Howe was born in Bladen (later Brunswick) County, N. C. in 1732. His father, Job Howe (or Howes), moved to North Carolina from Charleston, S. C. , and settled on the Cape Fear River, where he became a prosperous rice planter. His mother, whose first name was Sarah, was a descendant of Sir John Yeamans.
Robert Howe was educated in England.
As a rice planter at Howe's Point on Cape Fear he amassed a considerable fortune. In 1756 he was made a justice of the peace for Bladen, and when Brunswick was erected in 1764 he was again appointed. In the same year, 1764, he was chosen a member of the Assembly and served by six reëlections until the outbreak of the Revolution. In 1766 he was made a captain and placed in command of Fort Johnston, holding the post until 1767 and again from 1769 to 1773, and in Tryon's expedition against the Regulators he served as a colonel of artillery. In the early Revolutionary movement he was a member of the safety committees of Brunswick and Wilmington and of the first three provincial congresses. He was also a member of the provincial Committee of Correspondence.
In 1775 Howe was made colonel of the 2nd North Carolina Regiment. He assisted in driving Lord Dunmore out of Virginia and commanded the troops which captured Norfolk. Promoted brigadier-general of the Continental Line in March 1776, he was sent to South Carolina. While he was absent his plantation was ravaged and his house destroyed by the British. Placed in command of North Carolina troops in South Carolina, he was soon given command of the Southern Department. In 1777 he was made major-general and the following year led an unsuccessful expedition against St. Augustine.
His position of command in Charleston was bitterly unpopular in South Carolina and was one of the causes of his duel with Christopher Gadsden which Major André satirized in a poem of eighteen stanzas. Late in 1778 Howe was ordered to the command of Savannah. Faced there with local opposition, led by the governor, he was prevented from making any adequate preparations for defense, and when the British landed he was forced to evacuate the city. Charges brought against him resulted in a court-martial in which he was acquitted "with highest honor, " but it was obvious that his usefulness in the South was ended and he was ordered to the North, where, after service at Verplanck's Point and Stony Point, he was placed in command at West Point.
Later he returned to the field. He was a member of the court which tried Major André. Singularly unfortunate as a soldier, he evidently retained the confidence of Washington, who sent him to suppress mutinies among Pennsylvania and New Jersey troops in 1781, and in 1783 he dispersed the mob in Philadelphia which had driven Congress from the city. Mustered out in 1783, he returned to North Carolina and resumed planting. In 1786 he was elected to the House of Commons, but, taken ill in Bladen County on his way to the session, he died without taking his seat.
Quotes from others about the person
Josiah Quincy met him on his southern trip and wrote of him: "Fine natural parts, great feeling, pure and elegant diction, with much persuasive eloquence a happy compound of the man of sense and sentiment with the man of the world, the sword and the senate" (Memoir, post, pp. 90, 92). But Janet Schaw in 1775 spoke of his having "the worst character you ever heard through the whole province, " adding, however, "he is very like a Gentleman" (Journal of a Lady of Quality, p. 167).
He married Sarah, the daughter of Thomas Grange, but after some years they became estranged and separated.
