Looking at Matthew H. Jouett’s classic portrait of Isaac Shelby, it would be difficult to envision his subject in the buckskins of a canny frontiersman or the uniform of a seasoned field officer. The face is round and jowly, and the body is somewhat rotund. The portrait depicts Shelby at around 70, in failing health and just a few years before his death. It does nothing to convey the lifetime of military and political service he devoted to Kentucky and the fledgling American nation.
Isaac’s grandfather brought the Shelby family to Pennsylvania from Wales around 1735. The clan soon moved to Maryland, where land was affordable and the country full of promise. Evan Shelby Sr. acquired around 1,200 acres, upon which he built a plantation, while Evan Jr.—Isaac’s father—purchased some 24,000 acres close to his father’s property. It was there that Isaac was born in 1750.
Evan Jr., who divided his attention between fur trading and farming, also served with distinction during the French and Indian War, swiftly rising in rank from private to captain. He set an example of boldness and fortitude that his son would emulate throughout his life.
Of necessity, the men of all three generations of Shelbys became skilled frontiersmen. According to his biographer, Paul W. Beasley, the young Isaac “inherited a sound, sturdy physique. In his prime, he stood about 5’11”, and was dark, spare and clean cut.” Formal education on the frontier was all but unheard of, and Isaac received relatively little of it. His time was spent in learning woodcraft and acquiring the skills of a hunter and surveyor. He apparently stood out among his neighbors, who appointed him deputy sheriff in his 18th year.
Five years later—by which time the peripatetic Shelbys had moved to Fincastle County, Virginia—Isaac fought as a militia lieutenant under his father at the Battle of Point Pleasant. It was the final engagement in what is known as Lord Dunmore’s War. The 1774 “war” was a blatant and ultimately successful attempt by Virginia’s royal governor, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, to remove the Shawnee and other tribes, open the Western frontier to white settlement, and “pacify [the] hostile Indian war bands.” Following their defeat at Point Pleasant, the Shawnee surrendered their tribal hunting grounds to white settlement.
After the war, Shelby briefly surveyed for the Transylvania Company, a short-lived land-investment firm intent on acquiring property for white settlement in the fertile region of Virginia and North Carolina known as Kentucky. While surveying, Shelby marked out 1,400 acres for himself and “improved” on it by planting a field of corn, thereby establishing legal possession.
When the Revolution erupted, the Virginia Committee of Safety appointed Shelby captain of a company of militia. Virginia Gov. Patrick Henry assigned him to the post of commissary agent, directing Shelby to secure provisions for the troops on the frontier. The assignment, which grew to encompass provisioning the regular army would occupy the young man for the next three years.
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In 1780, Shelby, by then a colonel in the militia, was called upon to help stop the British from seizing North Carolina and the northwest corner of South Carolina. The redcoats had already overrun Georgia and much of South Carolina, and things were going badly for the Americans. Maj. Patrick Ferguson, the British officer charged with uniting and commanding the Loyalists in the region, had publicized his intention to hang any “Overmountain Men”—frontiersmen living west of the Appalachian Mountains—caught fighting against the Crown and to level their towns by fire and sword. It was a threat that motivated rather than frightened the rugged mountain folk, and they joined the rebels in large numbers.
Shelby had fought American Indians in Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia. Now, he would face the British as an officer in the field. He combined volunteers from his county militia with Overmountain Men and militiamen under Cols. John Sevier and Charles McDowell. Bolstered by volunteers from Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, they marched to find and eliminate Ferguson and his command. Their little army by then totaled around 900, while Ferguson commanded some 1,100 Loyalists.
On Oct. 7, after successfully fighting two smaller battles just days earlier, the Patriots attacked Ferguson’s forces along a ridge atop Kings Mountain, in what is now Cherokee County, South Carolina. Shelby’s advice to his men was short and to the point: “When we encounter the enemy, don’t wait for the word of command. Let each one of you be your own officer … If in the woods, shelter yourselves, and give them Indian play; advance from tree to tree, pressing the enemy and killing and disabling all you can. Your officers will shrink from no danger.”
After an hour of heavy fighting, the firing ceased. Ferguson had been killed, and his second-in-command surrendered. American losses totaled 28 killed and 62 wounded, while the Loyalists suffered 157 killed, 163 wounded and 698 missing or captured. A Tory who survived the battle wrote in his diary, “The 7th of Octor [sic]. the cursed rebels came upon us killed and took us every soul and so My Dear Friends I bid you farewell for I am started to the warm country.”
Although the credit for the battle plan has never been fully resolved, Beasley wrote, “Impartial searching of the evidence seems to indicate that Shelby was the one who designed the method of attack,” but added, “No one man could claim sole honors for the victory.”
Still, from that day forward, Shelby was widely known as “Old Kings Mountain,” and the battle as the “turning point of the American Revolution.” Beasley succinctly stated, “Ferguson [had] boasted that ‘he was on Kings Mountain, that he was king of the mountain, and that God Almighty could not drive him from it.’ Shelby proved him wrong.”
Word of the victory, singular in a string of recent Patriot defeats, spread and emboldened the Americans, inspiring long-lived legends of Shelby and his fellow commanders. Thirty-three years after the battle, the governor and general assembly of North Carolina presented Shelby with a commemorative sword “for your gallantry in achieving with your brothers in arms the glorious victory over the British forces … at the Battle of Kings Mountain.”
In the year following the battle, Shelby raised a force of some 400 riflemen and joined the camp of Francis Marion, the famed “Swamp Fox.” Marching with the combined force, Shelby was instrumental in seizing two enemy forts simultaneously without firing a shot.
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Shelby’s successes in the field led to what would become a lifelong political career. He was well known in the region, and over the next several years, it seemed that he was named for every available position in Virginia and Kentucky. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 1781 and re-elected the following year. He was named a trustee of the new Transylvania Seminary; chaired a convention of military officers discussing the separation of Kentucky from Virginia; became a member of the congressionally organized Board of War for the District of Kentucky; served as high sheriff, justice of the peace and member of the court for Lincoln County; and in 1792—the year Kentucky became a state—he was named its first governor. Somehow, Shelby found the time to marry and father 11 children.
Shelby’s four-year term as governor was fraught with issues. One of the biggest problems facing Kentuckians was the constant fear of attack by Native Americans. As governor, Shelby was also commander-in-chief of the militia, and when Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne roundly defeated the confederation of tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, thereby ending the threat of Indian hostility, fully half of his force was comprised of Shelby’s Kentucky militiamen.
The newly forged Kentucky Constitution prohibited a governor from serving consecutive terms. At the end of his four years in the governor’s chair, Shelby retired to Traveler’s Rest, the Kentucky plantation in Lincoln County he had built years earlier. When the War of 1812 broke out, the citizens of Kentucky voted Shelby back in as governor by an overwhelming majority. He gave his whole-hearted support to the defense of the new nation, and—at nearly 63 years of age—raised and commanded a force of some 3,500 Kentucky militiamen. When his age was questioned, he replied, “I have never enjoyed a better state of health.”
A major general by that time, Shelby marched his men to join Gen. William Henry Harrison’s army, and together they re-took Detroit from the British. They then invaded Canada at the Ontario border, pursuing the retreating British army and their American Indian allies under Tecumseh. On Oct. 5, 1813, they met and engaged along the Thames River near the Native settlement of Moraviantown. Harrison’s forces inflicted a stunning defeat on the enemy, killing Tecumseh and taking nearly 600 prisoners. The American casualty list totaled seven killed and 22 wounded. The victory enabled the United States to maintain control over what then was the Northwest.
In his report to the secretary of war, Harrison wrote in praise of Shelby: “At the age of sixty-six [sic], as preserving all the vigor of youth, the ardent zeal which distinguished him in the Revolutionary War, and the undaunted bravery which he manifested at King’s Mountain … I am at a loss … how to mention [the service] of Governor Shelby, being convinced that no eulogism [sic] of mine can reach his merit.”
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When his second term as governor ended, Shelby was prompted to run as presidential candidate James Monroe’s vice president, but he refused. After the election, President Monroe offered Shelby the Cabinet position of secretary of war. Again, Shelby demurred, citing his age as the reason.
In 1818, Congress passed a resolution: “That the thanks of Congress be and they are hereby presented to Major General William Henry Harrison, and Isaac Shelby, late Governor of Kentucky, and through them to the officers and men under their command, for their gallantry and good conduct in defeating the combined British and Indian forces … on the Thames … and that the President of the United States be requested to cause two gold medals to be struck, emblematical of this triumph, and presented to General Harrison and Isaac Shelby, late Governor of Kentucky.” And so they were.
That same year, Shelby performed his final public service when he and Andrew Jackson arranged a treaty with the Chickasaws in which the tribe ceded all the lands west of the Tennessee River to the United States. In 1820, Shelby suffered a debilitating stroke that deprived him of the use of his right arm and resulted in the partial loss of function in his left arm and legs. Over the next few years, his health continued to decline. On July 18, 1826, he quietly passed away while in conversation with his wife.
Shelby had long since achieved national fame, and newspapers throughout the country wrote eulogies. The Vermont Sentinel and Democrat of Aug. 25 contained a lengthy paean, stating, “A more honest man never lived, a more noble one never died.” And The Kentucky Gazette of July 21 closed with this: “His name will descend to posterity as one of the worthies of Kentucky.”
That Shelby was the right man for his time and place is beyond dispute. His biographer, Beasley, referred to him as the “George Washington of the West,” and few if any who knew him would have disagreed.