Backcountry Resistance: South Carolina’s Militia and the Fight for American Independence

Presented by Carl P. Borick

In Backcountry Resistance, Carl P. Borick delivers a groundbreaking account of the citizen militia that defied British forces in South Carolina’s volatile Backcountry during the pivotal Southern campaign of the Revolutionary War. When Charleston fell in May of 1780 and the Continental Army retreated, many assumed the Patriot cause in the South had collapsed. In the state’s rugged interior, though, partisan militias waged a brutal insurgency that challenged British control and changed the course of the war.

Focusing on rank-and-file militiamen, Borick explores how these ordinary men were recruited, armed, fed, and motivated. Drawing on underused pension records and state claims, he reconstructs their everyday realities and their battlefield experiences. He also examines the war’s devastating effects on civilians, including enslaved people and women, who played crucial roles in the struggle.

Richly detailed and grounded in the human experience of warfare, Backcountry Resistance offers the most comprehensive portrait to date of South Carolina’s militia during the decisive years of the American War of Independence.

Carl P. Borick is the Director of the Charleston Museum in Charleston, SC. He received a Bachelor of Science in Accounting from the University of Delaware and a MA in History from the University of Alabama. His previous publications include: A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780; Relieve Us of this Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South, 1780-1782; and The Charleston Museum: America’s First Museum.

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