Lillington, John Alexander
Lillington, John Alexander
LILLINGTON, JOHN ALEXANDER. (1725?–1786). Militia officer. North Carolina. Born in Barbados around 1725, Alexander Lillington was the son of a British officer. His family emigrated to North Carolina in 1734. Apparently he was a wealthy and elderly man when the Revolution started, but he sided from the first with the Patriots. He served on the Wilmington Council of Safety, became a colonel of the militia, and led a force of 150 minutemen from Wilmington in the important victory over the Loyalists at Moores Creek Bridge, North Carolina, on 27 February 1776. On 15 April 1776 he was commissioned as a colonel of the Sixth North Carolina Regiment, but on 16 May 1776 he resigned and served throughout the rest of the war as a militia brigadier general. He and his son, Colonel John Lillington, took part in General Horatio Gates's ill-fated Camden campaign, probably as part of the fleet-footed North Carolina militia force commanded by Lillington's friend and neighbor, Richard Caswell. After the war he returned to his estate, where he died in 1786.
SEE ALSO Camden Campaign; Lillington, John; Moores Creek Bridge.
revised by Michael Bellesiles