Maintaining continuous fire was a critical aspect of early Frontier Partisan warfare, an element rendered challenging by the slow-loading characteristics of flintlock rifles. If your force expended all of its firepower at once, you were extremely vulnerable to close-quarters attack with melee weapons — whether the bayonets of Redcoats or the tomahawks and war clubs of native warriors.
American Rifleman by Don Troiani.
Carolina militia Captain Andrew Pickens solved this problem under intense pressure during the Cherokee War of 1776. We’ll be delving into that campaign in the upcoming Frontier Partisans Podcast on the American Revolution on the frontier.
The war flared in the Carolina backcountry just as the Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain and the American Continental Army was taking a drubbing at the hands of General Lord William Howe in New York.
Young, militant Cherokee warriors, fed up with the encroachment of white settlers on their hunting lands in the far west of South Carolina and North Carolina and into what would become Tennessee, fell upon frontier settlements, killing and burning.
Cherokee Country by Robert W. Griffing.
British agents had urged restraint; the British government was not quite ready to engage in hard war against their rebellious colonists, and the agents feared that the Cherokee would not distinguish between rebels and Loyalists. The warriors could not be held back.
In response to the attacks on their western frontiers, South Carolina raised a large and well-supplied force of 1,100 militia soldiers under Major Andrew Williamson to invade Cherokee Country. Captain Pickens was leading an advance scouting party of 25 men on August 12, 1776, when he ran into a large war party of some 185 Cherokee.
Pickens immediately deployed his men in two concentric rings. The outer ring would fire, then retire inside the circle to reload while the men of the inner ring stepped up to fire. The Frontier Partisan bushfighters slugged it out in close-range firefight. The Cherokee attempted to break the ring, and a savage hand-to-hand struggle ensued.
Pickens’ brother, leading another patrol, responded to the sound of the guns, and when they arrived on the field, the Cherokee pulled back. They had killed 11 of Pickens’ men — but they took a savage mauling at the hands of the militiamen. Cherokee casualties are reported as 65 KIA on the field, and 14 taken prisoner.
Pickens buried his dead in the nearby abandoned village of Tamassee. He burned the village and its corn fields, and proceeded with Williamson’s column in a scorched earth campaign that would break the Cherokee momentum and force the nation to sue for peace.
The “Ring Fight” was one of just a handful of actions in the campaign, a short, sharp, bloody firefight where quick thinking and quick action saved a badly outnumbered command from being completely overwhelmed.
The hard core Cherokee militants pulled back into northern Georgia and would continue their war against American settlers for almost two decades.
Pickens would serve in the American Revolution, leading militia at the critical Battle of Cowpens, and leading partisans in the irregular campaign that roiled South Carolina in 1780-81. He would serve as a Congressman in the new American government. He built his final home at Hopewell Plantation in western South Carolina, very near the site of the Ring Fight.
J.R. says
I listened to a Jack Carr podcast with SOG veteran Dick Thompson. He described his first time in combat and how the fine motor skills were compromised when the bullets started flying. This with a CAR 15 and magazines. I cannot imagine reloading a flintlock quick enough to get back into the ring to engage.
JimC says
Right? Powder spilled all over the place… Civil War battlefield leavings showed muskets loaded repeatedly but not fired — the rifleman forgot to put on the cap. I reckon the same thing happened with men forgetting to prime their rifles. So many distinct steps required to load and fire; it would have been extremely difficult with the lead flying, smoke everywhere, and war cries splitting the air.
Quixotic Mainer says
I think plugging caps on is even worse than priming a pan, especially with cold hands! I bet the ACW guys dropped a few for every one they put on. One point away from percussion I guess.
The war cry comment reminds me; have you heard the Jessta James song War Cry? I found it looking for the Benjamin Roger’s sing by the same name and gained a new musician. He’s got the whole gunslinger tunes thing down.
JimC says
Dig that! Thank you.
J.R. says
Makes you think about the 100 men ina battle. “10 shouldn’t be there, 80 are targets, 9 are fighters and lucky to have them, for they make the battle, but 1 he is a warrior and he will bring the others back.” I think in this case all of those men in the ring were warriors. In that time you didn’t have to look far on the frontier for capable men. They were there because that is the kind of men that were drawn to the frontier.
Greg Walker says
“Pickens buried his dead in the nearby abandoned village of Tamassee. He burned the village and its corn fields, and proceeded with Williamson’s column in a scorched earth campaign that would break the Cherokee momentum and force the nation to sue for peace.”
“Scorched earth military campaigns involve the deliberate destruction of resources—such as food, water, shelter, and infrastructure—to prevent an enemy from using them. This strategy can be defensive, where a retreating army destroys its own territory to starve an invader, or offensive, where an advancing army destroys the enemy’s resources to break their will and capability to fight.”
Some other notable examples of scorched earth campaigns include Harrying of the North (1069–1070); Sherman’s March to the Sea (1864); World War II Eastern Front (1941–1945); Vietnam War (1955–1975); Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022–present); and Operation Epic Fury (2025-present / Iran).
It is the civilian populations that suffer the most during scorched earth military campaigns. This strategy deliberately destroys homes, agricultural land, essential infrastructure, and resources. This leads to mass starvation, population displacement, long-lasting trauma, and loss of livelihood for local communities. A good example of such strategy occurred in 1981 when the Salvadoran Army (Atlacatl Battalion) razed the town of El Mozote and smaller surrounding villages to the ground killing over 1000 men, women, elderly, children, and infants.
The strategy backfired on the Salvadoran military and civilian leadership at the time bringing massive and long term attention from the press, United Nations, and internal / external political figures.
Is such a strategy successful? It depends on who the victor is at the end of the war.