Breaking the Loyalists

The road into the swamp runs flat and straight now, a ribbon of asphalt across land that looks calm and harmless, but it was not calm on Monday, October 15, 1781. It was the last violent gasp of a local civil war inside a larger revolution. Between present-day Red Springs and Shannon, along the tangled fingers of Little Raft Swamp and Rockfish Creek, mounted men went to work with sabres, pistols, and hard horses. By nightfall the Loyalist force that had strutted in triumph a month earlier had broken apart, and the path toward Wilmington opened to the Patriot column under Griffith Rutherford. If you want the scene in one sentence, it is this. Joseph Graham’s dragoons did the one thing the Tories assumed nobody would do, they rode straight into the swamp and up onto the causeway, and the sand gave way under the last big Loyalist army in North Carolina.

It matters where this happened and when. The date sits four days before Yorktown, which tempts people to shrug and say the war was already decided. That is neat, and it is lazy. In North Carolina, the “Tory War” had been hot all summer and early fall, with raids, ambushes, and councils of men who knew each other too well. Raft Swamp was a Loyalist refuge, a place notorious enough to be named that way in state references, and the ground had already soaked up blood at nearby fights. The engagement at Raft Swamp belongs to the Wilmington campaign, the last serious campaign in North Carolina, and it was not a sideshow. Cut out the Tory base areas and you cut the legs from under British control on the coast. That is what Rutherford meant to do.

Rutherford did not come sneaking. In August the state unleashed him to drive the British and their allies out of Wilmington. He had reputation enough that Nathanael Greene cautioned him in writing, cool and blunt, to ease off the torch and the banishment of suspected Tories. Greene had to balance victory with the politics of tomorrow, and he knew that indiscriminate severity breeds the sort of vengeance that never runs out of recruits. You can hear the edge in the words that survive, complaining of people “driving [Tories] indiscriminately from their dwellings,” laying waste, destroying, burning. It is not a sermon, it is operational guidance. Winning a war is one kind of arithmetic, rebuilding a state is another.

The Loyalists in the Cape Fear country had momentum before Raft Swamp. On September 1, at McPhaul’s Mill on Little Raft Swamp, a combined Loyalist force led by the relentless David Fanning smashed Thomas Wade’s much larger Whig column, killed nineteen, and carried off more than fifty prisoners. A week and a half later Fanning rode into Hillsborough and hauled off Governor Thomas Burke and other officials in a raid that became instant legend and instant outrage. When the Whigs tried to cut him off at Lindley’s Mill on September 13, the Loyalists fought them off in a hard, four-hour fight. Fanning came out wounded, Hector McNeill came out dead, and the whole countryside felt the tremor. The Loyalists were noisy, confident, and gathering again.

By early October the Loyalist field command rested with Colonel Duncan Ray and Colonel Archibald McDugald, and also with a second “Hector McNeill,” the one the men called One-Eyed. The deception was simple, and it was theatrical. Old Hector had been killed at Lindley’s Mill, but the leadership put One-Eyed Hector into his place to keep morale from sagging. Men will follow a ghost if the name is heavy enough. They drilled at McPhaul’s Mill, talked big, then backed away to a position they considered stronger, a hill that looked down on the little bridge and causeway across the swamp. If Rutherford was coming, and he was, this would do. They even pulled the planks from the bridge to slow or stop any cavalry. The theory was tidy. Reality forgot to read it.

Rutherford moved a large army, nearly a thousand militia by conservative counts and perhaps several hundred more. You do not shove a body that big through swamps without a sharp point in front, so he threw his cavalry vanguard forward under Major Joseph Graham. Graham’s job was the oldest job in war, find the enemy, fix him if you can, and hold him long enough for the hammer to land. He was a natural for the work, trained, aggressive, and already blooded that year. The numbers that rode with him into the fight vary by source, but the picture is clear enough, a small detachment of dragoons and mounted militia accustomed to bad ground and worse hours, hunting a force that thought itself untouchable behind a missing bridge.

On the afternoon of the 15th, Graham’s horsemen collided with mounted Loyalists near Rockfish Creek. The Loyalists fell back to the high ground covering the causeway over Little Raft Swamp, exactly where they believed the broken bridge would be decisive. They did not dismount and dress a line. They did not build a crossfire. They sat their small horses on the crest, gazed down on the gap, and assumed the Western dragoons would pull up and think better of it. Good cavalry does not wait for permission. Graham gave the point. The lines spread, eased off the road, and rode into the swamp itself. The men guided their big horses up from the muck and onto the causeway from both sides. Surprise is a polite word. Panic is closer.

The first Patriot charge shattered the Loyalist front. Most of the Tories were not horse soldiers, not trained to fight from the saddle, and certainly not skilled with sabres in that tight funnel. Once a charge like that hits, the fight becomes personal and very short. Graham’s men used the sword freely and then kept the momentum with pistols and sheer weight. It is here that the sources give you the unforgettable image. So many horses and men jammed the narrow way that the passage clogged. The little Scotch ponies, the so-called sand-hills ponies that had brought their riders to glory at McPhaul’s Mill, now became obstacles. Patriot dragoons dismounted and began shoving the Loyalists’ mounts over into the ditch, noses poking up from the water on either side, so the hunt could keep moving. If it sounds brutal, that is because it was.

The fight stretched and stumbled along the causeways in a running battle. A small rearguard made a stand on a rise, and here the sources disagree about size, whether it was a few dozen men from McDugald’s unit or something closer to a hundred and fifty. Either way, the stand collapsed under a second charge. Night comes early in a swamp under trees, and the work fell into darkness. Sometime around ten, Graham had the trumpet call sound and pulled the men back. He had scattered the enemy. The bridge and the swamp and the hill were no help at all. You can grease logs and pry up planks, but it does not stop a determined rider who will take the wet path to your flank. That was the lesson.

It is fair to take a breath here and talk about severity. Local memory and nineteenth-century histories keep grim lists. There are stories of men who begged and were shot anyway, men pulled from cover and cut down, and of Major Charles “Devil Charley” Polk splitting the skull of an older Gaelic-speaking Scot who tried to slip away after being called out. No one should pretend that partisan war is a parade of rules. This was neighbor on neighbor at the end of a long, poisonous summer. The accounts are not comfortable. They are also part of why the Loyalist will to fight broke so completely that night. The saber did more than slash. It wrote a warning.

When the shooting and galloping stopped, the ledger was lopsided. The Whigs lost either one man or none at all, depending on which report you believe. The Loyalists left sixteen dead, fifty wounded, and somewhere between fifteen and twenty captured, almost all the casualties delivered by cold steel. Numbers are never perfect in fights like this, but the proportion tells you what happened, one side surprised and unraveled, the other side fast and fearless with a blade. The next morning Rutherford ordered his men back into the swamp to collect stragglers and to make sure the swamp would not be used as a rally point for a second try. There was not going to be a second try.

If you read Joseph Graham’s later account, the defeat did not only break bodies, it broke the Loyalist spirit, and that is a phrase historians quote because it fits the result. Men who had ridden with Fanning now surrendered, or they went home and lay low, or they drifted over the line into South Carolina. Courage is a fragile currency. It spends fast when you watch your friends pile up at a choke point you thought was safe. Local Loyalism did not disappear overnight, the small war stumbled on for months in scattered blows, but the last large, confident Tory army in North Carolina dissolved at Raft Swamp. That is not a footnote. That is a hinge.

Rutherford did what he set out to do. He steadied the country people at Brown Marsh, reassured those who had been squeezed by raids, then moved down toward Wilmington. The British enclave depended on Loyalist energy in the interior. Take away the interior pressure, and the garrison’s value withered. History loves a clean ending, so people point to Yorktown on October 19 and call that the period at the end of the sentence. In the Cape Fear country, the punctuation is more like a semicolon, a pause while men like Rutherford finished the job that made the surrender matter in daily life. You do not restore order just because a larger army stacks arms a state away. You restore it when the last local army collapses on a dark causeway.

What about the often repeated line that Raft Swamp was the last battle fought in North Carolina. It is safer to say it was among the final engagements in the state, and it certainly scattered the last substantial Loyalist field force. You can argue labels, you cannot argue the effect. After October 15, no one in Robeson and the neighboring counties could plausibly claim that the Tory muster could stop a determined march from the interior to the coast. If your standard for a battle is numbers, stakes, and consequence, Raft Swamp earns the name. The marker by the road is not there for nothing.

Walk the ground today and you can still see the logic that fooled the men who chose it. The causeways pinch movement. The water waits just below the grass. When men ripped up the planks from the old bridge, they were trying to chisel the battlefield to match their needs. That is an old trick, and it usually works on cautious opponents. Graham was not cautious that day. He pushed weight across the one place his enemy believed impassable, at speed, and with enough shock to rip the thread of confidence in a single pass. You do not have to flood a valley to make a dam fail. Sometimes one weak section cracks and the whole wall goes. The hill above Little Raft Swamp cracked.

There is a reason the image of men shoving ponies off the narrow way sticks. It is absurd and cruel at the same time, which is to say it is war. These were small, tough horses, perfect for the pine barrens, fast when the rider wanted to sneak and jab, hopeless when pressed into a sabre fight on a ribbon of ground. The Western dragoons had heavier mounts, more reach, and the habit of closing. You could not save a formation on the causeway by skill once the press began. The only answer would have been to dismount, form a line beyond the choke point, and make the cavalry come to you in fire. That discipline did not appear.

If you prefer precise numbers for the opposing forces, the ranges tell their own story. The overall Patriot column under Rutherford ran close to a thousand militia, perhaps more, but the vanguard at Raft Swamp was a few scores to a hundred and fifty by some tallies. The Loyalists in the neighborhood had swelled from three hundred to perhaps six hundred after the earlier September triumphs, but the men actually engaged on the hill and causeways that evening were closer to two hundred. This is how partisan wars work. You brag with big numbers and then die in a small place with the men who managed to show up. The scoreboard that night shows a small fight with a large consequence.

The battle threads back through earlier names and places that deserve a quick return visit. McPhaul’s Mill sits in these same swamps, a Tory fortress in all but title. It is where the September victory fed the later confidence that failed in October. Hillsborough is where Fanning shamed the Patriot government and snatched its governor under their noses, which poured fuel on the Whig fire. Lindley’s Mill is where the Loyalists proved they could hit hard even when bloodied, but where they also lost Old Hector and set up the disguise that would come to nothing. Tie those knots, then pull the rope, and you arrive at a causeway in Robeson County at twilight.

If you want a primary voice, Joseph Graham’s later papers and narratives are indispensable. They are not stenography taken from a saddle, they are recollection, which means all the caveats apply, memories harden into stories and stories sand off the rough edges. Yet you still hear the horseman’s eye in his lines, the way he writes about weight, about a charge through mud, about the speed at which a mounted fight turns from bluff to butcher. Pair Graham with the decades-later interviews collected by the Reverend Eli Caruthers, and you have the texture of how veterans explained the thing to their neighbors and grandchildren. Critically read, they are a window you cannot get from a neat map.

If you want a state summary, the NCpedia entries are honest and spare. They do not overreach. They put Raft Swamp as the key stroke in the Wilmington campaign and give you the casualty figures and the outcome without romance. For ground-truthing the drive and the stops, the field guide at American Revolution in North Carolina is unusually useful, a simple walk-and-read set of directions that puts your boots where the horses went. A local historian’s page, while not an academic source, stitches the McPhaul’s Mill fight and the Raft Swamp rout into one story that mirrors what old men around kitchen tables told for generations. It all adds up the same way. The Tories had a good September, then they met a vanguard that did not care what they tore off the bridge.

Memory does not end in the books. You can stand where the highway sign stands, marker I-51, at NC 211 and Old Lowery Road, and read the line the state chose to preserve, how the Whigs routed the Tories near here and broke their resistance in the area. If you keep your eyes open in the neighborhoods and in the county files, you will also find the quieter memory. People speak of bones found at a corner during construction in the 1960s, at Old Lowery and McLeod, and of a burial spot where wood markers once stood and then weathered away. History raises marble. Communities remember with directions, that place over there, the one your grandfather told you not to disturb. Both kinds of memory are honest in their own way.

There is a temptation to write North Carolina’s 1781 story as a straight line from Guilford Courthouse to Yorktown, as if everything that happened between those two famous points were just the echo. Resist the temptation. The southern war depended on who controlled the countryside on any given week, and that depended less on British regiments than on whether men like Fanning could gather a couple hundred armed neighbors and ride. Raft Swamp is the moment when that last illusion of Loyalist control in this region broke. The fact that it broke in a sudden, savage cavalry charge is not a romantic flourish. It is the tactical fact that underwrote a strategic turn.

People sometimes ask what the lesson is, and they want a modern gloss. There are a few. Do not assume your engineering will save you when your opponent is willing to go where you will not. Do not mistake September’s momentum for October’s security. Do not neglect the political effect of how you fight. Greene’s warning to Rutherford was not a lecture, it was a recognition that cruelty prolongs wars and poisons peace. The Patriots won at Raft Swamp with speed and surprise, not with house burnings, and the way the victory landed in local hearts mattered. You cannot saber a county into reconciliation. You can, however, finish the fighting fast enough that reconciliation has a chance.

If you are planning to write the plaque text of your own, boil it down to this. In the swamp country of Robeson County, a Patriot vanguard under Major Joseph Graham smashed a large Loyalist gathering that had swaggered on the strength of a stunning month of successes. The Tories chose ground they believed cavalry could not cross, then watched cavalry cross it. The casualties were uneven, the outcome decisive, and the consequences immediate. Rutherford’s march to the outskirts of Wilmington followed, and the Loyalist war in the neighborhood collapsed into small, bitter raids that dwindled as the winter came on. When you stand by the highway marker, the traffic hums through the same corridor where the horses tried to fight. That is history in Carolina, the old road under the new road, the same line drawn twice, once in mud and once in asphalt.

If you read this with the historian’s squint, you will find the seams. Numbers wobble. Nineteenth-century narratives love a good villain and a sharper hero. Even so, Raft Swamp does not hinge on a disputed digit. It hinges on tactical intent, execution, and a fresh reading of ground. Graham found the key and turned it. Rutherford did the rest. In a revolution that was often fought by men who did not wear the same color two months in a row, that is about as clear as things get. It is a battle you can still trace with your boots, and a lesson you can still feel in your bones. On a hill above a narrow way, men bet on a missing bridge. Their opponents bet on courage, skill, and a line of horses pushing out of the black water. We still live with the results.