Washington's Immortals

by Patrick K. O'Donnell

  Chapter 29

  “Lay Their Country Waste

  with Fire and Sword”

  The Patriot militiaman lay on the ground, clutching his right arm. Wounded in a skirmish, the hapless man looked dully at his shattered limb.

  The life-threatening wound was just the beginning of his horrific ordeal. The available medical treatments of the day were as likely to kill patients as to cure them. But in the backwoods of Carolina, even these barbaric treatments were unavailable. Instead, wounded men bit down on a leather strap or a stick, grimacing against the pain while their comrades held them down during “surgery.”

  In this case, with the bone “very much shattered,” everyone knew the soldier’s arm must be amputated if he were to have any faint chance of survival. With no doctor available, a blacksmith hacked off the limb “with a shoemaker’s knife and a carpenter’s saw. He stopped the blood with the fungus of the oak, without taking up a blood vessel.”

  Scenes like these repeated over and over again as Loyalist militiamen pushed their way north, skirmishing with their countrymen along the way. The victory at Camden had a galvanizing effect on the Tories, emboldening them to rise up against their Whig counterparts. By this time, the number of Loyalists in the British army in America had swelled dramatically. In the early years of the war, the British didn’t consider the Loyalists reliable and didn’t make them a major factor in their strategy. The global war had bled the Crown’s troops from North America, and the British had a dramatic need to fill the shortfall. They raised thousands of provincials in New York, and by 1780 nearly nine thousand Tories were serving in the British army. However, the policy was coming into effect a little too late. Throughout the war, the British consistently struggled to find enough troops to garrison areas that they had taken. Had the British actively recruited Loyalists from the beginning of the war, they would have had more troops to man outposts and protect the Loyalist population in areas they had cleared.

  Despite the success at Camden, Cornwallis reported to General Henry Clinton that the “whole country” along the border with North Carolina and northeast South Carolina was in “an absolute state of rebellion.” Bands of guerrillas nipped at the British forces and slowly waged a war of attrition in some ways similar to the petite guerre in New Jersey in 1777. They also terrorized British sympathizers in a campaign of intimidation. The British had a hard time protecting the local Loyalist population outside Charleston. A vicious civil war roiled the countryside; both sides employed brutal methods and gave no quarter. In a series of more than a dozen small battles, Cornwallis estimated that he lost nearly a tenth of his fighting force that had landed in Charleston in February 1780.

  Cornwallis was convinced that to pacify South Carolina, he had to invade North Carolina and stamp out insurgents who were coming across the border. Over the summer of 1780 he laid plans for seizing North Carolina and began contacting Loyalist leaders and stockpiling supplies. He prepared to march with twenty-two hundred men from Camden to Charlotte, North Carolina.

  Backcountry militia forces, loyal to the Crown, grew quickly, often terrorizing Whigs by plundering and torching the homes of those who served Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter. They hanged combatants and roughed up civilians. The war raging in the backcountry of the South was very different from the war in the North, but, as in modern war, the militiamen had an oversized impact on the population—influencing it, intimidating it, or even protecting it—and they went places regulars had trouble entering.

  Many Loyalist militiamen coalesced around Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ferguson, whom the Marylanders first encountered when his raiding force landed at Monmouth County, New Jersey, back in April 1780. On September 1, Ferguson joined Cornwallis at Camden. “Major Ferguson joined us from Camden again with the disagreeable news that we were to be separated from the Army, and act on the frontier with the militia,” recalled Anthony Allaire, an American Loyalist volunteer. Ferguson’s task was to act as a screening force, protecting Cornwallis’s left flank from rebel partisans who had been congregating west of the Appalachian Mountains. Ferguson’s Loyalists represented the left wing of Cornwallis’s plan to invade North Carolina. Flawed from the beginning, this plan lacked a backbone of British regulars integrated into Ferguson’s troops and instead relied entirely on militiamen. It was a rare strategic blunder for ­Cornwallis—and one that proved disastrous.

  Next, disastrously for the British, British General Sir Henry Clinton had issued an edict requiring paroled prisoners to join the British militia or be considered traitors to the Crown. The proclamation roiled the population, which was split between Whigs and Tories. Whigs, on the defense, found themselves in the position of having nothing to lose from fighting against the British. This announcement—combined with confiscations of property from Americans found working against the Crown’s interests, and with various atrocities like that committed at Waxhaws—spurred many to oppose the Crown rather than to join the Loyalist militias like Ferguson’s.

  With nearly a thousand Tory militiamen, Ferguson moved north from the British stronghold at Ninety Six, which helped secure the backcountry of South Carolina and acted as an anchor in a series of posts in the southern part of the state. He and his group attempted to snuff out the insurgency by force and boldly proclaimed, “If they do not desist from their opposition to the British arms, we would march over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword.”

  He made an appeal to the Loyalists of North Carolina, issuing a call to arms for their self-defense that included a heavy dose of propaganda:

  Gentlemen: unless you wish to be eat up by an inundation of barbarians, who have begun by murdering an unarmed son before his 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 or deserve to live, and bear the name of men, grasp your arms in a moment and run to camp. . . . If you choose to be pissed upon 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.

  Ferguson’s words didn’t do much to rally support, but they thoroughly pissed off a group of Americans known as the Overmountain Men. These rugged, independent Americans had defied the king and settled beyond the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763, which established everything west of the Appalachian Mountains as Indian territory. Considered illegal squatters, this mixture of Scottish and Irish immigrants (along with a few Germans and Welsh) inhabited what is today the extreme northeast corner of Tennessee, where Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia meet. Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore called them a “dangerous example” for their rebellion against the Crown.

  True pioneers, hardened by years of living on the frontier, they fought constantly for their survival against both the elements and the Indians in the area. That hard living had shaped the men’s bodies, and to their foes, they seemed truly intimidating: “[They] appeared like so many devils from the infernal regions, so full of excitement were they as they darted like enraged mountains up the mountain. . . . They were the most powerful-looking men, [I] ever beheld; not overburdened with fat, but tall, raw-boned, and sinewy with long matted hair—such men as were never before seen in the Carolinas.”

  As one backwoodsman later bragged, “We were formidable. . . . Our equals were scarce, and our superiors hard to find.”

  Ferguson’s foolhardy boast about hanging their leaders and laying waste to their country stiffened the resolve of the Overmountain Men, who intended to destroy the Scottish-born officer. To separate friend from foe, the men used a password and countersign for identification. Ominously, the countersign was “Buford,” a reference to the Waxhaws Massacre.

  Ferguson marched toward Tennessee to screen Cornwallis’s arm
y, which was heading for North Carolina, and had quickly occupied Charlotte without a fight. When he received word of the approach of the Overmountain Men, he withdrew to Kings Mountain, where the Loyalist militia set up a defensive position. The British officer expected to be reinforced by Cornwallis, who was encamped roughly twenty-five miles away.

  A downpour pelted the Overmountain Men on October 7, 1780, as they rode in rows toward Kings Mountain. Their officers reminded them to keep their weapons dry. Many of them removed their shirts to wrap around their Deckard rifles. These rifles, made by a German immigrant, were among the best available at the time, able to shoot accurately at a distance of 250 yards, a feat unmatched by other weapons during the Revolution.

  As the Overmountain column came to a brief halt, Colonel Isaac Shelby, the effective commander of the group, turned to another officer and said, “I will not stop until night. I will follow Ferguson into Cornwallis’s lines.” Three officers took their places at the van of their respective regiments, as they trundled forward again into the streaming rain. By noon the rain had stopped, and a cool breeze brushed the faces of the marching men. When the three regiments were passing a house owned by a Tory, a girl suddenly rushed out and questioned some of the men. “How many are there of you?”

  “Enough to whip Ferguson if we can find him,” the men responded.

  The girl pointed to a ridge several miles away. “He’s on that mountain.”

  With the new information, the officers agreed to a simple plan: envelop the mountain and annihilate the Loyalists.

  Around 3:00 p.m. on October 7, 1780, an order came down from the officers: “Dismount and tie your horses. . . . Tie up greatcoats, blankets, etc. to your saddles.”

  Militiaman James Collins, only a teenager at the time but a trusted courier, recalled that the men rode into battle armed to the teeth with locally forged weapons: “We got swords, butcher knives, and war spurs made by the blacksmiths.” The teenager also remembered the moments leading up to the battle: “We were paraded and harangued in a short manner of the prospect before us. The sky was overcast with clouds, and at times a light mist was falling; our provisions were scanty and hungry men were like to be fractious; each one felt his situation; the last stake was up and the severity of the game must be played; everything was at stake—life, liberty, property, and even the fate of wife, children, and friends seemed to depend on the issue: death or victory was the only way to escape suffering.”

  As the men assembled, the officers invited the faint of heart to leave. But peer pressure influenced the men, who “could not well swallow the appellation of ‘coward.’” All of them received general orders: “Fresh prime your guns, and every man go into battle firmly resolving to fight till he dies.”

  The men silently moved toward their positions around the mountain where Ferguson’s Loyalists were camped. According to Ferguson’s morning report, the Loyalists numbered 1,125 men, with the only British national being Major Patrick Ferguson. Nine hundred Overmountain Men surrounded the Loyalists.

  About ten minutes before the final column could get into position, the Overmountain Men attacked. “The orders were at the firing of the first gun for every man to raise a whoop, rush forward, and fight his way as best he could.” Collins recounted the furious assault as the men let out bloodcurdling shouts. “We were soon in motion, every man throwing four or five balls in his mouth to prevent thirst”—and also to be in readiness to “reload quick.” The Overmountain Men weaved through the trees and boulders as they charged up Kings Mountain.

  Foolishly, Ferguson did not entrench on top of the mountain. Instead, he formed up battle lines. As the Loyalist Americans fired down on the Overmountain Men, their volleys tended to overshoot the charging Patriots. Collins recalled, “Their great elevation above us proved their ruin: they overshot us altogether, scarce touching a man except those on horseback, while every rifle from below seemed to have the desired effect.”

  The Loyalists, however, repelled Collins and his group twice. One Patriot soldier recalled, “The fight seemed to become more furious. Their leader Ferguson came into full view, within rifle shot, as if to encourage his men.” Collins and the men charged for a third time. The Loyalists’ ranks began to melt away. Sensing victory, the officers roared, “Hurrah, my brave fellows! Advance!”

  The Loyalists began crying for quarter as the pocket of resistance at the top of the crest started to collapse. The final phase of the battle lasted about twenty to thirty minutes. Ferguson spurred on the men from his white charger, waving his gleaming sword as he rode from one end of the line to the other, but despite his efforts to rally his troops, white flags of surrender began to appear.

  The Overmountain Men chose not to accept the surrender of those who called for quarter. Many of the rebels yelled, “Give them Buford’s play!” Disregarding the white flags, the Overmountain Men slaughtered the Loyalists. As one rebel recalled, “[We] continued to fire without comprehending in the heat of the moment what had happened; some had heard at Buford’s defeat, the British had refused quarter . . . and were willing to follow that bad example.” Several of the officers attempted to intercede and, knocking guns upward, shouted, “Don’t shoot! It is murder to kill them now for they have raised the flag!

  “Cease firing! For God’s sake, cease firing!”

  Collins recalled the carnage: “The poor Tories appeared to be really pitiful; the dead lay in heaps on all sides, and the groans of the wounded were heard in every direction.”

  Their leader shared the fate of his men, as did one of Ferguson’s mistresses, Virginia Sal, who had accompanied him into the battle. The beautiful redhead was struck in the head by a bullet.30 Surveying the scene, Collins spotted Ferguson’s bullet-riddled body and noted, “It appeared that almost fifty rifles must have leveled at him at the same time; seven balls had passed through his body; both his arms were broken and his hat and clothing were literally shot to pieces.”

  30. Ferguson had two mistresses, known as Virginia Sal and Virginia Paul. Virginia Paul escaped the battle alive but was held prisoner by the Overmountain Men. Documentation corroborates the existence of the two women, and ground-penetrating radar revealed a second body buried under Ferguson’s on Kings Mountain.

  Reports indicated that 157 Tories were killed; 163 were badly wounded. The Overmountain Men captured 698 men as prisoners.

  On the day after the battle, the families of the Loyalist Americans gazed on the horror of the battlefield. “The next morning, which was Sunday, the scene became really distressing; the wives and children of the poor Tories came in, in great numbers; their husbands, fathers, and brothers lay in great heaps while others lay wounded or dying,” Collins recalled. The victors hastily buried the dead. They covered the fallen with old logs, tree bark, and rocks, leaving them vulnerable to the beasts of the forest. Collins observed, “The hogs in the neighborhood gathered into the place to devour the flesh of men. . . . Half the dogs in the country were said to be mad and were put to death.” Collins returned to the battlefield several weeks later to witness the haunting remains of Ferguson’s militia. “All parts of the human frame lay scattered in every direction.”

  Savagely, the Overmountain Men stabbed and beat many of the Tories they had taken prisoner before subjecting them to a long march into captivity. Lieutenant Anthony Allaire noted in his diary, “Several of the militia that were worn out with fatigue, and not able to keep up, were cut down and trodden to death in the mire.” Allaire was lucky. He and several of the captured militiamen escaped and began a two-hundred-mile journey to the British stronghold at Ninety Six, avoiding Rebel patrols along the way.

  By October 7, 1780, Ferguson and his entire force had been either killed or captured. The victory of the Overmountain Men served as a turning point in the South. The colonists now saw the “invincible” British as vulnerable to defeat. Yet the victory came at a price. “State legislatures, especially the one i
n North Carolina, seemed to think the war could be won by militia alone, and there was no longer a need to build states’ Continental Regiments.”

  Even in Maryland, the issue of militiamen versus Continentals remained a problem, as did the short enlistment period. Men would train up, gain esprit de corps with their comrades, and then be sent back to civilian life. “Just as such soldiers begin to learn the common duties of a military life, their times expire,” wrote Gist, “and they return disgusted to their former State as Citizens, by which means an Army becomes enervated, disagreeable sensations arises in the Breasts of our Officers, they feel a conscious inferiority for want of proper Commands and lose that emulation necessary in a military life. This gives place to a relaxation of Discipline, which must ever be followed by misfortune and Disgrace in Action.”

  Gist warned that, as in any war, politics played a major role in the army’s success or failure, and he called on the legislature to set aside personal goals in favor of the cause. He wrote, “The Independence of the United States is as fixed as fate; yet if we neglect to support it with Dignity or to aim at national Glory, if we cease to sacrifice private Interests to public Good, the Blessing will corrupt at our touch and like an affectionate love, worn out by Injuries, grow into a hated Monster.”

  Most of the responsibility for Ferguson’s defeat lay on Cornwallis’s shoulders for dividing his army and allowing one wing to be destroyed. Seriously ill, Cornwallis spent more than a dozen days riding in the back of a wagon. Believing that the opposing force numbered more than three thousand, he retreated from Charlotte to Winnsboro, South Carolina, ending his first invasion of North Carolina.

  Cornwallis didn’t return to the colony for four months. Sir Henry Clinton perfectly summed up the importance of the American victory: “[Kings Mountain] unhappily proved the first link in the chain of evils that followed each other in regular succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America.”