Scopholites was a derogatory name given to mainly South Carolina backcountry Loyalists, or ‘King’s Men,’ during the American Revolution by rebellious colonials calling themselves patriots. A form of propaganda, the term united patriot frontiersmen who lumped all who favored the Crown to be defined as enemies. The moniker’s origins ran from a notorious cattle thief, to a skin disease, to tying the name to a slave caravan; all meant to belittle and degrade entire communities. As such, scopholites were to be silenced or driven from their homes. The result; early in the American Revolution and throughout the conflict, loyalists and patriot rebels turned to violence as the Carolinas boiled over in civil war.
Whig Settlers
As Native Americans were pushed further west and the interior, opportunities for settlement arose, mainly among the lower social order of small farmers and the ‘working class.’ Throughout the 1740’s and into the 1760’s predominantly Scotch-Irish and German Palatines in Pennsylvania and coastal northern regions followed the Great Wagon Road through Virginia, settling into the Carolina backcountry wilderness. Most of these were second generation Americans who enjoyed a deepening feeling of independence from the established colonial government ruled by Royal Governors and their provincial legislatures. By the late 1760’s, this self-determination frowned upon coastal Carolina governments ruled by a wealthy planter aristocracy that over taxed backcountry settlers with England’s blessings.
This erupted in violence with the pre-revolution North Carolina Regulator Movement (1766-1771). Backcountry settlers rebelled against what they saw as corrupt, wealthy coastal officials and their oppressive and unfair taxes and fees for land distribution. Though the movement was squashed, the seeds of rebellion prospered amidst the growing patriot movement against England, particularly in South Carolina. By the time war erupted, many North Carolina regulators remained loyal to England, feeling suppressed by coastal elite planters, who had become leaders in the patriot cause. However, in South Carolina, though coastal planters could not be trusted, there remained a strong, rebellious sentiment that was focused against the royal government, particularly amongst these second-generation Americans. But so too, there were enclaves of backcountry settlements who chose to remain firmly loyal.
Loyalist Enclaves
The Carolinas, particularly South Carolina, had many different populations of Americans who remained loyal to the British government prior to and throughout the American Revolution. The coastal Royal Government of South Carolina wished to dilute the growing numbers and power of largely disenfranchised native-born American frontiersmen who favored Whig and the growing rebellious faction. They advertised and attracted newly arrived immigrants, many fresh off the boat in Philadelphia who traveled the Great Wagon Road south, or Charleston and Savannah, traveling up the river. Cash bounties to settlers arriving from Europe and offered the best frontier lands for exclusive townships created for Scots-Irish, French, Swiss, Palatine, and German families respectively. Such minority communities thus owed everything to the colonial status quo and risked losing a great deal, including even their cultural identities, to an unfettered frontier American democracy that lifted all restrictions on their colonial privileges.[1]
The different peoples in these communities included the immigrant, poor, ethnically distinct, and a predominantly non-slaveholding Waxhaw settlement in the Catawba Valley on the border between North and South Carolina. Historian Peter N. Moore wrote that this Scots-Irish “Blackjack” settlement found itself “suspect, excluded, and vulnerable” to neighbors who “crushed dissent and heightened fear and hatred of difference.” For these same reasons, German settlements at the fork of the Broad and Saluda Rivers (the so called “Dutch Fork” after the Germanic “Deutsch” settlers there) in South Carolina also remained predominately Loyalist.[2]
Origin of Name
Colonial frontiersmen used the moniker Scopholite to refer to the associates of Joseph Coffel, also Scoffield, Scoval, Scophol, etc., a notorious chicken, cattle, and hog thief who had been a constable for the area between the Broad and Saluda Rivers prior to 1772. A connection between those who supported the Crown and old colonial order, and a notorious thief served the rebellious Whig propaganda. “Scoffelite” also plays on the word “scrofula,” a skin disease popularly known as the “King’s evil,” which supposedly could be cured by a monarch’s touch. The word “Coffle,” meaning animals or slaves chained together from the Arabic word qāfila (caravan) also matched the public treatment of captured Loyalists. Dr. David Ramsey, a witness to the American Revolution and one of its very first historians, wrote that in South Carolina the bandits called Scopholites became the Loyalists or Tories while the Regulators who had opposed them before the war joined the Revolution.[3] Pejorative terms Whig and Tory bandied by each to describe the other side had its dubious origins. Kings Men and loyalists, labeled Tory, came from the Irish word for ‘pursued’ and bandit. Whilst rebels and patriots attained the title Whig, which from the 1600’s onward meant ‘country bumpkin.’
American Revolution
After Lexington, Massachusetts, and outbreak of war, on July 23, 1775, the Committee of Safety moved to persuade the support of the backcountry. The South Carolina Legislature drafted am Association document; sign the oath of rebellion against England or suffer severe consequences. In effect, the patriots drew a line, you are with us or against us. Many settlers in the fork between the Broad and Saluda rivers had refused to sign. William Henry Drayton, wealthy lawyer and Charleston stateman, was chosen to carry the patriot message and convince loyalist enclaves to sign the Association. He was joined by Colonel Richard Richardson, state militia leader who, among Patriots and Tories, his prestige and fairness had garnished the respect from lowland planters and backcountry settlers alike.
When the loyalists refused to sign, Richardson led the largest number of militiamen ever assembled in the colony and overwhelmed all Tory resistance in what has been called the Snow Campaign, late November – December 30, 1775. Leaders were jailed and led to prison. Individuals and small groups scattered into the wilderness. Tory communities cowered in fear of further attacks, forcing many to sign on with the rebellion, or forced to become refugees, fleeing their homes. Many ended up in East Florida, where they joined a growing number of loyalists organized into the Florida Rangers, led by former Georgia Tory, Thomas Brown.
Sixteen-year-old Scottish immigrant Baikia Harvey related to his godfather the terror felt by ‘Kings Men,’ and fate of prisoners taken by mostly second-generation rebels during the Snow Campaign: “Dear Godfather tell all my Country people not to come here for the Americans will Kill them Like Dear in the Woods & they will never see them. . . every time they Draw sight at any thing they are sure to kill or Creple & they Run in the Woods Like Horses I seed the Liberty Boys take Between Two & Three hundred Torreys & one Liberty man would take & Drive four or five before him Just as shepards do the sheep in our Cuntry & they have taken all their arms from them and put the head men in gaile”[4]
After four years of relative calm, South Carolina once again erupted in violence after the British army invaded Charleston, South Carolina. Once the Southern Continental Army surrendered on May 12, 1780, the state fell to British rule. Roles were reversed. Resistance groups, rebel bands of militias and rangers, roamed the countryside as many patriot families fled to become refugees. For the remainder of the war, both sides battled to keep or regain territories. Backcountry communities and neighbors were split in a fierce civil war. Seething hatred pitted rebel patriots against ‘Scopholite’ Tories that would carry on to the end of the war, in many cases, scores were still settled after a formal peace was signed.
Power and Reason of Titles
When you disagree with someone, or a group, label them. Give them a name. The viler the better. Empty them as human beings, their essential worth as a person. And when these names are imposed on an entire group of people, as were loyal frontier settlers who favored England’s government over a rebellious one, a steady process of dehumanizing takes place that makes it easier to deprive persons of legitimate human rights. Easier to dispose of. Easier to drive them from their homes; in this case many loyalists were forced to settle in the Georgia frontier or East Florida. Life unworthy of life can be herded or sold as animals, savages. As was common throughout American history with African and Native Americans. Practiced by cultures worldwide since the dawn of time, it remains popular to this day. Nationalist movements worldwide use names as tools of distraction and propaganda, defined in antisemitic, Islamophobic, racism, or anti-immigration’s usage of illegal aliens.
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Reference
Evens, James L. “The Cruel Practice of Using Language to Dehumanize Others.” Word & Way.
“Colonel Robert Gray’s Observations on the War in Carolina,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 11 (July 1910)
Davis, Robert Scott. “Failure and the King’s Cause on the Southern Revolutionary War Frontier.” May 3, 2013: Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution, A Journal. https://southern-campaigns.org/the-march-of-the-scopholites/#_edn4
Ramsay, Dr. David History of the American Revolution in two Volumes. 1789: R. Aitken & Son, Philadelphia, PA.
Schenawolf, Harry. “General Richard Richardson: South Carolina’s First in Freedom.” November 25, 2025. Revolutionary War Journal.
Endnotes
[1] Davis.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.