David Fanning

We can’t be sure what started David Fanning on the path that would make him one of the most notorious and controversial figures of the American Revolutionary War. By many accounts he took up the Loyalist cause after being robbed and abused by a band of Patriots, but no such event is mentioned in Fanning’s memoir. Whatever his motivation, historians agree that it is unlikely that Fanning fought so ferociously because of any great affinity for the royal government. Rather, it seems likely that for Fanning (and many others like him) the issue was much more personal.

Orphaned in Virginia at a young age, Fanning was raised by abusive foster parents in North Carolina, before running away from home as a young teen. As a child he suffered from “scald head,” a skin disease left him bald and with a scarred head, which he always kept covered with a scarf or wig. At age 19 he moved to the South Carolina backcountry, where he was living when the war broke out. There he may or may not have been robbed and assaulted by Patriot thugs, leading him to join the Loyalist militia. Either way, over the next five years Fanning participated in the backcountry guerrilla warfare, including one stint as a scout in the Patriot militia. Captured numerous times, he always managed to escape or obtain his release. By early 1781 he was commanding his own regiment of partisan Loyalist militiamen in North Carolina, skirmishing and raiding across the state. In July 1781 British authorities officially commissioned him a colonel of Loyalist North Carolina militia. That was when the most notorious phase of his career began.

In the year following his commissioning, Fanning led his men in three dozen battles or skirmishes across North Carolina. The most famous episode of his career occurred on September 12, 1781, when he led his men in a surprise attack on Hillsborough, the North Carolina capital, in which he captured Governor Thomas Burke and much of the North Carolina legislature. Fanning’s command defeated the Patriot forces who attacked them the next day, aiming to liberate the captives. Fanning was severely wounded in the battle, but his prisoners were safely delivered to British authorities in Wilmington.

The war in the Southern backcountry had always been brutal, with frequent atrocities and reprisals. For Fanning the violence intensified after the surrender at Yorktown and after the British withdrew from North Carolina. Fanning and his men terrorized the North Carolina backcountry, raiding, burning homes, and summarily executing captured Patriots, often in retaliation for the hangings of Loyalists. His several attempts to negotiate an end to the fighting were rebuffed. Fanning was ruthless but he was also fearless and bold, a master of hit and run partisan warfare.

In April 1782 Fanning married the teenaged daughter of one of his officers and made his way to British-controlled Charleston, South Carolina, and from there to St. Augustine, Florida. Returning to North Carolina was never an option. The general Act of Pardon issued by the state in 1783 specifically excluded him. If captured, he would surely have been hanged.

In 1784 Fanning and his wife emigrated to a settlement of Loyalist refugees in New Brunswick. There he became a businessman and prospered, until he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for raping a 15-year-old girl. Fanning’s appeal to the provincial governor for a pardon was granted, but he was expelled from the province. He and his family then moved to Nova Scotia, where he became a shipbuilder. There he died on March 14, 1825, one hundred ninety-eight years ago today, at about age 70.

The portrait is by Richard Luce and is on the cover of the Joe Epley’s 2016 book A Passel of Trouble, an historical novel about Fanning’s life.