Colonel Elijah Clarke, b. December 10, 1736 (some give 1733 & 1742) – December 15, 1799, was one of the unsung heroes of the American Revolution. Fierce and determined in battle, the Georgian militia leader was always in the thick of the fight, having received multiple wounds throughout the war; two life threatening. From Florida to the Carolinas, and the ‘Indian Territory’ of the Creek and Cherokee Nations, he led countless guerilla raids as well as leading his militia against steely British regulars. One of the uncommon men of the war’s southern theatre, his persistence in quick, aggressive attacks against Tory and regular British troops helped carry on the war after the defeat of two American Southern Continental armies in 1780.
Clarke proved to be a gifted, partisan leader, riding at the head of formidable men accustomed to arms, horses, and the rough life of campaigning in the field. By the time Major General Greene came on the scene in December of 1780, Clarke and his fellow Georgians had already seen action in several major battles including multiple large and small skirmishes. Greene would later write of these hard riding and hard fighting backcountry men in a letter to Alexander Hamilton in which he wrote “…there is a great spirit of enterprise among the back people; and those that come out as Volunteers are not a little formidable to the enemy. There are also some particular Corps under Sumpter [General Thomas], Marion [Swamp Fox] and Clarke that are bold and daring.”
Some historians believe had Clarke not tarnished his reputation with anti-government and unscrupulous land grab schemes after the war, he would have gained a more prominent place in the annuals of the American Revolution. To be heralded alongside such figures as Thomas Sumter and Francis ‘Swamp Fox’ Marion as among the south’s greatest patriot leaders.
Early Life
Clarke was the son of Scot- Irish parents, Johnathon Alston Jr. (1689-1767) and Mary Gibson (1689-1757). Like many Scot-Irish immigrants, his parents followed the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania into North Carolina. Of seven siblings in which only three survived to adulthood, he was born near Tarboro in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. He married Hannah Harrington (1745-1827) c. 1763-65, and started a family; sources differ by numbering eight – fifteen children in which four did not survive childhood – his son John Clarke become Georgia’s governor, 1819-1823.
Elijah was an impoverished, illiterate frontiersman who, as a young man, moved to Anson County, North Carolina and built a home on the edge of the wilderness. He had become disillusioned by the North Carolina Regulator War (1767-1771) that culminated in the May 16, 1771 Battle of Alamance in which the royal government ended the movement, resulting in the hanging of six frontiersman leaders. He left North Carlina in 1771 and settled to a grant on the Pacolet River in present day Spartanburg County, South Carolina (named for the Spartan militias of the war).
Finding farming unsatisfactory in the region, he left two years later in 1773 and relocated on ceded land in Georgia, later in 1777 named Wilkes County for John Wilkes; English parliamentarian who supported American Independence (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania was also partially named for him). The ‘ceded lands’ emerged in the 1760’s, after the departure of the Spanish and French and the Proclamation of 1763, along with land cessions from the Native American Creek and Cherokee. Land speculators purchased these large tracts of the northwestern regions of Georgia, about fifty miles from Augusta, Georgia. These speculators accumulated a large profit by selling the ceded lands to farming settlers. The region would gain prominence in the war. Many of the wilderness settlers in Wilkes County would ultimately support the rebellion, suffering devastation and removal when British troops invaded South Carolina and Georgia in 1780.
Early in the American Revolution
Clarke’s inherent leadership skills became apparent to many in the ceded lands and he soon became a captain in the local militia. Like many of his fellow settlers in 1774 who found themselves on a petition in support of the king’s government, Clarke’s status as loyalists was in name only for by 1775, he was active in the rebel movement. In 1776, the Cherokee Nation, led by Dragging Canoe, staged multiple raids against wilderness settlements from eastern Tennessee (part of North Carolina) to Georgia. Clarke’s militia of the ceded lands, yet to be named Wilkes’ County militia, staged many counter raids against native bands of the Cherokee. The following year in 1777, now head of the Wilke’s County, Georgia militia, Clarke staged raids against the Creek Nation. The Cherokee would join the Creek as allies to crown loyalists, or Tories, and later regular British troops after England invaded the south in force in 1779.
Florida’s Failed Invasions: 1776, 1777, 1778
Now a Lt. Colonel of State’s militia, Clarke’s Wilkes’ County militiamen joined all three invasions staged against the British and Loyalist Refugee Rangers led by Colonel Thomas ‘Burntfoot’ Brown in East Florida.
- First Invasion staged in August of 1776 was a failure from the very planning of the expedition. Arguments over leadership, that which would plague all three invasions first raised its ugly head between Continental forces and local South Carolina and Georgia legislatures. The result was a mismanaged foray into Florida which was beaten back by continual raids from the Florida Rangers, led by loyalist Brown, and his Seminole allies. The only plus for the rebels was establishing a series of forts along the coast.
- The Second Invasion in 1777 was of similar failure, mainly through bickering between rebel generals and politicians. After Loyalist Brown captured rebel Fort McIntosh on Feb. 17, 1777, a hastily organized force marched and sailed south towards St. Augustine, Florida. Clarke was involved in defending the Georgia frontier and in April, Continental General Robert Howe dispatched 300 South Carolina and Virginia recruits to join him. Continentals sailed south against Augustine and floundered in their attempt, while militiamen under Colonel John Baker and Clarke marched overland. On May 17, 1777, at the Battle of Thomas Creek, Baker’s and Clarke’s men were ambushed by Colonel Brown’s rangers, Seminole, and 100 British regulars under Colonel James Prevost. The result was a complete route of rebel forces. Clarke received one of his many wounds during the battle and was able to make it back to Georgia.
- The Third Invasion of Florida in 1778 ended up just as dismal as the first two. In March of that year, Brown, with his Florida Rangers and Seminole allies, marched north into Georgia and raided settlements and stole cattle while burning rebel Fort Howe. The Georgia Continental regiment along with South Carolina Continentals and Georgia militia, numbering 1,300 men, answered and in early May, 1777, and marched south, not reaching Florida until June 26th. Once more military generals and rebel politicians clashed leading to ultimate defeat. At the Battle of Allegator Bridge, June 30th, the Americans were lured into a trap and faced devastating volleys by loyalists and British regulars. The invasion eventually petered out. Clarke reportedly was wounded again, though minor, at this clash.
Kettle Creek
Clarke would achieve his first victory at the Battle of Kettle Creek, February 14, 1779. The Battle occurred around fifty miles northwest of Augusta at present day Washington, Georgia, in the ceded lands, renamed Wilkes County. The British captured Savannah Georgia on December 29, 1778. Commanding officer Colonel Archibald Campbell (recently exchanged for inept blowhard Ethan Allen) aided by Colonel Provost and Brown’s Florida Rangers from St Augustine set about invading the interior of Georgia. Empowered by the British presence along the Savannah River, Loyalist militia from North and South Carolina marched to join forces with the British, led by Colonel John Boyd and Lt. Colonel John Hamilton.
Rebel militia were determined to defeat this force prior to their joining the British. The rebels were led by South Carolina hardened and capable leader Colonel Andrew Pickens with Lt. Colonel Clarke’s Wilkes County militia along with Colonel John Dooley of Georgia. On the morning of the 14th, the rebel militia, outnumbered two to one, attacked the loyalist camp. Colonel Pickens led the center while Clarke’s men were on the left and Dooley’s on the right. The two-hour battle that pitted neighbor against neighbor was bloody and hard fought with little quarter granted. The rebels drove the loyalists back and though suffered a defeat at the Battle of Briar Creek, ultimately recaptured Augusta and pushed the British back into their defenses at Savannah.
August 1780: Wofford’s Ironworks and Musgrove Mill
After a year’s stalemate, in March of 1780, Commander-in-Chief of British Forces America, General Henry Clinton, led an invasion against Charleston, South Carolina. Clinton captured the city along with the entire American Southern Continental Army on May 12, 1780. This led the door wide open for a British invasion into the backcountry. All of Georgia and most of South Carolina fell to the British who established strong outposts across the two colonies. As a partisan, Clarke led his frontier guerillas, called refugees, into the Carolinas to carry on the fight.
In August, 1780, several sources state the 8th, Clarke had teamed up with Colonel Isaac Shelby, leading Over the Mountain Men from Eastern Tennessee then part of North Carolina, and Colonel William Graham, leading North Carolina’s Lincoln County militia. The three commanders led about 600 horsemen were shadowing Major Ferguson’s large loyalist militia of around 1,800 strong. Ferguson sent Captain James Dunlap, along with 144 loyalists after Clarke’s baggage train. The rebels set a trap and ambushed the loyalists, driving them back after a brief and bloody hand to hand fight. Clarke was wounded with two saber thrusts, resulting in what is believed his third wound of the war.
At the Battle of Musgrove Mill, August 18, 1780, Shelby and Clarke teamed up again in what was a considerable defeat of both loyalists and British regular forces. Located in western South Carolina in present day Spartanburg region, the British suffered over 150 men to just 12 rebels. Clarke’s riflemen played a substantial role in the rebel victory after the British regulars were lured into a trap. When a detachment of Delancey’s Brigade and New Jersey Volunteers led by Lt. Col. Alexander Innis (killed), partisan troops trained and equipped as British redcoats, charged after rebel horsemen, Clarke’s and Shelby’s men rose from behind barricades and poured a devastating fire into the British ranks. The result was a complete rout of the enemy.
1st Siege of Augusta
Clarke’s victory against British regulars did much to raise confidence in those supporting the rebel cause and recruits began to pour into rebel ranks. On June 8, 1780, Clarke’s old nemesis, Colonel Thomas ‘Burntfoot’ Brown, of Florida and Kettle Creek, had captured Augusta at the head of his Florida Rangers, renamed King’s Carolina Rangers. Thomas, an Augusta native, had been tarred and feathered as a loyalist in 1775 and driven out of Georgia into Florida. So too his skull was fractured by a rifle butt and boiling tar poured into his boot, burning off two toes, thus the nickname ‘Burntfoot.’ As such, Brown, like Clarke, a fierce and able fighter, became one of the rebel militia’s greatest enemies. When Brown started hanging those rebels suspected of breaking their paroles, as per British General Cornwallis’ orders, Clarke decided to retake the town.
Clarke, along with Colonel Thomas McCall of South Carolina, attacked Augusta on September 14, 1780. They took the town and fort, but failed to dislodge Brown and his Creek and Chayanne allies from the MacKay Plantation, a mile and a half out of Augusta, where Brown had barricaded he and his men. Fort Ninety-Six’s commander, Lt. Colonel Harris Cruger’s relief force of 500 British trained partisan redcoats arrived on September 18th. Clarke withdrew the siege marched and quickly marched northwest into Wilkes’ County, Georgia. Clarke had to leave behind 29 wounded who were hanged or brutally killed by Brown and his Creek and Chayanne allies. Cruger followed Clarke and laid the torch to over 100 Whig homes, driving many of the rebel settlers north as refugees into the Carolinas.
Fishdam Ford, Long Cane, and Blackstocks
Some sources place Clarke at the Battle of Fishdam Ford, Nov 9, 1780, leading Georgia riflemen along with Colonel Thomas Sumter’s South Carolina militia. Like Musgrove Mill, Fishdam Ford was another devastating defeat for British Regulars. Major James Weymss and his hated 63rd Regiment of foot. Just a few weeks prior, Weymss and his regulars had torched a sixty-mile path through South Carolina’s low country, destroying over a 100 homes and businesses and hanging suspected parole violators. The result of the battle was a total rout. Most of the 63rd was annihilated, as well as the capture and wounding of Major Weymss.
Battle of Blackstocks, Nov. 20, 1780. Clarke’s Georgia riflemen would play a key role in British Lt. Colonel Banastre Tarleton’s first defeat of the war; historians considered a prelude to the Battle of Cowpens some two months later, on January 17, 1781. Clarke had joined General Thomas Sumter in keeping an eye on British General Cornwallis’ army. Cornwallis sent Tarleton after the ‘gamecock’ and true to his previous successful tactics, when sighting Sumter’s men positioned on a hill in and around the Blackstocks’ Farm, proceeded in a direct, frontal attack. The action wiped out the remnants of the 63rd Foot from Fishdam Ford, plus rained havoc on his Legion cavalry, before the youthful Legionnaire withdrew his men in defeat – though having claimed victory to his superiors.
Battle of Long Cane – Dec. 12, 1780 was a defeat for Col. Clarke and Colonel Thomas McCall (both had joined forces for the first siege of Augusta in September) leading 100 of his Georgia refugee militia. He came up against a large, Loyalist partisan force of 500 British regulars and loyalists led by Lt. Colonel Isaac Allen. Clarke’s men were driven back after a hard initial clash. The rebels suffered 21 casualties to only four for the British. Clarke was seriously wounded, his fourth, and would spend the winter months recreating; joining General Andrew Pickens in March of 1781. Major John Cunningham would command the Georgia militia in Clarke’s stead and lead them during the decisive Battle of Cowpens.
Second Siege of Augusta
Clarke had returned to lead his Georgia militia in the spring of 1781, in time to suffer an epidemic of small pox that raged through the American Southern Army. He survived and joined Brigadier General Andrew Pickens of South Carolina and Continental Dragoon commander Lt. Colonel Henry ‘Lighthorse Harry’ Lee in what has been labeled the Second Siege of Augusta, May 21 to June 6, 1781. After Clarke’s failed first attempt to take Augusta, Loyalist Colonel Thomas Brown rebuilt Fort Augusta on the grounds of St. Paul’s Church and renamed it Fort Cornwallis. It was an impressive fort of extensive defensive works and high walls garrisoning over 500 men. Including redouts, such as Fort Grierson, a quarter mile west of the fort, and there were approximately 600 British loyalists and Native American allies to face the rebel force of 1,600.
The 80 loyalists at Fort Grierson, led by Lt. Colonel Thomas Grierson, were forced to flee the fort. They were captured and because of the horrendous deaths of the captured rebel wounded at the first siege of Augusta, rebel militia killed all eighty loyalists. After the lone rebel cannon proved ineffective, a Maham Tower (first used successfully at the siege of Fort Watson, April 14 – 23, 1781) was constructed and the cannon hauled to its height. After several days of lobbing shells into the fort, Colonel Brown saw the writing on the wall and sued for surrender with the reassurance he and his men would not suffer the same fate as their companions in Fort Grierson.
End of War and Later Anti-Government and Land Grab Schemes
This was the last action of the war for Colonel Clarke. He was elected to the Georgia Legislature in 1781 and assumed his role as a political leader until 1790. He and his Georgia militia would not take part in the last major action in the south and one of the bloodiest battles of the war; Battle of Eutaw Springs, September 8, 1781. He would; however, take up the sword again, leading the Georgia State Militia as General in defeating the Creeks at Jack’s Creek, in present day Walton County, Georgia, on September 21, 1787.
At war’s end, the North Carolina Legislature presented him with a gratuity of $30,000 and Georgia granted him the confiscated plantation of loyalist Thomas Waters. Beside the state assembly, he worked on the commission of confiscated estates, and in the state constitutional convention of 1789. He also acted as a commissioner for Georgia’s treaties with Native American groups. During his time in the Georgia legislature and afterwards, Clarke accumulated vast tracts of land through various land speculating schemes. In 1793, frustrated by the Spanish influence in Georgia, he joined a fraudulent affair sponsored by Citizen Genet, the French minister to the United States, to drive the Spanish out of Florida. Clarke resigned his commission in the Georgia Militia to become a major general in the French army at a salary of ten thousand dollars a year. But Genet’s recall the following year was demanded by Washington, thus avoiding a crisis. Because of this, the United States established a set of procedures governing neutrality.
The following year, Clarke led a body of troops across the Oconee River into Creek territory claiming massive areas of Native American land. The Trans-Oconee Republic”, used by later historians, described the short-lived independent state established by Clarke in 1794. He and his followers erected as many as six fortified settlements, wrote a constitution, and elected their own officials. But after a few months, pressure from the federal government forced Georgia Governor George Mathews to act, and Clarke’s independent state was abandoned. Because of Clarke’s popularity among the settlers, he was not arrested nor any charges ever filed or penalties levied.
The next year, 1795, Clarke was right back at it, joining an expedition whose goal was to drive Spain from Florida. Clarke organized a small army of three hundred followers, calling themselves the Sans Culottes, meaning ‘without breeches,’ referring to their lower-class status – a rallying call for the lower classes during the French Revolution. They invaded Spanish territory before the whole scheme was ended again by Governor Matthews, with the threat of government reprisals.
In 1795, Clarke still had one major land grab scheme up his sleeve when he signed onto the notorious Yazoo Land Fraud. That year, Georgia Governor George Mathews signed the Yazoo Act, which sold 35 million acres of land in present-day Alabama and Mississippi to just four companies for $500,000. The money paid was later privately distributed to other legislatures, state officials, and influential Georgians, like Elijah Clarke. In 1796, under pressure from settlers who protested the fraud, the Georgia General Assembly declared the act void. However, to illustrate how a change in political parties also effects the legislative branch, (something obvious by today’s extreme rulings by a far-right majority in the Supreme Court) the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the land sales in 1810. The government paid out four million for five hundred-thousand-dollar investment, leaving a tidy profit for those involved in the original scheme.
But by the time Clarke could have fully reaped his questionable venture, he had been dead for eleven years. Clarke died at his plantation in Wilkes County on December 15, 1799, just one day after George Washington died at Mt. Vernon, December 14th. He was buried at Woodburn in Lincoln County, Georgia.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO READ MORE ON CLARKE AND THE WAR IN THE SOUTH, CHECK OUT THESE RECOMMENDED BOOKS
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RESOURCE
Buchanan, John. The Road to Guilford Courthouse. 1997: John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York, NY.
Coleman, Kenneth. The American Revolution in Georgia, 1763-1789. 1958 reissue 2021: University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.
Commager, Henry Steele & Morris, Richard B. editors. The Spirit of Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by its Participants: 2002 Edition: Castle Books, Edison, New Jersey.
Crawford, Alan Pell. This Fierce People, The Untold Story of America’s Revolution in the South. 2024: Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY.
Davis, Robert Scott Jr., “Elijah Clarke (1742- 1799)” New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Draper, Lyman C. King’s Mountain and Its Heroes: History of the Battle of King’s Mountain, October 7th, 1780, and the Events Which Led to It. 1881: P. G. Thompson, New York, NY.
Farnham, Thomas J. “Elijah Clarke.” 1979, NC Pedia, Revised by SLNC Government and Heritage Library, July 2023. https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/clarke-elijah
Hall, Leslie. Land & Allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia. 2001: University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA.
Jones, Charles Colcock. The History of Georgia. 1883: Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston, MA.
Lynch, Wayne. “Elijah Clarke and the Georgia Refugees Fight British Domination.” Sept. 15, 2014. All things Liberty.
McCall, Mac. “The Fight for Augusta.” January 2020 Augusta Magazine.
Powell, William S editor. “Elijah Clarke.” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 6 volumes, 1979-1996: University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC.
Schenawolf, Harry. “American Revolution: In the South, Not a War for Liberty, But a Brutal Civil War” Nov. 12, 2017: Revolutionary War Journal.
Schenawolf, Harry. “Road to Camden; The Southern War of the American Revolution.” Nov. 6, 2018: Revolutionary War Journal.
Scott, Rober Scott. “Elijah Clarke.” New Georgia Encyclopedia. Sept. 12, 2002.
Ward, Christopher. The War of the Revolution. 1952: MacMillan, New York, NY. 2021: Reissue by Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY.