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The Battle of Musgrove Mill, August 19, 1780, occurred near a Enoree River ford, on what in the twenty-first century is the border between Spartanburg, Laurens and Union Counties in South Carolina.[1] During the course of the battle, 200 Patriot militiamen defeated a combined force of approximately 300 Loyalist militiamen and 200 provincial regulars.
Background[]
By the summer of 1780, the war that raged in the Backcountry of South Carolina had effectively become America’s first civil war.[2] Few men engaged on either side had ever seen Great Britain, and Backcountry fighting tended to be especially brutal and retaliatory.[3]
Battle[]
On the evening of August 18, two hundred mounted Patriot partisans under joint command of Colonel Isaac Shelby, Colonel James Williams, and Colonel Elijah Clark prepared to raid a Loyalist camp at Musgrove’s Mill, which controlled the local grain supply and guarded a ford of the Enoree River. The Patriots anticipated surprising a garrison of about an equal number of Loyalists, but a local farmer informed them that the Tories had recently been reinforced by about a hundred Loyalist militia and two hundred provincial regulars on their way to join British commander Major Patrick Ferguson.[4]
With their position compromised by an enemy patrol and horses unable to go on without rest, the Patriots understood that they must stand and fight despite being outnumbered better than two to one. At the top of a ridge across the road leading down to Musgrove Mill, the partisans quickly formed a semicircular breastwork of brush and fallen timber about three hundred yards long.[5]
In the best tradition of guerilla tactics, a band of about twenty men under the leadership of Captain Shadrach Inman crossed the Enoree and engaged the enemy. Feigning confusion they retreated back toward the line of ambush until the Loyalists were nearly on the Patriot line. When the latter spotted the Whig militia, they fired too early. The Patriots, however, held their fire until the Loyalists got within killing range of their muskets.[6]
Patriot musket fire operated “with devastating effect.” [7] Nonetheless, the Tory regulars were well disciplined and nearly overwhelmed the Patriot right flank with a bayonet charge. (Frontiersmen had no bayonets.) Isaac Shelby ordered his reserve of “Over Mountain Men,” frontiersmen from modern Tennessee, to support him, and they rushed into the battle shrieking Indian war cries.[8] The Tories wavered, and when a number of their officers went down, they broke—although not before Captain Inman, who had a key role in implementing the Patriot strategy, was killed on the battlefield.
Patriots ran from their positions “yelling, shooting, and slashing on every hand.”[9] The whole battle took perhaps an hour. Within that period, sixty three Tories were killed, an unknown number wounded, and seventy were taken prisoner.[10] The Patriots lost only about four dead and twelve wounded.[11]
Aftermath[]
Some Whig leaders briefly considered attacking the Tory stronghold at Ninety Six, South Carolina; but they hurriedly dispersed after learning that a large Patriot army had been defeated at Battle of Camden three days previous. Shelby’s forces covered sixty miles with Ferguson in hot pursuit before making good their escape.[12] In the wake of General Horatio Gates’ blundering defeat at Camden, the victory at Musgrove Mill heartened the Patriots and served as further evidence that the South Carolina backcountry could not be held by the Tories.
In the twenty-first century, Musgrove Mill State Historic Site is a unit of the South Carolina park system and is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
Notes[]
- ↑ Musgrove Mill State Historic Site website.
- ↑ Walter Edgar, Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), xi. In the nineteenth century, George Bancroft wrote “South Carolina moved toward independence through the bitterest afflictions of civil war….Families were divided; patriots outlawed and savagely assassinated; houses burned, and children driven into the forests.” History of the United States, 11th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1875), 10:300.
- ↑ Edgar, 130-38. "The British army of occupation and its Tory allies, by unleashing the horrors of civil war on South Carolina, sowed the seeds for the defeat of their cause."
- ↑ John Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 177. “Provincial regulars” were Americans who enlisted in British army units, as opposed to British regulars and Tory militia. Edgar, 153.
- ↑ Edgar, 114, Buchanan, 177.
- ↑ Edgar, 114, Buchanan, 177.
- ↑ Edgar, 114.
- ↑ Buchanan, 178.
- ↑ Edward McCrady, The History of the Revolution in South Carolina (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 2:693.
- ↑ Buchanan and Edgar give the losses as 63 killed, 90 wounded, 70 taken prisoner. Buchanan, 178; Edgar, 115. The figures in the text are those from a wayside at Musgrove Mill State Historic Site.
- ↑ Buchanan gives Patriot losses as four killed and seven wounded. Buchanan, 179.
- ↑ Edgar, 115, Buchanan, 179: “In forty-eight hours they had completed two forced marches, had neither slept nor rested, and had fought and won against a superior force an action renowned for its ferocity.”
External links[]
- Musgrove Mill State Historic Site.
- Loyalist Institute website, photographs of battle site.
- National Register Properties in South Carolina, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, includes photographs of the park and battle site.
de:Schlacht von Musgrove Mill