_KING'S MOUNTAIN AND THE PATRIOTS OF TENNESSEE._

Never was the South in so desperate a plight as in the autumn months of
that year of peril, 1780. The British had made themselves masters of
Georgia, and South Carolina and North Carolina were strongly threatened.
The boastful Gates had been defeated at Camden so utterly that he ran
away from his army faster than it did from the British, and in three
days and a half afterward he rode alone into Hillsborough, North
Carolina, two hundred miles away. Sumter was defeated as badly and rode
as fast to Charlotte, without hat or saddle. Marion's small band was
nearly the only American force left in South Carolina.

Cornwallis, the British commander, was in an ecstasy of delight at his
success. He felt sure that all the South was won. The harvest was ready
and needed only to be reaped. He laid his plans to march north, winning
victory after victory, till all America south of Delaware should be
conquered for the British crown. Then, if the North became free, the
South would still be under the rule of George the Third. There was only
one serious mistake in his calculations: he did not build upon the
spirit of the South.

Cornwallis began by trying to crush out that spirit, and soon brought
about a reign of terror in South Carolina. He ordered that all who would
not take up arms for the king should be seized and their property
destroyed. Every man who had borne arms for the British and afterward
joined the Americans was to be hanged as soon as taken. Houses were
burned, estates ravaged, men put to death, women and children driven
from their homes with no fit clothing, thousands confined in prisons and
prison-ships in which malignant fevers raged, the whole State rent and
torn by a most cruel and merciless persecution. Such was the Lord
Cornwallis ideal of war.

Near the middle of September Cornwallis began his march northward, which
was not to end till the whole South lay prostrate under his hand. It was
his aim to fill his ranks with the loyalists of North Carolina and sweep
all before him. Major Patrick Ferguson, his ablest partisan leader, was
sent with two hundred of the best British troops to the South Carolina
uplands, and here he gathered in such Tories as he could find, and with
them a horde of wretches who cared only for the side that gave them the
best chance to plunder and ravage. The Cherokee Indians were also bribed
to attack the American settlers west of