John Dooly
Colonel John Dooly, born in Wilkes County, Georgia, of Irish parentage, about 1740. Was an American Revolutionary War hero. He commanded a regiment at the Battle of Kettle Creek in 1779 and was killed at his home by Tories in 1780.
History
Early twentieth-century Georgia historian Otis Ashmore wrote that "of the many heroic men who illustrated that stormy period of the Revolution in Georgia that 'tried men's souls' none deserves a more grateful remembrance by posterity than Col. John Dooly." Ashmore's subsequent entry, however, failed to meet that need because, before the bicentennial of the American Revolution, almost all of the source material on Dooly came from Hugh McCall's The History of Georgia . Collectively, what McCall wrote about the colonel formed an heroic tale of a martyred battlefield leader in the struggle for American independence who lost a brother in an attack by native americans, led Patriot forces to victory over the Tories at the Battle of Kettle Creek and, finally, died at the hands of Tories in his own home. Unintentionally, McCall gave literature its first Georgia folk hero.Behind the Story
Dooly's story, however, would not remain in that part of Patriot lore described by historian Hugh Bicheno as "propaganda not merely triumphing over historical substance, but virtually obliterating it." Research on the Revolution since Ashmore's time has evolved from only the major military events of that war to the world in which it occurred. Dooly's life, for example, illustrates how he and his neighbors in the ceded lands had been moving for greater control of their frontier world. This struggle occurred before, during, and after the Revolution. He emerges, in that context, as a man of motives and actions more complex than McCall's simplistic although basically accurate account.Father and son
John Dooly's role in those events began with his father Patrick. Everything known about Patrick Dooly's life parallels that of the archetypical traditional and historical southern Scots-Irish frontiersman, as portrayed in works like David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Likely a native Irishman, he appeared in frontier Frederick County, Virginia, land records as early as 1755. As with many other Virginians, Patrick moved to the South Carolina frontier sometime between August 2, 1764, and July 2, 1765, according to land grant records, likely in search of unclaimed property to develop for sale to later settlers and for security from conflicts with the natives. His subsequent deed records indicate that he had a wife named Anne and that he could at least sign his name. A few years later, an adult John Dooly traveled hundreds of miles from the Ninety Six frontier to Charleston, the seat of the only local government body in South Carolina, to go through the legal formalities to settle his father's insignificant estate. The probate records prove that both Patrick and Anne had died by December 6, 1768, because on that date John received all of his father's property as the nearest male relative under the then-current laws of primogeniture. The inventory showed a household that possessed a slave woman, a female slave child, books, household goods, and the remains of a small wheelwright or blacksmith operation. John sold off the estate's only other asset: his father's last tracts of land.Growing family
Patrick and John Dooly would share land development in common but, as proved more typical with later leaders of the Revolution than its opponents, father and son followed significantly different lives. By means unknown, John acquired an education and, on February 3, 1768, secured a commission as deputy surveyor. The province of South Carolina employed him in 1771, quite likely as a participant in the expedition to help the colony's surveyor Ephraim Mitchell locate and mark the boundary with North Carolina. Within a few years, Dooly became a merchant and a land developer far beyond anything his father had achieved. John married Dianna Mitchell, quite likely related to the many Mitchells who were South Carolina surveyors, including cartographer John Mitchell and the deputy surveyor Thomas Mitchell. The latter also became the first husband of Dooly's sister Elizabeth. John and Dianna Dooly had a growing family by 1773, eventually numbering at least two sons, John Mitchell and Thomas, and a daughter Susannah. By that time, John had made his brothers Thomas and George his protégés, with Thomas even becoming a deputy surveyor.General accounts of the lives of such backcountry people as the Doolys survive but suffer from being highly prejudiced. Englishman Charles Woodmason, for example, described the people of this frontier as living little different from their livestock. In 1774, Scotsman William Mylne wrote less passionately. He lived alone in the woods on a rented farm on Steven's Creek, South Carolina, near Dooly-owned land but also close to Augusta. Mylne's house consisted of a sixteen by twenty foot enclosure made from stacked pine logs and covered with a clapboard roof. When not keeping snakes and the resident cat from eating his chickens, he subsisted by hunting and fishing. His stout and well-made male neighbors lived like natives; they followed their livestock while their women stayed home to plant a wide variety of grains, vegetables, and fruits. Mylne wrote of how the colorfully dressed and largely Baptist backcountry people raised tobacco that they took to distant cities like Charleston and Savannah to sell. That product would travel to Europe and then return for purchase by the original growers as snuff. Frontier people could barter for goods from local merchants like John Dooly, but they found the prices in such stores to be too high.
A changing frontier
The growing number of Baptists in the backcountry, members of a new Protestant religion that Anglican minister Charles Woodmason noted with great disdain, represented one of the many important changes along the frontier. Sanders Walker, one of the appraisers of Patrick Dooly's estate, had been a Baptist minister in South Carolina since 1767. He and his fellow locally ordained clergymen created their own revolution in filling a long-standing demand for ministers in the backcountry where the need could not be met by the traditional religions that required men like Woodmason to obtain formal training. That Baptists appeared in large numbers among all political factions on the frontier during the Revolution illustrates that this social change, like so many others, transcended the conflict of 1775-1783.The North Carolina Regulator War that broke out among backcountry people and literally at John Dooly's very door in Ninety Six in the late 1760s serves as an even greater example of what historian Jack Greene described as settlers on the southern frontier desiring "improvement" in the form of courthouses, schools, towns, and an environment conducive to trade and investment. Civil affairs on the South Carolina frontier proved so confused that Dooly's father, for example, once received a grant of land that appears in various colonial records as being in three different counties, none of which had a courthouse or any other form of local government. Rev. Charles Woodmason, a Regulator supporter, denounced what he viewed as a morally uninhibited culture in frontier South Carolina, but he also saw the growth of its population as dynamic and that its economy grew as fast. Its struggle became an economic revolution in the form of opportunities emerging so fast as to force a breakdown of any limitations placed on it. Thousands of frontiersmen like Dooly participated in that colonial revolution and demanded from South Carolina's government the right to the benefits of rule of law in the backcountry. As with almost all of the frontiersmen directly affected by that successful and sometimes violent popular uprising to force the establishment of courts on the frontier, Dooly's name appears on none of the surviving records, including on the list of pardons granted to one hundred and twenty Regulator leaders.
Legislative nightmares
As a merchant, land speculator, and surveyor, however, Dooly benefited in many ways from the success of the Regulators, as did the millers and blacksmiths who also would assume leadership roles in the backcountry. Further progress on the frontier, for him and other ambitious men of the new and growing middle class in the region, required meaningful civil government. Previously Dooly had to travel the hundreds of miles to Charleston to file or answer court suits. In 1771, for example, he had to go to the provincial capital to defend himself in a case over a debt based on a document to which his name had been crudely forged two years earlier. In another instance, Dooly took William Thomson to court over debts due for a long list of trade goods. The latter apparently finally settled the dispute with land. Soon after, however, Thomson filed a civil suit for damages against Dooly for having "beat bruise wound & evilly entreat him so that his life was greatly despaired" with "swords & staves." Dooly countered that Thomson had repeatedly threatened his life.Bigger investments
John Dooly's own time to take a public leadership role came later and further west, in Georgia. In January 1772, after the peace and security of the new courts brought about a rise in property values on the South Carolina frontier, he mortgaged of his lands to Charles Pinckney of Charleston. With his new capital, Dooly could finance a major investment. Four months later, as a resident of South Carolina, he petitioned to secure land across the Savannah River in St. Paul Parish near Augusta on the colonial Georgia frontier. He also obtained a commission as a Georgia deputy surveyor and had by then acquired seven slaves. Dooly shortly afterwards abandoned these beginnings for another prospect. George Galphin and other Georgia and South Carolina traders had tried to compel the Cherokee to trade a large tract of land to pay for the growing debts allegedly owed to them. In 1773, Georgia royal governor James Wright preempted this plan and persuaded the Creek and Cherokee nations to give up what he named the Ceded Lands, some that would greatly expand the northwest border of St. Paul Parish. The natives received a cancellation of their debts, which Wright planned to pay by selling the new lands, a plan that benefited the British government by almost simultaneously ending all of the free headright grants in America. The additional territory, in theory, would significantly add to Georgia's colonial population and militia numbers by being limited exclusively to persons like the Doolys from other colonies. Ceded Lands sales also paid for a company of rangers who would serve as a form of civil protection from bandits that settlers from the pre-Regulator days of South Carolina could particularly appreciate.In this new Ceded Lands, Dooly built a cabin on Fishing Creek, which he later abandoned before claiming that included an island and the of "Lee's Old Place," also called Leesburg, at the mouth of Soap Creek on the Savannah River. In 1759, Thomas Lee of South Carolina had obtained a warrant of survey to this land on the indeterminate edge of what was then the Georgia frontier, but he had never obtained a formal grant. Dooly, like most of his neighbors, borrowed money from prominent Lt. Thomas Waters of the rangers to make the initial payment on his acquisition, which he named "Egypt." He also obtained loans from Savannah merchants to pay for further improvements, and he may have raised still more funds by selling three slaves. Dooly thus set out to create a plantation similar to the much larger venture begun by his new neighbor on the Savannah River, wealthy Englishman Thomas Waters. The latter had been a resident of Georgia and South Carolina since at least 1760, when he had worked for a previous company of rangers as quartermaster.