The Star Fort and the Struggle for the Backcountry: Ninety Six in the American Revolution

Long before the first musket was fired in anger on its soil, Ninety Six was already a place that mattered. Situated in the rolling piedmont of western South Carolina, the settlement had served since the 1730s as a trading post and crossroads — its curious name, by tradition, derived from the supposed distance of ninety-six miles to the Cherokee town of Keowee. The most common proposed etymology remains a reference to the distance in miles between the settlement and Keowee, though historians have long noted that the actual distance between the two locales is closer to seventy-eight miles.

The historian David P. George, Jr., has advanced the alternate hypothesis that "Ninety Six" is a reinterpretation of "the nine and six," a reference to two sets of southerly flowing streams — nine tributaries of Marion and Henley creeks and six tributaries of Thompsons Creek. The site sat astride the ancient Cherokee Path, a trade route worn some eight feet wide and several feet deep by generations of use, linking the Cherokee towns in the Appalachian foothills to the colonial settlements on the coast. Around 1751, an Irish-born Cherokee trader named Robert Gouedy established a permanent trading post at the crossroads, dealing in cloth, beads, rum, gunpowder, and deerskins; by the time of his death in 1775, Gouedy owned over 1,500 acres and was owed debts by nearly 500 people. By the eve of the Revolution, Ninety Six had grown into the most significant hub of settlement, commerce, and political authority in the Carolina backcountry, a region that sprawled from the fall line to the Blue Ridge. It was home to a courthouse, a jail, and a thriving community of farmers, merchants, and traders whose loyalties were anything but uniform. When the war came, it came to Ninety Six early, burned hot, and left scars that would shape the community — and the broader contest for American independence — for years.

The road to open conflict at Ninety Six was paved by a struggle over gunpowder — and by the failure of diplomacy. During the summer of 1775, William Henry Drayton led a five-man commission on a six-week tour of the backcountry to suppress the large number of Loyalists in the region, and in the face of great odds managed to procure a treaty of neutrality from Loyalist leaders at a conference in the town of Ninety Six.

Drayton and the powerful Loyalist leader Thomas Fletchall agreed to a truce on September 16, effectively preventing an immediate civil war in the South Carolina backcountry. But the truce proved short-lived. On July 12, 1775, Patriot forces under Major James Mayson seized nearby Fort Charlotte on the Savannah River — an act the South Carolina Historical Society has called the first overt act of the Revolution in South Carolina. Mayson's men hauled away more than a thousand pounds of gunpowder, cannons, muskets, and ammunition. But Loyalists intercepted the cache, and control of these vital supplies became the spark that ignited the first armed clash. The Committee of Safety had also sent wagons with 1,000 pounds of gunpowder to ensure the Cherokee's neutrality — keeping the Indians pacified on the western frontier was a primary concern for the fledgling state government — but rumors spread that the powder was meant to arm the Cherokee against the Loyalists. On October 31, just eighteen miles from Ninety Six, Patrick Cunningham and 150 men stopped the convoy and raided the wagons.

In 1775 Loyalists precipitated the battle by seizing a shipment of gunpowder intended as a gift of friendship to the Cherokee.

The first significant armed engagement between Patriot and Loyalist forces in the Southern colonies did not take place at Charleston or Savannah but here, in the Carolina interior. In response to this hostile act, Patriot Major Andrew Williamson mustered approximately 500 troops at Ninety Six, and his men built a makeshift fort on the high ground just west of the jail — a simple square structure made of fence rails, baled hay, and beef hides that enclosed a barn and outbuildings.

On November 19, 1775, Loyalist commanders Captain Patrick Cunningham and Major Joseph Robinson arrived with over 2,000 men, but though greatly outnumbered, the Patriots in the fort would not surrender. The engagement — known as the First Battle of Ninety Six, or the Siege of Savage's Old Fields — raged sporadically over three days, November 19–21, 1775, marked by negotiation as much as bloodshed. On the 21st, both sides agreed to negotiations, and the next day both forces agreed to withdraw and cease hostilities for 20 days while they conferred with their political leaders in Charleston. Among the Patriot casualties was James Birmingham, a member of the Long Cane Militia, who is considered the first Patriot killed in the South during the American Revolution; a monument erected in 2009 at the national historic site marks his sacrifice.

The battle demonstrated that the Revolution in the South would not simply be a contest between Continental regulars and British redcoats, but a savage civil war among neighbors. Its immediate aftermath proved the point. Loyalist leaders, including Robert Cunningham and Patrick Cunningham, rejected the truce agreement.

The Snow Campaign — one of the first major military operations of the American Revolutionary War in the southern colonies — soon followed, as an army of up to 3,000 Patriot militia under Colonel Richard Richardson marched against Loyalist recruiting centers in South Carolina, flushing them out and frustrating their attempts to organize. The Patriot expedition earned its name from the heavy snowfall in the later stages of the campaign.

The campaign resulted in the elimination of large-scale Loyalist activity in the backcountry — but only temporarily. Grievances smoldered, loyalties hardened, and both sides knew the war would return.

Return it did, with devastating force. After the fall of Charleston in May 1780, the British moved to consolidate their grip on the interior. In June 1780, shortly after Charleston fell to the British, Lieutenant Colonel John Harris Cruger took command at Ninety Six.

Cruger was a wealthy New York Loyalist who served as lieutenant-colonel of the First Battalion of DeLancey's Brigade — from a long established and prosperous merchant family in New York, he had been on the Governor's Royal Council when the war began.

Cruger wasted no time building up the defenses. He laid out the star fort design and had militia and slaves spend months building up huge earthen walls and other defenses.

Built by Loyalist soldiers and slaves from nearby plantations between December 1780 and early 1781, the Star Fort's distinctive eight-pointed design was the work of Lieutenant Henry Haldane, a British Royal Engineer, who believed that the star shape would be better suited to defend the terrain than a more traditional square fort.

The design allowed defenders to fire muskets and cannons in all directions.

Ninety Six's "Achilles