The McIntosh Brothers – Leaders of Coastal Georgia’s Patriot Rangers

by Denise Weimer

Two of the sons of John Mohr McIntosh and Marjory McIntosh, who lived on the Altamaha River near Darien, Georgia, played pivotal military roles in South/Coastal Georgia at the outbreak of the American Revolution. William was John’s oldest son. Lachlan was second oldest, born in 1727. When he was eleven, an alligator killed his three-year-old brother Lewis while they were swimming in the river, leaving seven children—William, Lachlan, John, Phineas, Mary Ann, and George.

Lachlan McIntosh

Lachlan grew to be nearly six feet tall and was a fast runner. William sneaked out of Darien and went to war with his father against the Spanish in the 1740s. Lachlan joined them but at fifteen was too young to see action.

Lachlan was trained at a friend of the family’s counting-house. He married Sarah Threadcraft of South Carolina on January 1, 1756. They moved to Darien and had eight children. In 1758, Lachlan received 1,000 acres on an island across from Darien on the north branch of Altamaha where tidal flow made rice lucrative. Later that year, he and William got a thousand acres on Broughton and Doboy Islands. William, who wed Mary Jane Mackay and had four sons, also acquired land on St. Simon’s Island. Eventually, Lachlan owned had 14,000 acres and sixty slaves. He was tax collector and justice of peace and used surveying skills on roads and to lay out new plan of Darien.

As the American Revolution broke out, the McIntoshes, like most Scots, were proud Patriots. As depicted in the last novel of my Scouts of the Georgia Frontier Series, A Calculated Betrothal, Lachlan and William led troops defending the frontier of South Georgia.

March 1776 - Congress approved a Continental battalion with Lachlan McIntosh commanding.

May 1776 – Fifty-year-old William McIntosh raided into East Florida with sixty horsemen, capturing prisoners, slaves, and cattle, and burning plantations.

June 1776 – William built forts on the Altamaha and St. Mary’s Rivers.

July 1776 - William’s force engaged soldiers from St. Augustine and Indian allies on the St. Mary’s.

August 1776 – Lachlan’s men raided every settlement north of the St. John’s River.

Sept. 16, 1776 – Lachlan became brigadier general and devised a system of frontier forts along the southern border of Georgia but never had enough men to adequately staff them. William became lieutenant colonel of the Georgia mounted troops with three hundred horsemen patrolling the frontier, garrisoned at Fort Barrington.

October 1776 – British plans to invade Georgia by land and sea caused Lachlan to spread his troops along the coast and order William to cross the Altamaha. Late in the month, William’s men attacked a troop on the Satilla River. When a party of Loyalists attacked Fort Barrington, eighteen men there held off the attack until William’s rangers forced the attackers to withdraw.

December 1776 – Lachlan led reinforcements to Fort Barrington, now renamed Fort Howe. Supporters of political leader Button Gwinnett tried to discredit Lachlan by claiming William’s soldiers failed to protect South Georgians. William’s men pursued Indians who had killed a trooper.

January 1777 – William took a troop to build Fort McIntosh on the Satilla River. Leaving South Carolinian Captain Richard Winn in charge, he headed back to civilization for leave, physically ill and frustrated by the false claims against him.

February 1777 – Fort McIntosh fell to the East Florida Rangers.

March 1777 – Button Gwinnett asked Lachlan for troops for an invasion of Florida. They argued over who was to lead it. Political and military tensions between them plus false accusations Gwinnett made against George McIntosh eventually led to the famous duel between Button and Lachlan. Button Gwinnett died from his wounds, and William and Lachlan left the state to defend their brother George in his trial and to offer their military services in Virginia.

A Calculated Betrothal: The death of her titled husband abandons Tabitha Gage on an isolated South Georgia plantation on the eve of revolution, left with only a log cabin on unsettled timber land.

Sergeant Edmond Lassiter comes to the aid of the dark-haired beauty fending off cattle rustlers. The Patriot scout and Loyalist widow are surprised by their shared values. When Edmond learns the same man who ruined his family is after what little Tabitha has left, he convinces her they should work together to make her land profitable—all while fighting off the British from East Florida and her greedy neighbor, who sabotages their every effort to succeed.

https://www.amazon.com/Calculated-Betrothal-Scouts-Georgia-Frontier-ebook/dp/B0D577ZJ1B/

Denise Weimer writes historical and contemporary romance from her home in North Georgia and also serves as a freelance editor and the Acquisitions & Editorial Liaison for Wild Heart Books. A mother of two wonderful young adult daughters, she always pauses for coffee, chocolate, and old houses.

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Fort Barrington/Fort Howe – South Georgia’s Rev War Stronghold

by Denise Weimer

Site of Fort Barrington

The last of my Scouts of the Georgia Frontier novels is set at Fort Barrington, a southerly stronghold during the American Revolution against incursions from British-allied East Florida Rangers and Seminole Indians. The stockade sat on the north side of the Altamaha River thirteen miles from Darien, Georgia. Originally, Fort Barrington was a British fort established in 1751 but left incomplete when funding ran out. The seventy-five-foot-square stockade comprised two bastions at the eastern and southern corners—the latter being at the river’s edge—a two-story wooden blockhouse, a well, a storeroom, a magazine, and barracks. Ramparts in the form of low embankments extended between bastions, with large wooden spikes driven into the ground around the perimeter. When Georgia’s Royal Rangers were disbanded in 1767, twenty-five mounted men had been posted at Barrington.

Colonial map showing Barrington

The Augustine Trail, later known as the Old Post Road, ran from Savannah, Georgia, to St. Augustine, Florida, crossing the Altamaha in view of Fort Barrington where the river was about a hundred yards wide. Famed naturalist William Bartram described Barrington in ruins in April of 1773 and the ferry boat rowed by a Creek Indian man who had married a white woman. Directly across from the fort was the site of Creek native Mary Musgrove Matthew’s Mount Venture, an early trading post established with her white husband in the 1740s.

By July 1776, eighteen Patriots were defending Fort Barrington when Indians and British from East Florida raided in the area. In September, the Georgia Battalion became the Georgia brigade, with Lachlan McIntosh brigadier general and his brother William lieutenant colonel. Three hundred horsemen were temporarily stationed at Fort Barrington, lacking barracks, clothes, blankets, medicine, and tools. Another attack came in October with the British allied forces repelled by William McIntosh’s rangers. In December, Fort Barrington was renamed Fort Howe in honor of Major General Robert Howe, who conceived of a plan to establish a string of forts in southern and coastal Georgia with the headquarters at Fort Howe.

By February, Fort Howe supported a garrison of forty men. The fall of the newly built Fort McIntosh farther south on the Satilla River on February 18, 1777, led the Americans to rally at Fort Howe. In a battle where twelve Patriots were lost, they prevented the British from crossing the Altamaha River to threaten more settled areas of Georgia. Soon after, the Patriots launched an ill-fated invasion of Florida, returning in defeat in June of 1777. Desertions mounted in fall of that year.

On March 13, 1778, Lt. Col. Thomas Brown led a hundred East Florida Rangers and ten Indians across the Altamaha to capture Fort Howe with the loss of only one man, yet killing two of the Patriots, wounding four, and capturing twenty-three. The fort was burned before the British-allied troops withdrew due to internal disagreements. Prompted by the fall of Fort Howe, Georgia’s assembly authorized another Florida expedition which was also doomed by heat, heavy rain, dwindling supplies, sickness, and desertions.

A Calculated Betrothal: The death of her titled husband abandons Tabitha Gage on an isolated South Georgia plantation on the eve of revolution, left with only a log cabin on unsettled timber land.

Sergeant Edmond Lassiter comes to the aid of the dark-haired beauty fending off cattle rustlers. The Patriot scout and Loyalist widow are surprised by their shared values. When Edmond learns the same man who ruined his family is after what little Tabitha has left, he convinces her they should work together to make her land profitable—all while fighting off the British from East Florida and her greedy neighbor, who sabotages their every effort to succeed.

https://www.amazon.com/Calculated-Betrothal-Scouts-Georgia-Frontier-ebook/dp/B0D577ZJ1B/

Denise Weimer writes historical and contemporary romance from her home in North Georgia and also serves as a freelance editor and the Acquisitions & Editorial Liaison for Wild Heart Books. A mother of two wonderful young adult daughters, she always pauses for coffee, chocolate, and old houses.

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Fort Barrington site photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fort_Barrington,_McIntosh_County,_GA,_US.jpg

The Rev War’s Trio of Villains in the South Georgia Swamps

by Denise Weimer

My November book release, the fifth novel in my Scouts of the Georgia Frontier, A Calculated Betrothal, took me to an entirely different setting—the South Georgia swamps. I’ve never written a novel set among the snakes and gators, and during the Revolutionary War, South Georgia was a strange place, indeed…a sort of no-man’s land between the Georgia Colony and East Florida, which was controlled by Great Britain. Few settlers bode in those flat pinewoods and murky bogs. Instead, planters north of the Altamaha River, where my story takes place, allowed criollo cattle (cattle of European origin born in the New World, like the Pineywoods Spanish breed) to roam and forage, herded by using brands and a series of wilderness pens.

As you can imagine, the East Florida Rangers with their Seminole allies coveted a stronghold from which they could launch invasions into the more populated coastal, middle, and northern portions of the state, starting with the settlements at Darien (Scots-Irish) and Savannah. That made Fort McIntosh on the Satilla River and Fort Barrington/Fort Howe (Barrington when under British hands, Howe when under Patriot) of great value. Multiple attempts were made on these forts by both sides, and the East Florida Rangers frequently raided cattle as well as goods and slaves from plantations along the border.

Among the leaders of the East Florida Rangers were three men with fearsome reputations—Colonels Thomas “Burntfoot” Brown, William “Bloody Bill” Cunningham, and Daniel McGirth. All were involved in the attack on Fort McIntosh on February 17, 1777, as depicted in A Calculated Betrothal.

Thomas Brown – In August, 1775, Brown refused to sign the Patriot Association and was abused, tarred, and feathered by the Sons of Liberty. The fracture to his skull gave him chronic headaches, and the roasting of his feet over a fire gave him his nickname, “Burntfoot.” He rallied Loyalists in the South Carolina backcountry but fled arrest, convincing East Florida Governor Patrick Tonyn of his “Southern strategy” to use rangers and Indian allies to subjugate Georgia and Carolina.

William Cunningham – A native of Ninety Six, South Carolina, William had not yet earned his “Bloody Bill” moniker by 1777. In fact, he started out on the Patriot side, opposing his cousins, Robert and Patrick Cunningham. But a misunderstanding when he attempted to resign led to him being hunted until he fled to Florida.

McGirth's flight - Joel Chandler Harris book

Daniel McGirth – Another South Carolinian who came to Florida with a burning zeal for revenge, like Cunningham, McGirth started out as a Patriot. As the story goes, an officer ordered him to give up his (very fast!) horse, Grey Goose. When he refused, he was court martialed, whipped, and imprisoned. He escaped on Grey Goose. The Patriots told the story differently, and theirs included words such as horse thieving and desertion.

All three of the men went on wreak havoc in the backcountry from Georgia to South Carolina, earning reputations as villainous and barbarous as any movie portrayal could be. While they bring some serious pressure to bear on my hero and heroine, Tabitha and Edmond also face much more personal enemies in the guises of Loyalist father and son landowners...

 

The death of her titled husband abandons Tabitha Gage on an isolated South Georgia plantation on the eve of revolution, left with only a log cabin on unsettled timber land.

Sergeant Edmond Lassiter comes to the aid of the dark-haired beauty fending off cattle rustlers. The Patriot scout and Loyalist widow are surprised by their shared values. When Edmond learns the same man who ruined his family is after what little Tabitha has left, he convinces her they should work together to make her land profitable—all while fighting off the British from East Florida and her greedy neighbor, who sabotages their every effort to succeed.

Releases tomorrow! https://www.amazon.com/Calculated-Betrothal-Scouts-Georgia-Frontier-ebook/dp/B0D577ZJ1B/

Denise Weimer writes historical and contemporary romance from her home in North Georgia and also serves as a freelance editor and the Acquisitions & Editorial Liaison for Wild Heart Books. A mother of two wonderful young adult daughters, she always pauses for coffee, chocolate, and old houses.

Connect with Denise here:

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