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an advantage, for the British fire from the ridge “overshot us altogether, scarce touching a man except those on horseback.” Ferguson’s Loyalists, with bayonets bared, came charging downhill under the frontiersmen’s deadly rifle fire which felled them in rows. The redcoat ranks wavered and fell back. Attempting to rally the assault, Ferguson rode forward on a white horse, slashing with his sword at two flags of surrender already raised among his troops by men in panic. Target of fifty rifles, he was pierced and torn by their bullets and blasted from the saddle to a dead heap on the ground. The ridge was captured; the Battle of King’s Mountain was over in half an hour. His bloodstained riderless white horse plunged in abandon down the embattled slope where Ferguson died. News of the defeat at King’s Mountain sped through the region, causing Loyalist adherents to blow away like dust clouds. “Dastardly and pusillanimous” in Cornwallis’ words, they refused after King’s Mountain to aid the British while the rebels turned more “inveterate in rancour.” Seven hundred of the Loyalist force that fought with Ferguson were taken prisoner. Of them, twenty-four were tried for treason by the rebels at a drumhead court-martial, and nine found guilty and hanged, heating the feud of Loyalists versus patriots.

In this situation Cornwallis was persuaded he must abandon the campaign for North Carolina and fall back to winter in South Carolina. Accordingly he set out for Winnsboro, about fifty miles south of King’s Mountain and thirty miles from Camden, where his fortunes had been so high. The retreat, though the distance was short, proved a ghastly ordeal and the winter at Winnsboro his Valley Forge. In continual rain his men marched without tents and with food so scarce that they subsisted on nothing but turnips and Indian corn scratched from the fields for a yield of five ears a day for two men. With no rum and no beef, they pulled their wounded in wagons jouncing over rough fields. Rivers were the worst, with half-starved horses barely able to reach the other side through rushing icy waters. The last reverse was loss of a single blockhouse, made of strong logs, on a hill which had been fortified by Colonel Rugeley of the Loyalist militia with earth piled at the base and a circle of stakes defying it to be taken except by cannon. The American cavalry officer Colonel William Washington fashioned an imitation cannon from a tree trunk and, pulling it up, though not too close for inspection, summoned the blockhouse to surrender. Colonel Rugeley yielded without firing a shot.

For the patriots, the small triumph at King’s Mountain was offset by the difficulties of trying to prepare for a winter without the suffering of Morristown and Valley Forge. Pennsylvania had 5,000 horned cattle growing too thin to serve for beef. They could not be slaughtered anyway, because there was no hard money to buy salt to preserve the meat and merchants would not salt anything for paper money. Shortage of everything persisted—of cash first of all, of clothes, shoes, blankets, ammunition and, less material but more important, of popular support. Lethargy in prosperous Virginia was notable. While he believed that “the views and wishes of the great body of the people are with us,” Greene wrote to Jefferson, then Governor of Virginia, “they are, except, for the influence of a few, a lifeless and inanimate mass without direction or spirit to employ the means they possess for their own security.” Washington felt chagrined to have the French witness the poverty of his army and the “paucity of enlistments.” When the French came to find “that we have but a handful of men in the field,” he feared that they “might sail away.” Washington was sadly discovering the frailty of his fellowmen. “It is a melancholy thing,” he wrote, “to see such a decay of public virtue and the fairest prospects overcast and clouded by a host of infamous harpies who to acquire a little pelf, would involve this great continent in inextricable ruin.… Unless leaders in the states bestir themselves, our