1732–1786
1
recorded events
Connected towns:
Wilmington, NCBiography
Robert Howe was born around 1732 in Brunswick County, North Carolina, to a family of the Cape Fear planter elite. He inherited considerable property on the lower Cape Fear River, entered colonial politics, and served as a British officer in earlier colonial conflicts before the Revolution reoriented his loyalties entirely toward the American cause. By the time the Continental Congress began organizing the Continental Army, Howe was among North Carolina's most prominent military men, and he received a brigadier general's commission in 1775, rising to major general by 1777.
Howe commanded the Southern Department of the Continental Army at one of its most critical and troubled moments. In December 1778, a British expedition under Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell struck at Savannah, Georgia, and Howe found himself attempting to defend the city with a small, poorly supplied force against a well-coordinated assault. The defense collapsed quickly — Savannah fell in a matter of hours — and the loss opened Georgia to British occupation for most of the remaining war. Howe faced a court-martial for the defeat but was ultimately acquitted, a verdict that reflected the consensus that the disaster was the product of overwhelming force and inadequate resources rather than personal incompetence. He continued to serve and demonstrated his value in a very different kind of action in January 1781, when he suppressed the mutiny of the Pennsylvania Line with firmness and efficiency, helping to hold together a Continental Army that was fraying under the strain of years of deprivation.
Howe's postwar years were relatively quiet, and he returned to North Carolina where the planter networks of the Cape Fear region that had supported his rise had been disrupted by years of brutal civil conflict between Patriots and Loyalists. He died in 1786, leaving behind a military record that was defined by one catastrophic defeat and a longer career of competent service that the Savannah disaster has often overshadowed. Military historians have generally treated him with more sympathy than his contemporaries, recognizing that the loss of Savannah was less a failure of generalship than a reflection of the chronic under-resourcing of the American Southern theater.
Events
Jul
1775
# The Burning of Fort Johnston, 1775 By the summer of 1775, tensions between American colonists and the British Crown had reached a breaking point not only in Massachusetts, where blood had already been spilled at Lexington and Concord, but across all thirteen colonies. In North Carolina, the royal governor, Josiah Martin, found himself increasingly isolated as Patriot sentiment swept through the colony. Martin had dissolved the colonial assembly in April 1775 after its members openly defied royal authority and began organizing committees of safety and correspondence that effectively created a shadow government. Stripped of any meaningful political power on land, Martin fled the governor's palace in New Bern and made his way to Fort Johnston, a modest British fortification situated at the mouth of the Cape Fear River near the port town of Wilmington. He believed the fort would offer him both physical protection and a symbolic seat from which to reassert Crown authority over the rebellious colony. Fort Johnston, however, was far from an imposing stronghold. It was lightly garrisoned, poorly maintained, and strategically vulnerable to any organized assault from the surrounding countryside. Martin nonetheless clung to the hope that the fort could serve as a rallying point for Loyalist support, which he believed was abundant in the Carolina backcountry. He began writing urgent letters to London requesting reinforcements and arms, envisioning a campaign that would use North Carolina as a base for suppressing the rebellion across the southern colonies. His plans, however, vastly overestimated Loyalist strength and underestimated the determination of the Patriot movement that was rapidly consolidating its hold on North Carolina. The Patriots, for their part, were well aware of Martin's presence at Fort Johnston and the danger he posed as a potential coordinator of Loyalist resistance. Two prominent North Carolina leaders took charge of the situation. Robert Howe, a Cape Fear planter and military officer who would later rise to the rank of Major General in the Continental Army, organized Patriot militia forces to confront Martin directly. Alongside him stood Cornelius Harnett, a Wilmington merchant and political leader often called the "Samuel Adams of North Carolina" for his fiery advocacy of colonial rights and his instrumental role in organizing resistance to British rule. Together, Howe and Harnett represented the twin pillars of Patriot authority in the lower Cape Fear region — military force and political legitimacy. On July 18, 1775, the Patriot militia under Howe and Harnett marched on Fort Johnston. Governor Martin, realizing that the fort could not be defended against such a force, abandoned it before the militia arrived, fleeing to the safety of HMS Cruizer, a British sloop of war anchored in the Cape Fear River. The Patriots then set fire to Fort Johnston, burning it to the ground and ensuring it could not be used again as a base for royal authority or Loyalist mobilization. The burning of Fort Johnston carried significance far beyond the destruction of a dilapidated fortification. It was the first overt military action of the Revolutionary War in North Carolina, marking the colony's decisive entry into armed resistance against British rule. The event drew a stark and unmistakable line: Patriot forces controlled the land, while the royal governor's authority extended no further than the deck of a British warship bobbing in the river. Martin's exile aboard HMS Cruizer became a powerful symbol of the collapse of royal governance, demonstrating that the Crown's power in North Carolina now existed only where the Royal Navy's guns could reach. The aftermath of the burning further shaped the course of the Revolution in the South. Governor Martin continued to agitate for a British military campaign to reclaim the southern colonies, efforts that eventually contributed to the ill-fated British expedition to the Carolinas in early 1776, culminating in the Patriot victory at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge in February of that year. Robert Howe went on to serve as a Continental Army general throughout the war, while Cornelius Harnett continued his political leadership until his capture by the British in 1781. The flames that consumed Fort Johnston that July day announced to the world that North Carolina's Patriots were prepared to fight, setting the stage for the larger struggles that would follow.