• The Battle of Guilford Courthouse, near Greensboro, North Carolina, where British forces won in March 1781 but were so badly battered that they were forced to retreat when the fighting ended
Citizen Army
Reenactors also will gather for a two-week commemoration of the march of 900 revolutionary militiamen who walked hundreds of miles through the rugged Appalachian Mountains to King's Mountain, South Carolina, from September 24 to October 6, 1780.
When they arrived, the angry mountaineers and farmers defeated an army of about 1,100 colonists led by Maj. Patrick Ferguson, a silver-tongued British officer who'd recruited the colonists to fight for King George III.
The militiamen were enraged when Major Ferguson sent word to them that he'd destroy their homes if they didn't take an oath of loyalty to King George III.
"He said if they didn't lay down their arms, he'd lay waste to their country with fire and sword," said Chris Revels, chief ranger at King's Mountain National Military Park. "That really stirred everybody up."
The anti-British colonists formed two militia armies, one near the present-day border of Tennessee and Virginia and the other in the foothills of northwestern North Carolina.
The two impromptu armies joined forces in North Carolina and continued south, determined to confront Ferguson's loyalist forces.
As they closed in on Ferguson and his troops, more patriots, including small bands of militia from South Carolina and Georgia, joined them.
Ferguson tried to join the main British army at Charlotte, North Carolina, which is just north of the South Carolina state line. But a carefully selected force of about 900 patriot militia dashed after the loyalists and caught them at King's Mountain.
Ferguson took what he thought was a strong defensive position on the mountain, but it proved to be a death trap. The patriot militia surrounded him.
"Thus the British major found himself attacked on all sides at once, and so situated as to receive a galling fire from all parts of our lines without doing any injury to ourselves," patriot militiaman Benjamin Sharp wrote later.
Thirty-Year Tradition
Reenactors started hiking segments of the patriots' march to King's Mountain in 1975 and have done it every year since then.
In 1980 President Jimmy Carter approved the creation of the Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail to commemorate the march.
The reenactors will start assembling in Tennessee in September for this year's reenactment, which will also include commemorations in some mountain towns along the march route.
Paul Carson, superintendent of the Overmountain Victory National Trail, said the militia's 1780 march is especially appealing to reenactors because it "celebrates the true citizen-army."
"I think, in the popular imagination, what appeals to people is that these men in 1780 were essentially reservists," Carson said. "They were men who were relatively unprofessional, who came together to meet a threat and overwhelmingly defeated the British. It's an amazing story."
Willie Drye is the author of Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, published by National Geographic.
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