The War in the South

An informal history of the Carolinas and Georgia in the American Revolution—when hangings were commonplace; passions were taut as strung gut; and scalding-hot tar-and-feathers were always near at hand. The American Revolution in Georgia and the Carolinas was that kind of war.

It had its heroes, including the “wraith-like” Francis Marion (the Swamp Fox), Sergeant Jasper (who heroically raised the patriot flag at Fort Sullivan, “Gamecock” Sumter, Andrew Pickens, Big Dan Morgan, and William Washington. And it also had its villians, like “Bloody” Banastre Tarleton, who gave only “Tarleton’s Quarter”—which was no quarter—on the battlefields. With his incomparable touch for vivid portraiture, Donald Barr Chidsey captures and recreates the face, the pulse, the dramatic presence of each of these men and many others.

The battles in the “Southern Department” were among the most fiercely contested in the Rovolution—the sieges of Savannah and Charleston, the brutal confrontations at Cowpens, Camden, Kings Mountain, Guilford Courthouse. Because of its topography, its people, and its political structure, the South bent the war to its own character, and the war here came to have unique historical significance. No student of American affairs can afford to neglect this dramatic and (until now) too-little-chronicled chapter in the American Revolution.