Alexander Chesney: A Loyalist at Kings Mountain and Cowpens

When the British Army invaded the southern colonies during the Revolutionary War, many colonists took up arms for the Crown. Alexander Chesney was one of these Loyalists.

From Ireland to the Carolinas

Chesney was born in 1758 into a Scots-Irish family in County Antrim, Ireland, and came with his family to Charleston, South Carolina, around 1772. When fighting reached the southern colonies around 1775, he volunteered as a guide for Loyalists opposed to the Patriot governments of the Carolinas.

In April 1776, Patriot militia under Colonel Richard Richardson captured him and offered a choice: serve with the Whigs or stand trial for helping Tory refugees. He recalled being "made a prisoner, my house ransacked, and Kept a prisoner in the Snowy Camp on Reedy River for about a week." Worried above all for his father, already jailed for "harboring some loyalists," he enlisted as a private in a Patriot militia unit for the next few years.

Fighting for the Crown

After the British captured Charleston on May 12, 1780, Chesney answered General Henry Clinton's call and joined Loyalist militia under Major Patrick Ferguson, winning several engagements as a lieutenant and then captain.

At Kings Mountain on October 7, 1780, he was defeated and shot. Patriot soldiers marched him toward Gilbert Town, taking his shoes and denying him "covering or provisions." There, he said, the Whigs held a "mock [trial]" that sentenced 24 Loyalists to death, then drove the prisoners toward the Yadkin River, "cutting and striking us by the road in a savage manner." Offered his freedom by Whig Colonel Benjamin Cleveland if he would teach Patriot militia Ferguson's drill, he refused. He later escaped on the way to Salem, North Carolina, hid in a cave, was recaptured, and was finally exchanged for a Patriot prisoner.

Cowpens

By January 1781 Chesney had raised a militia company to serve under Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, victor at Waxhaws and Camden, and helped guide him from Fort Ninety-Six through the Pacolet River country in pursuit of Patriot General Daniel Morgan. In the days before the battle, Morgan's troops occupied Chesney's plantation at Grindal Shoals; Chesney said they stripped it of grain, trees, clothing and blankets — likely, the source suggests, to intimidate other Loyalists nearby.

On January 17, 1781, Tarleton asked Chesney and his other guides about the ground ahead, his view of the Patriot line blocked by trees and rising terrain. Though he could hardly see the enemy and his men had been marching since 2 a.m., Tarleton attacked the Patriots' three lines:

1. The first two lines — sharpshooters and militia — fired several volleys and fell back about 150 yards.
2. The British pressed on toward the third line of Continental soldiers, who traded fire and then charged with bayonets.
3. Patriot militia and cavalry struck both flanks, closing a double envelopment around Tarleton's force.

About 86 percent of the British soldiers were killed, wounded or captured. Chesney, who led a Loyalist militia unit in the fight, called it "a total defeat" caused by "dreadful [sic] bad management," blaming Tarleton for acting "imprudently."

Exile

With his plantation plundered, Chesney moved to Charleston, led Loyalist militia in more skirmishes near the Edisto River, and on May 19, 1782, sailed for Castle Haven, Ireland. He spent most of his remaining life as a captain in the British military, living in Ireland and Britain. Like many Loyalists, he fought with great conviction against the rebellion — and paid heavily for it.

Sources

Based on "Alexander Chesney," National Park Service, Cowpens National Battlefield and Kings Mountain National Military Park, drawing on The Journal of Alexander Chesney, a South Carolina Loyalist in the Revolution and After (1921), from which the quotations come, and histories by Melissa Walker, Norman Desmarais, John Buchanan and Lawrence E. Babits; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The source's "County Atrium" is corrected to County Antrim. Its portrait of Chesney, credited to the Ulster Museum, is not reproduced.