The premise of Alan Pell Crawford’s 2024-book “This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South” is that the Revolutionary war’s southeastern campaigns have received little to no attention in history books, yet the battles that occurred between patriots and British soldiers in the southern colonies led to the end of the war at Yorktown.
The book’s subtitle may be a bit of an overreach. The stories of battles, civilian struggles, and more are often overlooked, yet Crawford’s introduction explains that lasting historical accounts are primarily the result of what is documented shortly after momentous events.
He explained, “The earliest accounts of the war came largely from biographies of [George] Washington himself, so the focus [was] on events that he was either directly involved in or closely associated with.” Thus, “Even educated Americans think of the War of Independence almost exclusively in terms of stirring stories about its beginnings—Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Washington crossing the Delaware, the cruel winter at Valley Forge—in which ‘embattled farmers’ and ‘citizens in arms’ led by Washington triumph over the greatest military power in the world.”
In this nonfiction book that reads like a novel, Crawford brings to light some lesser-known but essential Revolutionary War soldiers involved in the southern campaign. In the first chapter, he introduces readers to Baron de Kalb, a middle-aged patriot who hailed from Bavaria. His letters to his wife and children living in Paris reveal his on-the-ground experiences trekking through the southern colonies, interactions with the Marquis de Lafayette, and impressions of Charles Town (now Charleston), South Carolina, then a center for finance and commerce.
Well into the war, in 1780, de Kalb wrote to his wife: “Here I am at last, considerably south, suffering from intolerable heat … and the most voracious of insects of every hue and form.” About Lafayette, he wrote that the famed French military officer and friend of Washington, was “a prodigy for his age, full of courage, spirit, judgement, good manners, feelings of generosity, and zeal for the cause of liberty.”
It was in the South, Crawford reminds readers, that some of the Revolutionary War’s figures did become notorious, namely British’s Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, known as “Bloody Ban,” for his ruthless soldiering practices; and Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who ended up surrendering to Washington at Yorktown in October 1781.
The book touches on the “myth, born of the Civil War era, that planters’ wives were fragile and delicate ladies, unaccustomed to work themselves.” Crawford includes, in fascinating detail, how one wealthy planter’s wife had to move from place to place to hide from the British with her children. She then nursed her husband’s battle wound, even having to dig out bone fragments from his leg.
For many attentive historians like Crawford, who has served as a resident scholar at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, minutiae matter. Details about what life was like during the struggle to secure America’s independence, what soldiers had to endure, and the daily tenacity required is what makes good reading.
Crawford includes clear examples, stating that before the intense battle at Camden, South Carolina, Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates of the Continental Army thought he was doing his men a favor by serving them a “hearty breakfast” just before fighting began. However, the “fresh-killed meat, raw corn, and green peaches with a dessert of molasses mixed with mush or dumplings” did a number on the soldiers’ digestive systems. Still, they fought on.
After reading “This Fierce People,” visitors to notable places in the Southern states will better understand why roads, bridges, buildings, forts, and more sport such names as Sumter, Moultrie, Pickens, Greene, and Marion. As Crawford pointed out, as he wrapped up his introduction: “It should become clear that the events of the southern campaign, during the three-plus-years that convinced the British to surrender, are as compelling as any of the most widely publicized events in the North.”
