Thursday, January 24, 2002 Military History Soldier's life filled with mystery, gaps By Roy Parker Jr. Correspondent For Capt. Joshua Hadley, Cumberland County's most experienced Continental soldier of the American War of Independence, the year 1781 offered new battlefield experiences. Three and a half years earlier, Hadley fought with Gen. George Washington's Main Army at the Battle of Germantown, Pa., in the autumn of 1777, where he suffered the first of his two war wounds. Hadley seems to have spent much of the time between 1778 to 1781 back home in Cumberland County. But the late summer of 1781, the war had shifted to the South. Following a British invasion of South Carolina in early 1780, British Gen. Charles Cornwallis invaded North Carolina in early 1781. Suffering heavy casualties at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse near present-day Greensboro in March, he retreated through the village of Cross Creek and on to Wilmington. In April, he marched north toward an October rendezvous with destiny at Yorktown, Va. Meanwhile, Gen. Nathanael Greene's little army of Continentals and militia was pressing the last South Carolina contingents of the British invasion army back toward its bases at Charleston and Savannah, Ga. In a series of fights with Redcoat contingents, never winning a tactical victory, but always maneuvering to cause a British retreat, Greene harried remnants of the Redcoat invaders. By August 1781, the North Carolina forces in Greene's army consisted of a scratch brigade of about 350 soldiers under Gen. Jethro Sumner. By then, Hadley was a captain, holding a commission dated 1779, in the 10th North Carolina Continental Regiment. The two little armies joined battle at Eutaw Springs, S.C., on Sept. 8, 1781. It was a slugging match, with British and Patriot forces suffering heavy casualties from pointblank musketry. Again, the long list of battle casualties included Hadley among the wounded. Hadley's war record didn't end with his service under Greene. For although Cornwallis surrendered his British forces at Yorktown in October of 1781, the War of Independence had its own momentum in North Carolina, and especially in the Cape Fear area, where a British force held the port town of Wilmington, not evacuating until November of 1781. Spurred by the British presence, Loyalists, so-called Tories, rose up in arms in large numbers, their hard-riding bands overwhelming Patriot militia forces, taking virtual control of whole counties along the Cape Fear River. Among victims of this bloody civil war was Hadley's father, Thomas Hadley, at the time sheriff of Cumberland County. He was slain, probably in July 1781, at his home near Carvers Creek in northeastern Cumberland, by night-riding Tories. Still busy Even as Sumner's brigade joined Greene in August, Tories swept into Cross Creek and briefly captured the county's leading Patriot officers. Despite the departure of the British, the area seethed with civil war right on into 1782. And Capt. Joshua Hadley was still busy. He held a commission to round up Tories, as well as deserters and delinquents from the Patriot forces, throughout the river area. And because of that service, we have history's only contemporary assessment of Hadley's personal and military character. A Maj. McRae, writing to Gen. Sumner from Wilmington in February 1782, reported: "Capt. Hadley is invested with orders for this district. There is still a great prospect of success if he is active, which I believe is much his character." McRae urged Sumner to "assist him with some assiduous officers." In August 1782, Hadley was writing to Sumner, reporting that he had a commission in the 1st North Carolina Regiment and stood ready for the sort of duty that McRae had mentioned months earlier. Hadley wrote: "Now in Cumberland there are delinquents and deserters that with little trouble and some state horse this would be accomplished. I wait until I hear from you." But the war was soon over, even in the Cape Fear. Joshua Hadley returned to civilian life. But in 1787, the call of military service drew him again. He is listed among eight captains of volunteer companies that the North Carolina government proposed to raise "for the defense of western counties" in a time of lawlessness in that part of the state west of the Appalachians that was to become the state of Tennessee. The record does not show whether Hadley actually marched with any troops. Like his military career, the history of Hadley after the War of Independence has many gaps and mysteries. The Hadleys had been in Cumberland County since the 1750s, and his father established one of the first merchant stores in the village of Cross Creek as early as 1761. Move to Wilson County But they gradually moved away, many to what is now Wilson County. As late as 1922, a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution there was named for "Captain Thomas Hadley." Apparently, veteran Joshua Hadley lived at least for a time in Cross Creek, renamed Fayetteville in 1783. In 1785, he is one of seven "commissioners" presiding over the town government. His name appears periodically in county government records as a juryman and witness, and as a security of tavernkeeper Lewis Barge's license in Cross Creek. In 1786, he sells one of the lots that he owned in Fayetteville originally confiscated from John Cruden, a Loyalist during the late war. Postwar state government military pay records show that Hadley received money for the pay of his wartime company as late as 1786. He also shared in the land grants issued to Revolutionary War veterans. An early accounting showed he was entitled to 3,480 acres of western lands as reward for 84 months of commissioned service in the Continental Line. In 1791, a warrant for 1,089 acres made to Hadley was assigned to Abisha Thomas. In Cumberland County records, Hadley appears as late as 1790, successfully suing his brother-in-law, Pat Travers, in a dispute over land. Census no help Confusion about the later years of Hadley is compounded by the Census of 1790, which lists no less than four Joshua Hadleys, two in Chatham County, none in Cumberland County. A later accounting of Revolutionary War veterans claims he died on Feb. 8, 1830, more than 50 years after he first took up arms in the War of Independence. It seems more likely that this refers to another generation. While the postwar history of this battle-tested soldier of the War of Independence is obscure, his name is forever preserved in the list of 58 Patriot signers of "the association," the defiant anti-British petition circulated in the village of Cross Creek in the summer of 1775. Those names are engraved on a stone marker which stands in a little park at the intersection of Bow and Person Streets in downtown Fayetteville.