Some say the war ended badly for my family. I say it ended badly for William Cunningham, who lived, fueled by hate, and died on a distant island before reaching the age of thirty. He left behind no one and nothing – except a legacy of blood. To my thinking, the war brought my family…
After the slaughter at Clouds Creek on that November morning, William Cunningham and his three hundred Loyalist horsemen rode away from the Carter’s Cabin where twenty-eight Patriot militiamen lay dead. Cunningham’s column moved north through the pine woods, their horses’ hooves churning the red clay of the Ninety-Six District. They had come for revenge, and…
Dawn came gray and heavy over Cloud’s Creek the next morning. It was a day that would not be forgotten – November 17, 1781. A mist was lifting from the water and the trees still dripped from the night’s rain. In the yard and cabin, Turner’s men were slow to wake, limbs stiff, clothes still…
The bloody autumn air of late 1781 carried the scent of woodsmoke and turned earth across the rolling hills of Mount Willing, South Carolina. Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, but in the backcountry the war had only grown more bitter – and more personal. Major William Cunningham’s Loyalist scouts—about three hundred strong. Many of them…
In the backcountry autumn of 1781, the great armies had shifted away, but the scars of war were everywhere. The British began pulling their troops out of the backcountry, even before the fall of Yorktown. For Loyalists like William Cunningham, it was clear enough: the king’s power in the interior was fading, and with it…
In the summer of 1780, only a few short months after the victory at Charles Town, the hopes of the British high command turned to the South as the key to crushing the American Revolution. General Lord Cornwallis was the principal British field commander of the Continental Army in the Carolinas and, later, in Virginia. Cornwallis believed…
The days here pass without measure — slow, airless days that grant a man too much time for thought. In the dim half-light, my mind drifts homeward, for memory is now my only liberty. Far beyond these walls lie the hills I love, the bright waters of the Little Saluda, and the familiar voices that…
Charleston held its breath for forty days. That spring of 1780, British warships had crowded the harbor as red-coated infantry closed in from the landward side, slowly tightening a noose around the most important American city in the South. The siege of Charles Town was not a sudden storm but a steady, remorseless pressure—parallels dug…
The war had not yet swallowed the South Carolina backcountry whole, but by the autumn of 1776, its shadow already stretched long across the red-clay fields and pine ridges of the Ninety-Six District. As William Cunningham was fleeing south to hide in the swamps near Savannah, Captain James Butler Sr. and his seventeen-year-old son William…
I once marched with the very men who would later curse my name: William Cunningham. In the beginning they persuaded me with promises. They swore I could serve close to home, guard the backcountry I loved, and would not be dragged down to the lowcountry to stand duty for Charleston’s merchants and lawyers. I believed…
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