Colonel William Candler, An American Patriot
By F. Lewis Smith, Camp 91 Historian
Published previously in The McDuffie Progress
and the July 2025 issue of the Thomson Guards Dispatch.
Two men mentioned in the movie “The Patriot” with Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger have a connection with us in McDuffie, Warren and Columbia Counties: Colonel Thomas Brown, the King’s Ranger who founded a colony east of Wrightsboro, known then as Brownsborough and known today as Appling, and Colonel Elijah Clarke, the greatest actual fighter of all our American patriots, and for whom our local State park is named. Colonel Brown’s right hand man in this area was his fellow countryman and friend, Captain William Manson, who also founded a colony around here, 3,500 acres on the western border of Wrightsboro, called Friendsborough, near the old Rock House. Colonel Brown was the British officer who had the thirteen American patriots, one for each colony, hanged in Augusta’s old white house called McKay’s Trading Post, near the Kroc Centre; not the Ezekiel Harris house, but across the street nearer the canal. But another patriot, a brave, hard, tough man, was able to withstand all the hardships of war in the 18th century in the backwoods of Georgia and South Carolina. His name was William Candler. His connection with us today is the late Charles Wesley "Charlie" Candler, Jr. (1946-2012) and his descendants. Charlie was a Thomson resident, a direct descendant and third great-grandson of Colonel William Candler.
|
|
|
Elijah Clarke
|
Rock House (c1785) near Wrightsboro
in McDuffie County, Georgia |
Before the American Revolution, William Candler was active in the civil affairs of the state and prominent in its councils; so prominent indeed that when the British captured Savannah in 1778 and re-established the royal government, one of the first acts of the Tory legislature was to name Candler as a traitor to the crown. When the war began, Candler was prosperous, but by its end he had lost almost everything. Still, when he died in 1784, he owned more than 6,000 acres of land in Richmond, Wilkes and Washington counties. The first legislature of Georgia after independence met in Savannah on January 6, 1784, and Candler was a member. Two representatives from what was then Richmond County showed up; the polls for that first election had been mistakenly opened at Brownsborough and at Augusta. However, to let every voter in the county have his vote counted, a committee decided to count all the votes and let the eight men with the highest number of votes represent the county. Of all the votes cast, William Candler received the highest number. William Glascock, William Few and Benjamin Few, all American patriots, were elected with him. This was Georgia’s first contested election. This was also William Candler’s last public service; he died in July 1784 but he had lived long enough to see his beloved state become an independent commonwealth. That had been doubtful during his life because Georgia was the only state to have allowed the sale of the British tax stamps that precipitated the Boston Tea Party, and she had become the only state to revert completely back to colonial status at the time during the war when the Tories completely occupied her.
