GEN. THOMAS SUMTER IN YORK COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA

GEN. THOMAS SUMTER IN YORK COUNTY
By: Louise Pettus

When Charleston fell to the British on May 12, 1780, the British took 5,683 Continental troops as captives. State government collapsed. Charleston was the capital of the state and there was no organized resistance elsewhere. In fact, most South Carolinians acquiesced and allowed Lord Cornwallis and his forces to occupy South Carolina at their leisure.

York County was the first, and for some weeks the only, county to refuse to accept allegiance to the British king. The "new rising," as the resistance movement in the New Acquisition (York County) was called, was led by Colonels William "Billy" Hill, Samuel Watson and Edward Lacey along with Capt. Andrew Neel. Within the month, they agreed to gather their followers under the direction of Thomas Sumter, a Virginia-born resident of the High Hills of the Santee.

A high percentage of the farmers of the New Acquisition were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had a long history of opposition to English and ecclesiastical oppression in the Old Country. The British forces, quite aware of this traditional hatred, singled out the Presbyterian churches for burning, calling them "sedition shops" and burned the libraries of Presbyterian ministers.

The first military unit to form with the purpose of redeeming the state met in York District and elected William Hill and Andrew Neel as their leaders. They established a camp, raised the American flag and sent word to other potential leaders of their action.

In June and July of 1780 there was much military action in the area as Thomas Sumter rallied not only Hill's forces but those of Edward Lacey and William Richardson Davie behind him. Armies crisscrossed the area now called the "Old English District."

A Philadelphia lawyer serving with the British forces, Christian Huck, got the upper hand at Col. Hill's Iron Works on Allison Creek. In the words of South Carolina's exiled Governor Edward Rutledge, who came to York County to confer with Sumter: "It was really melancholy to see the desolate condition of Poor Hill's plantation, and the situation of his family--all his fine iron works, mills, dwelling house and buildings of every kind, even his negro houses, reduced to ashes, and his wife and children in a little log hut. I was shocked to see the ragged and shabby condition of our brave and virtuous men, who would not remain in the power of the enemy."

Governor Rutledge also wrote that many of the paroled local Whigs had later been hanged and that the British "burned a prodigious number of houses and turned a vast many women, formerly in apparent or easy fortune, with their children, almost naked into the woods."

From his Charlotte base of refuge, Governor Rutledge visited Sumter at Samuel Watson's in Bethel community where Sumter was taken to recover after he was wounded at Blackstock's. As soon as Sumter could be safely moved he was taken to John Price's stone house at Tuckaseegee Ford in Mecklenburg County.

When Sumter was back in the saddle he returned to York County. At one time he had a camp at the Nation Ford crossing of the Catawba River. Various accounts mention him at Haglar's Hill and Haglar's Branch, at later-day Fort Mill. His longest encampment was on Clems Branch on the east side of Sugar Creek in Lancaster County. In camp he had up to 200 Catawba Indians who supplemented local recruits that numbered, at various times from 100 to 600 men.

When the locus of the war shifted to the lower part of the state most of Sumter's New Acquisition troops stuck with him, including the Catawba Indians who were used to track the enemy.

When Cornwallis' troops were driven out of the state into North Carolina and finally defeated at Yorktown, Virginia, the South Carolina government reconstituted itself. Thomas Sumter was elected a state senator in 1781.

Later, in 1789, when the first Congress of the United States assembled, the congressman representing South Carolina's fourth district, of which York County was a part, was Thomas "the Gamecock" Sumter. Though never popular with lowcountry aristocrats, for the rest of his life, Sumter had the undying loyalty of York Whigs.