Loyalists in the Southern Campaign, Volume I, Murtie June Clarke.
Loyalists at Kings Mountain, Bobby Gilmer Ross.
Loyalists in the Siege of Ninety-Six, Bobby Gilmer Ross.

Tradition says Hubbard Quarles was the son of Moses Quarles. Since Moses Quarles was patriarch of the only Quarles family in the right part of SC during the Revolution, and the name “Hubbard Quarles” is repeated often among Moses’ descendants, we can assume tradition has it right this time.

Lists of Loyalist soldiers in the three references cited above are the only mention of Hubbard Quarles found in authoritative print. He is named as “Qualls Hubbard” on one list and “Hubbard Quarles” on another. Comparison of names on the lists verify there is only one man, Hubbard Quarles.

Hubbard Quarles was part of Captain Shadrack Lantrey’s company, Fairforest Regiment, Ninety-Six Brigade of Loyalists. Colonel Daniel Plummer was Regimental Commander and Colonel Patrick Ferguson was Brigade Commander.

Hubbard Quarles took part in the Battle of Kings Mountain and the siege of Ninety-Six. It is not known if he was in the Battle of Eutaw Springs. The following brief summary of events around that part of the Revolutionary War in the South is all we really know about Hubbard Quarles.

To have been a Loyalist soldier in 1780, Hubbard was most likely born between 1755 and 1762.

British plans to shift the Revolutionary War from the North, where it had almost stalemated, to the South was signaled by the British capture of Charleston in the Spring of 1780. Cornwallis planned to move north from Charleston through the eastern and central Carolinas with his British Regulars and experienced Loyalists from the Northeast. He believed a Loyalist force could be raised in western SC that would be large enough to control any Whig [Patriot] efforts to harass him from the west.

Cornwallis assigned Major Patrick Ferguson to recruit and lead the western Loyalists. Ferguson carried on a backwoods campaign of commendable personal diplomacy, riding almost alone from farm to farm and promoting the British cause, often in a talk over a kitchen table.

Ferguson with a small British force occupied Orangeburg on June 12, 1780. Another British officer accepted the surrender of the small Patriot garrison at Ninety-Six on June 10, 1780. Orangeburg became British Headquaters in the west, and forward operations were centered at Ninety-Six.

Ferguson was authorized to activate seven regiments in seven areas where Loyalist sentiment was high. Each of the seven regiments was to be commanded by an experienced Loyalist officer. The whole would make up the Ninety-Six Brigade. For instance, the Fairforest Regiment was recruited along the Tyger River and Fairforest Creek from Spartanburg, SC, south into Union County. Daniel Plummer, a Pennsylvania Loyalist, commanded the regiment. The Fairforest Regiment was activated June 14, 1780.

Patrick Ferguson proposed to Cornwallis that the men in the Ninety-Six Brigade who had wives, children or other significant responsibilities stay in the area to keep peace, and that he [Ferguson] march north with the unmarried, childless men from all of the regiments. Ferguson’s northbound troops, plus some North Carolina Loyalists, were defeated on Kings Mountain by a larger force of Patriots from the North Carolina and Virginia mountains.

Patriot riflemen, moving from tree to tree up the sides of Kings Mountain, were effective in picking off British officers. Patrick Ferguson was killed and Daniel Plummer was wounded. Some of the Loyalist soldiers escaped through the brush on the sides of the mountain. Some were captured and later exchanged. Some, it is said, were allowed to escape. The Virginians, according to one account, had no prisoners left after about three days on the march back home. All had been allowed to go off in small groups into the woods on “personal business” and hadn’t come back.

Colonel Plummer and some of his men had rejoined the British at Ninety-Six before the Patriots began a siege of that fort May 22, 1781. Colonel Plummer, three company captains and sixty-two men of the Fairforest Regiment were evacuated from Ninety-Six to Orangeburg when British decided to get out of Ninety-Six, in July, 1781.The best information we now have says the evacuees from Ninety-Six, and later from Orangeburg, were in Charleston until the war ended in 1783. The British and Loyalists defeated the Patriots at Eutaw Springs, north of Charleston in September, 1781.

[Research of James Foster: May 22, 2004]