My Osher class called “Forgotten Founders: The Pinckney Family of South Carolina” starts next Monday, March 20. I’m busily putting the final touches on my first day and beginning to zoom in on the second day.
One thing I’ve learned while working on this class is that I didn’t know very much about the Southern Campaign in the American Revolution. All I knew is that the British changed their focus to the South in 1778 after their failure at Saratoga and their fear of French intervention. But I basically paid attention to the South only after the 1780 Fall of Charleston and the subsequent drive through the Carolinas to Yorktown in 1781. However, between 1775 and 1779 there was a whole lot of military activity in the South – focused mainly on the Georgia/Florida frontier and efforts by Continental forces and militias to capture the British stronghold at St. Augustine. In fact, an estimated 130+ battles occurred in South Carolina, beginning in November of 1775 and extending through November, 1782. I’ll be using the maps below during the second week of the class (I think), but I want to show them to you now. These are all taken from https://www.colonialra.com/maps/.
And in case you’re wondering why this interests me, all of the Pinckney men of eligible age fought in the Revolution – either as part of the South Carolina militia or the Continental Army – and three of them were held by the British as prisoners of war after the fall of Charleston. Two of them – Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (born in 1746) and his first cousin once removed Charles Pinckney (1757) – participated in skirmishes and invasion forces attempting to seize St. Augustine and relieve the siege of Savannah prior to the 1780 events at Charleston. This is where they earned their military titles and gained the experience – and the contacts – that served them in South Carolina and the nation after the war.
These maps (and the accompanying explanations found on the website and other materials) counter some misconceptions of Revolutionary War history:
That the southern colonies were of little importance until the siege of Charleston in 1780
That East Florida and West Florida were of no importance at all
That Britain’s first attempt to invade the American colonies was in 1777, when General Burgoyne brought a 5,000-man army into upper-New York from Canada
That the 1780 siege of Charleston was not ordered until after Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga (in fact, it was ordered six weeks prior)
These are all things I thought to be true. I now have questions about the whole American Revolution narrative that I have internalized over the years. I have some ideas about why this happened.
Universities in New England developed the first history departments in the country, which means they developed the first academic historians who wrote their interpretations of history. These interpretations, because they were first, became the baseline. Later historians, many of whom were also trained at these same universities supported this narrative, which soon became the publicly agreed-upon story. Historians who attended different universities (particularly in the South) examined the assumptions made by the early historians and, using expanded sources, challenged their conclusions. These challenges were often seen as much-maligned “revisionist history” and only partially and grudgingly included in public history.
By the 1820s, much of the American South (including South Carolina, the home of the Pinckney family) was identified with the rising states’ rights mentality that led to political and cultural efforts to distance the region from the rapid commercialization of the country. The Pinckney family shared these beliefs: by the 1820s, they were firmly attached to people like John C. Calhoun, who could not comprehend an America that did not rely on enslaved labor. This growing divide would end tragically in the American Civil War, after which the region was defeated and impoverished. Any narrative that included the South as part of the mainstream of the country’s history was discredited and dismissed.
If you talk to South Carolinians who have studied this history, they have no doubts that the South was written out of the main story of America as a kind of back-formation. The real contributions of the South to the American victory over the British were submerged by the 19th-century anti-slavery (and anti-South) opinions of Ivy League historians.
I imagine if we chose to examine many of our own beliefs we consider to be true, we might be very disappointed with what we find. Sigh. Thanks, Karen, for this essay!
Excellent. Wish I could take your course.