First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [124]
them extra mobility, and the outrage aroused by the Waxhaw massacre stirred desires of revenge and augmented the feud between Loyalists and patriots. Their strife as much as anything kept the fires of rebellion hot in the Carolinas. In South Carolina, Cornwallis had to admit that the Swamp Fox “had so wrought on the minds of the people partly by the terror and punishments and partly by the promise of plunder that there was scarce an inhabitant [in the region] that was not in arms against us.” His diagnosis of the hostility, ignoring the raids of Tarleton and Benedict Arnold, who were plundering homes, burning flour mills and dragging off civilians as prisoners to the lethal prison ships, reflects the willful blindness of the invader who assures himself that the natives are only made unfriendly by some other provocation than his own. Cornwallis was convinced that after so crushing a defeat as the Americans had sustained at Camden, they could not maintain the Revolution in the South except with help from the North. To him this meant one thing—that he must wipe out the rebel forces in North Carolina and take control of that province. The one necessity for victory—to destroy the enemy’s army—proved beyond his reach. Exasperated by the partisans’ warfare that erupted whenever districts were thought pacified, Cornwallis’ commander in the province, Major Patrick Ferguson, resorted to the threat of terror. He issued a proclamation in September, 1780, to patriot officers that if they persisted in resistance to British arms, he would march over the mountains, hang their leaders and lay waste to the country with fire and sword. Ferguson was not a tyrant but ordinarily a humane and temperate individual. He had entered military service at fourteen, when his family purchased for him a cornetcy commission in the Royal Scots Greys. After a study of military science, more technical than ballroom dancing and the opera, he invented a rapid-firing breech-loading rifle capable of four shots a minute while hitting a target at 200 yards. As more efficient than anything the British Army possessed, it was, of course, not adopted; only 200 were manufactured. Ferguson was one of the few English officers to treat the American Loyalists with equality, sitting and talking with them for hours on the state of affairs and the ruinous effects of rebellion. As a local hero to the back-country people, he was chosen to lead a campaign to stamp out the patriot fires. Nevertheless, his ill-advised proclamation had the normal effect of such things. Used by the partisan leaders to call “over-mountain” men to throw off the iron heel of the oppressor in defense of their homes and lands, it brought in more than 1,000 mounted volunteers with their sharpshooting rifles. Clad in buckskin, they assembled at Sycamore Shoals in Tennessee. Ferguson sensed their dangerous mood and sent for reinforcements to Cornwallis, who was camped with his army only 35 miles away at Charlotte in North Carolina. His message, expressing urgency, read “something must be done,” but the help did not come. Taking the road to Charlotte that passed by a high ridge called King’s Mountain, and sharing the usual assumption that the Americans would be beaten, Ferguson decided to confront his pursuers on the ridge, though he might have reached Cornwallis in a couple of hours. He took his stand on a cleared oval space that crowned the ridge whose slopes were thickly wooded by tall pines from top to bottom, creating, as he believed, an impregnable position. The frontiersmen, informed of his location by spies, marched through a night of rain with rifles wrapped to keep them dry and their ears alert for sounds of ambush. As the weather cleared, they reached King’s Mountain at three in the afternoon, where they dismounted and circled the base of the hill. Having no commander, they elected a Colonel William Campbell to take command. Then, with war whoops and barking rifles, they charged up the hill, crouching behind tree trunks as they climbed. The height above, which had seemed a daunting obstacle, proved