The King's Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier

by Edward J. Cashin

The King's Ranger explores not only military history but also such aspects of the American past as colonial migration, upheaval in the backcountry... and the formation of new settlements in the Caribbean.

316 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1989

About the author

A specialist in the history of Georgia and the southern frontier in the 18th century, Edward J. Cashin was Professor emeritus of History and Director of the Center for the Study of Georgia History at Augusta State University in Augusta, Georgia.

Reviews

[Will Cadle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The life of Thomas Brown is an interesting one, and would've been an interesting read if in more capable hands. Brown had hardly arrived in Augusta, GA, and moved into his home from land provided by a King's Grant, when he was accosted by locals who demanded to know if he was "for" or "agin" the King. He gave the wrong answer, and his life, already almost forfeit the moment he replied, would seem to go downhill thereafter. He was forcibly (how else) taken from his home, tarred and feathered (yes, something that literally happened at time, the brands used to heat the tar cost Brown a couple of his toes), and run out of town.
He would eventually return as a King's Ranger with a cohort of loyalists and wrest Augusta from control of the Patriots. However, as I said, things went downhill. A battle and siege resulted in Brown being captured; he surrendered to Light-Horse Harry Lee (Robert E. Lee's father...some people, unfamiliar with the Lee legacy spanning two major wars, are surprised to learn that the father served in the Revolutionary War and the son served in the Civil War, but it is so).
The story, I think, is a compelling one, but Dr. Cashin had a tendency to dote on provincial names from the Augusta community, I suspect out of concern for offending anyone, and the result is a tedious listing of prominent people (at least locally prominent), but such dry representation leaves a lot to be desired considering Tom Brown's history.

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The other side of the American Revolution has been tossed, when recalled at all, into the murky dungeon of history, serving as propaganda foil to an unquestioned and mostly unchallengeable mythology. The prevailing simplified narrative of freedom-seeking Patriots against deluded collaborators of repression overlooks the true civil war that marked the Revolution, and the often self-serving motives of those who speared it. In fact, without the determined terrorism of a vanguard few the secession movement in the colonies could not have succeeded.

A case in point was English immigrant Thomas Brown. Like so many others he sought a new life in a new land yet saw both, and himself, as an extension of a common British land. When the Sons of Liberty stormed his Augusta plantation, demanding he take a loyalty oath to the republic and its new state of Georgia, his refusal earned him torture, humiliation, and the destruction of his investment. For the duration of the ensuing conflict he vowed to repay his tormentors in kind.

Thus was born his Loyal Ranger corps, based in then-British East Florida at St. Augustine. Edward Cashin gives us a well-fleshed account of Brown's career as forest partisan, his struggles with the British officer corps, his role as an Indian agent and often-unsuccessful attempts to control His Majesty's native allies. The British-US border war of the St. Mary's has been marginalized, yet its brutality was as intense as anything in Kansas in the next civil war. Brown's raids into Georgia laid the foundation for the British retaking of Savannah, and then Charleston. If British commander Cornwallis had consolidated his gains there with a popular Loyalist government, instead of chasing an elusive victory at Yorktown, the American Revolution would have gone far differently.

Author Cashin is an expert in early Georgia and Augusta and does his best put flesh on a very skeletal history. Yet the story remains if one cares to look. Brown's career took him from the Seminole swamps to the Georgia Blue Ridge. When remembered at all, his name is castigated as a terrorist collaborator of British atrocity; while Patriot terrorists such as Paddy Carr have been given a free pass on the "right side" of history.

Brown evacuated the mainland after the British withdrawal, ending his days as a gentleman planter as he'd hoped, in the British West Indies; carrying the scars of his torture and the wounds of war, a veil drawn over his struggle as befalls all losers in grand national movements. A complicated, detailed, and often twisting narrative of a period more complex than the simplistic curriculum propagated by the Patriot forebears of CNN. If Brown could see the American landscape today, he would recognize the insurrectionists of 4/6/21 as old foes of a country far from exceptional.

[Ronnie Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

So Far a very good book I never knew there was so much fighting in Georgia during the American Revolution.

[Tree Rings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative of the man - Thomas Brown, and his contemporaries.