"I keep promising myself to write on how David Fanning, the Tory guerrilla turned British colonel, became a psychotic murderer off the battlefield in North Carolina in 1782. But was it late 1781? First, I have to try to settle tough questions. Did Fanning really do no harm to any human being in South Carolina?[1] Did he really stage a dramatic public presentation of himself as backwoods Tory savior early in 1781?[2] Did he really learn of Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown days before Gen. Griffith Rutherford learned of it?[3] How did he deal, practically and emotionally, with being abandoned when the British evacuated Wilmington, leaving him without ammunition, other supplies, and what he had gloried in, praise?[4] How many people, men and women, did he slaughter in cold blood? We don't know.
We are still hampered by the absence of wartime North Carolina newspapers, diaries, and ordinary personal records and by flaws in stories that circulated word of mouth before North Carolinians tried to write their own histories, and even after histories were published. Misunderstandings and legends are still being repeated. I'm ready to believe the worst about Fanning, partly because my docket of Fanning's previously unknown murders keeps getting longer,[5] but in this air-clearing piece I cast doubt on his guilt or absolve him of three different murders or sets of murders.
In 1851 Fanning's first victims (off the battlefield) were identified by Joseph Johnson:[6] "His first marauding expedition is said to have been to Deep river; and the earliest sufferers from his rapacity and violence, were Charles Spearing, Captains Dreck and Dye." Fanning "went to Spearing's in the night, shot him as he ran from the house, took his gun, scoured the neighborhood, and returned to Rains'" (that is, he went back to John Rains's house on Brush Creek near where it flows into Deep River below Fanning's frequent base at Cox's Mill in Randolph County). Former North Carolina Gov. D. L. Swain had provided the text Johnson published, and in 1853 he salvaged it to introduce a valuable paper left by Archibald D. Murphey, the great researcher who died in 1832 before finishing his history of North Carolina.[7] Here Swain named the "earliest sufferers" as "Charles Shearing, Captains Duck and Dye." That is, he corrected "Spearing" and "Dreck" but did not fix the problem with the syntax and the captains, whose fate was left ambiguous…"
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Amicalement
Armand
paints brigs for the British fleet.
