Georgia Enters The Revolution

From Our Country, a "Household History for All Readers," Vol. II, by Benson J. Lossing, published 1877:

Georgia, tardy in joining the Continental movement, felt the flame of patriotism warming the hearts and minds of her sons early in 1775. In February, the inhabitants of the parish of St. Johns, in that province, chose Lyman Hall to represent them in the second Congress, and he took his seat as such at the middle of May. In July the Provincial Convention that had been formed adopted the American Association, and chose delegates to represent the whole province in the Congress; and then the bright galaxy of the "Old Thirteen" was perfected. The royal governor, Sir James Wright, had tried in vain to suppress the rising tide of republicanism in Georgia. So early as May, 1775, when it was suspected that he was about to imitate General Gage, by seizing the ammunition of the province, several members of the Council of Safety and others broke open the magazine, sent a greater portion of the powder to Beaufort, South Carolina, and hid the remainder in their own garrets. When the governor and the Tories were preparing to celebrate the king's birthday, on the 4th of June, by firing the cannon on the battery in Savannah, some of the leading Whigs spiked the guns there, and hurled them to the bottom of the bluff. Not long afterward, a letter written by the governor to General Gage, asking him to send troops to Georgia to suppress the rising rebellion there, was intercepted at Charleston. The republicans were greatly exasperated; and a day or two afterward they seized a British ship at the mouth of the Savannah River, with thirteen thousand pounds of gunpowder on board. The spirit of resistance waxed from stronger and stronger, until, in January, 1776, the Whigs resolved to endure the adverse influence of the governor and the Tories no longer. Joseph Habersham, a member of the popular legislature, with some armed volunteers, seized Governor Wright and made him a prisoner on parole at his own house. A sentinel was placed before it, with orders not to allow any intercourse between the governor and the Loyalists. During a stormy night in February, Sir James escaped through a back window of his house, walked five miles down the borders of the river with a friend, and then entering an open boat, fled in the pelting rain, under the cover of darkness, for shelter to the British vessel-of-war Scarborough, lying in Tybee Sound. [John] Stuart, the Indian agent for the Southern Department, had fled for safety to St. Augustine. He had incurred the bitter resentment of the patriots by trying to execute an atrocious order from Gage, as commander-in-chief of the forces, in these words:
"The people of Carolina in turning rebels to their king have lost all faith; improve a correspondence with Indians to the greatest advantage, and even when opportunity offers make them take arms against his majesty's enemies, and distress them all in their power; for no time is now to be kept with them; they have brought down all the savages they could against us here, who, with their riflemen, are continually firing upon our advanced sentries; in short, no time should be lost to distress a set of people so wantonly rebellious; supply the Indians with what they want, be the expense what it will, as every exertion must now be made on the side of government."
Gage had borne the same false testimony concerning the employment of the savages by the Americans, to the British ministry, as an excuse for his barbarous recommendations to make allies of them with the British army. At the same time the British emissaries were among the savage tribes of the north trying to form alliances with them, and to incite them to war against the Patriots. 
So was ended royal rule in Georgia.

Lt. Col. Thomas Brown & the King's Rangers

From the New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Thomas Brown (1750-1825)", by Edward J. Cashin, Augusta State University:

Commanding a regiment of loyalists known as the King's Rangers, Thomas Brown took part in several important actions in Georgia during the Revolution. ...
Born in 1750 in Whitby on the North Sea coast of England, Brown was the son of a wealthy merchant and alum manufacturer. When he was twenty-four his father outfitted a ship for him and recruited more than seventy indentured servants in Yorkshire and the Orkney Islands for a voyage to Georgia. Young Brown and his servants established Brownsborough in St. Paul Parish, above Augusta, Georgia, in November 1774. Governor James Wright appointed him a magistrate in that region.Brown's arrival coincided with the increase of Revolutionary sentiment in Georgia. He strongly opposed the efforts of the Sons of Liberty to enforce the continental association against trade with Britain. As a result the "Liberty Boys" made an example of him, almost killing him. When he recovered Brown rallied Loyalists in the South Carolina upcountry but was advised by the royal governor, Sir William Campbell, to await the arrival of British troops. Under threat of arrest by the Revolutionary government of South Carolina, Brown fled to British East Florida. He unveiled his plan for the subjugation of Georgia and Carolina to Patrick Tonyn, the governor of Florida, and he volunteered to raise a regiment of rangers who would ride with the Indians against the people on the frontier, in conjunction with the invasion of British troops along the coast. Governor Tonyn became an ardent advocate of the plan, sometimes known as the "southern strategy." Tonyn commissioned Brown as a lieutenant colonel of the Florida Rangers in June 1776.
Brown formed his regiment of rangers, recruited Indian allies, and began a campaign of harassment of the Georgia frontiers. In response Georgia staged three abortive invasions of Florida to secure the borderlands. When General Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander in chief, adopted the southern strategy in 1778, he sent an army under Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell to land on the Georgia coast, march to Augusta, and there meet Indian allies. Brown's rangers joined Campbell's regulars in Savannah and marched to Augusta. On the way they attempted to rescue Loyalists in the Burke County jail; Brown was wounded in the effort.
The Indians were slow to arrive, and a contingent of Loyalists were caught by Georgia and South Carolina militia under Elijah Clarke, John Dooly, and Andrew Pickens and defeated in the Battle of Kettle Creek on February 14, 1779. The British retreated from Augusta, only to turn on the pursuing Americans in the Battle of Briar Creek, March 3, 1779. The British victory there permitted the restoration of royal government in Georgia and the return of Governor James Wright and his council.
During the French and American Siege of Savannah in October 1779 Brown and his rangers helped defend the city. Sir Henry Clinton dispatched more troops to Georgia and South Carolina and laid siege to Charleston. When that important city fell to the British on May 12, 1780, American opposition generally collapsed. Thomas Brown and his rangers, now styled the King's Rangers, garrisoned Augusta. In 1779 Brown became superintendent of the Creek and Cherokee Indians and attempted to employ them against rebel resistance according to his original plan. In September 1780, however, Brown was surprised by a raid of approximately 600 Georgians under Clarke. In the course of a four-day battle Brown was again wounded but was relieved by British reinforcements from Ninety-Six, South Carolina. Either Brown or Lieutenant Colonel John Harris Cruger, who outranked him, ordered thirteen American prisoners hanged in accordance with Lord Cornwallis's standing order regarding those who swore to lay down their arms and took them up again.
For better protection of Augusta, Brown constructed Fort Cornwallis on the grounds of St. Paul's Church, dismantling the church in the process. He withstood a siege by continentals under Lieutenant Colonel Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, Georgians under Lieutenant Colonel Elijah Clarke, and South Carolinians under General Andrew Pickens. After two weeks of fierce fighting, during which Americans dug trenches near the fort and mounted a cannon on an improvised tower, Brown, together with his rangers and their Indian allies, surrendered on June 5, 1781.
Brown was taken under escort to Savannah and paroled. When he was exchanged for an American officer held by the British, he recruited another regiment of rangers and engaged in skirmishes outside Savannah with encircling American troops under General Anthony Wayne. After Savannah surrendered, in July 1782, Brown joined the thousands of refugees who went to British Florida, only to be forced to leave when that province was returned to Spain in the peace treaty of 1783. Some Loyalists migrated to Nova Scotia, but Brown and many of his rangers settled on Abaco Island in the Bahamas. Loyalists regarded Brown as a hero and elected him to the Bahamian legislature.

Gen. Sir Henry Clinton & the Southern Theatre

In March 1775, King George III dispatched reinforcements to the American colonies under General Sir Henry Clinton and fellow Major-Generals William Howe and John Burgoyne to strengthen the British position in Boston. On 17 June, with the British army having been besieged in Boston since April, Clinton was one of the British field commanders in the Battle of Bunker Hill. This assault to drive the rebels from the heights north of Boston harbor was successful, but only at the heavy cost of over 1,000 British casualties.
In January 1776, Clinton was sent south with a small fleet and 1,500 men to assess military opportunities in the Carolinas. In June, Clinton led a naval assault on Fort Sullivan at Charleston, South Carolina, successfully defended by Colonel William Moultrie. It was a humiliating failure for Clinton. The British did not attempt to renew the battle to try to take the fort again, and by mid-July the fleet withdrew northward. Clinton and his twenty-five ships rejoined the main fleet to participate in General Howe's August 1776 assault on New York City.
In May of 1778, after the British disaster of the Saratoga Campaign, Clinton replaced Howe as Commander-in-Chief for North America. He assumed command in Philadelphia. France had by this time overtly entered the war on the American side, and because of this Clinton was ordered by his government to send 5,000 of his troops to the Caribbean, which forced him to withdraw from Philadelphia and retreat to New York. Having concentrated his forces, for a time he pursued a policy of making mere forays from there. Before year's end, however, Clinton regained the initiative for the British and sent an expedition south to strike at Georgia. This force took Savannah in December, and by early 1779 it had gained control of the hinterland.
The Georgia campaign presumed Loyalist support would appear as soon as redcoats were present in strength. The notion that the South was more likely to be friendly to British forces had been entertained by George Germain, the American Secretary, for much of the war to date, a notion fed by Loyalist exiles in London. Contrary to expectations, the wave of public support for the arrival of British troops never materialized, leaving Clinton and his subordinates isolated. For much of the remainder of the war in the South, British commanders aimed at mobilizing Loyalist support, but results were never as successful as they had anticipated.
By late 1779 Clinton assembled a force for the next step in his strategy, an invasion of South Carolina. he took personal command of this campaign, and a force with 14,000 men sailed south from New York at the end of the year. By early 1780, Clinton lay siege to Charleston. In May, together with Admiral Mariot Arbuthnot, he forced the surrender of the city, with its garrison of 5,000. It was during the siege and capture of Charleston that Clinton's inability to cooperate with equal ranking officers began to become more evident. Arbuthnot and Clinton did not work well together, and the feud would last until the end of the war with disastrous results for the British high command.
Clinton subsequently returned north, leaving 8,000 British troops in the southern theatre under the command of General Cornwallis, his second-in-command. From New York, he continued to oversee and take an active interest in the Southern campaign, as evidenced in his correspondence with Cornwallis. However, as the campaign progressed, he grew further and further away from his subordinate. As the campaign drew to a close, the correspondence became more and more acrimonious.
In 1782, after being replaced as Commander-in-Chief by Sir Guy Carleton, Sir Henry Clinton returned to England.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Gen. Benjamin Lincoln (1733-1810)

Benjamin Lincoln was born on January 24, 1733, in Hingham, Massachusetts. He would grow to follow his father's footsteps into local political office. At 21, Lincoln became town constable and in 1755, Lincoln entered the 3rd Regiment of the Suffolk militia as an adjutant. In 1757, he was elected town clerk of Hingham, then Justice of the Peace in 1762. In 1772, Lincoln was promoted to lieutenant colonel of the 3rd Regiment of the Suffolk militia. Being in the Suffolk militia allowed Lincoln to gain military experience which he used in three major battles of the American Revolution. In 1776, he was promoted to brigadier general, then major general, then commander of all Massachusetts troops in the Boston area. After the British evacuation of Boston, Lincoln joined General George Washington at New York, commanding the right wing at the Battle of White Plains. Shortly after seeing action at Fort Independence, he was commissioned into the Continental Army as a major general.
In September of 1777, Lincoln joined Horatio Gates' camp to take part in the Battles of Saratoga. Lincoln's role in the Second Battle of Saratoga was cut short after a musket ball shattered his ankle.
After recovering from this severe wound, Lincoln was appointed Southern Department Commander in September 1778. He participated in the defense of Savannah, Georgia on October 9, 1779 and was forced to retreat to Charleston, South Carolina, where they were subsequently surrounded, then forced to surrender to Lieutenant General Henry Clinton on May 12, 1780. This was one of the worst Continental defeats of the war. Lincoln was denied the honors of war in surrendering, which deeply rankled. He was exchanged as a prisoner of war, paroled, and, in the court of inquiry, no charges were ever brought against him. After the exchange, Lincoln returned to Washington's main army, even leading it south to Virginia and playing a major role in the Yorktown surrender in October 1781. General Lord Cornwallis was so humiliated by his defeat at the hands of the "Colonials" that he refused to personally surrender his sword to General George Washington, sending his second-in-command, General Charles O'Hara, in his stead. In response, General Washington sent his subordinate, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, to accept Cornwallis's sword after the defeat at Yorktown.

(from: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lincoln)

Francis Salvador (1747-1776)

Francis Salvador was born in London in 1747, the fourth generation of Salvadors to live in England. His great grandfather Joseph, a merchant, established himself as a leader of England's Sephardic community and became the first Jewish director of the East India Company. When George III ascended the British throne, Joseph Salvador arranged an audience for the seven-man delegation that officially congratulated the king on behalf of the Jewish community.
Even before Francis Salvador's birth, his family developed interests in America. Salvador's grandfather teamed with two other leaders of the London Jewish community to raise funds to send some of London's destitute Jews to the new British colony in Savannah, Georgia. The Georgia trustees subsequently voted to ban Jewish immigration to Georgia but not before grandfather Salvador and his two associates had landed forty-two Jewish settlers in Savannah in July 1733. When the founder of the colony, James Oglethorpe, intervened on behalf of the Jews, the trustees decided to let them stay. The Salvador family then purchased personal land holdings in South Carolina.
As a young man, Francis Salvador was raised in luxury in London. He was well educated by private tutors and traveled extensively. At age twenty, he married his first cousin, Sarah, and took his place in the family shipping firm. The devastating effects of a 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, where the family had extensive interests, weakened the family fortune. The failure of the East India Company completed its ruin. By the early 1770's, virtually the only thing left of the Salvador family's immense wealth was the large plot of land they had purchased in the South Carolina colony.
In 1773, in an attempt to rebuild the family fortune, Francis Salvador moved to South Carolina. Intending to send for his wife Sarah and their children when he had prepared a proper home for them, Salvador arrived in Charleston in December and established himself as a planter on a seven thousand acre tract he acquired from his uncle. Salvador found himself drawn to the growing American movement against British rule and unhesitatingly threw himself into the patriot cause. Within a year of his arrival, at the age of 27, Salvador was elected to the General Assembly of South Carolina. He became the first Jew to hold that high an elective office in the English colonies. He would hold the post until his sudden death.
In 1774, Francis Salvador was elected as a delegate to South Carolina's revolutionary Provincial Congress, which assembled in Charleston in January 1775. The Provincial Congress framed a bill of rights and prepared an address to the royal governor of South Carolina setting forth the colonists' grievances against the British crown. Salvador played an important role in the South Carolina Provincial Congress, which appointed him to a commission to negotiate with Tories living in the northern and western parts of the colony to secure their promise not to actively aid the royal government.
When the second Provincial Congress assembled in November 1775, Salvador urged that body to instruct the South Carolina delegation in Philadelphia to vote for American independence. Salvador played a leading role in the Provincial Congress, chairing its ways and means committee and serving on a select committee authorized to issue bills of credit to pay the militia. Salvador was also part of a special commission established to preserve the peace in the interior parts of South Carolina, where the English Superintendent of Indian Affairs was busily negotiating treaties with the Cherokees to induce the tribe to attack the colonists.
When the Cherokees attacked settlements along the frontier on July 1, 1776, massacring and scalping colonial inhabitants, Salvador, in an act reminiscent of Paul Revere, mounted his horse and galloped nearly thirty miles to give the alarm. He then returned to join the militia in the front lines, defending the settlements under siege. During a Cherokee attack early in the morning of August first, Salvador was shot. He fell into some bushes, where he was subsequently discovered and scalped. Salvador died forty-five minutes later. Major Andrew Williamson, the militia commander, reported of Salvador that, "When I came up to him after dislodging the enemy and speaking to him, he asked whether I had beaten the enemy. I told him 'Yes.' He said he was glad of it and shook me by the hand and bade me farewell, and said he would die in a few minutes."
His friend Henry Laurens reported that Salvador's death was "universally regretted," while William Henry Drayton, later Chief Justice of South Carolina, noted that Salvador had "sacrificed his life in the service of his adopted country." Dead at twenty-nine, never again seeing his wife or children after leaving England, Salvador was the first Jew to die waging the American Revolution. Ironically, because he was fighting on the frontier, he probably did not receive the news that the Continental Congress in Philadelphia had, as he urged, adopted the Declaration of Independence.

(Source: "Francis Salvador: Martyr of the American Revolution", by Michael Feldberg, director of the American Jewish Historical Society, Jewish World Review Feb. 12, 2001)

Gen. William Moultrie (1730-1805)

Until 1760 William Moultrie had a fairly undistinguished career as a member of South Carolina's provincial assembly. But after playing a central role in putting down a Cherokee uprising, he became a leader in his colony's military affairs. Early in the Revolution his expertise won him command of the Continental army's Second Regiment. Moultrie commanded the fort on Sullivan's Island on June 28, 1776, and he was successful in repulsing the British fleet when they tried to enter Charleston harbor. It is said that during the bombardment of Fort Sullivan, General Charles Lee continuously tried to micromanage Moultrie's situation from a distance. While the battle raged, Lee sent a letter to Moultrie by an aide, saying, "If you should unfortunately expend your ammunition without beating off the enemy or driving them on the ground, spike your guns and retreat with all order possible; but I know you will be careful not to throw away your ammunition." Moultrie, instead, asked for more gunpowder. In appreciation of his efforts the fort was subsequently renamed after him. He was promoted to brigadier general in the Continental service, and thereafter operated independently. After the fall of Savannah (1778), he decisively defeated the British forces at Beaufort in February of 1779. Moultrie was captured by the British after the fall of Charleston in 1780 and sent as prisoner to St. Augustine. Exchanged in 1782, he was then promoted to major general.
Following the war, William Moultrie was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1783. In 1784, he served as Lieutenant Governor. He was then elected governor for a two-year term in 1785. While governor, Moultrie created the county court system, and relocated the South Carolina capital from Charleston to Columbia in 1786. He was elected to the State Senate in 1787. He was elected to his second two-year term as governor in 1792, and retired from public office in 1794. In 1802 his Memoirs of the American Revolution were published in two volumes. William Moultrie died in Charleston on 27 September 1805 and was interred at Windsor Hill Plantation.