New Bern

New Bern in 1775 was the most important town in North Carolina. It was the colonial capital, home to Tryon Palace — the most elaborate government building in British North America south of Williamsburg — and the seat of the royal governor's power. When the Revolution came to North Carolina, it came first to New Bern.

The story begins with the Regulator movement of the late 1760s and early 1770s. Western North Carolina farmers, suffocating under corrupt local officials who extracted illegal fees, formed an extralegal movement called the Regulators and demanded accountability from a colonial government based in New Bern. Governor William Tryon responded by leading an army of eastern militiamen westward to Alamance Creek, where on May 16, 1771, he crushed the Regulators in a battle that killed several men outright and led to the execution of six more. Tryon's palace — built 1767–1771 at enormous expense, partly from taxes the Regulators had refused to pay — stood as a physical symbol of what eastern gentry power looked like to the backcountry poor.

When Tryon left for New York in 1771, his successor Josiah Martin inherited the palace and the resentments. Martin proved unable to read the colony's shifting mood. As Patriot committees organized across North Carolina in 1774 and 1775, Martin threatened, cajoled, and finally fled in the spring of 1775. He abandoned New Bern and took refuge on a British warship in the Cape Fear River — the last royal governor of North Carolina to exercise any real authority.

The Patriots who took control of New Bern faced an immediate problem: a large Loyalist population, particularly among Scottish Highland settlers in the Cape Fear valley who had sworn oaths to the Crown on arrival in America. In February 1776, a Loyalist army of approximately 1,500 Highlanders marched toward Wilmington expecting to link up with a British fleet. They never made it. At Moore's Creek Bridge, twenty miles north of Wilmington, a Patriot force of roughly 1,000 men ambushed the Loyalists crossing the bridge, killing or capturing most of them in a battle lasting roughly three minutes. Moore's Creek ended Loyalist military power in North Carolina for the rest of the war and prompted the British to abandon their planned southern invasion of 1776.

New Bern's significance extends beyond these events. The town hosted North Carolina's Provincial Congresses, the bodies that governed the colony as royal authority collapsed. It was here that North Carolina's delegates were empowered to vote for independence in the Continental Congress. And it was here that Cornelius Harnett — one of the most capable Patriot organizers in the south — built the administrative infrastructure that kept North Carolina functioning as a state through the war's grinding southern campaign.

The British never occupied New Bern, which is itself historically significant. The town functioned as a rear-area base throughout the conflict, supplying Continental forces in the south without suffering the destruction that hit Charleston, Camden, and later Wilmington NC. That relative security made it more valuable, not less: a working government and supply system were what Greene's threadbare army needed as it fought its way through the Carolina backcountry in 1780 and 1781.