08/02/2026
The Revolutionary War in Northeast Georgia: The Forgotten War for NE Georgia
Post 1 — Tugaloo and Colonel Samual Jack’s Georgia Militia
Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a Georgia militia column marched north from the Fort James area, near the confluence of the Broad and Savannah rivers, toward the Cherokee town of Tugaloo. Its purpose was to retaliate for the attacks that had swept across the southern frontier earlier that summer.
Major Samuel Jack led it from the Fort James area in the Ceded Lands during the final days of July 1776, or perhaps the first days of August. The exact date is unclear. A report written at Augusta on August 21 and printed in Dixon and Hunter's Virginia Gazette gives the length of the march and its destination but not the day it began, and no orders for the expedition have been located. That report placed 240 men under Jack's command and described a three-day march to Tugaloo and a neighboring Estatoe in the same river country (Owens, 2021, p. 126).
Tugaloo was old, and when Colonel George Chicken visited in 1725, he called it "the most ancient town in these parts." A census taken four years earlier counted 208 people living there. People from all seven Cherokee clans made their homes in the town. At its center stood a domed council house built of earth and timber, holding a fire that tradition said must never go out. Corn, beans, potatoes, and peaches grew in fields surrounding houses framed with saplings and covered in cane, straw, and mud (Cartledge, 1984, pp. 32–33; Walker, 2005, p. 78).
The Tugaloo area was a cluster of settlements along the river country where the Tallulah and Chattooga come together. The same 1721 census counted more than 600 people at nearby Estatoe, around 200 at Chauga, and about 90 at Chattooga. These were not villages in the compact sense we might picture today. A Cherokee town could stretch for a mile or more along the bottomland, with houses and fields spreading outward from the council ground at its center (Sheriff, 1989, p. 13; Walker, 2005, p. 78). The towns were tied to one another. In January 1715, the people of Estatoe and Tugaloo met for a ball game. By 1763, the headman Saluy led both Tugaloo and Old Estatoe, evidence that leadership and political relationships crossed the boundaries between neighboring settlements (Sheriff, 1989, p. 13; Wynn, 1990, pp. 14–16).
One Cherokee tradition held that the Creator placed the first fire on a hill at Tugaloo. Thirty-five years after the town burned, a Moravian diarist recorded a Cherokee vision that still named Tugaloo as the first place created. The vision lamented the sale of Cherokee land and remembered the hill where the first fire had been placed. White people, the account noted, had since taken possession of the town and built a house there (McLoughlin, 1984, p. 145).
The Tugaloo town cluster had long stood at the center of a far-reaching network of trade and travel. The Unicoi Trail ran from the Tugaloo through the Nacoochee Valley, crossed Unicoi Gap, and continued toward the Hiwassee and the Overhill towns. English traders followed it into Chota and Tellico by 1690. Other paths connected Tugaloo with Augusta, Keowee and the Lower Towns, Virginia's Great Indian Warpath, Creek country to the west, and the Gulf Coast to the south. One route followed the Peachtree Ridge and Hog Mountain corridor toward Coweta on the Chattahoochee (Baker, 1981, pp. 34–36; Hemperley, 1989, pp. 32–33).
Jack's Georgians marched toward Tugaloo on roads Cherokee people had traveled for generations (Bouwman, 1980, pp. 1–11).
Long before those roads carried armies, they carried trade. Deerskins traveled south while cloth, fi****ms, powder, kettles, tools, and rum moved north. Augusta merchants supplied Cherokee hunters on credit and expected repayment in skins. As game declined and debts accumulated, commerce became increasingly tied to the transfer of land.
On June 1, 1773, Creek and Cherokee headmen meeting at Augusta ceded more than two million acres north of the Little River to Georgia, partly to satisfy what they owed the traders. Georgians called the territory the New Purchase, the Ceded Lands, or the Oconee Country. Fort James rose near the confluence of the Broad and Savannah rivers to protect settlers moving onto that ground. Three years later, Jack's expedition would march from that frontier toward Tugaloo (Haynes, 2013, pp. 54, 60).
Another land sale widened the dispute. At Sycamore Shoals in March 1775, Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company negotiated the purchase of roughly twenty million acres in what is now Kentucky and Tennessee. Attakullakulla, Oconostota, and other headmen accepted the agreement. Dragging Canoe, Attakullakulla's son, opposed it. To him, one concession had followed another while settlement continued moving west. Many younger fighters agreed and followed through with Dragging Canoe’s thread to make the new concessions a dark and bloody ground (Hatley, 1995, pp. 186–200).
In 1776, Cherokee towns did not reach one national decision about war. Some leaders favored resistance. Others negotiated, waited, or tried to remain neutral. Nanyehi, remembered in English-language accounts as Nancy Ward, opposed the attacks and, according to the surviving tradition, sent Isaac Thomas to warn frontier settlements (Wilson, 1976, p. 11). British agents carried ammunition, gifts, and promises into Cherokee country, but the towns did not act as British military units. Cherokee leaders made their choices through their own councils, relationships, and experiences of land loss (Hatley, 1995, p. 191).
Between June 29 and July 1, war parties struck along the frontier from the Georgia and South Carolina backcountry northward toward the Watauga, Nolichucky, and Holston settlements. Panic moved almost as quickly as the attacks. Reports reaching Georgia officials claimed that roughly 100 people had been killed and that many women and children had been carried away. One settler swore that he had seen more than 100 people buried in a single day, supposedly victims of Creek attacks. These were wartime reports, however, not confirmed casualty totals.
The war parties did not fit neatly into the racial and political divisions later accounts often impose on the conflict. Some included Creek allies. White Loyalists also accompanied Cherokee forces. Patriot sources called some of these men Scopholites, a name applied to Loyalists who sometimes adopted Native clothing, paint, and methods of fighting. Cherokee resistance to land loss, the civil war between Patriots and Loyalists, and Britain’s effort to preserve its influence in the southern interior all fed the violence that followed (Dean, 2012, pp. 128–138; Hatley, 1995, pp. 191–193).
Georgia’s frontier faced two directions.
Cherokee towns lay to the north, while the New Purchase remained unsettled and dangerous to the west. In May 1776, a Lower Creek delegation traveled to Augusta after a party of Georgians associated with Thomas Fee ambushed it and killed a young man from Coweta. The Chewacla Warrior told Georgia officials that he preferred neutrality, but he demanded satisfaction for the killing and an explanation for forts built beyond the boundary established in 1773. The Council of Safety ordered two troops of light cavalry to pursue Fee. That same month, John Hill presented a petition from the inhabitants of the New Purchase asking for another troop “for the defense of the back settlement.” Georgia was preparing to strike the Cherokee towns while trying to keep a second frontier from breaking into war (Haynes, 2013, pp. 100–101).
Georgia had begun moving supplies before the column formed. On July 12, Captain Elijah Clarke was escorting provision wagons toward the rendezvous at the confluence of the Broad and Savannah rivers when Cherokee warriors attacked his detachment. Clarke and three of his men were wounded, and three Georgians were reportedly killed. He would spend the next twenty years fighting on this frontier and eventually give his name to a Georgia county, but in the summer of 1776 he was a militia captain with a wagon train (McCall, 1909, p. 317).
By July 23, four colonies were organizing separate military expeditions into Cherokee country. William Christian raised men in Virginia. Griffith Rutherford commanded the North Carolinians, and Andrew Williamson assembled the South Carolina militia. Georgia committed roughly 200 men under Samuel Jack. A report written only weeks later called him Major Jack and placed 240 men under his command, while later histories usually called him colonel.
Jack did not lead a standing Continental regiment north from Georgia. His command appears to have been assembled from militia and volunteers living around Augusta and along the upper Savannah frontier, men accustomed to the roads, rivers, and unsettled border country through which they marched. They served within the militia structure created by Georgia’s provisional government, though no muster roll, uniform description, or original order for the expedition has yet surfaced. Writing a generation later, Hugh McCall divided the force into five companies under John Twiggs, John Jones, Leonard Marbury, Samuel Alexander, and Thomas Harris. Twiggs can be independently placed under Jack.
Each colony supplied its own commander, route, and timetable, and the columns never operated as a single army. Mountains, distance, uncertain roads, and slow communication kept them apart, though all four governments intended to carry the war into Cherokee country (McCall, 1909, pp. 314–315; Milling, 1969, pp. 316–317).
In South Carolina, the purpose went beyond retaliation. On July 24, William Henry Drayton [title] ordered Williamson to "make smooth work" as he advanced, cutting down Cherokee cornfields and burning Cherokee towns. He tied military defeat to the transfer of Cherokee land into public hands. Those were South Carolina's orders, and they describe what South Carolina wanted. No comparable written instructions to Jack's Georgia command have yet been located, so we know what one government intended and can only infer the other from what its men did (Hatley, 1995, pp. 192–193).
On August 10, Williamson's South Carolinians crossed the Tugaloo against opposition and entered the settlement from the east. The defenders had withdrawn. Houses on the Georgia bank were already burned (Dean, 2012, p. 149). Georgians had been there first.
A few entries are still being confirmed. Full citations available on request.
Baker, G. In the Shadow of Yonah: A History of White County, Georgia. [Edition and date being confirmed.]
Bouwman, R. E. (1980). Traveler's Rest and the Tugaloo crossroads. Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Parks, Recreation and Historic Sites, Historic Preservation Section.
Cartledge, T. (1984). [Publication details being confirmed.]
Hatley, M. T. (1995). The dividing paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the era of revolution. Oxford University Press.
Haynes, J. S. (2013). Patrolling the border: Theft and violence on the Creek–Georgia frontier, 1770–1796 [Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia]. OpenScholar@UGA.
Hemperley, M. R. (1989). Historic Indian trails of Georgia. Garden Club of Georgia.
McCall, H. (1909). The history of Georgia: Containing brief sketches of the most remarkable events up to the present day (1784) (Vol. 2). A. B. Caldwell. (Original work published 1816)
McLoughlin, W. G., Conser, W. H., Jr., & McLoughlin, V. D. (1984). The Cherokee ghost dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789–1861. Mercer University Press.
Milling, C. J. (1969). Red Carolinians (2nd ed.). University of South Carolina Press. (Original work published 1940)
Owens, R. M. (2021). 'Indian wars' and the struggle for eastern North America, 1763–1842. Routledge.
Sheriff, G. C. (1989). Sketches of Cherokee villages in South Carolina. [Publisher being confirmed.]
Walker, C. O. (1988). Cherokee footprints, Vol. 1: The principal people, "Ani-Yunwiya." Jasper, GA: Charles O. Walker.
Wilson. (1976). [Publication details being confirmed.]
Wynn, J. T. (1990). Mississippi period archaeology of the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains (Laboratory of Archaeology Series Report No. 27). University of Georgia.
