The Man Called Burnfoot

Thomas Brown arrived in Georgia in 1774 with capital, ambition, and a plan to establish a plantation in the backcountry. He was twenty-four years old, a recent immigrant from Yorkshire, and he had chosen his timing badly.

By the summer of 1775, the political situation in Georgia had hardened to the point where anyone of means who had not publicly declared for the Patriot cause was assumed to be an enemy. A group of Liberty Boys — the local name for the Sons of Liberty — arrived at Brown's plantation near Augusta in August 1775 with the intention of compelling him to sign an oath of loyalty to the Patriot cause. Brown refused. What happened next depends on the source: the least damning version says he was beaten, had his feet burned over hot coals, and was tarred and feathered before being run out of town. Brown's own account, and the accounts from British sources, are considerably more graphic.

He emerged from the experience with permanent damage to his feet — which is where the nickname Burnfoot came from, though he apparently despised it — and with a hatred for the Patriot cause that operated at a personal level well below politics. He made his way to British lines and spent the early years of the war organizing Loyalist networks in South Carolina and Georgia. By 1780, with Charleston fallen and Augusta in British hands, he was the commandant of the town and the king's principal agent for maintaining relations with the Cherokee and Creek nations.

Brown was effective. He was also brutal in ways that exceeded what the military situation required. After Clarke's failed assault in September 1780, he hanged thirteen of the Patriots who had been left behind. He used his Creek and Cherokee auxiliaries in ways that terrorized the Patriot backcountry population. The cycle of reprisal he helped set in motion made the Augusta theater one of the most savage of the entire war.

When Pickens and Lee finally took Fort Cornwallis in June 1781 and Brown surrendered, Georgia militiamen tried to kill him as he was being escorted out. Patriot officers physically shielded him — an irony that Brown himself must have noticed. He survived, evacuated with the British fleet, and eventually settled in the Bahamas, where he died in 1825. He never returned to Georgia.

What Brown's story shows is that the backcountry war was not purely a political conflict or even a military one. It was personal in a way that the formal narrative of campaigns and battles cannot capture. Men who had been tortured did not forget it. Families who had lost relatives to reprisals did not put that aside when the fighting ended. The Georgia backcountry in 1780–1781 was a place where the Revolution had collapsed into something that looked less like a war of independence and more like a civil war with no front lines and no rules.