Robert Howe (; – December 14, 1786) was an American military officer who served in the American Revolutionary War. The descendant of a prominent North Carolinian family, he was one of five general officers, and the only major general, in the Continental Army from North Carolina. Howe also played a role in the colonial and state governments of North Carolina, serving in the legislative bodies of both.
Howe served in the colonial militia during the French and Indian War and commanded Fort Johnston at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. He also served as a colonel of Governor William Tryon's artillery during the Regulator Movement in North Carolina. Howe suffered greatly when Tryon, a personal friend, became governor of New York, and he staunchly opposed Tryon's successor. He became active in organizing efforts within North Carolina and among the American colonies between 1773 and 1775 and was an active member of the North Carolina Provincial Congress. At the outset of the Revolutionary War, Howe was promoted to brigadier general and was heavily involved in actions in the Southern Department, leading a combined force of Continental Army regulars and Patriot militia to defeat at the British capture of Savannah in 1778.
Howe's career as a military commander was contentious and consumed primarily by conflict with political and military leaders in Georgia and South Carolina. In 1778, he fought a duel with Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina which was spurred in part by Howe's conflict with South Carolina's state government. Political and personal confrontations, combined with Howe's reputation as a womanizer among those who disfavored him, eventually led to the Continental Congress stripping him of his command over the Southern Department. He was then sent to New York, where he served under General George Washington in the Hudson Highlands, although Howe did not have a successful or significant career in that theater.
Howe sat as a senior officer on the court-martial board that sentenced to death John André, a British officer accused of assisting Benedict Arnold in the latter's plot to change allegiance and deliver West Point to the British. Howe himself was accused of attempting to defect to the British, but the accusations were cast aside at the time as having been based in a British attempt to cause further discord in the Continental Army. Howe also played a role in putting down several late-war mutinies by members of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Lines in New Jersey and Philadelphia and returned home to North Carolina in 1783. He again became active in state politics, but died in December 1786 while en route to a session of the North Carolina House of Commons.
Early life and family
Howe was born in 1732 to Job Howe (also spelled "Howes"), the grandson of Governor James Moore, who presided over the southern portion of the Province of Carolina. Job was also a descendant of Governor John Yeamans. Howe's mother may have been Job's first wife Martha, who was the daughter of colonial North Carolina jurist Frederick Jones., cf , where Jane, Job's third wife, is attributed as his mother, and , where Howe's mother is called Sarah. Job Howe's ancestors had been planters and political figures in South Carolina during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Prior to Howe's birth, his family left Charleston to settle on the banks of the Cape Fear River in the Province of North Carolina. Howe's father was a member of the extended Moore family, formerly of South Carolina, who settled the lower Cape Fear River and collectively owned more than of farmland on it by the 1730s. Job Howe died in 1748, leaving his estate and the wealth of his parents to Robert. Robert had two brothers and two sisters, all of whom were mentioned in Job's will.
As a young boy, Howe may have been sent to England to obtain an education, although several sources doubt that Howe made the journey. At some point between 1751 and 1754, after completing his education, Howe married Sarah Grange, who was heiress to a large fortune. Howe had numerous affairs, fathering an unknown number of children in and out of wedlock, including a son, Robert; two daughters, Mary and Ann; and up to four additional daughters whose mothers' names are not recorded. Howe was widely considered a womanizer by contemporaries; by 1772 he became estranged from Grange, and the two separated. In the year of their formal separation, Howe recorded a deed for the support of his wife.
Loyalist sympathizer and diarist Janet Schaw described Howe prior to the revolution:
Howe inherited a large amount of assets from his grandmother and, upon the death of his father, became the owner of "Howe's Point" a plantation on the Cape Fear River, as well as a rice plantation near what was formerly known as Barren Inlet (now called Mason Inlet). The site of the former plantation is located on the mainland directly across from Figure Eight Island. Howe also owned a plantation called "Mount Misery" in what was Bladen County. His grandmother had provided Howe with slaves and money with which Howe was intended to build his fortune.
Colonial political and military service Around 1755, Howe captained a militia company in Bladen County, and was appointed a justice of the peace for that county in 1756. Howe was elected to the Province of North Carolina House of Burgesses from Bladen County in 1760 and served until 1762. In 1764, the Assembly created Brunswick County, and Howe was both appointed its justice of the peace and re-elected to the Assembly from the new county. Howe would be re-elected six more times from Brunswick County. In 1765, Howe worked with other colonial leaders such as Hugh Waddell, Abner Nash, and Cornelius Harnett to found the Wilmington Sons of Liberty organization, which was active in protesting the Stamp Act 1765 that taxed most printed materials. At the time, the members of the Sons of Liberty did not consider their resistance to be rebellion, as it was based on the idea that government officials who performed acts in opposition to the will of the people were not acting with full authority. After the resolution of the Stamp Act Crisis, Howe was made an officer of the provincial exchequer. Despite the Cape Fear River area being the epicenter of Stamp Act protests in North Carolina, Howe took no substantial part in the active confrontations with Governor William Tryon, due in large part to their personal friendship and the patronage provided by the Governor for Howe's political ambitions.
During the Anglo-Cherokee War, Howe commanded a company in the NC Provincial Regiment, alongside provincial soldiers from Virginia. In 1766, he was commissioned as a captain of militia and was given command of Fort Johnston, located at the entrance of the Cape Fear River in present-day Southport, North Carolina. Howe served in this capacity between 1766 and 1767, and again between 1769 and 1773. Although satisfied with this position, Howe ultimately desired to obtain a commission in the regular British Army, which was traditionally a prerequisite for the commander of Fort Johnston. Howe was never granted this commission, despite Tryon's support. In the 1768 session of the colonial assembly, Howe played a prominent role by introducing a bill to remedy a currency shortage in the colony. His bill would have led to the acceptance of commodities as legal tender in the province, but it was not passed. The Regulator movement was in part based on the grievances farmers in the North Carolina backcountry had about back taxes and pressure from private creditors, both of which Howe's 1768 bill had attempted to address.
Despite his efforts to reform the province's policies, Howe was made a colonel of artillery by Governor Tryon and served under the Governor against armed protesters in the piedmont during the War of the Regulation. Howe was among the Governor's entourage when he confronted the Regulators in Hillsborough in 1768, and in 1771, at the Battle of Alamance, Howe served in a dual role as a commander of artillery and quartermaster general. In early 1773, when Josiah Quincy II visited North Carolina to foster cooperation between Southern activists and those in Boston, he investigated the causes of the War of the Regulation to which he had been sympathetic. Howe served as Quincy's guide and with the assistance of Cornelius Harnett and William Hooper convinced Quincy that the Regulator movement had been unjustified and wrong to take up arms against Tryon. Quincy found Howe to be a "most happy compound of the man of sense, the sword, the Senate, and the buck ... a favorite of the man of sense and the female world", continuing to say that "[Howe] has faults and vice – but alas who is without them." More importantly, however, Quincy's visit with Howe, Hooper, and Harnett engendered a desire among those present to open up inter-colonial lines of communication in order to coordinate responses to future impositions by the British government.
Howe's private fortunes were never stable, and between 1766 and 1775, he was forced to mortgage land and sell slaves to generate funds. In 1770, Howe was able to purchase Kendal Plantation on the Cape Fear River, a rice plantation, but in 1775, he mortgaged it for around £214. While the causes of Howe's financial misfortunes are unknown, several contemporary critics held that the cause was Howe's need to keep up appearances among the ruling elite, while Josiah Martin, Tryon's successor as Royal Governor, believed Howe's misfortunes were evidence of his potential for malfeasance with the public money. In particular, Martin believed that Howe was intentionally under-staffing Fort Johnston in order to pocket excess funds the colonial assembly had appropriated for the garrison there, which was a common form of embezzlement among previous commanders and other royal officials. Howe, as a legislator and public official, had a poor working relationship with Martin, and Martin deprived him of his appointed offices – the captaincy of Fort Johnston and his position with the provincial exchequer – shortly after the new governor's arrival. A legislative confrontation in 1770 over the Provincial Assembly's attempts to pass a law authorizing attachment of real property in North Carolina owned by persons living in England placed Howe in direct confrontation with Martin, who preferred a requirement that colonial subjects seek relief from courts in England rather than in North Carolina. Martin believed that Howe's virulent opposition to the new governor's policies was driven by Howe's anger at being deprived of his valuable appointed positions.
Revolutionary political and militia service In December 1773, the North Carolina colonial assembly created a committee of correspondence, to which Howe, as well as Richard Caswell, John Harvey, John Ashe, Joseph Hewes, and Samuel Johnston were appointed. That committee was tasked with corresponding with other colonies to coordinate plans of resistance to British attempts to tax or otherwise burden the colonists. Beginning in 1774, Howe was a member of the Wilmington and Brunswick County Committees of Safety, and in August of that year, served as a member of a committee that organized the collection of corn, flour, and pork to be sent to Boston. At the time, the Port of Boston had been closed by one of the Intolerable Acts, specifically the Boston Port Act, which was in reaction to the Boston Tea Party and other protests against the Tea Act.