King's Mountain
About the time when James Robertson went from Watauga to fling out the
frontier line three hundred miles farther westward, the British took
Savannah. In 1780 they took Charleston and Augusta, and overran Georgia.
Augusta was the point where the old trading path forked north and west,
and it was the key to the Back Country and the overhill domain. In
Georgia and the Back Country of South Carolina there were many Tories
ready to rally to the King's standard whenever a King's officer should
carry it through their midst. A large number of these Tories were
Scotch, chiefly from the Highlands. In fact, as we have seen, Scotch
blood predominated among the racial streams in the Back Country from
Georgia to Pennsylvania. Now, to insure a triumphant march northward for
Cornwallis and his royal troops, these sons of Scotland must be gathered
together, the loyal encouraged and those of rebellious tendencies
converted, and they must be drilled and turned to account. This task, if
it were to be accomplished successfully, must be entrusted to an officer
with positive qualifications, one who would command respect, whose
personal address would attract men and disarm opposition, and especially
one who could go as a Scot among his own clan. Cornwallis found his man
in Major Patrick Ferguson.
Ferguson was a Highlander, a son of Lord Pitfour of Aberdeen, and
thirty-six years of age. He was of short stature for a Highlander--about
five feet eight--lean and dark, with straight black hair. He had a
serious unhandsome countenance which, at casual glance, might not arrest
attention; but when he spoke he became magnetic, by reason of the
intelligence and innate force that gleamed in his eyes and the
convincing sincerity of his manner. He was admired and respected by his
brother officers and by the commanders under whom he had served, and he
was loved by his men.
He had seen his first service in the Seven Years' War, having joined the
British army in Flanders at the age of fifteen; and he had early
distinguished himself for courage and coolness. In 1768, as a captain of
infantry, he quelled an insurrection of the natives on the island of St.
Vincent in the West Indies. Later, at Woolwich, he took up the
scientific study of his profession of arms. He not only became a crack
shot, but he invented a new type of rifle which he could load at the
breach without ramrod and so quickly as to fire seven times in a minute.
Generals and statesmen attended his exhibitions of shooting; and even
the King rode over at the head of his guards to watch Ferguson rapidly
loading and firing.
In America under Cornwallis, Ferguson had the reputation of being the
best shot in the army; and it was soon said that, in his quickness at
loading and firing, he excelled the most expert American frontiersman.
Eyewitnesses have left their testimony that, seeing a bird alight on a
bough or rail, he would drop his bridle rein, draw his pistol, toss it
in the air, catch and aim it as it fell, and shoot the bird's head off.
He was given command of a corps of picked riflemen; and in the Battle of
the Brandywine in 1777 he rendered services which won acclaim from the
whole army. For the honor of that day's service to his King, Ferguson
paid what from him, with his passion for the rifle, must have been the
dearest price that could have been demanded. His right arm was
shattered, and for the remaining three years of his short life it hung
useless at his side. Yet he took up swordplay and attained a remarkable
degree of skill as a left-handed swordsman.
Such was Ferguson, the soldier. What of the man? For he has been
pictured as a wolf and a fiend and a coward by early chroniclers, who
evidently felt that they were adding to the virtue of those who fought
in defense of liberty by representing all their foes as personally
odious. We can read his quality of manhood in a few lines of the letter
he sent to his kinsman, the noted Dr. Adam Ferguson, about an incident
that occurred at Chads Ford. As he was lying with his men in the woods,
in front of Knyphausen's army, so he relates, he saw two American
officers ride out. He describes their dress minutely. One was in hussar
uniform. The other was in a dark green and blue uniform with a high
cocked hat and was mounted on a bay horse:
I ordered three good shots to steal near to and fire at them; but the
idea disgusting me, I recalled the order. The hussar in retiring made a
circuit, but the other passed within a hundred yards of us, upon which I
advanced from the wood towards him. Upon my calling he stopped; but
after looking at me he proceeded. I again drew his attention and made
signs to him to stop, levelling my piece at him; but he slowly cantered
away. As I was within that distance, at which, in the quickest firing, I
could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out
of my reach, I had only to determine. But it was not pleasant to fire at
the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself very
coolly of his duty--so I let him alone. The day after, I had been
telling this story to some wounded officers, who lay in the same room
with me, when one of the surgeons who had been dressing the wounded
rebel officers came in and told us that they had been informing him that
General Washington was all the morning with the light troops, and only
attended by a French officer in hussar dress, he himself dressed and
mounted in every point as above described. I am not sorry that I did not
know at the time who it was. ¹
¹ Doubt that the officer in question was Washington was expressed by
James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper stated that Major De Lancey his
father-in-law, was binding Ferguson's arm at the time when the two
officers were seen and Ferguson recalled the order to fire, and that De
Lancey said he believed the officer was Count Pulaski. But, as Ferguson,
according to his own account, "leveled his piece" at the officer, his
arm evidently was not wounded until later in the day. The probability is
that Ferguson's version, written in a private letter to his relative, is
correct as to the facts, whatever may be conjectured as to the identity
of the officer. See Draper's King's Mountain and its Heroes, pp. 52-54.
Ferguson had his code towards the foe's women also. On one occasion when
he was assisting in an action carried out by Hessians and Dragoons, he
learned that some American women had been shamefully maltreated. He went
in a white fury to the colonel in command, and demanded that the men who
had so disgraced their uniforms instantly be put to death.
In rallying the loyalists of the Back Country of Georgia and the
Carolinas, Ferguson was very successful. He was presently in command of
a thousand or more men, including small detachments of loyalists from
New York and New Jersey, under American-born officers such as De Peyster
and Allaire. There were good honest men among the loyalists and there
were also rough and vicious men out for spoils--which was true as well
of the Whigs or Patriots from the same counties. Among the rough element
were Tory banditti from the overmountain region. It is to be gathered
from Ferguson's records that he did not think any too highly of some of
his new recruits, but he set to work with all energy to make them
useful.
The American Patriots hastily prepared to oppose him. Colonel Charles
McDowell of Burke County, North Carolina, with a small force of militia
was just south of the line at a point on the Broad River when he heard
that Ferguson was sweeping on northward. In haste he sent a call for
help across the mountains to Sevier and Shelby. Sevier had his hands
full at Watauga, but he dispatched two hundred of his troops; and Isaac
Shelby, with a similar force from Sullivan County crossed the mountains
to McDowell's assistance. These "overmountain men" or "backwater men,"
as they were called east of the hills, were trained in Sevier's method
of Indian warfare--the secret approach through the dark, the swift dash,
and the swifter flight. "Fight strong and run away fast" was the Indian
motto, as their women had often been heard to call it after the red men
as they ran yelling to fall on the whites. The frontiersmen had adapted
the motto to fit their case, as they had also made their own the Indian
tactics of ambuscade and surprise attacks at dawn. To sleep, or ride if
needs must, by night, and to fight by day and make off, was to them a
reasonable soldier's life.
But Ferguson was a night marauder. The terror of his name, which grew
among the Whigs of the Back Country until the wildest legends about his
ferocity were current, was due chiefly to a habit he had of pouncing on
his foes in the middle of the night and pulling them out of bed to give
fight or die. It was generally both fight and die, for these dark
adventures of his were particularly successful. Ferguson knew no
neutrals or conscientious objectors; any man who would not carry arms
for the King was a traitor, and his life and goods were forfeit. A
report of his reads: "The attack being made at night, no quarter could
be given." Hence his wolfish fame. "Werewolf" would have been a fit name
for him for, though he was a wolf at night, in the daylight he was a man
and, as we have seen, a chivalrous one.
In the guerrilla fighting that went on for a brief time between the
overmountain men and various detachments of Ferguson's forces, sometimes
one side, sometimes the other, won the heat. But the field remained
open. Neither side could claim the mastery. In a minor engagement fought
at Musgrove's Mill on the Enoree, Shelby's command came off victor and
was about to pursue the enemy towards Ninety-Six when a messenger from
McDowell galloped madly into camp with word of General Gates's crushing
defeat at Camden. This was a warning for Shelby's guerrillas to flee as
birds to their mountains, or Ferguson would cut them off from the north
and wedge them in between his own force and the victorious Cornwallis.
McDowell's men, also on the run for safety, joined them. For forty-eight
hours without food or rest they rode a race with Ferguson, who kept hard
on their trail until they disappeared into the mystery of the winding
mountain paths they alone knew.
Ferguson reached the gap where they had swerved into the towering hills
only half an hour after their horses' hoofs had pounded across it. Here
he turned back. His troops were exhausted from the all-night ride and,
in any case, there were not enough of them to enable him to cross the
mountains and give the Watauga men battle on their own ground with a
fair promise of victory. So keeping east of the hills but still close to
them, Ferguson turned into Burke County, North Carolina. He sat him down
in Gilbert Town (present Lincolnton, Lincoln County) at the foot of the
Blue Ridge and indited a letter to the "Back Water Men," telling them
that if they did not lay down their arms and return to their rightful
allegiance, he would come over their hills and raze their settlements
and hang their leaders. He paroled a kinsman of Shelby's, whom he had
taken prisoner in the chase, and sent him home with the letter. Then he
set about his usual business of gathering up Tories and making soldiers
of them, and of hunting down rebels.
One of the "rebels" was a certain Captain Lytle. When Ferguson drew up
at Lytle's door, Lytle had already made his escape; but Mrs. Lytle was
there. She was a very handsome woman and she had dressed herself in her
best to receive Ferguson, who was reported a gallant as well as a wolf.
After a few spirited passages between the lady in the doorway and the
officer on the white horse before it, the latter advised Mrs. Lytle to
use her influence to bring her husband back to his duty. She became
grave then and answered that her husband would never turn traitor to his
country Ferguson frowned at the word "traitor," but presently he said:
"Madam, I admire you as the handsomest woman I have seen in North
Carolina. I even half way admire your zeal in a bad cause. But take my
word for it, the rebellion has had its day and is now virtually put
down. Give my regards to Captain Lytle and tell him to come in. He will
not be asked to compromise his honor. His verbal pledge not again to
take up arms against the King is all that will be asked of him." ¹
¹ Draper, King's Mountain and its Heroes, pp. 151-53.
This was another phase of the character of the one-armed Highlander
whose final challenge to the back water men was now being considered in
every log cabin beyond the hills. A man who would not shoot an enemy in
the back, who was ready to put the same faith in another soldier's honor
which he knew was due to his own, yet in battle a wolfish fighter who
leaped through the dark to give no quarter and to take none--he was fit
challenger to those other mountaineers who also had a chivalry of their
own, albeit they too were wolves of war.
When Shelby on the Holston received Ferguson's pungent letter, he flung
himself on his horse and rode posthaste to Watauga to consult with
Sevier. He found the bank of the Nolichucky teeming with merrymakers.
Nolichucky Jack was giving an immense barbecue and a horse race. Without
letting the festival crowd have an inkling of the serious nature of
Shelby's errand, the two men drew apart to confer. It is said to have
been Sevier's idea that they should muster the forces of the western
country and go in search of Ferguson ere the latter should be able to
get sufficient reinforcements to cross the mountains. Sevier, like
Ferguson, always preferred to seek his foe, knowing well the advantage
of the offensive. Messengers were sent to Colonel William Campbell of
the Virginia settlements on the Clinch, asking his aid. Campbell at
first refused, thinking it better to fortify the positions they held and
let Ferguson come and put the mountains between himself and Cornwallis.
On receipt of a second message, however, he concurred. The call to arms
was heard up and down the valleys, and the frontiersmen poured into
Watauga. The overhill men were augmented by McDowell's troops from Burke
County, who had dashed over the mountains a few weeks before in their
escape from Ferguson.
At daybreak on the 26th of September they mustered at the Sycamore
Shoals on the Watauga, over a thousand strong. It was a different
picture they made from that other great gathering at the same spot when
Henderson had made his purchase in money of the Dark and Bloody Ground,
and Sevier and Robertson had bought for the Wataugans this strip of
Tennessee. There were no Indians in this picture. Dragging Canoe, who
had uttered his bloody prophecy, had by these very men been driven far
south into the caves of the Tennessee River. But the Indian prophecy
still hung over them, and in this day with a heavier menace. Not with
money, now, were they to seal their purchase of the free land by the
western waters. There had been no women in that other picture, only the
white men who were going forward to open the way and the red men who
were retreating. But in this picture there were women--wives and
children, mothers, sisters, and sweethearts. All the women of the
settlement were there at this daybreak muster to cheer on their way the
men who were going out to battle that they might keep the way of liberty
open not for men only but for women and children also. And the battle to
which the men were now going forth must be fought against Back Country
men of their own stripe under a leader who, in other circumstances,
might well have been one of themselves--a primitive spirit of hardy
mountain stock, who, having once taken his stand, would not barter and
would not retreat.
"With the Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!" cried their pastor, the
Reverend Samuel Doak, with upraised hands, as the mountaineers swung
into their saddles. And it is said that all the women took up his words
and cried again and again, "With the sword of the Lord and of our
Gideons!" To the shouts of their women, as bugles on the wind of dawn,
the buckskin-shirted army dashed out upon the mountain trail.
The warriors' equipment included rifles and ammunition, tomahawks,
knives, shot pouches, a knapsack, and a blanket for each man. Their
uniforms were leggings, breeches, and long loose shirts of gayly fringed
deerskin, or of the linsey-woolsey spun by their women. Their hunting
shirts were bound in at the waist by bright-colored linsey sashes tied
behind in a bow. They wore moccasins for footgear, and on their heads
high fur or deerskin caps trimmed with colored bands of raveled cloth.
Around their necks hung their powder-horns ornamented with their own
rude carvings.
On the first day they drove along with them a number of beeves but,
finding that the cattle impeded the march, they left them behind on the
mountain side. Their provisions thereafter were wild game and the small
supply each man carried of mixed corn meal and maple sugar. For drink,
they had the hill streams.
They passed upward between Roan and Yellow mountains to the top of the
range. Here, on the bald summit, where the loose snow lay to their
ankles, they halted for drill and rifle practice. When Sevier called up
his men, he discovered that two were missing. He suspected at once that
they had slipped away to carry warning to Ferguson, for Watauga was
known to be infested with Tories. Two problems now confronted the
mountaineers. They must increase the speed of their march, so that
Ferguson should not have time to get reinforcements from Cornwallis; and
they must make that extra speed by another trail than they had intended
taking so that they themselves could not be intercepted before they had
picked up the Back Country militia under Colonels Cleveland, Hampbright,
Chronicle, and Williams, who were moving to join them. We are not told
who took the lead when they left the known trail, but we may suppose it
was Sevier and his Wataugans, for the making of new warpaths and wild
riding were two of the things which distinguished Nolichucky Jack's
leadership. Down the steep side of the mountain, finding their way as
they plunged, went the overhill men. They crossed the Blue Ridge at
Gillespie's Gap and pushed on to Quaker Meadows, where Colonel Cleveland
with 350 men swung into their column. Along their route, the Back
Country Patriots with their rifles came out from the little hamlets and
the farms and joined them.
They now had an army of perhaps fifteen hundred men but no commanding
officer. Thus far, on the march, the four colonels had conferred
together and agreed as to procedure; or, in reality, the influence of
Sevier and Shelby, who had planned the enterprise and who seem always to
have acted in unison, had swayed the others. It would be, however,
manifestly improper to go into battle without a real general. Something
must be done. McDowell volunteered to carry a letter explaining their
need to General Gates, who had escaped with some of his staff into North
Carolina and was not far off. It then occurred to Sevier and Shelby,
evidently for the first time, that Gates, on receiving such a request,
might well ask why the Governor of North Carolina, as the military head
of the State, had not provided a commander. The truth is that Sevier and
Shelby had been so busy drumming up the militia and planning their
campaign that they had found no time to consult the Governor. Moreover,
the means whereby the expedition had been financed might not have
appealed to the chief executive. After finding it impossible to raise
sufficient funds on his personal credit, Sevier had appropriated the
entry money in the government land office to the business in hand--with
the good will of the entry taker, who was a patriotic man, although, as
he had pointed out, he could not, officially, hand over the money.
Things being as they were, no doubt Nolichucky Jack felt that an
interview with the Governor had better be deferred until after the
capture of Ferguson. Hence the tenor of this communication to General
Gates:
As we have at this time called out our militia without any orders from
the Executive of our different States and with the view of expelling the
Enemy out of this part of the Country, we think such a body of men
worthy of your attention and would request you to send a General Officer
immediately to take the command.... All our Troops being Militia and but
little acquainted with discipline, we could wish him to be a Gentleman
of address, and able to keep up a proper discipline without disgusting
*the soldiery.
For some unknown reason--unless it might be the wording of this
letter!--no officer was sent in reply. Shelby then suggested that, since
all the officers but Campbell were North Carolinians and, therefore, no
one of them could be promoted without arousing the jealousy of the
others, Campbell, as the only Virginian, was the appropriate choice. The
sweet reasonableness of selecting a commander from such a motive
appealed to all, and Campbell became a general in fact if not in name!
Shelby's principal aim, however, had been to get rid of McDowell, who,
as their senior, would naturally expect to command and whom he
considered "too far advanced in life and too inactive" for such an
enterprise. At this time McDowell must have been nearly thirty-nine; and
Shelby, who was just thirty, wisely refused to risk the campaign under a
general who was in his dotage!
News of the frontiersmen's approach, with their augmented force, now
numbering between sixteen and eighteen hundred, had reached Ferguson by
the two Tories who had deserted from Sevier's troops. Ferguson thereupon
had made all haste out of Gilbert Town and was marching southward to get
in touch with Cornwallis. His force was much reduced, as some of his men
were in pursuit of Elijah Clarke towards Augusta and a number of his
other Tories were on furlough. As he passed through the Back Country he
posted a notice calling on the loyalists to join him. If the
overmountain men felt that they were out on a wolf hunt, Ferguson's
proclamation shows what the wolf thought of his hunters.
To the Inhabitants of North Carolina.
Gentlemen: Unless you wish to be eat up by an innundation of barbarians,
who have begun by murdering an unarmed son before the aged father, and
afterwards lopped off his arms, and who by their shocking cruelties and
irregularities give the best proof of their cowardice and want of
discipline: I say if you wish to be pinioned, robbed and murdered, and
see your wives and daughters in four days, abused by the dregs of
mankind--in short if you wish to deserve to live and bear the name of
men, grasp your arms in a moment and run to camp.
The Back Water men have crossed the mountains: McDowell, Hampton,
Shelby, and Cleveland are at their head, so that you know what you have
to depend upon. If you choose to be degraded forever and ever by a set
of mongrels, say so at once, and let your women turn their backs upon
you, and look out for real men to protect them.
Pat. Ferguson, Major 71st Regiment. ¹
¹ Draper, King's Mountain and its Heroes, p. 204.
Ferguson's force has been estimated at about eleven hundred men, but it
is likely that this estimate does not take the absentees into
consideration. In the diary of Lieutenant Allaire, one of his officers,
the number is given as only eight hundred. Because of the state of his
army, chroniclers have found Ferguson's movements, after leaving Gilbert
Town, difficult to explain. It has been pointed out that he could easily
have escaped, for he had plenty of time, and Charlotte, Cornwallis's
headquarters, was only sixty miles distant. We have seen something of
Ferguson's quality, however, and we may simply take it that he did not
want to escape. He had been planning to cross the high hills--to him,
the Highlander, no barrier but a challenge--to fight these men. Now that
they had taken the initiative he would not show them his back. He craved
the battle. So he sent out runners to the main army and rode on along
the eastern base of the mountains, seeking a favorable site to go into
camp and wait for Cornwallis's aid. On the 6th of October he reached the
southern end of the King's Mountain ridge, in South Carolina, about half
a mile south of the northern boundary. Here a rocky, semi-isolated spur
juts out from the ridge, its summit--a table-land about six hundred
yards long and one hundred and twenty wide at its northern end--rising
not more than sixty feet above the surrounding country. On the summit
Ferguson pitched his camp.
The hill was a natural fortress, its sides forested, its bald top
protected by rocks and bowlders. All the approaches led through dense
forest. An enemy force, passing through the immediate, wooded territory,
might easily fail to discover a small army nesting sixty feet above the
shrouding leafage. Word was evidently brought to Ferguson here, telling
him the now augmented number of his foe, for he dispatched another
emissary to Cornwallis with a letter stating the number of his own
troops and urging full and immediate assistance.
Meanwhile the frontiersmen had halted at the Cowpens. There they feasted
royally off roasted cattle and corn belonging to the loyalist who owned
the Cowpens. It is said that they mowed his fifty acres of corn in an
hour. And here one of their spies, in the assumed rôle of a Tory,
learned Ferguson's plans, his approximate force, his route, and his
system of communication with Cornwallis. The officers now held council
and determined to take a detachment of the hardiest and fleetest
horsemen and sweep down on the enemy before aid could reach him. About
nine o'clock that evening, according to Shelby's report, 910 mounted men
set off at full speed, leaving the main body of horse and foot to follow
after at their best pace.
Rain poured down on them all that night as they rode. At daybreak they
crossed the Broad at Cherokee Ford and dashed on in the drenching rain
all the forenoon. They kept their firearms and powder dry by wrapping
them in their knapsacks, blankets, and hunting shirts. The downpour had
so churned up the soil that many of the horses mired, but they were
pulled out and whipped forward again. The wild horsemen made no halt for
food or rest. Within two miles of King's Mountain they captured
Ferguson's messenger with the letter that told of his desperate
situation. They asked this man how they should know Ferguson. He told
them that Ferguson was in full uniform but wore a checkered shirt or
dust cloak over it. This was not the only messenger of Ferguson's who
failed to carry through. The men he had sent out previously had been
followed and, to escape capture or death, they had been obliged to lie
in hiding, so that they did not reach Cornwallis until the day of the
battle.
At three o'clock on the afternoon of the 7th of October, the
overmountain men were in the forest at the base of the hill. The rain
had ceased and the sun was shining. They dismounted and tethered their
steaming horses. Orders were given that every man was to "throw the
priming out of his pan, pick his touchhole, prime anew, examine bullets
and see that everything was in readiness for battle." The plan of battle
agreed on was to surround the hill, hold the enemy on the top and,
themselves screened by the trees, keep pouring in their fire. There was
a good chance that most of the answering fire would go over their heads.
As Shelby's men crossed a gap in the woods, the outposts on the hill
discovered their presence and sounded the alarm. Ferguson sprang to
horse, blowing his silver whistle to call his men to attack. His
riflemen poured fire into Shelby's contingent, but meanwhile the
frontiersmen on the other sides were creeping up, and presently a circle
of fire burst upon the hill. With fixed bayonets, some of Ferguson's men
charged down the face of the slope, against the advancing foe, only to
be shot in the back as they charged. Still time and time again they
charged; the overhill men reeled and retreated; but always their
comrades took toll with their rifles; Ferguson's men, preparing for a
mounted charge, were shot even as they swung to their saddles. Ferguson,
with his customary indifference to danger, rode up and down in front of
his line blowing his whistle to encourage his men. "Huzza, brave boys!
The day is our own!" Thus he was heard to shout above the triumphant war
whoops of the circling foe, surging higher and higher about the hill.
But there were others in his band who knew the fight was lost. The
overmountain men saw two white handkerchiefs, affixed to bayonets,
raised above the rocks; and then they saw Ferguson dash by and slash
them down with his sword. Two horses were shot under Ferguson in the
latter part of the action; but he mounted a third and rode again into
the thick of the fray.
Suddenly the cry spread among the attacking troops that the British
officer, Tarleton, had come to Ferguson's rescue; and the mountaineers
began to give way. But it was only the galloping horses of their own
comrades; Tarleton had not come. Nolichucky Jack spurred out in front of
his men and rode along the line. Fired by his courage they sounded the
war whoop again and renewed the attack with fury.
"These are the same yelling devils that were at Musgrove's Mill," said
Captain De Peyster to Ferguson.
Now Shelby and Sevier, leading his Wataugans, had reached the summit.
The firing circle pressed in. The buckskin-shirted warriors leaped the
rocky barriers, swinging their tomahawks and long knives. Again the
white handkerchiefs fluttered. Ferguson saw that the morale of his
troops was shattered.
"Surrender," De Peyster, his second in command, begged of him.
"Surrender to those damned banditti? Never!"
Ferguson turned his horse's head downhill and charged into the
Wataugans, hacking right and left with his sword till it was broken at
the hilt. A dozen rifles were leveled at him. An iron muzzle pushed at
his breast, but the powder flashed in the pan. He swerved and struck at
the rifleman with his broken hilt. But the other guns aimed at him
spoke; and Ferguson's body jerked from the saddle pierced by eight
bullets. Men seized the bridle of the frenzied horse, plunging on with
his dead master dragging from the stirrup.
The battle had lasted less than an hour. After Ferguson fell, De Peyster
advanced with a white flag and surrendered his sword to Campbell. Other
white flags waved along the hilltop. But the killing did not yet cease.
It is said that many of the mountaineers did not know the significance
of the white flag. Sevier's sixteen-year-old son, having heard that his
father had fallen, kept on furiously loading and firing until presently
he saw Sevier ride in among the troops and command them to stop shooting
men who had surrendered and thrown down their arms.
The victors made a bonfire of the enemy's baggage wagons and supplies.
Then they killed some of his beeves and cooked them; they had had
neither food nor sleep for eighteen hours. They dug shallow trenches for
the dead and scattered the loose earth over them. Ferguson's body,
stripped of its uniform and boots and wrapped in a beef hide, was thrown
into one of these ditches by the men detailed to the burial work, while
the officers divided his personal effects among themselves.
The triumphant army turned homeward as the dusk descended. The uninjured
prisoners and the wounded who were able to walk were marched off
carrying their empty firearms. The badly wounded were left lying where
they had fallen.
At Bickerstaff's Old Fields in Rutherford County the frontiersmen
halted; and here they selected thirty of their prisoners to be hanged.
They swung them aloft, by torchlight, three at a time, until nine had
gone to their last account. Then Sevier interposed; and, with Shelby's
added authority, saved the other twenty-one. Among those who thus
weighted the gallows tree were some of the Tory brigands from Watauga;
but not all the victims were of this character. Some of the troops would
have wreaked vengeance on the two Tories from Sevier's command who had
betrayed their army plans to Ferguson; but Sevier claimed them as under
his jurisdiction and refused consent. Nolichucky Jack dealt humanely by
his foes. To the coarse and brutish Cleveland, now astride of Ferguson's
horse and wearing his sash, and to the three hundred who followed him,
may no doubt be laid the worst excesses of the battle's afterpiece.
Victors and vanquished drove on in the dark, close to the great flank of
hills. From where King's Mountain, strewn with dead and dying, reared
its black shape like some rudely hewn tomb of a primordial age when
titans strove together, perhaps to the ears of the marching men came
faintly through the night's stillness the howl of a wolf and the
answering chorus of the pack. For the wolves came down to King's
Mountain from all the surrounding hills, following the scent of blood,
and made their lair where the Werewolf had fallen. The scene of the
mountaineers' victory, which marked the turn of the tide for the
Revolution, became for years the chief resort of wolf hunters from both
the Carolinas.
The importance of the overmountain men's victory lay in what it achieved
for the cause of Independence. King's Mountain was the prelude to
Cornwallis's defeat. It heartened the Southern Patriots, until then cast
down by Gates's disaster. To the British the death of Ferguson was an
irreparable loss because of its depressing effect on the Back Country
Tories. King's Mountain, indeed, broke the Tory spirit. Seven days after
the battle General Nathanael Greene succeeded to the command of the
Southern Patriot army which Gates had led to defeat. Greene's genius met
the rising tide of the Patriots' courage and hope and took it at the
flood. His strategy, in dividing his army and thereby compelling the
division of Cornwallis's force, led to Daniel Morgan's victory at the
Cowpens, in the Back Country of South Carolina, on January 17,
1781--another frontiersmen's triumph. Though the British won the next
engagement between Greene and Cornwallis--the battle of Guilford Court
House in the North Carolina Back Country, on the 15th of March--Greene
made them pay so dearly for their victory that Tarleton called it "the
pledge of ultimate defeat"; and, three days later, Cornwallis was
retreating towards Wilmington. In a sense, then, King's Mountain was the
pivot of the war's revolving stage, which swung the British from their
succession of victories towards the surrender at Yorktown.
Shelby, Campbell, and Cleveland escorted the prisoners to Virginia.
Sevier, with his men, rode home to Watauga. When the prisoners had been
delivered to the authorities in Virginia, the Holston men also turned
homeward through the hills. Their route lay down through the Clinch and
Holston valleys to the settlement at the base of the mountains. Sevier
and his Wataugans had gone by Gillespie's Gap, over the pathway that
hung like a narrow ribbon about the breast of Roan Mountain, lifting its
crest in dignified isolation sixty-three hundred feet above the levels.
The "Unakas" was the name the Cherokees had given to those white men who
first invaded their hills; and the Unakas is the name that white men at
last gave to the mountain.
Great companies of men were to come over the mountain paths on their way
to the Mississippi country and beyond; and with them, as we know, were
to go many of these mountain men, to pass away with their customs in the
transformations that come with progress. But there were others who clung
to these hills. They were of several stocks--English, Scotch,
Highlanders, Ulstermen, who mingled by marriage and sometimes took their
mates from among the handsome maids of the Cherokees. They spread from
the Unakas of Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky; and
they have remained to this day what they were then, a primitive folk of
strong and fiery men and brave women living as their forefathers of
Watauga and Holston lived. In the log cabins in those mountains today
are heard the same ballads, sung still to the dulcimer, that entertained
the earliest settlers. The women still turn the old-fashioned spinning
wheels. The code of the men is still the code learned perhaps from the
Gaels--the code of the oath and the feud and the open door to the
stranger. Or were these, the ethical tenets of almost all uncorrupted
primitive tribes, transmitted from the Indian strain and association?
Their young people marry at boy and girl ages, as the pioneers did, and
their wedding festivities are the same as those which made rejoicing at
the first marriage in Watauga. Their common speech today contains words
that have been obsolete in England for a hundred years.
Thrice have the mountain men come down again from their fastnesses to
war for America since the day of King's Mountain and thrice they have
acquitted themselves so that their deeds are noted in history. A
souvenir of their part in the War of 1812 at the Battle of the Thames is
kept in one of the favorite names for mountain girls--"Lake Erie." In
the Civil War many volunteers from the free, non-slaveholding mountain
regions of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the Union Army, and it is said
that they exceeded all others in stature and physical development. And
in our own day their sons again came down from the mountains to carry
the torch of Liberty overseas, and to show the white stars in their flag
side by side with the ancient cross in the flag of England against which
their forefathers fought.