When Campbell ordered Boyd and his seven hundred men, many recruited from among local Tories, to concentrate on destroying the few remaining Georgia militia, the British forces camped at a farm on Kettle Creek to rest, slaughter some cattle, and graze their horses. It was a prosperous farm, with canebrakes and a swamp on two sides. Colonels Clarke, Dooly, and Pickens, with 350 men, found Boyd’s campfires from the previous day and closed in to within a mile of the farm. Dooly was on the right flank and Elijah Clarke was on the left, each with 100 men, and Pickens was in the center with 150. At daybreak, the Americans launched a simultaneous attack. Boyd fell, mortally wounded, and the remaining British troops fled across the stream. Clarke forded the open creek under fire, and his horse was shot, falling on him. He narrowly escaped drowning but was able to join in mopping up the battlefield and in the subsequent celebrations.

Following the debacle in Savannah, Kettle Creek was one of the most startling victories of the war, and news of it swept through the colonies. The psychological impact was enormous, coming at a time when the general presumption had been that the British were invulnerable and the revolution in the south was doomed. Many Whigs renounced their oaths of allegiance to the crown and returned to their homes, and a greatly encouraged General Lincoln dispatched General Ashe on to Augusta and even began preparations to retake Savannah.

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Most of Boyd’s men went back home to North Carolina, but two hundred reached Augusta, where Campbell’s regular troops treated them with contempt. One hundred British had been killed and seventy-five taken prisoner, five of whom were former Whigs whose names were known by Colonel Pickens. They were hanged as traitors. The Americans suffered nine killed and twenty-three wounded and captured, including a small man named Stephen Heard, who had been a large landowner and a prominent Whig politician in Savannah. When Colonel Campbell heard about the hangings at Kettle Creek, he decided to execute Heard as a public demonstration of British justice. Heard had a giant house slave called Mammy Kate, who learned that he was in Augusta and sentenced to be hanged. She filled a large basket with clothing and some pies and cakes as gifts for the British guards, entered the compound, and got permission to visit her master so that he could dress appropriately during his last hours of life. Wanting as much of a pageant as possible for the public execution, the British agreed. Mammy Kate went into the guardhouse, put Heard in the basket, arranged the pile of clothes under a blanket on his cot to resemble a sleeping man, placed the basket on her head, and carried him out of Augusta. Back home again, he set her free and gave her a home and a surrounding tract of land on his small plantation.