David Fanning operated in the backcountry of North Carolina from 1775 to 1783, commanding Loyalist militia units in a sustained guerrilla campaign. He was captured fourteen times and escaped or was pardoned each time. He participated in approximately thirty-six engagements and never lost a battle in which he commanded. His capture of Governor Thomas Burke from the temporary state capital at Hillsborough on September 12, 1781 is documented in both his memoir and the official records of the North Carolina state government. The memoir is at the Internet Archive.
The Loyalist war in North Carolina was a civil war within a civil war, fought between neighbors in a region where political loyalty was deeply divided. Fanning operated with small units of mounted militia, moving quickly, drawing on Loyalist sympathizers for intelligence and supplies, and avoiding pitched battle with superior Patriot forces. He built a network of contacts across the Carolina backcountry that provided early warning of Patriot movements.
I collected a party of two hundred and fifty-three men and attacked Colonel Collier at Lindley's Mill, and routed his whole party, and took upward of forty prisoners.
On September 12, 1781, Fanning led approximately 950 men in a pre-dawn raid on Hillsborough, then the temporary capital of North Carolina. Governor Thomas Burke was taken prisoner along with members of the General Assembly and several Continental Army officers. Burke eventually escaped. The operation produced no lasting military advantage: Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown five weeks later. Fanning recorded the entire operation in his narrative.
Fanning was attainted by North Carolina after the war and banned by name from returning. He went to Nova Scotia and then to New Brunswick, where he was granted land and elected to the provincial legislature. He died in Nova Scotia in 1825. His narrative, written after the war, gives an account of his operations in his own voice that no official record replicates.
In 1800, David Fanning was tried and convicted in New Brunswick for the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. He was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted on condition of permanent exile from New Brunswick, and he was expelled from the provincial legislature. He spent his remaining years in Nova Scotia and died there in 1825. TFR records this because the primary source record includes it and because the character of the man who produced the memoir is part of the historical record. The Fanning Narrative remains a primary source document of genuine historical value regardless of what its author did after writing it. Both are true simultaneously.
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