Moses Kirkland and the Origins of the Southern Strategy

Moses Kirkland was a man born into the unsettled margins of South Carolina, where ambition and survival often blurred together. By the mid-1770s he was a planter of modest means, a militia captain in the backcountry, and a restless figure whose loyalties shifted with the winds of opportunity. In the opening year of the Revolution, he aligned briefly with the Provincial Congress, only to switch his allegiance when the rebellion hardened into war. That decision would place him on a path both remarkable and ill‑fated: from provincial captain to Loyalist courier, from prisoner in Philadelphia to exile upon the sea. His life, in many ways, mirrors the turbulence of the southern frontier itself.[1]

By 1775 Kirkland had caught the attention of royal officials who were eager for allies in the Carolinas and Georgia. East Florida’s governor, Patrick Tonyn, sought ways to knit together Loyalist strength in the backcountry with Indian alliances that could threaten the rebel provinces from the south. Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, had already demonstrated a willingness to employ enslaved men and Native allies on behalf of the Crown, while Lord William Campbell, last royal governor of South Carolina, looked for any opening to regain control of Charlestown and the surrounding country. Together, these men penned letters insisting that the southern colonies were filled with untapped Loyalists, men who would rise by the thousands if only the king’s troops arrived in force. Charlestown and Savannah, they urged, offered the key to restoring royal authority.[2]

Kirkland became their chosen courier. In December 1775 he boarded the small vessel Betsey at St. Augustine, carrying more than forty-five letters from Tonyn, John Stuart of the Southern Indian Department, and Lord Dunmore, bound first for Gen. Thomas Gage in Boston and ultimately for London. It was a bold mission: the Atlantic seaboard bristled with rebel patrols, and couriers captured in possession of such dispatches risked being hanged as spies. Kirkland, however, was undeterred. Perhaps he saw in this voyage a chance to prove his worth to the Crown, to transform himself from a backcountry planter into a man of consequence.[3]

The voyage was short lived. Off Cape Cod, Capt. John Manley of the Continental Navy seized the Betsey and its cargo. Kirkland was taken prisoner, and the dispatches—“of great consequence,” as George Washington soon wrote—were rushed to Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge outside Boston. Newspapers quickly picked up the story. The Virginia Gazette and Maryland Gazette printed the tale of the captured Loyalist courier, casting Kirkland as a traitor to his province and a willing agent of the king.[4]