…Carolina's Backcountry Loyalists.
"When British Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton began operations against Charleston in March 1780, he decided not to call upon the Loyalists in the South Carolina backcountry to assist him. Although employing Loyalists to aid the regular army was a key element of British strategy in the South, Clinton believed that they would be endangered if he summoned them prematurely. He did not wish to "expose them to the malevolence of their enemies before I was fully certain of success," he wrote, "and thus bring danger and trouble upon themselves, at a time when the King's army, being employed in the reduction of Charles town, could not assist or second their struggles."[1]
On May 3, with Charleston's capitulation a virtual certainty, Clinton put into motion his plan for mobilizing the Loyalists. He delegated the task to James Simpson, the former royal attorney general of South Carolina who was serving as Clinton's secretary during the campaign. Acting on the general's instructions, Simpson issued orders to several Loyalist refugees who were with the army to proceed to the backcountry and call on the Loyalists there to join the fight. Although Simpson indicated in his orders that Clinton was sending more than one emissary to the Loyalists, the only individual known to have undertaken this mission was Richard Pearis.[2] Pearis was so successful in carrying out his orders that he quickly established the basis for a successful Loyalist militia in South Carolina; however, his successes were just as quickly undone by British officers.
Little is known about Pearis's early life. He was born in Ireland, the year not known, and immigrated to North America with his family at the age of ten. By 1752 he had settled in Virginia and became involved in the Indian trade. Two years later he had formed a partnership with Nathanial Gist, son of the famed frontiersman and associate of George Washington, Christopher Gist. In 1755, shortly after the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Virginia's Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie appointed Pearis captain of "a Company of Provincials in the Virginia Service," as well as an agent to the southern Indian nations. Pearis, who by then may have been married to a Cherokee woman, appears to have played an important role in recruiting Cherokee warriors to participate in British Brigadier General John Forbes's expedition against French Fort Duquesne in 1758. The French evacuated the fort as Forbes approached, and Pearis claimed that he "was the first British Subject who entered Fort Pitt [the name the British later gave to the former French post] at its reduction for which I had General Forbes public Thanks."…"
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