John Dooly

Colonel John Dooly (1740–1780), born in Wilkes County, North Carolina, was an American Revolutionary war hero. He commanded a regiment at the Battle of Kettle Creek in 1779 and was killed at his home by Tories in 1780.

Early twentieth-century Georgia historian Otis Ashmore wrote that "of the many heroic men who illustrated that stormy period of the Revolution in Georgia that 'tried men's souls' none deserves a more grateful remembrance by posterity than Col. John Dooly."(n1) Ashmore's subsequent entry, however, failed to meet that need because, before the bicentennial of the American Revolution, almost all of the source material on Dooly came from Hugh McCall's The History of Georgia (1816). Collectively, what McCall wrote about the colonel formed an heroic tale of a martyred battlefield leader in the struggle for American independence who lost a brother in an Indian attack, led Patriot forces to victory over the Tories (Loyalist Americans who supported the British cause) at the Battle of Kettle Creek and, finally, died at the hands of Tories in his own home.(n2) Unintentionally, McCall gave literature its first Georgia folk hero.

Dooly's story, however, would not remain in that part of Patriot lore described by historian Hugh Bicheno as "propaganda not merely triumphing over historical substance, but virtually obliterating it."(n3) Research on the Revolution since Ashmore's time has evolved from only the major military events of that war to the world in which it occurred. Dooly's life, for example, illustrates how he and his neighbors in the ceded lands had been moving for greater control of their frontier world. This struggle occurred before, during, and after the Revolution. He emerges, in that context, as a man of motives and actions more complex than McCall's simplistic although basically accurate account.(n4)

John Dooly's role in those events began with his father Patrick. Everything known about Patrick Dooly's life parallels that of the archetypical traditional and historical southern Scots-Irish frontiersman, as portrayed in works like David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America.(n5) Likely a native Irishman, he appeared in frontier Frederick County, Virginia, land records as early as 1755. As with many other Virginians, Patrick moved to the South Carolina frontier sometime between August 2, 1764, and July 2, 1765, according to land grant records, likely in search of unclaimed property to develop for sale to later settlers and for security from conflicts with the Indians. His subsequent deed records indicate that he had a wife named Anne and that he could at least sign his name.(n6) A few years later, an adult John Dooly traveled hundreds of miles from the Ninety Six frontier to Charleston, the seat of the only local government body in South Carolina, to go through the legal formalities to settle his father's insignificant estate. The probate records prove that both Patrick and Anne had died by December 6, 1768, because on that date John received all of his father's property as the nearest male relative under the then-current laws of primogeniture. The inventory showed a household that possessed a slave woman, a female slave child, books, household goods, and the remains of a small wheelwright or blacksmith operation. John sold off the estate's only other asset: his father's last tracts of land.(n7)

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