Originally published in the Journal of the American Revolution on July 28, 2021 Colonel Samuel Bryan is thought to be the highest-ranking Loyalist officer to remain in the United States after the Revolutionary War. Despite being a high-ranking British officer in command of hundreds of men, little is known about him and the militia unit he commanded. With the arrival of British regulars in the Carolinas in 1780, Bryan came out of hiding and fled to British lines where he was p

Originally published in the Summer 2021 issue of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research ( Vol. 99, No. 397) On 6 August 1780, Lieutenant-General Charles Cornwallis, in a letter to the commander-in-chief of British forces in America, General Sir Henry Clinton, wrote that ‘it may be doubted by some whether the invasion of North Carolina may be a prudent measure, but I am convinced it is a necessary one’.1 Cornwallis, who had been left in charge of British Regul