When fighting broke out in Massachusetts in April 1775, the Province of South Carolina did not move as a unit. The Charleston coast tended toward the Patriot cause; the upcountry, with its German and Scots-Irish settlers, leaned heavily Loyalist under the influence of Thomas Fletchall. For months the two sides circled each other through tarrings and featherings and tense parleys rather than open battle. William Henry Drayton and the Reverend William Tennent rode upcountry in August to rally Patriot sentiment, and Drayton even negotiated a fragile truce with Fletchall in September. Then came the gunpowder. Loyalists seized a shipment the Council had sent to the Cherokee, and that single act of theft pushed the dispute past the point words could fix.

Williamson reached the area with roughly 500 men and threw up a hasty stockade in the fields belonging to John Savage, near the old trading town of Ninety Six. The Loyalists, led by Major Joseph Robinson and Captain Patrick Cuningham, had nearly four times that number. By any military calculation, the Patriots should have surrendered or been overrun. Instead, the war was still young enough that no one quite knew how to behave. Leaders from both sides actually began negotiating an end to the standoff. Then Loyalists seized two Patriot militiamen outside the stockade walls, and a two-hour gunfight erupted across the November fields. After that first burst of violence, the siege settled back into what historians later called a desultory affair, conducted with more caution than conviction.

On November 21, the Patriots held a council of war and decided to break out that night. They were preparing the sortie at sunset when a Loyalist appeared at the stockade carrying a parley flag. The next morning, terms emerged that bordered on absurd given the imbalance of forces: the Loyalists would withdraw across the Saluda River; the Patriots would destroy their own fort; both sides would return prisoners taken since November 2; the Patriots had to surrender their swivel guns, which were returned three days later anyway. Four Loyalists were killed and twenty wounded. The Patriots lost one soldier and twelve wounded. Why the larger force chose to negotiate has never been satisfactorily explained. Governor Campbell blamed weak Loyalist leadership. Others suspected the Loyalists had heard that Colonel Richard Richardson was already mobilizing a relief force in the lowlands.

Richardson was. By the end of November he had over 4,000 men under arms, and his Snow Campaign rolled through the backcountry arresting or dispersing the Loyalist leadership Williamson had just made peace with. The campaign ended on December 22 when fifteen inches of snow buried the region and Richardson's unprepared men struggled back to the lowlands through drifts. Most prominent Loyalists fled to West Florida, including Thomas Brown, who would return later in the war with a vengeance that became its own legend. The first siege of Ninety Six had ended without much bloodshed, but the political settlement it produced did not hold. Within five years, Ninety Six would be a British outpost. In 1781, Nathanael Greene would lay siege to it again, and the backcountry war would have become one of the cruelest theaters of the Revolution.

Savage's Old Fields itself is quiet farmland now, just south of present-day Ninety Six, the town that took its name from a long-disputed colonial estimate of the distance to the Cherokee village of Keowee. The 1781 siege site is preserved as Ninety Six National Historic Site, with the earthworks of the British Star Fort still visible in the South Carolina red clay. The 1775 affair has no monument of its own, which feels appropriate. It was the kind of engagement that happens before anyone has decided what kind of war they are in: still negotiating, still pretending the neighbors will go home. By 1781, no one was pretending anymore.