Wilmington, North Carolina, and the Revolutionary War: Port Town at the Edge of Empire

Wilmington sits where the Cape Fear River bends and widens toward the Atlantic, a geography that made it one of colonial North Carolina's most vital ports and, during the American Revolution, a prize that both sides understood they could not afford to ignore. Unlike the more celebrated battlefields of Yorktown or Saratoga, Wilmington's revolutionary story is not defined by a single dramatic engagement. Instead, it is the story of a town caught in the currents of an eight-year struggle — a place where patriots first struck against royal authority, where a British occupation reshaped the war in the Carolina interior, and where Lord Cornwallis made the fateful decision that would lead him to Virginia and ultimate defeat. To understand Wilmington's role is to understand how the Revolution was won not merely through heroic charges but through the grinding logic of supply lines, coastal access, and strategic geography.

Founded by 1739, Wilmington was the largest city and port in North Carolina during the American Revolution, with roughly 1,200 residents and 200 homes. The town's economy rested on its position along the Cape Fear River, which connected the Carolina backcountry to the Atlantic. Naval stores harvested from surrounding longleaf pine forests — tar, pitch, turpentine, and rosin — fueled Britain's global navy, and the Port of Brunswick near the river's mouth exported more naval stores in the 1760s than any other colonial port, representing some 70 percent of the world's supply. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of naval stores worth £50,000 annually, produced from the longleaf pine forests along the Cape Fear River Valley, were shipped from Wilmington.

By 1790, when the first federal census was taken, more than 38 percent of the population of the Lower Cape Fear counties of New Hanover, Bladen, Brunswick, Duplin, and Onslow consisted of enslaved Black people — a stark reminder that this prosperity was built upon forced labor. Wilmington's commercial importance made it politically powerful, and that power, in turn, made it a flashpoint for resistance.

The seeds of revolution in Wilmington were sown a full decade before the first shots at Lexington and Concord. In October 1765, when the British Parliament's Stamp Act threatened to tax nearly all printed materials in the colonies, Wilmington erupted. The Sons of Liberty in North Carolina included such political leading lights as John Ashe, James Moore, Hugh Waddell, Cornelius Harnett, and other members of the Assembly as well as Moses John De Rosset, mayor of Wilmington. On October 19, angry crowds assembled in the streets to burn the likeness of a supporter of the act in effigy. Twelve days later, on October 31, citizens staged a remarkable piece of political theater: they placed an effigy of Liberty in a casket and carried it through town in a mock funeral procession. Just before committing the coffin to the earth, a member of the group checked Liberty's vital signs and, finding a pulse, rose up and proclaimed that "LIBERTY had still an Existence in the Colony!" On November 16, when Dr. William Houston, the colony's appointed stamp distributor, arrived in Wilmington, a crowd of three to four hundred people accompanied by drums and flags escorted him to the courthouse and compelled him to resign his position. Governor William Tryon worked hard to convince North Carolinians to accept the tax, but when HMS Diligence arrived on November 28th bringing the tax stamps, the colonists refused to let them be brought ashore. The following February, roughly a thousand armed colonists from Brunswick, New Hanover, and Bladen counties marched on the lower Cape Fear, seized vessels that had been impounded by the British Navy for sailing with unstamped papers, and forced every court and customs official to operate without stamps. In February of 1766, Speaker John Ashe, Cornelius Harnett, James Moore, and Col. Hugh Waddell led several hundred citizens through Brunswick, arresting key royal officials and forcing the comptroller to resign.

Acting in a forthright manner, without fear, these men succeeded in preventing the operation of the Stamp Act in North Carolina. The resistance was so thorough that North Carolina became the only colony to never issue the Stamp Act taxes at all.

At the center of much of this defiance stood Cornelius Harnett, a Wilmington merchant, planter, and statesman who would come to be known as the "Samuel Adams of North Carolina" for his leadership in the protests.

In 1765, Harnett became the chairman of the Sons of Liberty and was a driving force behind the Cape Fear's organized resistance. He was a leading American Revolutionary statesman in the Cape Fear region, and a delegate for North Carolina in the Continental Congress from 1777 to 1779 where he signed the Articles of Confederation. His story would reach a tragic conclusion during the British occupation of 1781.

The spirit of protest in Wilmington extended beyond the Stamp Act and beyond the men who dominated its formal politics. In the spring of 1774 or early 1775 — the precise date remains uncertain — the women of Wilmington actually burned their tea to protest imposing trade legislation and increased taxation.

Hard evidence for the Wilmington Tea Party is scarce. However, a Scottish visitor to the Cape Fear region, Janet Schaw, describes agitated Wilmingtonians' swelling discontent.

Details are sketchy, but the effort was apparently entirely led by women. The only eyewitness was a disapproving pro-British observer, and there are no other accounts of the event. This women-led act of defiance preceded by months the more famous Edenton Tea Party of October 25, 1774, in which 51 women in Edenton resolved to stop buying English imports in support of the actions and resolutions of the First Provincial Congress.

As tensions escalated into open conflict, the Cape Fear region moved from protest to armed action. In May 1775, Royal Governor Josiah Martin fled his own palace to seek protection at Fort Johnston at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. After Martin's escape, a group of Whigs, led by John Ashe and Cornelius Harnett, seized Fort Johnston in July 1775 and burned it to the ground. The torching marked the first active violence against the British in North Carolina.

Governor Martin then sent his family to New York, transferred his headquarters to Fort Johnston on 2 June 1775, and instigated a plot to arm enslaved persons. After the fort's destruction, Martin remained aboard the Cruizer for many months, attempting to rally Loyalists to his cause while awaiting the arrival of British redcoats to help reconquer the province. His efforts bore fruit in Governor Martin's plan to rally Highland Scots and other Loyalists for a march to the coast, but that plan met disaster at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge on February 27, 1776. Nineteen miles north of Wilmington, one of the first clashes of the early throes of the American Revolutionary War transpired at what is now Moores Creek National Battlefield.

The Loyalists marched forth to discover that the Patriots had stripped the bridge of its planks and covered what remained with grease