Loyalist Robert Gray's "Observations"

Colonel Robert Gray resided in Cheraws District, South Carolina, and served as Justice of the Peace for that district in 1766. His name was listed on the roll, dated 2 September 1775, of a volunteer Rangers company from Camden District. He most likely joined the Loyalists after 1776. After the War, Gray relocated to Nova Scotia.

From "Colonel Robert Gray's Observations on the War in Carolina," South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. XI, No.3, July 1910:

The want of paying sufficient attention to our militia produced daily at this time the most disagreeable consequences. In the first place, when the rebel militia were made prisoners, they were immediately delivered up to the regular officers, who, being entirely ignorant of the dispositions and manners of the people, treated them with the utmost lenity and sent them home to their plantations upon parole and in short they were treated in every respect as foreign enemies. The general consequences of this was that they no sooner got out of our hands than they broke their paroles, took up arms, and made it a point to murder every militia man of ours who had any concern in making them prisoners. On the other hand whenever a militia man of ours was made a prisoner he was delivered not to the Continentals but to the rebel militia, who looked upon him as a State prisoner, as a man who deserved a halter, and therefore treated him with the greatest cruelty. ...

[The inhabitants of Williamsburg Township, South Carolina] carried on a continual predatory war against the rebels and sometimes surprised them at their musters. In short, they carried on the war against the rebels precisely as they had set the example and as the post at George Town supplied them with arms and ammunition they overawed and harassed Marion's brigade so much that he was obliged to leave the inhabitants of the Cheraw District at home to protect their properties while he could only call out the people of Williamsburgh Township and the neighborhood of George Town; when a small party of rebels ventured among them they were cut to pieces—when a large body invaded them, which they found they could not withstand, they hung in small parties on their skirts, harassed them with false alarms, killed their sentries, drove in their pickets, and soon compelled them to leave the country. It may not be improper to observe that the rebel militia did not at all times turn out voluntarily under their leaders, for when they were averse to an expedition they compelled them on pain of death and there have been often severe examples made of them. On the other hand the Little Pee Dee men only defended their own country and never went upon a more distant expedition than to Georgetown. The rebel militia from Bladen County in North Carolina at times also harassed the loyal inhabitants of Little Pee Dee, but with little effect. ...

Lord Rawdon finding [the rebels] had out marched him sent for Major Frazer of the South Carolina Regiment to march with it and intercept them at Lynch's Creek. They had just crossed the creek when Maj. Frazer came up with them who attacked them and routed their whole body in a few minutes. They were now exceedingly dejected; instead of 300 men under Lord Rawdon's command they had seen so many different detachments of troops superior to their whole force that they despaired [sic] of success and notwithstanding Sumpter who had carried off a number of Negroes, offered one to every person who would enlist for ten months as a dragoon to form a body of state cavalry, he could hardly procure a single recruit and he began to grow extremely unpopular. ...

We soon lost great part of the backcountry, the cruelty exercised by the rebels on our militia exceed all belief. Lord Rawdon finding he could not bring [Nathanael] Greene to action embarked for England on account of his health. ...

[F]rom this place to what is now called the Ridge betwixt Saluda and Edisto Rivers on the road to Ninety Six on one hand and from a few miles to the Southward of Santee to the Salkehatchie on the other, the inhabitants refused to submit to the rebels although left by the army and surrounded at almost every hand the enemy who were in possession of Ninety Six district and the disaffected inhabitants of the Forks of Santee, the country betwixt Salkehatchie and Savannah Rivers and all the rice lands from thence to Ashley River in short, the whole province resembled a piece of patch work, the inhabitants of every settlement, when united in sentiment being in arms for the side they liked best and making continual inroads into one another's settlements. ...

The district of Ninety Six being all this while much divided in sentiment suffered severely. The Tories in many places would neither submit nor go to Charles Town, they hid themselves in the swamp, from whence they made frequent incursions upon their enemies. When opposed by a superior force they dispersed, when the storm blew over they embodied again and recommenced their operation. A petty partisan [war] started up in every settlement and headed the Whigs or Tories, both parties equally afraid of the other, dared not sleep in their house, but concealed themselves in swamps, this is called lying out. Both parties were in this condition in general all over Ninety Six District and every other part of the province wherever it was checkered by the intersection of Whig and Tory settlements. ...

The swamps were filled with Loyalists, the rebels dare not sleep in their houses, and Sumpter irritated by the hostility of the Country, got the Catawba Indians to track the Loyalists from the swamps, which were at the same time traversed by large parties of armed rebels to kill or take the Tories. ...

Gen. Rutherford who commands the militia brigade from Mecklenburg and Salisbury is a perfect savage and bears the most rancorous hatred to Tories. ...

Col. Thomas Neel (1739-1779)

Thomas Neel was the second of ten children. His father was originally from the Cape Fear coastal area of North Carolina, but had moved to Mecklenberg County as one of its earliest settlers. This family would come to sacrifice more than most for their countrymen and the Patriot cause. From Carolina historian Louise Pettus:

In 1764 he [Thomas Neel] was one of a committee of four to select a site for Bethel Church and became one of its first elders. He was elected to the North Carolina General Assembly to represent Tryon County. In the Assembly he was active in rallying backcountry representatives to gather petitions for building roads and ferrys. He was appointed as a member of the board of trustees of Queen's College in Charlotte. He served as a justice of the peace and as a judge of Tryon County from 1769 to 1772.
In 1772 Neel served on the Boundary Commission that drew the North Carolina-South Carolina boundary line west of the Catawba River. Meantime, he was acquiring land in South Carolina. As soon as the boundary was settled he applied for a South Carolina land grant for 779 acres that had originally been patented in North Carolina. This land was near the Catawba River south of present-day Highway 49 near Buster Boyd Bridge.
Neel's first military experience was in North Carolina Governor Tryon's expedition against the regulators of Alamance County in 1771. Holding the rank of Captain, Neel commanded the Tryon County troops. By 1775 he was a Colonel in command of the militia of both the New Acquisition and Tryon County [therefore serving both North and South Carolina].
When South Carolina declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776, Neel was elected to the First South Carolina Provincial Congress. He spent little time with the Provincial Congress. Instead, he led the militia in what is called either the Cherokee Campaign or the Snow Campaign. The Cherokee Indians were scalping white settlers who were settling on traditional Cherokee hunting grounds. One of those scalped was the wife of Thomas Neel, Jean Spratt. Jean Spratt Neel had long coal-black hair. It is believed that the Cherokees intended to claim her scalp as that of a Catawba Indian, their traditional enemy. Thomas Neel was already in the field at the time of his wife's scalping. Struggling through waist-deep snow, Neel and his men surprised the Cherokee and destroyed many of their towns and villages.
In 1777 and 1778 Neel headed a regiment in the Florida and Georgia Campaigns that operated out of Phillip's Fort in Georgia. His last expedition was the defense of Charleston. Neel was shot through the head and killed in the battle of Stono.
Thomas Neel and Jean Spratt had three sons and four daughters. Daughter Sarah married David Johnston, a Revolutionary soldier with Capt. Jacob Barnett's horse troop. And daughter Mary married Lt. Col. James Hawthorne. Hawthorne fought in several major battles and an unknown number of skirmishes, and was twice wounded during the Revolutionary War. He served under Col. Thomas Neel in the Snow Campaign in 1775, and was Lt. Col. to Col. Neel in that fateful battle at Stono.

All three of Thomas and Jean's sons fought in the Revolution, and like their father, gave their lives for it. Son Andrew rose to the rank of Colonel and was detached by Sumter at Clems Branch as commander of the troops of York and Chester. He afterwards fell in the 1780 battle of Rocky Mount. Andrew's twin Lt. Col. Thomas Neel was killed in 1781. At age 16, youngest son Lt. John Neel was serving in Col. Joseph Hayes' Fifth Regiment when they fell victim to the (literal) butchery of Maj. William Cunningham's Loyalist militia in an ambush at Hayes' Station in 1778. He lies buried next to his father in Bethel Presbyterian Cemetery in York County, South Carolina.

Thomas "Kanawah" Spratt (1731-1807)

Thomas "Kanawah" Spratt was born in 1731 onboard ship while his parents and older sisters were crossing the Atlantic from Ireland. Thomas was his parents' only son, and lived to become a legendary figure in their region of the Carolina frontier. According to Carolina historian Louise Pettus:

Some writers say that Thomas "Kanawah" Spratt was on his way to settle in either Abbeville [South Carolina] or Fairforest (near present-day Spartanburg) when the Catawba Indians persuaded him to settle among them. The nickname "Kanawah" was given to Spratt by the Catawbas. Spratt fought with the Indians on several occasions, and it is said that on an expedition in the area of present-day West Virginia, Spratt displayed such courage that the Indians named him for the nearby river. That's the same way the Catawba chief earned the name "New River."
The Catawbas were greatly attached to Spratt. Evidence was given of that in a tale about Spratt participating in the signing of the famed Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence on May 20, 1775. Spratt was to be a signer but "instead of dipping into an ink well, he dipped into a gallon jug." Spratt was placed in the county jail, and when some Catawba Indian friends heard of it, they "got on their horses, rode up to the jail, ripped off two or three planks and took Kanawha out, put him on his horse, then they raced their steeds around and around the court house several times––yelling and whooping––after which the Catawbas and Kanawah headed their horses back down Nation Ford Road for their homes in what is now Fort Mill."