Abraham the Unstoppable, Part 7

In the climax of his dramatic story, Abraham’s efforts to bring hope to the garrison at Fort Loudoun ended in tragedy and despair. While assisting his comrades at Fort Prince George, Abraham dodged Cherokee bullets and flying tomahawks, and then rode like the wind through a gauntlet of Indian warriors to carry news of frontier violence to the provincial government back in Charleston.

By the end of July 1760, the government of South Carolina had not received any intelligence from, or been able to deliver any news to Fort Loudoun, in what is now eastern Tennessee, for more than six weeks. Lieutenant Governor William Bull entrusted a packet of official dispatches to the formerly-enslaved express rider, Abraham, who departed Charleston early on the morning of August 2nd. His mission was simple and direct: he was to reach Fort Loudoun, some 450 miles to the northwest, and inform the starving, beleaguered garrison that a regiment of Virginia soldiers was in motion to rescue them. At that moment, however, the Virginians marching under the command of Colonel William Byrd were still several weeks distant from Fort Loudoun. Their slow, overly-cautious progress reflected a certain reluctance to get involved, and their mission ultimately proved to be of little consequence to the ensuing chain of events.[1] The message of hope entrusted to Abraham that August was the only relief available.

As Abraham galloped westward along the path leading between Charleston and the backcountry settlements, he followed a path that is roughly equivalent to the present U.S. Route 176. Somewhere in the eastern part of what is now Orangeburg County, between Holly Hill and St. Matthews, he passed the long column of slow-moving, war-weary troops under the command of Colonel Archibald Montgomery. Having been humiliated by the Cherokee at the battle of Etchoé Pass on June 27th, Montgomery abandoned his westward campaign against the Indians and turned back towards the coast. The main body of his troops, numbering about 1,500 men, marched eastward from Fort Prince George on July 4th. Colonel Montgomery and his suite arrived in Charleston six weeks later, on August 10th, and the following day his troops arrived at a camp site near what is now the old Navy Base in North Charleston. Their transport vessels weighed anchor from the Cooper River on August 16th, and on the 20th set sail for New York.[2]

In contrast to the slow-moving army, Abraham and other express riders routinely made the 300-mile journey between Charleston and Fort Prince George in six or seven days, and the additional 150 miles over the mountains to Fort Loudoun in a further five to seven days, depending on the weather. Abraham was in a rush to get to that distant fort as quickly as possible, to deliver good news to the garrison he had not seen since he left them in mid-May to carry details of their miserable situation back to Charleston. As I mentioned in an earlier episode of this story, it’s possible that Abraham was friends with some of the people at Fort Loudoun, and was perhaps even more intimately acquainted with a special someone in that vicinity. The surviving documents relating to his adventures in 1760 reveal nothing of Abraham’s internal sentiments, but his willingness to make repeated, dangerous journeys to Fort Loudoun suggest that he had some sort of personal attachment to the place or its people. Furthermore, it was the fort’s commander, Captain Paul Demeré, who propelled the enslaved Abraham into action by promising to secure his manumission. Now that the South Carolina legislature had officially taken that matter under consideration, Abraham might have felt obliged to thank the man who had set him on the path to freedom.

The scene to which Abraham was racing was far worse than it had been during his last visit, some three months earlier. Letters from Fort Loudoun written in the final days of July 1760 described the garrison as “miserable beyond description.” Having been trapped inside the fort for many months without receiving reinforcement or supplies, they felt as if they had been “forsaken by God and man.” “For some time, they subsisted on horse-flesh; but that [diet] being discovered by the Indians,” the Cherokee took care “that none of those animals shall come in their way” any longer. “The fort was constantly surrounded, in such a manner, that no body dared stir out of it, even for water or [fire] wood; and the paths were every where so well guarded, that it was almost impossible for any one to escape the fort.” The Indians taunted the garrison with the news that the army under Colonel Montgomery had been humiliated at Etchoé Pass on June 27th and had turned back. They hadn’t received any news from Fort Prince George, their nearest neighbor, since June 3rd or 4th, and the people now had “no hopes of relief” or even of receiving news. The paths leading to the fort were “all more closely guarded than ever.” Captain Demeré and his officers “had made several ineffectual attempts to bring about a peace with the Indians,” but the native warriors were not inclined to feel compassion for the “melancholy situation” of their former allies. The starving garrison, said the Cherokee headmen outside, would “soon be at their mercy.”[3]

On August 6th, Capt. Demeré and his officers held a council of war within Fort Loudoun, “to concert the properest measures to be pursued in their present distress.” Voting by secret ballot, the men unanimously agreed “that it was impracticable to maintain the fort any longer; and that such terms as could be procured from the Indians, consistent with honour, should be immediately accepted of, and the fort abandoned.” Capt. John Stuart and Lieutenant James Adamson traveled to the nearby Cherokee town of Chota on August 7th to negotiate terms with the headman known as the Great Warrior (Oconostota), and then returned to the fort to pack their belongings. Capt. Demeré fulfilled his final duty by composing a letter to Lt. Gov. Bull in Charleston to explain this decision. “Considering the great distress they were in,” the commander hoped that Bull would not disapprove of the terms the garrison accepted. In closing his letter on August 8th, Demeré noted “that the garrison were to set out the next morning [for Fort Prince George], flattering themselves that the Indians meant them no harm; and they would make all the dispatch their starved condition would admit of.” The captain then handed his official letters to a new express rider, a man named Charles McLamore (possibly a free mulatto), who would carry them across the mountains to Fort Prince George and on to Charleston.[4]

On the morning of August 9th, the garrison marched out of Fort Loudoun with drums beating and flags waving, carrying most of their weapons, ammunition, and personal belongings. They surrendered the fort, including its artillery and a significant supply of gunpowder and lead shot, to several hundred triumphant Indians who had gathered to witness the evacuation. Many of the Cherokee voiced their desire to put everyone death immediately, but Oconostota, the Great Warrior, intervened. Insisting that the decision to make peace or war was his alone, the powerful headman said “he with his own hands would kill the first Indian that should attempt to hurt a white man.” Reluctantly obeying, the assembled warriors formed a column and commenced the long journey through the Cherokee Valley Towns and on to Fort Prince George. The weary garrison, numbering around 150 soldiers and a few dozen women and children, fell in behind their escort. Two miles into their slow march, Charles McLamore galloped ahead and commenced his express journey towards Charleston. After covering about sixteen miles that first day, the column of Indians and colonials stopped in a meadow near Cane Creek, about two miles from the Cherokee town of Great Tellico, and made camp for the night. After dark, the escorting Indians disappeared, and the garrison was alone in the wilderness.[5]

The next morning, shortly after the garrison’s drummer beat reveille, a party of hostile Cherokee appeared around the perimeter of the peaceful meadow camp. The soldiers immediately stood to their arms and adopted defensive positions. Panic began to spread through the women and children in the camp, and a few shots rang out from both sides. Some of the Indians raised the war-whoop, and suddenly a swelling native crowd descended on the camp with a vengeful fury. One survivor later recalled that “vollies of small arms [fire] and showers of arrows poured in upon them from every side.” In a short burst of bloody violence, the Cherokee killed and scalped all of the officers, some two dozen men, except Capt. John Stuart, who was whisked away to the safety of his powerful allies among the Cherokee. Capt. Paul Demeré, the most reviled of the white soldiers, was scalped, tortured, made to dance, dismembered, and killed. Ensign John Bogges and ten privates ran towards a nearby river, where seven of them drown; three of the starving survivors afterwards got to the Cherokee town of Hiwassee, where two of them “burst themselves with eating.” In the hail of gun fire and hand-to-hand fighting on the morning of August 10th, several other private soldiers and a few women were also killed, but the majority of the refugees were taken by the Cherokee “to be distributed amongst the several towns, as prisoners or slaves.”[6]

The motivations behind the massacre at Cane Creek have remained unclear since that bloody day in the summer of 1760. Conflicting reports about Indian rivalries, revenge for previous wrongs, and misunderstandings about the terms of surrender have clouded our understanding of the event from the moment it was first reported, and it’s difficult to separate conjecture from the facts in surviving accounts. Regardless of the true causes of that violent episode, or the exact number of casualties, we know that the survivors from the garrison of Fort Loudoun were scattered among the Cherokee nation after the attack on August 10th. There were no able-bodied witnesses to carry word of the event back to Fort Prince George, or any other distant colonial settlement. It took several weeks for news of the massacre to reach the network of colonial outposts that stretched across South Carolina from Fort Prince George to Charleston.

Meanwhile, Abraham was still in motion up the path and, like everyone around him, unaware of the tragedy that had occurred at Cane Creek. Since he departed Charleston early on the morning of August 2nd, Abraham would have reached Fort Prince George within the usual timeframe of six or seven days, sometime between the evening of August 7th and the morning of August 9th. Let’s split the difference and say he arrived there on August 8th. Since his mission was to reach Fort Loudoun with important news for that garrison, he probably rested briefly at Fort Prince George and continued his westward journey the following day, around August 9th. If we accept these dates as reasonable estimates, we can surmise that Abraham was somewhere in western North Carolina, on his way to Fort Loudoun, when the massacre took place at Cane Creek on August 10th.

The sparse documentary trail of Abraham’s movements during this time frame do not specify whether or not he reached Fort Loudoun in mid-August 1760. If he did, he would have found it occupied by a contingent of hostile Cherokee, and he likely would have retreated stealthily into the forest to avoid detection. He had enough experience with the Cherokee to know better than to walk right in and ask questions. Approaching the fort from the southeast, Abraham might have passed through the meadow at Cane Creek a few days after the massacre at that site. If so, we might imagine that he encountered some physical evidence of the attack, such as damaged vegetation, remnants of torn clothing, or perhaps small articles dropped during the struggle. Any remaining bodies, body parts, and pools of blood at the scene would likely have been carried away by wolves, vultures, and insects. In any case, we know that Abraham remained ignorant of the fate of Capt. Paul Demeré and the rest of the garrison of Fort Loudoun. He might have suspected that some violence befell those people, but the facts remained unknown to him for some time longer.

Charles McLamore, who witnessed the surrender and then galloped away on August 9th, made a lightning-fast journey across the mountains and arrived at Fort Prince George on the evening of August 12th. On hearing the news of the recent surrender, the garrison at the Keowee fort were of course surprised and disappointed, but they knew too well the difficulties of being blockaded and harassed by the surrounding Indians. McLamore rested briefly at the fort and conversed with the officers about the Cherokee situation. The express rider told them he was “very confident that not one of them [who had surrendered at Fort Loudoun] will be hurt [by the Indians],” and he “supposed they will arrive here [at Fort Prince George] about Monday next,” the 18th of August. After sharing the story of the surrender of the Overhill fort, McLamore then resumed his journey on the morning of August 13th to carry this important news to Charleston.[7]

While Charles McLamore’s was resting briefly at Fort Prince George, several hundred Cherokee warriors from the Middle Towns of western North Carolina were quietly moving down to the Lower Towns in western South Carolina, which Colonel Montgomery’s troops had burned in early June. Their mission was to harass the garrison at Fort Prince George, now the sole British outpost on the western frontier of Carolina, and perhaps to starve them into surrendering as well. The Indians established a sort of headquarters at the charred town of Toxaway, about ten miles north of the fort, and then deployed a number of scalping parties to patrol and blockade a broad perimeter around the vicinity of Fort Prince George.[8] The garrison within had been unhappy and hungry for some time, and had threatened to mutiny when Colonel Montgomery was present six weeks early. The colonel had posted there several companies of his Royal Scots and Highlander regiments to quell their complaints, but now those soldiers joined the chorus of voices wishing to quit the Indian business and go home.

Through this new Cherokee gauntlet our hero, Abraham, had to pass when he returned to Fort Prince George sometime around the middle of August. Although we don’t know the details of his movements during the second week that month, a newspaper story published later in Charleston definitely places him within the fort’s palisaded walls on the morning of August 18th. On that day, about an hour before daybreak, three soldiers in the garrison, “two Royals and one Highlander, made an attempt to desert, but were detected.” Two of the men were arrested by their comrades before they could get out of the fort, but the third—a soldier named Laurence Kelly—managed to get outside the walls. Kelly immediately jumped on a horse belonging to the fort’s interim commander, Ensign Alexander Miln, and rode away as quickly as he could. To pursue the runaway redcoat, the commander picked a trusted ally who was an expert horseman with a proven knowledge of the local terrain. “At day light,” said the newspaper report, “Mr. Miln, with the negro Abram,” saddled two horses and immediately “went in pursuit of the deserter.”

The men galloped for nearly an hour until they reached Twelve-Mile Creek, which is about twelve miles due east of the site of Fort Prince George, in modern Pickens County. Unable to catch up with the deserter, however, Ensign Miln and Abraham turned their horses and headed back towards the fort. “As they were crossing Crow-Creek, which is very near the fort [and now part of Lake Keowee], they were fired at by three Indians” lying in ambush. One of the bullets “shot one of Abram’s boots through,” while another mortally wounded “his horse under him.” As the dying animal collapsed in mid-stride, one of the attacking Indians threw a tomahawk at Abraham “as he fell” from the saddle. The flying ax “struck him in the back,” but the severity of the wound is unknown. Abraham survived the fall, rolled clear of the convulsing horse, and the tomahawk fell to the ground. The details of the next few moments were not reported in the newspaper. Miln and Abraham were “very near the fort,” but they were still in danger. The report of gunfire must have alarmed the garrison, who perhaps responded by firing in the direction of the scalping party. The attack and fall surely rattled Abraham’s mind and body, but his keen instinct for survival must have immediately propelled him into an upright, defensive posture. It’s unclear whether he faced his attackers head-on, or what weapons he—a formerly-enslaved man—might have carried that day. Perhaps he ran for cover under the walls of the nearby fort, or leapt onto the back of Ensign Miln’s horse and rode to safety.

After describing the tomahawk flying through the air and striking Abraham’s back, the newspaper report of this dramatic incident simply noted that “Mr. Miln and Abram however luckily got back” to Fort Prince George. Following their return to safety, “a party [of soldiers] immediately went out” in pursuit of the attacking Indians, “but the enemy surpassed them so much in activity”—that is, by running away—“that they soon disappeared.” The soldiers scouted the area for while and inspected the site of the ambush for clues. When they returned to the fort that afternoon, said the newspaper, “the party bro’t in no other trophy than the tomahawk which had been thrown at Abram and some horse flesh.” Abraham’s mount, mortally wounded in the morning attack, was now destined to become a meal for the starving garrison.[9] The tomahawk, I’d like to think, became a souvenir that Abraham tucked into his belt and proudly carried from that day forward.

For more than two weeks after learning of the surrender of Fort Loudoun, Abraham and the rest of the men at Fort Prince George waited for the arrival of the weary men, women, and children from that distant garrison. Everyone knew their progress over the mountains and valleys of western North Carolina would be slow, but they were expected to reach the Keowee fort as early as August 16th or as late as the 18th. When they did not appear by that time, the people at Fort Prince George became concerned. Perhaps “the bad weather we had last week has retarded their journey,” said the most optimistic, while the resurgence of Cherokee patrols around Fort Prince George induced others to entertain darker thoughts. “These events . . . alarmed us a good deal, and awakened our fears for the command from Fort Loudoun,” reported one anonymous correspondent. It now seemed probable, he said, “that the Cherokees have slaughtered the victims from Fort Loudoun, after their infernal manner, and that they are now in quest of fresh prey.”[10]

News of the surrender of Fort Loudoun, carried by Charles McLamore, reached Lt. Gov. Bull at his plantation on the Ashley River on the evening of August 19th, and the “Articles of Capitulation” were printed in the South Carolina Gazette on Saturday, August 23rd. A week later, however, there was still no word of the missing garrison. The weekly Gazette of August 30th admitted this was “a circumstance that alarms many exceedingly,” but nonetheless tried to reassure its readers. “We are in no pain for the safety of that command,” said the editor, “if the Indians are so desirous as they pretend of accommodating matters with us, and especially if what we have been told, of the uncommon regard they have for Capt. [John] Stuart, and the amazing influence he has in the [Cherokee] nation, be true.”[11]

Our man, Abraham, was still lingering at Fort Prince George in late August, no doubt recovering from his recent injuries. Assigned to deliver messages to Fort Loudoun and then return to Charleston with news from that fort, Abraham was among those waiting impatiently for any information about the fate of that missing garrison so he could complete his mission. On the morning of August 31st, a soldier venturing outside the gates of Fort Prince George found a letter “put up on a stick by the side of the [Keowee] river,” adjacent to the fort, addressed “To the Officer commanding Fort Prince George.” Inside the fort, Ensign Miln read the anonymous note and discovered it was “from some white person in the Middle Settlements, a confederate of the Cherokees.” The author advised Miln and his men “to desert that fort [Prince George] as speedily and secretly as possible, to march all night and [the] next day, and he should not be hurt; for that, since the surrender of Fort Loudoun, the Indians had murdered Capt. Paul Demeré, and 23 more of this command.” Cherokee warriors were planning to force the surviving soldiers to man the cannon from Fort Loudoun and to bring down a large force to storm Fort Prince George. The missing garrison, so long awaited, had been destroyed, and now the men at Fort Prince George were facing a similar fate.[12]

This was devastating, incendiary news, and it needed to get to the lieutenant governor in Charleston as quickly as possible. While Abraham readied a new horse for the long journey back to the capital, Ensign Miln rallied his men to increase their watches and to prepare the fort for attack. An unidentified correspondent within the fort penned a letter for his friends in Charleston, which later appeared in the newspaper: “Altho’ we are not without frequent melancholy reflections, to which our very low diet, severe duty, &c. contribute greatly, yet do not imagine we are so dispirited as to think of giving up or evacuating this post: no; we shall never do either without orders from a superior power: On the contrary, Mr. Miln, our commanding officer, seems resolved to defend it to the last extremity, or perish with it; and his garrison, I believe, to a man, are determined to do the same, for we have no reason to expect any mercy; besides, we too well know what would be the consequences of acting otherwise.”[13]

Abraham galloped out of Fort Prince George on the morning of September 1st and headed southeastward for Charleston. Considering the number of Cherokee that had moved back to the Lower Towns and surrounded the fort, Abraham must have known that the first leg of his journey would be the most dangerous. The path between the fort and the Twelve-Mile Creek continued to be a gauntlet of danger. For Abraham, however, this peril was nothing new. His first few trips in and out of Fort Prince George, back in the winter and spring, had been similarly dangerous, and he had recently survived a near-fatal ambush. A white man named Thomas Hawkins, who was a Cherokee confederate and might have been among the Indians lying in wait for Abraham, later reported that the first twelve miles of the path outside Fort Prince George were “way-laid” at that time by a force of “300 Indians,” and “that Abram, the last time he went down [it,] had a very narrow escape.”[14] The details of that incident are unknown, but we can use our imaginations to visualize our fearless black hero riding at break-neck speed through a hail of Indian gunfire and flying tomahawks and emerging with hardly a scratch.

Abraham arrived at the Congarees (the site of the modern town of Cayce), the half-way-point of his journey, on the morning of Thursday, September 4th. While resting briefly there, he spoke with another express rider who was just about to depart for Charleston. Abraham told the courier about the letter found by the Keowee riverside a few days earlier, and its report of the murder of the officers from Fort Loudoun. Two days later, on the evening of Saturday, September 6th, the editor of the South Carolina Gazette in Charleston reported that he had held the presses until 5 p.m. in the hopes of hearing some breaking news from the frontier, when the express rider arrived with news gleaned from Abraham. “We have the mortification to learn,” reported the Gazette printed that evening, “that the negro Abram arrived at Congarees on Thursday morning [September 4th] with [the] most disagreeable accounts, viz., that the garrison of Fort Loudoun was not arrived at Fort Prince George last Sunday (the 31st ult[imo].) or any tidings from them, but that Mr. Miln had that morning received a letter (found by the river side),” that informed them that Capt. Paul Demeré and other soldiers had been murdered by the Cherokee, and warned the garrison to abandon Fort Prince George lest they too should suffer the same fate.[15]

About twelve hours after the Charleston newspaper printed the first news of the fate of the Fort Loudoun garrison, Abraham galloped into the capital on the morning of Sunday, September 7th, under “gloomy” skies and with a “brisk gale” blowing in his face. He delivered his “dispatches to his honor the lieut[enant]. governor,” and distributed “some private letters” to their recipients as well.[16] Abraham had been on the frontier for five troublesome weeks, and was supposed to have reached the garrison at Fort Loudoun. Now that he had returned with news of the loss of those men and women, and threats of an escalating war, I suspect that Abraham had the full attention of the lieutenant governor. Bull likely interrogated the now-familiar black courier in an effort to understand better the latest developments on the frontlines of the Cherokee war, but no details of the conversation survive. Having completed his ninth express mission for the provincial government, Abraham no doubt found a comfortable resting place somewhere in the bustling port town, pulled off his bullet-riddled boots, and enjoyed a bit of well-deserved relaxation.

In the ensuing weeks in the autumn of 1760, more details about the massacre at Cane Creek trickled down to Charleston and were printed in the local newspapers. Many of the people who marched out of Fort Loudoun on August 9th had been murdered, but the majority were now living among the Cherokee towns as slaves and prisoners. Lt. Gov. Bull and South Carolina’s provincial government worked diligently to negotiate prisoner exchanges with the Indians and to ransom the white survivors secreted among their distant towns. The legislature debated the terms of a new and even larger military campaign to proceed westward again and finally defeat the Cherokee nation once and for all. In the midst of all of this activity, our hero, Abraham, disappeared from the historical radar of surviving documentary records. The conflict now known as the Anglo-Cherokee War continued for another year, into the autumn of 1761, but Abraham’s name disappears from the contemporary newspaper reports about the express riders carrying breaking news to and from the forts on the western frontier.

I haven’t found any documentary evidence of Abraham’s movements during the remainder of the year 1760, so it’s possible that something happened to him. Perhaps the fatigue of multiple long-distance trips, the lingering effects of contracting small pox, the tomahawk wound in his back, the fall from his dying horse, and witnessing so much death and destruction all combined to take a serious toll on his physical and mental health. Perhaps he simply needed more time to rest and recuperate. Considering Abraham’s success in carrying important dispatches through hostile territory and harsh weather, I think Lt. Gov. Bull likely asked Abraham to embark on another mission to the frontier, but perhaps he declined. Alternatively, we might imagine that Abraham rested only briefly in Charleston and then ventured back to the Cherokee frontier on a private mission. Perhaps one of the prisoners taken by the Indians from the garrison of Fort Loudoun was especially dear to him, and he was determined to use all his strength to secure their freedom. Perhaps we’ll never know.

Fortunately for us, Abraham’s name reappears in a few surviving documents dating from 1761 and 1762, though in the context of far less dramatic circumstances. I’m planning one more Abraham episode, at some point in the coming weeks, as a sort of epilogue to conclude his dramatic story. In the meantime, I’ll close today’s program by thanking those of you who voted Charleston Time Machine “best local podcast” in the City Paper’s 2019 competition. Thanks, y’all!