by Jack Kelly
The unrest did not end there. Before the end of January, troops of the New Jersey Line, with similar grievances, left their camp and marched toward Trenton. Learning along the way that their demands had been addressed, they likewise returned to their camp. Marching back, they still grumbled loudly against their officers. Washington could not let the epidemic go any further. He worried about an “end to all subordination in the Army, and indeed to the Army itself.”41
The New Jersey men awoke in their camp to find loyal Continental troops surrounding them. They were ordered to come out of their huts, instantly, without their arms. From a list of the worst offenders, three were chosen at random and told to kneel. Twelve of the mutineers were handed muskets and ordered to execute them. Two of these ringleaders were shot dead, the third pardoned.
The British, when they heard about the mutinies, were ecstatic.
Washington was dismayed. He sent Henry Knox on an urgent tour of New England to beg for funds and supplies from what Knox called “vile water-gruel governments.”42 The results were paltry. The erosion of the army continued.
“We began a contest for liberty and independence ill provided with the means for war,” Washington wrote after the mutinies, “relying on our own patriotism to supply the deficiency.”43 The downward trajectory of the American cause suggested that patriotism might not be enough.
But already, in this blackest of nights, flickers of light were beginning to appear in the most unexpected of places.
Sixteen
Downright Fighting
1780
Over-mountain men, they were called. Backwater men. Shirt men. Barbarians. Savages. They were mostly Scots-Irish, mostly poor, latecomers to America, forced to search for affordable homesteads in the remote uplands of the Appalachian Mountains. They had spread south and west along the Great Wagon Road until they populated the interior of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. They had drifted to the far side of the mountains, into what would become Tennessee and Kentucky.
“A race of hardy men, who were familiar with the use of the horse and rifle,” American cavalryman Henry Lee called them, “stout, active, patient under privation, and brave.”1 Clannish, suspicious, resentful of arbitrary authority, dissenters in religion, Whigs in politics, crack shots, survivors. They distrusted outsiders, danced reels and jigs, drank knockdown liquor, married young for love. They had until now avoided an all-out struggle with the British. Scratching a living in remote valleys and hollows, they eyed the Cherokee to the west warily and kept to themselves. Most had not gone off to war, but the war was about to come to them.
Having blasted the rebel army at Camden, General Cornwallis saw an open road before him. First, he would roll across North Carolina. Then he would topple the lukewarm rebels in Virginia, who would soon be enduring raids led by the newest British general, Benedict Arnold. After that, Maryland and Pennsylvania would fall and Cornwallis would bring an end to the rebellion in a glorious stroke. He had not taken into account the men from the backwoods.
As his army entered North Carolina, Cornwallis assigned a body of loyalists, recruited and trained by Major Patrick Ferguson, to skirt the Appalachians and protect his left flank. The slender, athletic Ferguson was the perfect choice for the role. Now thirty-six, he had fought as a dragoon in Europe, the West Indies, and Nova Scotia. At the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, a musket ball had smashed his right elbow, forcing him afterward to swing his sword with his left hand.
Nicknamed “Bull Dog” by his men, Ferguson had a special rapport with the country loyalists, whom other officers scorned as “crackers.” He gathered several thousand of them near a South Carolina outpost called Ninety Six and rigorously drilled them in European-style tactics. He ordered them to whittle the handles of long knives so they could plug them into the barrels of their rifles and shotguns when they charged the enemy. He believed that only a “war of desolation” that was “shocking to Humanity” could subdue the southern patriots.2
In September 1780, he marched north with a thousand loyalists. Because of previous raids by cohorts of over-mountain men, Ferguson decided to shake his fist at the ignorant rebels who might threaten his force from the west. He sent a prisoner on parole with a message to those who thought the mountains would protect them. He ordered them to “desist from their opposition to British arms” or he would “march over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country to waste with fire and sword.”3 He hoped his words would cow the Whigs and encourage those still loyal to the king.
To the contrary, Ferguson’s threat woke up the backcountry. Word spread. The settlers took the menace seriously. Isaac Shelby, a tall, muscular, reserved man from the sparsely populated region beyond the Appalachians, had already led two hundred mounted riflemen into the North Carolina foothills that spring to fight bands of Tories. He gathered his men again. John Sevier brought another 250 fighters. Short and thick, Sevier was a hard-drinking Huguenot, as loud and brash as Shelby was quiet. William Campbell came down from the Virginia hills with 400 men. At six foot six, with his family broadsword strapped across his back, he made an impressive figure. A fourth contingent of 350 brawlers accompanied Benjamin Cleveland, a three-hundred-pound hunter, gambler, and fighter of Indians.
On September 25, the men met at Sycamore Shoals in what is now eastern Tennessee. Many brought their families. The congregation was the largest and most exciting gathering any of them had ever attended. As campfires dotted the hills, the rough, mostly uneducated men talked about what to do.
The decision did not take long. The next day they headed out, an army without tents or uniforms, without a hierarchy or a supply system. Armed with knives, tomahawks, and their deadly accurate rifles, they waded through snow over mountain passes and descended into the foothills of North Carolina.
His men outnumbered by this troop of backwoodsmen, Ferguson decided to retreat rather than risk a battle. At first, he headed straight south, then veered east to bring his force closer to the main British army camped at Charlotte. He asked Cornwallis to send him reinforcements.
Continuing to exhibit a tin ear, Ferguson issued a proclamation intended to rouse the loyalists of the region. Warning of “an inundation of barbarians,” he advised them to hurry to his camp unless they wanted to be robbed and murdered and see their wives and daughters “abused by the dregs of mankind.” Fail to respond and they would be “pissed upon forever and ever by a set of mongrels.”4 Tories were largely indifferent to the appeal, but the over-mountain men took the insult personally.
They were, like the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, fiercely independent. Their Presbyterian religion, overseen by elected elders, predisposed them to democracy. Like their Gaelic ancestors, they followed war chiefs whom they chose for their physical prowess rather than their education or social standing. Having long sparred with natives, they had learned the tricks of wilderness fighting. A British officer called them “more savage than the Indians.”
On the east side of the mountains, they elected the towering William Campbell as their commander. Waiting out a day of rain, the leaders gave the irresolute their last chance to back out. No one did. If a battle ensued, they were to fight Indian style. “Don’t wait for the word of command,” Shelby told them. “Let each one of you be your own officer and do the very best you can.”5
They worried that Ferguson’s force might elude them and find safety with Cornwallis, so they detached a flying corps of nine hundred men riding the unit’s best horses. This mobile army rode out to run Ferguson down. They rested that evening at an open field in South Carolina called the Cowpens, a ranch where local herdsmen grazed and traded cattle. After consuming some hastily roasted beef, the mountain men took to their saddles again and rode nonstop through the rain-soaked dark.
About noon the next day, October 7, 1780, the rain finally abated. Sensing they were closing in on Ferguson’s trail, they questioned the in
habitants of a farmhouse. The men there, preferring neutrality, pretended ignorance. But a girl followed the patriots outside and whispered to them that the enemy were camped on a hill about a mile away.
Kings Mountain, two miles inside South Carolina, rose only about sixty feet above the surrounding country. The hill slanted a half mile from southwest to northeast. Its sides were forested and rocky, its flat top cleared of trees. Ferguson was confident his corps of one hundred provincial veterans and a thousand trained militiamen could hold the high ground against the “barbarians.” He had formed his wagons into a semicircle at the broader northeast end of the hill as a makeshift fortification.
He reportedly “defied God Almighty and all the rebels out of Hell” to conquer him, swearing he would “never surrender to such banditti.” He wrote to Cornwallis: “I arrived this day at Kings Mountain & have taken a post where I do not think I can be forced by a stronger enemy than that against us.”6 He requested the British commander to send him several hundred dragoons to help his men rout his enemies and quench the rebels’ fervor for good.
The over-mountain men formed the simplest of plans: to mount the hill from all directions. “The orders were,” a soldier noted, “at the firing of the first gun, for every man to raise a whoop, rush forward, and fight his way best he could.” Campbell simply told them to “shout like Hell and fight like devils!” If pushed back, they should retreat but immediately regroup and attack, using the trees and rough ground for cover.7
Units took up position around the hill and waited for the bellowing that would signal the advance. Ferguson’s pickets around the bottom of the slopes suspected nothing as the stealthy mountain men crept into position. Then a shot rang out and an eerie ululation sounded from all directions.
Ferguson’s second in command was Abraham DePeyster, member of a wealthy New York loyalist family. “Things are ominous. Those are the same yelling devils I fought at Musgrove Mill,” he said, referring to Shelby’s earlier raid.8 Ferguson, the only Briton on the field that day, had aligned his Tory militia down the center of the hilltop. Commanding from horseback, he led his provincial veterans to the southwest end to meet the rebel advance. Just as they had been trained, his men delivered a stinging volley, fixed bayonets, and charged. The rebel riflemen fired, but without time to reload, they had to flee down the hill. Ferguson blew a silver whistle to recall his men. His plan was working.
But a wounded Tory lying among the rocks nervously watched the over-mountain men come climbing back. They looked “like devils from the infernal regions . . . tall, raw-boned, sinewy, with long matted hair.”9 Like devils.
Ferguson now had to wheel around and confront enemy soldiers coming up the sides and northeast end of the hill. Deadly rifle fire was crackling from all directions. Two more bayonet charges failed to stop the onslaught.
“The mountain was covered with flame and smoke and seemed to thunder,” a witness said. Another declared that the mountain “appeared volcanic; there flashed along its summit and around its base and up its sides, one long sulphurous blaze.”10
The groans and screams of wounded Tories began to mix with the relentless bawling and yipping of the attackers. They drove Ferguson’s troops back until they occupied a tiny perimeter near the wagons. At that point, Ferguson saw no hope except to attempt a breakout. He found few volunteers to accompany him. As he spurred his horse in a desperate lunge, a dozen riflemen took aim and drilled him with seven balls, including one through his face. He fell and was dragged down the hillside by his panicked mount.
Left in command, DePeyster thrust up a white flag. Confusion and passionate hatred kept the firing from dying out immediately. Some mountain men continued to shoot into the mass of Tories, but Shelby rode in between the forces, ordering the enemy soldiers to sit. More than 150 Tories had been killed and nearly 700 prisoners taken.
“The dead lay in heaps on all sides, while the groans of the wounded were heard in every direction,” remembered a teenage patriot. “I could not help turning away from the scene before me, with horror, and though exalting in the victory, could not refrain from shedding tears.”11
The victors ceased firing but continued to seethe. Remembering Ferguson’s edict meant to inflame neighbor against neighbor, they gathered around the dead commander’s body, stripped off his scarlet uniform, and pissed on him.
Still worried that Cornwallis might send Tarleton chasing after them as he had after Buford, the over-mountain men marched quickly away, taking their prisoners with them. They left the dead and some of the wounded for their kin from surrounding loyalist families, who converged on Kings Mountain to locate loved ones. Wolves also converged. And feral hogs.
A week later, the patriots further satisfied their thirst for vengeance by trying and condemning thirty-six of the most notorious of their Tory prisoners. By torch light, they hanged nine of the men from the limbs of oak trees before officers thought better of the action and halted the execution. The backwoods army soon dispersed, the men trudging back over the mountains to protect their families.
The patriot victory at Kings Mountain drove a nail through the British hope for a Tory uprising. No organized force of loyalists would ever match in numbers or training the group that Ferguson had commanded. A short two months after the glorious British victory at Camden, a chill ran through the hot blood of the loyalists.
Kings Mountain also discouraged Cornwallis. He decided to delay his invasion of North Carolina. Just as Burgoyne, descending from Canada, had felt the thundercloud of John Stark’s militia on his left after the battle of Bennington, Cornwallis now feared an attack on his own left by the ghostly army of shirt men. Before October ended, he was retreating from Charlotte toward winter quarters in Winnsboro, South Carolina, seventy miles to the south. His thinking had turned defensive.
The small but decisive Kings Mountain victory could not be attributed to the American high command nor to any one leader. No general rode at the head of the army that accomplished it. Congress did not order or pay for it. It was, like the rout of the redcoats at Concord five years earlier, a people’s victory, an amateurs’ victory. The crude, spirited, hardy, determined volunteers who crossed the mountains served, Washington said, as “proof of the spirit and resources of the country.”12
Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson later called Kings Mountain a “turn in the tide of success” that the British had enjoyed since their capture of Charleston. British commander Henry Clinton wrote in his memoirs that the battle “unhappily proved the first Link of a Chain of Evils that followed each other in regular Succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America.”13
A turning of the tide is not always immediately apparent. Patriots in the North remained shaken by the stunning, disheartening news of Arnold’s betrayal. Washington’s main army was still inactive, suffering from lack of men and money. “We have lived upon expedients until we can live no longer,” Washington wrote late in October.14
* * *
During the summer of 1780, Horatio Gates and Daniel Morgan, both of them inactive, both vexed at Congress, had sat on the porch of Gates’s Virginia estate, drinking and smoking and discussing the progress of the war. Gates mentioned that he hoped to be rewarded for his Saratoga victory with a major independent command in the South. If he received the assignment, he wanted Morgan with him.
Nearing forty-five, Morgan was afflicted by recurring “ciatick pain,” the wear and tear of a rough life. He had sat on the sidelines since 1779, when Washington had passed over him when choosing a leader for the corps of light infantry. Eager to get back into action, he agreed to help his friend if his health permitted. Gates received his southern command, but by the time Morgan recovered and set out to join him, Gates’s army had been blasted at Camden. Morgan was needed more than ever.
The rifleman’s arrival cheered the shattered army. Gates, gathering the remnants of his command at Hillsbor
ough, asked the Old Wagoner to take charge of a fast-moving “flying army” of infantry and horse. With this mobile force, Morgan could respond to contingencies in that chaotic and dangerous theater of war. Gates assigned him two key lieutenants: The quiet, level-headed John Eager Howard led a reliable contingent of Maryland and Delaware Continentals. Pudgy, round-faced Colonel William Washington was a cavalry commander with a reputation for ferocity in battle.
Before the year was out, Nathanael Greene had arrived to relieve Gates. The southern command was now seen as the graveyard of honor. Although it meant a return to a battlefield command, Greene had been reluctant to take charge of the bleak situation. He reportedly told Washington that his friend Henry Knox was the man for the job: “All obstacles vanish before him; his resources are infinite.”
“True,” Washington replied, “and therefore I cannot part with him.”15
Congress had at last recognized Morgan’s ability by promoting him to brigadier general. Greene was eager for him to lead his flying army into the field. He added several hundred Continentals to the force, all he could spare. Supply and manpower remained crippling problems. Greene found his army “rather a shadow than a substance, having only an imaginary existence,” with barely 1,500 men fit for duty at Charlotte.16 The new commander kept a nervous eye on Cornwallis, camped ninety miles to the south.
Although the military textbooks argued against it, Greene decided to divide his army in the face of a superior enemy. In the depleted land, feeding a concentrated mass of hungry men was next to impossible. Splitting his force would increase forage opportunities and threaten Cornwallis from two directions, perhaps holding him in place while the Americans rebuilt their capability. Spreading out would also hearten patriots in the countryside.