Date
4-7-2026
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Michael S. Griggs
Keywords
Catawba River, Yadkin River, American Revolution, Revolutionary War, Patriot, Whig, Loyalist, Tory, Griffith Rutherford, Charles Cornwallis, William Richardson Davie, Covenanting, Presbyterian, Monongahela, militia, rifle, Regulation, War of the Regulation
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Harris, Jacob Dean, "A Fiery Ring: The Preternatural Revolutionary Politics and Warfare of the North Carolina Yadkin-Catawba River Basin Scots-Irish" (2026). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 8049.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/8049
Abstract
To varied degrees, the eighteenth-century clans known as the Scots-Irish who migrated from Northern Ireland and the Anglo-Scottish borderlands to the British North American frontier sought contentment predicated on free worship, land ownership, and economic and political autonomy. Several of those family groups who had first settled the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia frontiers, under the pressure of imperial warfare, made the journey to the North Carolina Yadkin-Catawba River Basin between 1754 and the American Revolution. Tight-knit clans with Presbyterian convictions filled the fertile lower Yadkin-Catawba River Basin, bound by the Catawba River in the west, the south branch of the Yadkin River in the north, the Jerseys Settlement on the east bank of the Yadkin, and by the ill-defined southern border. Clan leaders and a few bold French and Indian War veterans shaped western North Carolina social, political, and military institutions, and established a unique regional mode of unconventional warfare.
By the time of the Revolutionary War, prominent British officers and soldiers who invaded western North Carolina described the lower Yadkin-Catawba River Basin as the most hostile region in America. Local anti-royal culture was rooted in the regional Presbyterians’ centuries-old, shared, and pronounced Covenanting religious system which prescribed the forceful replacement of tyrants by God-centered and republican-style governments by consent. Animated by the Covenanting faith, western North Carolina Scots-Irish communities forged a preternatural resistance culture and waged a vigorous partisan war (1775–1781) that neutralized regional Loyalism, cemented republican state governance, and dashed the first major redcoat invasion of their new state. The clans’ unconventional victory helped to strengthen the British domestic war opposition movement and set the strategic conditions necessary for Patriot Generals Nathanael Greene and George Washington’s decisive final campaigns.
