Visiting Our Past: The Revolutionary boyhood of Robert Henry

Robert Henry’s great-great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Henry Laisy, has called him “the Forrest Gump of Revolutionary times” — not that he was slow-witted; in fact, he was almost too smart, but because he shows up at many of our region’s top historical events.

In a 1928 biography of Henry, Buncombe County historian Foster Sondley called Henry the “most versatile man who ever lived and wrought in these mountains.”

Sondley gave Robert Henry a legendary birth. Henry was born, he said, in a “hastily built rail pen” when his father, Thomas Henry, and his mother, Isabella Shields Henry, were moving from the Winchester area of Virginia to a Scots-Irish settlement area in South Carolina.

They came with traffic, as families with wagons made the trek after the 1760-61 War with the Cherokee had resulted in a cession of land east of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“The term ‘rail pen,’” Richard Russell notes in his book, “Robert Henry: A Western North Carolina Patriot,” “defined several building types in pioneer days, including a settler’s first dwelling,” which was a single, small-room “pen” intended to serve as a dwelling for a few months until a permanent home could be built.

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Thomas decided, the story goes, to settle in the area of Robert’s birth, building a home on the South Fork of the Catawba River, west of Charlotte.

Russell busts this myth, noting that Thomas Henry had been buying land there as early as Jan. 23, 1764, almost a year before the earliest assumed date of Robert’s birth, Jan. 10, 1765. Robert had not been the reason for stopping and staying.

It doesn’t entirely matter. Legend represents truth more memorably than biography.  And though it must be distinguished from fact for important reasons, it also must be recognized as often having a greater effect on history than facts.

The perfect hotbed

The fact about Robert Henry’s home place is that it was a hotbed. Because of geography.

It’s where easterners and westerners clashed during the Regulator Movement. It’s the area where Loyalists and Patriots fought at the Battle of King’s Mountain, the decisive British defeat in the South. The region was a crime zone, and thus a law and order zone, without law.

Plantation builders opposed small farmers, whom they characterized as barbarians, and who were natural friends of the Cherokee, also feared. 

“One of the Regulation’s underlying objectives, perhaps the most compelling,” Tom Hatley asserts in his book “The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Revolutionary Era” “was to create a society safe for slave ownership and paternally governed families.”

It was natural for the planters to direct the militias they formed to put down “horse thieves” and warring Indians toward corrupt British officials who wanted to treat them like slaves.

The word “slave” back then related to position of power. African-American slavery was the racial system. Southern planters also did not want to be “slaves” to the North.

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The road to sedition

In 1770, the Royal Governor, William Tryon, built himself a palace in New Bern and funded it with an unfair “poll tax” — a flat tax based on number of adults rather than wealth. The Regulators protested and Tryon’s armies put them down disastrously at the Battle of Alamance, May 14, 1771.

“Many of the Regulators departed” after that, Wilma Dykeman wrote in her book “With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Kings Mountain, 1780.” They went to “the farthest land they knew of that was open for settlement — the area that was soon to become the Watauga country.”

Thomas Henry was 52 at the time of Alamance and was buying up land right up to the Revolutionary War. Martha, his wife, was pregnant with their fifth child, Isaac. Robert, the second child, was 6. Nobody in the household was of soldier age. But the war was everywhere. Thomas, a master carpenter, supplied wagon parts to militias.

He got in on the excitement of being American. “The men who had fought with Tryon at Alamance,” William Powell wrote in his book “North Carolina through the Centuries,” “were themselves organizing committees, congresses and armies for rebellion.”

When, in 1775, local leaders got together in Charlotte to write a declaration of independence for North Carolina — the Mecklenburg Resolves — Thomas went and took Robert with him to get care for the boy’s fox bite. Maybe I made that up. What Sondley said was that Robert had been bitten by a rabid fox, and Thomas took him with him lest hydrophobia caused Robert to attack the family.

On May 19, 1775, Thomas rode “Black Filly” to Charlotte with Robert beside him. They went to the courtroom where Thomas engaged in debates and discussions.

“That night,” Sondley related, Robert “slept on his father’s great coat behind the door just inside the courtroom where the assembly was in session.” For a long time, Robert stayed up and asked men questions and heard all about liberty and war.

The people of Tryon County — Henry’s people — made their own resolves and formed their own militia.

After the Declaration, Russell points out, the militia went about getting loyalty oaths, and Thomas’ signature on such a document has not been found.

King’s Mountain

On August 16, 1780, British Lt. Gen. Cornwallis routed a much larger American force under the command of General Horatio Gates at Camden, South Carolina.  It was “one of the worse defeats in American military history,” Army historian Dr. John R. Maass said in a 2009 online article.

“After a grueling march through a Tory-infested country,” Maass relates, Gates and his force camped “a dozen miles north of Camden” on Aug. 13. The force included 1,200 veteran Continentals, plus 3,000 state troops and “inexperienced militia units.” On Aug. 15, Gates ordered a night march toward Camden, "to begin at ten p.m. that night.”

In the morning, the Americans encountered the British on the road, as Cornwallis had also sent his troops marching. The British won by exploiting the advantage they had on their right flank, where Gates had put the inexperienced militia opposite Cornwallis’ best soldiers.

Thomas Henry (age 61) and his eldest son Joseph (age 17), “who had entered the service in June,” were there, Russell reports.

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When Thomas got back home, the climate had changed; Tories felt dominant.  One time, pursued by men shooting at him at his home, Thomas escaped death by hiding in a hollow chestnut stump, his grandson, William L. Henry, related in a letter brought to light by Russell.

That night, William recounted, Thomas crossed swamps, got ahead of the bushwhackers at two different points and killed three of them. He then fled across the South Fork of the Catawba River to a place where 15-year-old Robert and his 18-year-old sister Jane brought him provisions.

When Maj. Patrick Ferguson stationed in Ninety-Six, 50 miles south of Greenville, to launch his conquest of the upcountry, newly formed Lincoln County formed a militia and young Robert joined. 

Tryon County was no more. In 1779, the North Carolina Assembly had wiped the name from official records, divided the district in two, and given the two parts Patriot names, Rutherford after Griffith Rutherford, a Brigadier-General in the Revolution; and Lincoln, after Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, commander of the Southern Armies. The Henrys became Lincoln County residents.

Ferguson organized seven battalions of militia and 4,000 troops of Loyalists to fight in his cavalry. They had to keep moving because their horses, “eating out one settlement” of its grain, “would soon necessarily have to move to another,” Lyman Draper wrote in his 1881 book, “King’s Mountain and Its Heroes.”

On Aug. 29, 1780, Cornwallis sent Ferguson into Tryon County (the British still called it that) to hunt down rebel leaders.

By Oct. 1, six days before the King’s Mountain battle, Ferguson was desperate for reinforcements and published an appeal to “the inhabitants of North Carolina” to pick up arms and go to camp.  Otherwise, “the Back Water men (who) have crossed the mountains” will begin their invasion “by murdering an unarmed son before the aged father” and “in four days,” you will “see your wives and daughters … abused by the dregs of mankind.”

Was the region so divided that a large number of well-meaning people would buy what was being said of their neighbors, no matter how rebellious they had become? Some historians think that the evil image of Ferguson was pumped up in order to motivate the opposition. 

Wayne Lynch, writing “A Fresh Look at Major Patrick Ferguson,” for the Journal of the American Revolution, cited sources that claimed Ferguson was “a finished soldier” and an “eminent literary talent” and a gentleman. Ferguson did favor burning enemy towns at harvest time — a strategy that Gen. Griffith Rutherford would employ against the Cherokee in 1776 — but Ferguson had once said after conquering a region, “We come not to make war upon women and children, but to give them money and relieve their distresses.”

Why wouldn’t it be as difficult to ferret out the truth then as it is now?

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Ferguson decided to head east toward Charlotte, and then he stopped to make a stand at King’s Mountain. The Patriots sent a “flying column” “of 910 picked horsemen,” 400 of whom were “Overmountain men,” into the night on a 33-mile ride in the rain from Cowpens to King’s Mountain, where they surrounded Ferguson’s men the next morning, John Buchanan documents in his book “The Road to Guilford Courthouse.”

Robert Henry was there, and he wrote about it. His rite of passage and the details of the battle are a story for another time.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen Times. He is the author of books on history and literature and manages the WNC book and heritage website The Read on WNC. Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter.net; or call 828-505-1973.