The Long Road to 250
The American Revolution was fought among neighbors — and its legacy still shapes the nation today
There’s Washington and Jefferson, Bunker Hill and Valley Forge. So, it’s understandable how in North Carolina, it might be easy to overlook how vital the state was to the fight for independence 250 years ago. But the evidence is all around.
“If you go to a museum or display of Revolutionary War history, you’re going to get all the things like the Boston Tea Party and the Saratoga campaign and Fort Ticonderoga and the cannons and all those kinds of things, but you’re not going to get the southern theater unless they have a little conflict star at Moore’s Creek Bridge and another at Guilford Court House,” says LeRae Umfleet ’98, project manager for North Carolina 250 at the Department of Cultural and Natural Resources.
“We are first in freedom for a reason. We were the first colony to call for independence from Great Britain.” That call being the April 12, 1776, Halifax Resolves.
So, this year, even after the fireworks fade, Americans and North Carolinians have a lot to celebrate – and a lot to think about – with this year’s Semiquincentennial. It’s been 250 years since John Hancock and the others signed the Declaration of Independence, and the inalienable rights it promised are still evolving.
American Revolution
Battles and Campaigns in North Carolina
Click the map to see campaigns fought in North Carolina.
Among the Continental Army soldiers who fought the British at Guilford Court House was Zachariah Jacobs, a free Black man born in New Hanover County.
Trevor Freeman ’20 worked with descendants of Jacobs to bring a historical marker recognizing his service in the Revolutionary War to Wilmington. The marker was unveiled March 26.
A war among neighbors
The fight for independence – from Great Britain, from King George, from taxation without representation – was never simple. It wasn’t merely Americans versus Redcoats, but often neighbor against neighbor, sometimes even family against family. It was fierce.
“Many if not most Americans fail to realize how violent the Revolution was and how it was really our first civil war,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson ’74. His latest book, Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, was published last year.
In North Carolina’s backcountry and coastal plain, loyalties were personal as much as political.
“Being a Loyalist was basically the default position at the beginning,” says Trevor Freeman ’20, museum educator at the Battleship North Carolina Memorial whose master’s thesis examined Black Patriots and Loyalists in the Revolution. “Everyone was expected to be loyal to the king. The Patriots … were the ones breaking from this and taking this very risky stand.”
Among those North Carolinians who fought for the Patriots were about 500 free Black men, he adds.
At Moore’s Creek Bridge in 1776, Patriot forces crushed Loyalist hopes of organizing in large numbers. Elsewhere, fighters such as Loyalist David Fanning carried out raids that turned the war into something personal.
The Revolution, in other words, was not only about independence. It was also about division – and the costs of choosing sides.
“Being a loyalist was basically the default position at the beginning. Everyone was expected to be loyal to the king. The patriots … were the ones breaking from this and taking this very risky stand.”
— Trevor Freeman ’20
Museum educator at the Battleship North Carolina Memorial
Why North Carolina mattered
By the late 1770s, the British shifted their strategy south, believing Loyalist support would be stronger there. Instead, they found fierce resistance.
North Carolina became central to that campaign.
After the 1781 American victory at Cowpens, South Carolina, Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene – Greenville’s namesake, though he never visited the area – began a strategic withdrawal across the Carolinas, drawing British Gen. Charles Cornwallis deeper into hostile territory.
“They were marching all through the Piedmont of North Carolina from Charlotte up through Virginia and back again,” Umfleet says. “Cornwallis got so frustrated, he burned his supply chain. He expected to live off the land – and this part of North Carolina didn’t want that.”
The campaign became known as the Race to the Dan – the Dan River in Virginia – a grueling pursuit that ended when Greene’s army crossed into Virginia, regrouped and returned to fight at Guilford Court House.
“Technically it was a win for the Brits,” Umfleet says. “But they had a large number of wounded, and their supplies were nonexistent.” That cost proved decisive.
“It was pretty much a Pyrrhic victory for the British,” says Lt. Col. William Dye ’04, commander of Air Force ROTC Detachment 600 at ECU. Dye, who is from Greensboro – the seat of Guilford County and another North Carolina city named for Greene – says the battle had consequences far beyond the field. Cornwallis limped toward the coast, then north into Virginia, where American and French forces closed in.
“Had it not been for that battle, we don’t know if Cornwallis would have gone to Yorktown and the war would have ended the way it did,” he says.
“The whole traipsing all over North Carolina,” Umfleet adds, “wore the British army out.”
Yorktown may have delivered the surrender, but North Carolina helped make it possible.
“We are first in freedom for a reason. We were the first colony to call for independence from Great Britain.”
— LeRae Umfleet ’98
Project manager for North Carolina 250 at the Department of Cultural and Natural Resources.
“The British were very intentional. If you’re enslaved by patriots, join the British and we’ll ensure your freedom. But when the war was lost, only 5,000 actually secured their freedom. … Notions of freedom and citizenship were not experienced the same by Blacks, whites and Natives.”
— Maria Esther Hammack ’12 ’15
Assistant professor of African American history, Ohio State University
Liberty – for whom?
Even as the Revolution expanded ideas of liberty, it did so unevenly.
“It’s vital to acknowledge that 500,000 Americans at that time – one in five – were enslaved Blacks,” Atkinson says. “The notion that ‘all men are created equal’ was aspirational, not literal.”
Maria Esther Hammack ’12 ’15, an assistant professor of African American history at Ohio State University, teaches her students that Jefferson wrote about Black Americans and the need to abolish slavery in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but he knew those ideas would never pass in that day. That reality shaped the choices people made.
“The British were very intentional,” she says. “If you’re enslaved by Patriots, join the British and we’ll ensure your freedom.”
Up to 30,000 did just that. “But when the war was lost, only 5,000 actually secured their freedom,” she notes.
The story, then, is not only about founders and generals, but also about people whose names are often missing from the most familiar versions of the past.
Hammack points to Hannah Till, an enslaved woman who supported George Washington’s army.
“If it wasn’t for her, Washington’s troops would have starved,” Hammack says. “At the end of the war … she ends up securing her freedom.”
Stories like Till’s complicate and enrich the national narrative.
“Notions of freedom and citizenship were not experienced the same by Blacks, whites and Natives,” Hammack says.
North Carolina’s hero in the War of 1812
Most Americans can name a few heroes and battles from the Revolutionary War. The War of 1812, by contrast, is often remembered dimly – if at all. But for author Michael Brantley, the conflict remains one of the most significant chapters in early American history.
In his new book, Captain Otway Burns (McFarland, 2025), Brantley revisits the bold Swansboro sea captain who commanded the privateer Snap Dragon and made a name raiding British shipping at a time when the young U.S. Navy had only a handful of functioning ships. Burns, Brantley says, rejected the label of pirate, considering himself “a branch of the Navy that worked on commission.”
He portrays Burns as fearless, brash and impossible to ignore – the kind of larger-than-life figure who helps make history vivid and human. At the time, Burns became a national celebrity, entrepreneur and state legislator. His brick company helped build Fort Macon. Burnsville in Yancey County is named for him.
But few remember him today.
“There are a lot of interesting people in history,” Brantley says, “if you tell it as a story and not a bunch of dates.”
– Doug Boyd
A promise tested over time
In North Carolina, the gap between ideals and reality did not end with independence.
“The Declaration of Independence was life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all; however, the United States and North Carolina had a long way to go before that promise of freedom was truly made available for all Americans regardless of race or sex,” says Umfleet. The struggle would continue through the Civil War, Reconstruction and beyond.
One of its darkest chapters came in 1898, when Wilmington’s biracial government was overthrown in a violent coup.
“Wilmington was what I think the New South could have become had the 1898 violence not happened,” says Umfleet, whose 2009 book, A Day of Blood: The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot, examines the revolt. “Black landowning was higher, education levels were higher, Black entrepreneurship was off the charts.”
The backlash was deliberate. “The white supremacists of 1898 did not like that,” she says. “They used every resource they could … to return control of state government to their hands.”
The result was decades of disenfranchisement and segregation.
“That’s a low point in our state’s history,” Umfleet says.
The founders had flaws – Washington, Jefferson and even Benjamin Franklin owned slaves – as did the people who came after. Yet, for Gerald Prokopowicz, professor of history at ECU, that does not diminish the nation’s founding ideals. It underscores how difficult they have always been to fulfill.
“The founders set out a goal that all men are created equal,” he says. “They understood that all people would not be treated equally. But they set it up as an ideal we can always attempt to approach.”
Service and the next generation
At ECU, questions about service and citizenship are not confined to the classroom. For ROTC cadets, they are personal.
“All these people came together and formed an amazing country,” says Cadet Holden Burroughs, a junior piano performance major from Greenville. “Our Constitution is still thriving today. It’s really cool we get to serve and protect this long-living law.”
Burroughs says he hopes future generations will see today’s service members with the same respect Americans show the Revolution.
“Just like we’re looking back 250 years, I hope people 250 years from now have the same view of us,” he says. “That we’re fighting for a good cause.”
Cadet Simone Ellerby sees patriotism and realism as compatible.
“There’s no country that’s perfect,” says Ellerby, a freshman psychology major from High Point. “But we keep growing, we keep learning from our mistakes.”
Even the possibility of serving during a period of conflict in the Middle East, she says, reinforces her sense of purpose.
“It’s a shocker … but it actually makes me excited to be of a different generation to come in and help,” Ellerby says. “That’s what I’m here for.”
For Dye, who served as a pilot during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that continuity through generations is one of the enduring meanings of military service.
“When I look at the Declaration of Independence … they talked about pledging their lives, fortunes and sacred honor,” he says. “Wearing the uniform gives us an opportunity to be part of that.”
From left, Lt. Col. William Dye ’04 and Air Force ROTC Cadets Simone Ellerby and Holden Burroughs serve with pride. (Photo by Steven Mantilla)
“We’ve known for 250 years that democracy is perishable. Every one of us is responsible for helping to shore it up.”
— Rick Atkinson ’74
Pulitzer Prize-winning author
A story still unfolding
From the Revolutionary War to today, the United States has fought many battles in the name of freedom. That brings Atkinson to the question at the heart of the Revolution.
“What are you willing to die for?” he says. He calls it “the most profound question any people can ask themselves.”
In North Carolina, that question played out in farm fields and river crossings, in militia musters and partisan raids, in the long retreat from Cowpens to Guilford Court House. It shaped the choices of Patriots and Loyalists, of soldiers and civilians, of enslaved people seeking freedom and officers trying to hold an army together.
Knowing that, Atkinson says, shapes how we see the past. “Understanding that the stakes were that high helps us appreciate the sacrifices and the risks that they took,” he says.
“We’ve known for 250 years that democracy is perishable. Every one of us is responsible for helping to shore it up.”
Two hundred and fifty years after independence, that work is still unfinished.
“A passion to service, a drive to be the best you can, an empathy toward the folks you’re leading,” Dye says. “We’re all in this together, and we need to make it as best we can.”
In a place like Greenville – named for a general whose campaign succeeded through endurance as much as triumph – that may be part of the lesson.
The letter home
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Freedom is not free. To illustrate the cost, Trevor Freeman ’20, museum educator at the Battleship North Carolina Memorial, will ask students who tour the ship to read a letter – not just any letter, but an “in case” letter written by one of the ship’s World War II crewmen, Petty Officer Oscar C. Stone, to his parents.