Captured at Kings Mountain
The Journal of Uzal Johnson, a Loyalist Surgeon
Edited by Wade S. Kolb III and Robert M. Weir
In the midst of the American Revolution, New Jersey native and surgeon Dr. Uzal Johnson traveled to South Carolina with the American Volunteers, a Loyalist unit under the
command of the British colonel Patrick Ferguson. Johnson’s wartime journal recounts
the movements of Ferguson’s Corps through the rebellious Carolina colonies from
March 1780 to March 1781 and gives a participant’s account of the American victory at
Kings Mountain, an event that gave hope to the Whigs and greatly dispirited the Loyalists. In this definitive edition of Johnson’s journal, Wade S. Kolb III and Robert M. Weir
provide an innovative examination of the document to advance our understanding of
the social, medical, and military history of the Revolution.
Beginning with the arrival of British forces at Savannah, Johnson’s account continues with the march of the Loyalist American Volunteers northward to the siege and
surrender of Charleston. The unit subsequently spent nearly four months in the South
Carolina backcountry attempting to organize a Loyalist militia and battling increasingly formidable Whig partisans. Their efforts collapsed in October 1780 at the Battle
of Kings Mountain, where Colonel Ferguson was killed and most of his forces were
captured. Surviving the battle, Johnson was marched with other captives toward Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he remained a prisoner of war for three months before
his release and return to Charleston. While in Hillsborough, Johnson was not closely
confined, and in his journal he describes treating civilian patients and socializing with
prominent local residents.
Kolb and Weir further enhance Captured at Kings Mountain with detailed maps of
Johnson’s route through Georgia and the Carolinas as well as an accessible introduction examining the complex textual connections between Johnson’s journal and the
somewhat similar record of Lieutenant Anthony Allaire. The extensive introduction
and comprehensive explanatory notes add a wealth of historical context to the people,
places, and events of Johnson’s adventure and his Loyalist perspective on the Battle of
Kings Mountain.
A graduate of the University of South
Carolina Honors College and Duke
University Law School, Wade S. Kolb
III serves as a clerk for the Honorable
Ed Carnes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Eleventh Circuit.
Robert M. Weir is a distinguished
professor emeritus of history at the
University of South Carolina and the
author of Colonial South Carolina: A History and The Last of American Freemen:
Studies in the Political Culture of the
Colonial and Revolutionary South.
March 2011, 248 pages, 13 illus.
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