The Liberty Trail

America’s independence was secured in South Carolina across its swamps, fields, woods and mountains. These events of 1779-1782 directly led to victory in the Revolutionary War. We call this history The Liberty Trail. 

The Liberty Trail—developed through a partnership between the American Battlefield Trust and the South Carolina Battleground Trust—connects battlefields across South Carolina and tells the captivating and inspiring stories of this transformative chapter of American history.

Connecting Revolutionary History

The vision for The Liberty Trail is ambitious, with the goals of permanently protecting more than 2,500 acres of battlefield land and ultimately linking nearly 80 sites.  

The Liberty Trail tour guide app connects 30 National Parks, SC State Parks, and local sites with a series of new battlefield parks being developed through The Liberty Trail partnership. Additional sites and features will continue to be added.

Combining the preservation of these hallowed battlegrounds with unique on-site interpretation and cutting-edge digital features, The Liberty Trail will connect visitors to the extraordinary events that came to pass nearly 250 years ago and honor the patriots that decided the Revolution’s outcomes in South Carolina.

The large number of Revolutionary War battle sites on The Liberty Trail is evidence of how important the Southern colonies were to the British war effort. By the mid-1700s, Charleston was the richest city in America. A flourishing export trade in rice and indigo, harvested by enslaved workers on nearby plantations, made its harbor a vital and bustling port. Its streets were filled with the elegant homes of wealthy planters and merchants. In the spring of 1776, over a year after after the first guns were heard at Lexington and Concord, the British attempted to wrest this jewel on the Atlantic coast from the Patriots in the Battle of Fort Sullivan. After their failure, the focus of the fight shifted back to the northern states. By 1778, however, with the war in the North at a stalemate, British command believed that it was time to launch a Southern Campaign.

The British were convinced that loyal southern citizens would help them subdue rebellion and restore the authority of the Crown. The successful capture of Savannah, Georgia, on December 29, 1778, inaugurated their strategy. A failed attempt by Patriot Major General Benjamin Lincoln to retake the city in 1779 bolstered Britain’s ambition to subdue the Southern colonies. By February 1780, British Commander-in-Chief for North America, Sir Henry Clinton, landed approximately 12,500 troops outside Charleston and laid siege to the city. With his force of just 5,000, Benjamin Lincoln could not resist the attack and surrendered the Patriot defenses to the enemy on May 12. The brutal engagement left the Southern Continental Army in tatters, and the British quickly set up outposts in the rural interior so they could easily move supplies and Loyalist recruits from the coast to the backcountry.

British efforts to suppress local rebellion after the occupation of Charleston took an unexpected turn and fueled discord between Loyalists and Patriots, pitting neighbor against neighbor. The source of the divisiveness was a British proclamation of June 3, 1780, which changed the terms of parole granted to Patriot militia after the Siege of Charleston. The condition of neutrality they agreed to suddenly no longer applied, and those who had gone home on parole were now forced to fight for the Crown or become an enemy of the state. If they refused to sign an oath of loyalty, they could be imprisoned or hanged. Their families could be captured or killed, and their homes and crops burned to the ground. Rather than win the British the allegiance they sought, the proclamation and violent aftermath stoked distrust and a desire for independence. Many of the paroled rushed to reenlist in the Patriot cause, leaving their farms and plantations to join partisan brigades.

As the Patriots in the southern colonies hustled to recruit, muster and train militia to counter the British occupation, well-drilled Royal and Loyalist troops overwhelmed them in key battles. At Waxhaws in late May 1780, British Legion commander Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton devastated the Patriot force under Colonel Abraham Buford in an encounter later known as “Buford’s Massacre.” At Camden, on August 16, Commander of the Southern Department of the Continental Army, Horatio Gates, was run off the battlefield by Charles Lord Cornwallis’s elite troops. Slowly, however, these partisan defeats incited defiance and strengthened Patriot resistance. Patriot victories at Huck’s Defeat, Hanging Rock, and Rocky Mount that summer buoyed morale. Partisan leaders—like Thomas Sumter, Francis Marion, and Andrew Pickens—fanned the spirit of revolt in remote areas and fought a relentless and savage guerilla war against their Loyalist neighbors. The intensity of the violence in the backcountry stunned Carolina outsiders such as Patriot Major General Nathanael Greene, who later said, “The whole country is in danger of being laid waste by the Whigs and Torrys, who pursue each other with as much relentless fury as beasts of prey.” That fury ultimately turned the tide of the war.

On August 18, 1780, about 200 mounted Patriots arrived near the Loyalist outpost of Musgrove Mill and ensnared a greater number of British Provincials and Loyalist militia in a deadly trap. With the help of the Overmountain Men—frontiersmen from west of the Appalachians—the Patriots had stunning victories over the British at King’s Mountain in October 1780 and Cowpens in January 1781. The arrival of Nathanael Greene in the winter of 1780, who replaced Gates as commander of the Continental Army in the South, further bolstered the American cause. Greene played a game of cat and mouse with Cornwallis, luring him into North Carolina in a maneuver that became known as “the Race to the Dan,” a critical river barrier that would cut the British off from their supply lines. The race ended in the Battle of Guilford Courthouse on March 15, 1781, where Cornwallis held the field but suffered heavy casualties. Unable to trap Greene, Cornwallis marched his men to Wilmington, and, later, into Virginia.

In April 1781, Fort Watson became the first British outpost to fall to the Patriots after the Siege of Charleston, and it paved the way for future partisan victories at Fort Motte and Fort Granby. The surrender of Fort Watson and the Battle of Hobkirk Hill also helped prompt British General Lord Rawdon to evacuate the important operational British base at Camden in May. Despite the British victory at Ninety Six in June, rural posts were gradually abandoned, and after the Patriots inflicted heavy losses on the enemy at Eutaw Springs in September, the British retreated toward Charleston. Cornwallis surrendered his army to George Washington at Yorktown in October 1781, but skirmishes persisted in the South for another year. Royal troops evacuated Savannah in July 1782. Finally, on December 14, 1782, the British boarded their ships in Charleston Harbor and sailed away from the southern coast, ending seven years of war in the South.