n Irish, with their
fellows of Calvinistic stock and faith, formed the back-bone of the
moral and order-loving element; and the Presbyterian Irish[1] were
almost to a man staunch and furious upholders of the Continental
Congress. Naturally, the large bands of murderers, horse-thieves, and
other wild outlaws, whom these grim friends of order hunted down with
merciless severity, were glad to throw in their lot with any party that
promised revenge upon their foes. But of course there were lawless
characters on both sides; in certain localities where the crop of
jealousies, always a rank backwoods growth, had been unusually large,
and had therefore produced long-standing and bitter feuds,[2] the rival
families espoused opposite sides from sheer vindictive hatred of one
another. As a result, the struggle in the backwoods between tories and
whigs, king's-men and congress-men,[3] did not merely turn upon the
questions everywhere at stake between the American and British parties.
It was also in part a fight between the law-abiding and the lawless, and
in part a slaking of savage personal animosities, wherein the borderers
glutted their vengeance on one another. They exercised without restraint
the right of private warfare, long abandoned in more civilized regions.
It was natural that such a contest should be waged with appalling
ferocity.

Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a
certain sense proper; or, at least, even if many of its manifestations
were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right. The
backwoodsmen were no sentimentalists; they were grim, hard,
matter-of-fact men, engaged all their lives long in an unending struggle
with hostile forces, both human and natural; men who in this struggle
had acquired many unamiable qualities, but who had learned likewise to
appreciate at their full value the inestimable virtues of courage and
common-sense. The crisis demanded that they should be both strong and
good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong.
Weakness would have ruined them. It was needful that justice should
stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had
they not put down their foes, of every kind, with an iron hand. They did
not have many theories; but they were too genuinely liberty-loving not
to keenly feel that their freedom was jeopardized as much by domestic
disorder as by foreign aggression.

The tories were obnoxious un