1780 · 1780s
Tarleton and the Gamecock
At the Battle of Blackstock's Farm, Colonel Banastre Tarleton — having just failed to overrun the Patriot militia of Colonel Thomas Sumter — complains in his dispatch that the Carolinians 'fought like a gamecock.' The epithet sticks.
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sortableYear: 1780
The Battle of Blackstock’s Farm (20 November 1780) was a sharp engagement in the South Carolina upcountry during the American Revolutionary War. Colonel Banastre Tarleton, the most aggressive of the British Legion’s officers, had been pursuing the Patriot militia of Colonel Thomas Sumter — a former Continental officer turned partisan commander, who had earned the nickname “The Gamecock” in earlier actions.
Tarleton’s attack on Sumter’s camp at Blackstock’s was repulsed with heavy British losses. In his dispatch to his superiors, Tarleton wrote:
“They fought like a gamecock, and Sumter was the most obstinate man I ever saw.”
The first half of the sentence stuck. Thomas Sumter became “The Gamecock” for the rest of his life, and after the war the epithet passed from his person to the whole of his state. The Palmetto Regiment of the Revolutionary War carried a gamecock on its standard; the State of South Carolina later adopted the bird as its official State Wild Game Bird (2009).
Sumter himself lived to the age of 97, dying in 1832 as the longest-lived senator in U.S. history at that date. He was, by all accounts, a fierce and complicated man — a slaveholder, a partisan, and a patriot who remained loyal to the Union as long as it was possible.