Not long after reading Ilario Pantano’s Grand Theft History, I came across the history of the Second Spartans, a South Carolina patriot militia regiment formed during the American Revolution. The beauty of the Second Spartans is that it was made up of men drawn from the northwest section of South Carolina (Union, Chester, Fairfield, York counties/districts to name a few) who were there during those critical years when the British initiated their Southern strategy against the colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, and they were there at that last critical juncture beginning with Patrick Ferguson’s defeat at King’s Mountain, which Lord Clinton, commander-in-chief of British forces, said put in motion a “chain of events that followed each other in regular succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America.” This timely publication of Oscar and Catherine Gilbert’s True For The Cause of Liberty dovetailed sweetly with Pantano’s book.
The co-authors’ individual talents dovetail nicely, too,
which, no doubt, explains this exceptional work; he at one time a Marine Corps
artilleryman with an interest in battlefield history, she a genealogist.
Together, their interests testify to hours upon hours of research required for deciphering
the battle actions—some, such as Cowpens, with contradictory accounts—and the
painstaking scouring of pension applications and family histories, letters, and
diaries reiterated in the book to create a remarkable look at what proved to be
the strategic scenario that convinced Lord Cornwallis he really did need to get
out of the Carolinas and ultimately convinced mother England she’d be better
served without this entire war.
I stated in an earlier post
that I knew the war in the South to have been particularly nasty. This book,
drawn from the statements of the men who actually fought it, leaves the reader
with no doubt as to just how nasty. It also speaks of dedication,
determination, and sacrifice. In their struggle against the king and his
agents, these men had to leave their families vulnerable to their loyalist
counterparts, British regulars, and Britain’s Indian allies, and there were
many, many militias throughout the South, so take this sketch of the Second
Spartans and magnify it a hundred times. It was no easy decision and no small
sacrifice, and the bloody battles, skirmishes, revenge killings, retribution,
hangings, tortures, rapes, and pillaging went on, constantly, for years—even
well after the war.
For the purposes of this blog post—one in an ongoing series
to do justice to the South’s role in the founding of this nation and in
securing that nation in the aftermath, and to emphasize my unwavering belief in
the Confederacy’s place as the true link to our Founders’ lost Republic, I
direct readers to the “Author’s Preface.” There note is made of the systematic
marginalization of Southern history since the mid-nineteenth century (before
South Carolina seceded). After the secession crisis and the South’s defeat, the
South’s role in the Revolutionary War was relegated to only a few lines of text
in mainstream history books, and it’s been shrinking since.
To their credit, for it’s not the purpose of their book, the
only place the authors point out the
current injustice being fomented against the South is in the preface. [Pointing
out the current injustice is my
purpose in writing this post.] That said, general lovers of American history
and of the Revolution—and I refer to those without an agenda either for or
against the South—will find much of value in this well-written, fast-paced
work. Truly, there is never a dull moment, and there is so much to learn and
questions answered—like “How, when all
the battles were fought and won in the north, did Cornwallis manage to get
himself surrounded in Yorktown, Virginia? And why, with Cornwallis’ surrender, did
the British just up and say, “We don’t want to play anymore, we’re going home”?
I mean, really, our history books make that surrender of Cornwallis sound as if
we’d razed London itself. He surrendered one army. Clinton was still alive and
kicking in New York.
Yes, there’s a lot more to the Revolutionary story on, actually, both sides of the Atlantic, and it’s been missing from the
mainstream for a long time now—and a big chunk of that missing narrative lies
in the South.
Thanks for reading,
Charlsie
