Profiles of Valor: George Lewis Gillespie

The White House Medal of Honor ceremony honoring Larry Taylor was an outstanding day for American Patriots.

Up next on my schedule of Patriot events is a weekend trip to Fort Watauga near present-day Elizabethton, Tennessee, for the annual observance of the Overmountain Men militia mustering at Sycamore Shoals. This encampment of American militia preceded the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780, a very pivotal battle in the American Revolution when a rugged group of settlers turned the Red Coat tide in the South, ultimately leading to victory at Yorktown.
It is the one living history reenactment I will attend this year because among the Patriots who engaged in that battle were some of my hardheaded Appalachian ancestors, including Col. George Gillespie, who, along with his brother and sons, joined others to form a gauntlet against British tyranny in the Carolinas.
Early in 1780, the British shifted their war strategy to the south in an effort to retain the Carolina and Virginia colonies — the breadbasket for the other colonies. General Lord Charles Cornwallis sent British regulars to invade South and North Carolina, and his officers were instructed to force pledges of Tory support from settlers. The British were bolstered by the fall of Charleston in May 1780 and victory at Camden in August. In early September, Cornwallis charged his campaign henchman, the infamously brutal Scotsman Major Patrick Ferguson and his large regiment of Loyalists, with protecting Cornwallis’s left flank in the Carolinas. He hoped to force all in the region to take loyalty oaths to the Crown.
Ferguson sent word to Appalachian settlers around Fort Watauga, in what was then Western North Carolina, that they must pledge their loyalty to the British or he would destroy them. He demanded that Patriots “desist from their opposition to British arms” or he would “march over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country to waste with fire and sword.”
He grossly underestimated the courage and resolve of these fiercely independent mountain folks — character traits that persist to this day.