echoe as the sun rose the next morning.37 Montgomery and Grant took stock of their losses. Nineteen troops and some packhorsemen and rangers lay dead. Sixty-six were wounded, some with broken femurs and others with traumatic brain injuries.38 Fifty Cherokees lost their lives, but only a few were wounded.39 The following day, British troops nursed the wounded. Cherokees interred their dead—and they exhumed and mutilated the British dead. At 5:00 P.M., Cherokee warriors fired on the camp from the hills surrounding Echoe. They wounded two or three soldiers, and then withdrew unscathed when a large detachment of Montgomery’s Highlanders engaged them.40 After this new Cherokee attack, the officers debated their options. They had traveled just sixty miles from Fort Prince George. Fort Loudoun lay ninety treacherous miles to the northwest. All agreed that with no British post in the Middle Towns, it would be “inhumane to Abandon” the wounded. Yet, they did not consider building a post. With so many horses killed and so much flour destroyed, the redcoats deemed it “impossible to Proceed.” As one provincial put it, “we had not force enough to attempt the relief of fort Loudoun.” In fact, “we must have lost Men in getting to it,” Montgomery concluded. Not only had Cherokee resistance exceeded the redcoats’ expectations. The Cherokee assault on the rear guard had proven decisive. Montgomery opted to leave for New York. “Tis impossible,” he wrote to General Amherst, “to extirpate” the Cherokees, “and they will not treat with us for fear of being made Prisoners.” Grant echoed Montgomery’s sentiments in a letter to Lieutenant Governor Bull. Yet he rather dubiously boasted that “we have succeeded in every thing we have attempted.” To prevent uproar in Charles Town, Bull suppressed one of Grant’s letters.
Montgomery scuttled flour and corn into the river to free up horses to carry the wounded. Then, leaving campfires in the village burning, he ordered a silent midnight retreat. Cherokees had scored a stunning victory. And they had saved the Middle Towns—and the smallpox-weakened residents and refugees in them—from annihilation. The dispirited army trudged over the battlefield, encountering the disinterred, scalped, stripped, and mutilated bodies of Captain Manly Williams of the Royal Scots, and others. The men marched twenty-five miles to War-Woman’s Creek, where they camped for the night.
Cherokees waited, too, intending to attack the next morning at a river crossing half a mile to the south. Just after the troops began their march, fifty Highlander flankers led by Montgomery’s cousin, Lieutenant Hugh Montgomery, spotted sixty Cherokees camped on a hill top. The Highlanders opened fire. More soldiers emptied a volley of shots into a group of Indians perched on another hill. The Cherokees dispersed with several dead. Cherokees then attacked the rear of the army as it forded the crossing. One Highlander was killed and another was wounded. British estimates placed the Cherokee dead at “at least A Dozen” that day. Given these casualties, and a paucity of ammunition, the Cherokees withdrew, and the army reached Fort Prince George uncontested.
As fear mounted, dissension made life tense in the garrison. Rangers and provincial soldiers deserted in droves. As Gadsden later wrote, fed up with Grant’s haughty treatment and disrespect on the campaign, they were further incensed to find their comrades “picked off” and the colonel “tamely submitting” to daily “scalping parties.” The demoralized soldiers threatened to return to Charles Town.
Montgomery left a detachment of British regulars “to strengthen the garrison and to keep the others in order.” With Atkin—who would not be negotiating a peace treaty after all—and with the sick and wounded—the retreat resumed. The day after Montgomery’s departure, four Cherokees killed and scalped a provincial soldier at Fort Prince George. It was an ominous sign to the British.44
On July 10, Abram reached Charles Town with accounts of the Cherokee victory and of Montgomery’s retreat. The colonel’s hasty departure had “rather inflamed, than extinguished” hostilities in the Southeast, Lieutenant Governor Bull reported. “The People here were terribly exasperated at this Retreat,” Georgetown’s William Fyffe remarked.
Cherokees stood poised to capture Fort Loudoun and Fort Prince George. They had so frightened the members of the council that some envisioned “the destruction of the British Southern Colonies.” And they turned British elites against each other. Burdened by rising costs (£50,000 sterling in just nine months) and the impracticable chore of raising troops, the assembly argued that Montgomery must not leave the Cherokee country. In dispatches carried by Abram, Bull begged Montgomery to invoke the discretionary powers in his instructions and to stay.46
Abram returned with the commander’s reply on July 23. Montgomery was determined to leave South Carolina. The colonel posted four companies of the 1st Regiment, Royal Scots, at the Congarees for defensive operations. Writing for Montgomery, Lieutenant Colonel James Grant insisted that the redcoats had humbled the Cherokees. Besides, as Grant saw it, the French posed little threat. They were “not in a Situation to the Southward to think of making Conquests.”47
Amherst told Montgomery to “not think of Coming away ’till You have most Effectually punished these Scoundrell Indians,” or else it would “begin again.” Had the colonel ensured, as Amherst had insisted, that “they cannot hurt the Province again soon?”48 The assembly doubted it. Pastor Archibald Simpson agreed. “We are to be exposed to the barbarous Indians enraged with loss of their people,” he said in an unusually long journal entry. Now, “the poor men in Fort Loudoun … will in all probability fall a prey to that horrid Enemy.” But, he allowed, “this is much owing to our own Inactivity,” the “troops not having been properly supported by the country.”
On the retreat, Grant fired a parting shot at South Carolina’s assemblymen: “Those Gentlemen might have … Exerted themselves a little more in forwarding the Publick Service.” The redcoat criticized South Carolina’s soldiers, too. He saw them as wholly incompetent and pitiful. The “few Provincials,” unpaid and dressed in rags, he wrote, “seemed determined Not to serve.” The South Carolina Rangers—unpaid for fourteen months— months—had gone home. Grant resented the colonials’ sense of entitlement. The province “would never have raised a man or taken any Step for their own Security.” They wished to reap the benefits of British rule but offered nothing in return.
As the redcoats retreated, horses weakened and carriages broke. Three more soldiers died. And “the Sickly Season was fast come on.” The redcoats boarded their still-waiting transports in Charles Town Harbor and sailed northward. They arrived too late to participate in the British conquest of Canada. The colonel secured leave and returned home. By January 1761, the British Army officer Isaac Barré, who was severely wounded in the Battle of Quebec, then passed over for a promotion, wrote, “Montgomery is pushing, & (in Companys whose credulity is adapted to such tales,) wants to pass for the Conqueror of the Cherokees.” Soon after, both Barré and Montgomery were elected to Parliament.49
Montgomery’s departure pushed the Overhill Cherokee men closer to their goal of capturing Fort Loudoun. The Fort Loudoun garrison envisioned its demise. Now 160 men, 20 women, and 20 children languished in an “excessively weekened” state. People ate horse flesh, scraps of pork, and beans smuggled in by Indian women. And they plucked plums from trees errantly planted in a ditch. Samuel Terron, a former trader now living among the Cherokees, explained that Montgomery’s retreat had emboldened the Cherokees. They saw it “as the effect of fear,” he reported. The British withdrawal imbued them with “fresh spirits in their attempt upon fort Loudoun.” The Indians “are afraid of no other troops than Virginians, who, they say, know how to shoot and fight them in their own way.” But Virginians were nowhere to be seen.50 Cut off from incoming correspondence since June 4, Demere and his men renounced “every prospect or hope of seasonable deliverance from any quarter.” On June 27, the captain described his situation as “miserable beyond description.” Letters from the fort, the South Carolina Gazette reported, made Fort Loudoun seem “as if it was abandoned and forsaken by God and man.” By July 7, the bread was gone, and only horse flesh remained. Soon, an express confirmed Montgomery’s defeat. Indians boasted that they had “killed and scalp’d so many their hands were sore.” The officers more than once proposed peace, but Oconostota refused. Parties of soldiers deserted on August 1, 4, and 5, and headed for Virginia.51 Could the Cherokees capture the fort before Colonel Byrd and the Virginians relieved it? Byrd collected soldiers, weapons, and supplies very slowly. He built forts every twenty-five miles along his march. On July 5, he reached Augusta County Court House. Two weeks later he camped on the Roanoke River. He was still 300 miles from Chota. He found “every article, except provisions, vastly deficient.” Virginia’s assemblymen differed. They charged him with unwarranted caution.52 Byrd had little desire to make war on the Cherokees. As a long-tenured member of the Virginia Council, his real goal was to draw off the Cherokee trade from South Carolina. Personal experience may also have contributed to his reluctance. Byrd’s 1758 service in Forbes’s campaign left him with
Tortora, Daniel J.. Carolina in Crisis (pp. 129-130). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.
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