Last time we spoke at length about James Roddye, we discussed his family, his personal life – or what we could know about it. I’d love to come upon some writings of his someday, so we could know something of what he thought about things. In his will, it’s clear he loved his wife – he calls her beloved twice. There’s just not much else.
I did fail to mention his appearances in the Bent Creek Church minutes. Roddye was one of the early members of the church and shows up quite a bit. Early on he comes up in a peculiar way: Apparently, our man got in some kind of fight with someone, so the church sent a couple other members over to the tavern with the red door to talk with him about it, as was common. No details are spoken of, but the members came back and said their mission was a success and they’d all decided James would come back to church when he was ready.
I doubt that was very long, because soon enough, he’s one of the members sent to talk with others about their transgressions.
There was one interesting point. In December 1805, James and his wife Lydia asked to be dismissed from the church, and they were. That generally means that the dismissee wants to attend another church somewhere. James and Lydia stayed away for nine years, then they reappear in the minutes in December 1814 and are “received by experience;” i.e. they came back to Bent Creek. This is another case of more research to be done, but I’m thinking one of two things: They either headed over to Claiborne County, where James owned land and businesses and where two of his daughters’ in-laws lived, or — this was when son Jesse Roddye and others of the family went to Rhea County. That southeastern county on the Tennessee River was formed in 1807, although white settlers began moving in about 1805 when the Cherokee were forced to give up their claims to the area.
In his more public life, though, we can know a few more things. We can only guess why he came to what would one day be East Tennessee, although if he came from North Carolina, as seems possible, he may have been moving west with other Baptists who were struggling with changes in religious doctrine. Or maybe he was an adventurous sort. I’m fairly certain he saw business opportunities. Most of the men who came into this area occupied only by the Cherokee (who had pushed out Muskogee, Yuchi, Shawnee, and more) were looking to take over land and sell it, and James certainly did his share of that.
I imagine his hanging his hat with the revolutionaries had much to do with those leanings. The colonial government of North Carolina wasn’t particularly supportive of attempts to take land from the Cherokee and in fact, had forbidden it. These future Tennesseeans, however, did it anyway, working up their own treaties – treaties that often were supported by this Cherokee leader or that one, but not this other one over here. Obviously, that’s gonna lead to conflict. Again, those are stories we’ll tell on these pages later on. For now, we’re just looking for our man James.
James pops up on the south side of the Watauga River in documents from 1778, and I think we can assume he was active in the Watauga Association, although we don’t see his name directly connected to it. We do see him as the Revolutionary War gets rolling.
Not all the Watauga men were patriots. Some were Tories, loyal to the British crown. A fellow named Grimes threatened to kill Roddye at one point, but Capt William Bean chased Grimes into the mountains and told him to get the hell out and not come back. Roddye later gets a little more land, with a cabin built by someone named Grimes …
That was just before word came into the mountains in the fall of 1780 that the British were planning to sweep across the southern colonies in search of a decisive victory that would rock General George Washington in the northeast. That word came in the form of a captured and pardoned patriot sent over the mountains to deliver a message from British Major Patrick “Bull Dog” Ferguson: Lay down your arms and quit fighting, Ferguson said, or he would “march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay waste the country with fire and sword.”
As you can imagine, these Overmountain men didn’t take kindly to that, so they gathered at Sycamore Shoals (now Elizabethton) and started a march for King’s Mountain in South Carolina, where Ferguson was planning his assault.
Two deserters warned Ferguson they were coming, but he likely didn’t expect the men he called “mongrels” to make the 330 mile trip in 10 days. The militias from Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and future Tennessee reached Cowpens in South Carolina on October 6 and learned that Ferguson was on King’s Mountain with 1,200 men. Ferguson made a huge error in camping there rather than moving on to Charlotte, just a day away.
The Overmountain men, led by Isaac Shelby, sent 900 of their number on horseback to get cover the 35 miles to King’s Mountain pronto. They raced through a rainy night and morning, surrounding the mountain on the afternoon of October 7. And they attacked.
It only took an hour for the mongrels to run the Tories ragged, with Ferguson on horseback cutting down surrender flags with his sword. He was shot off his horse, then shot and killed the patriot who demanded his surrender, and was then shot and killed himself. By seven men. Once their angry bull dog was dead, the rest of the Tories surrendered. Grimes, by the way, was caught and hanged.
There’s much more, of course. The Overmountain men scared the dickens out of Cornwallis, though, and he didn’t come back south for quite some time. And he lost. The colonies won their independence from Britain.
We know that Roddye went to King’s Mountain. He was in Capt William Bean’s company, serving as a private. We’re not sure if he was among the 900 men who fought the 65 minute battle or if he remained behind with the rest of the militia. But he was serving in Bean’s company — and Bean’s company was with John Sevier — so he likely did make the trip to the mountain.
And since King’s Mountain was more or less the extent of Roddye’s service in the war, we can be certain he was never a colonel. He was a private in Bean’s company, and that’s how he’s listed in genealogy records of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Our man was a colonel, though, just not during the Revolution. We’ll get to that in part three, when James Roddye packs up and moves to Greene County with his father-in-law, George Russell.
Loved this