About the Presenter
Dr. Trenton Cole Jones is the Washington Library’s current Georgian Papers Fellow. He is an assistant professor of early American history at Purdue University, author of Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution. His research project, The Tory Rising, is the story of a little-known insurrection of British loyalists—or Tories—that nearly destroyed the American Revolution before independence was even declared.
In February 1776, over two thousand recent Scottish immigrants, as well as disaffected backcountry farmers known as Regulators, took up arms against revolutionary North Carolina’s Patriot-controlled government. Hoping to join forces with a British fleet sailing from Ireland, the loyalists marched towards the coast, only to meet defeat at the hands of Patriot militia on the banks of Moore’s Creek Bridge, just thirty miles from the sea.
The insurrection may have failed, but its causes and conduct had far-reaching implications. Fear of loyalist insurgents propelled many southerners to embrace independence. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson accused Britain’s king of inciting “treasonable insurrections in our fellow-subjects.” It was the Tory Rising that he had in mind.