Daniel McGirt
Daniel McGirt, also given as McGirtt or McGirth, (c. 1750 – 1804), a native of the Camden District in South Carolina, was the leader of an outlaw gang that operated in northern Florida and southern Georgia during the latter 1700s.
[9] Wells' Register and Almanac for 1775 records that James McGirt held offices of trust and confidence, serving as a lieutenant-colonel in Richard Richardson's regiment of the provincial militia.
Kirkland and Kennedy, authors of Historic Camden: Colonial and Revolutionary, are inclined to believe that he remained true to the Crown, and retired with his family to East Florida around the beginning of the conflict.
He writes: "It is suspected that some of the McGirts who were formerly settled near Camden and some time ago retired to East Florida and who, it seems, have given themselves up to these scandalous practices are the perpetrators of this villainy, who have also taken off with them a great many horses from the settlements on the Wateree River.
He says that as a young man, Daniel McGirt was an accomplished hunter and rider, intimately familiar with the woods and trails from the Santee River to the lands of the Catawba Nation.
Stung by this disgrace, McGirt determined to escape, and succeeded by dislodging the window bars of his cell with a broken trowel probably passed to him by a guard.
Gen. Augustine Prévost's army on its devastating raid of 1779 through lower Carolina in which plantations were laid waste and robbed of all their valuables[26]— live stock, silver plate, provisions, and enslaved blacks.
Suspecting that he would wish to cross a creek with very high banks, on the Bettyneck plantation ten miles below Camden, they removed the only bridge at that point and concealed themselves on either side of the way.
McGirt and his comrade rode blindly into the ambuscade, but, putting spurs to their horses, passed unscathed by the musketry fire until they reached the chasm.
Tonyn, governor of the last-mentioned loyal province (East Florida), granted a commission to a horse-thief of the name of McGirt, who, at the head of a party, had for several years harassed the inhabitants of South Carolina and Georgia.
After peace was proclaimed, he carried on the same practices against his former protectors in East Florida, until they were obliged, in self-defense, to raise the royal militia of the province to oppose him.”After Gen. Cornwallis and Col. Tarleton defeated Gen. Gates and the Patriot forces at the Battle of Camden in 1780, McGirt and his fellow Loyalist Rangers Thomas Brown and William Cunningham returned to South Carolina from their exile in East Florida to exact revenge for the mistreatment they had suffered at the hands of their former neighbors.
[28] During and after the war, McGirt led an interracial gang that relied on corrupt government, intimidation of local officials, and election fraud to avoid accountability for their thefts of livestock and other property, as well as the kidnapping of slaves, in Georgia.
The most notorious among them was the gang led by McGirt, who had assembled a band of mounted men, mostly refugees and vagrants, with the Loyalist John Linder from the South Carolina Lowcountry as his chief lieutenant.
To protect the settlers from the "banditti", as he called them, Governor Tonyn raised two troops of light horse under the command of Lt. Col. William Young, and ordered him to bring the marauders to justice, characterizing them as "murderers and assassins".
A few weeks later the troublemakers left Havana with passports for New Providence in the Bahamas; Mayfield arrived, but McGirt and Cunningham had jumped ship and landed on the East Florida coast.
[36][2] In spite of his several arrests over the years for capital crimes, McGirth was able to use his political connections to such good effect that he had a peaceful death in 1804 as a free man in Camden County, Georgia.
